Art and Design Commons^™

A Body Finding Freedom Within Itself, Malda Smadi

Masters Theses

When a dislocation of any type occurs, whether geographical, emotional, or spiritual, the disorder pushes the self to retreat to safety. For me, that safety is in my body. It is in this place of retreat where I locate my original home.

In this space of translocation, I forage for materials from my surroundings and places that I belong to. Moving between Dubai, Damascus, Beirut, and Providence, I shape a reality dependent on what is available. I then transform these materials, searching for the forms and relationships that emerge while meditating on home and the body as a moving vessel …

Heretic Territories: Spells For Fracture, Mia Greenwald

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This monograph accompanies the MFA thesis exhibition, Heretic Territories: spells for fracture. The show uses video, weaving, clay, and bacterial/fungal bodies in three main bodies of work: Inter; Lost, remain, fracture; and For, Of Them. The pieces, and the relationship between them, explore themes of magic, the body, and land in contradiction and opposition to colonial and capitalist structures. I approach the artificial hierarchies that subjugate people, non-human creatures, and land while trying not to replicate the mistakes of posthumanist scholarship that bypasses the fact that not all people are afforded full access to the category …

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.

The Quads, Elmer D. Guevara

Theses and Dissertations

My work attempts to reconcile my familial history. By reconstructing narratives, I am advancing a new sense of our family archive. My goal is to grant the viewer with autobiographical snippets delivered through the piecing and meshing of multiple scenarios and events that derive from family album photos and reimagining spaces.

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes, Pol Morton

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores ideas of transness, chronic illness, and injury. Through assemblage and repetition, my larger-than-life paintings address the dissociation and fragility of a body that is unmapped by society. These autobiographical works attempt to locate the self when it is trapped, whether in a bed, in the home, or within the body itself.

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.

Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei

Theses and Dissertations

This article elaborates Xiong Wei's inspiration and experience from different cultural, political, social systems and art environment as a Chinese artist living in the United States, and the logic and methodology of how he went from a social realist sculptor to a contemporary artist.

Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The absence of happiness, the absence of nature, the absence of justice, the absence of absence, which is presence. My desire is to make these voids visible and sensible by connecting to and with others, from our intimate and collective life experiences, with empathy, and by sharing. Through a hybrid of sculpture, installation, and performance, I move within this tense in-between space, asking myself about that void, if it is possible for it to be filled, or if it is perhaps too big, or if it is perhaps too late.

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Lifetime, Emily E. Kuchenbecker

Theses and Dissertations

Time is my bully. Time marks the start of something, as well as the end. We are all carrying out the inexorable passing of time as it relates to our impending mortalities.

I do not fear death.

The awareness of my body’s impermanence employs me to feel that much more connected to the vessel containing that of which I am.

But what am I? Am I my body- or is it much deeper?

Through the work executed during my graduate research, I have attempted to quantify my existence through the archiving my time and body. This document ushers you through …

Ultrasound—Re:Viewing Bodies, Minjee Jeon

Theses and Dissertations

A medical evaluation of physical impairment imposes the additional burden of “labeling” the patient with the condition. The binary nature of the normal versus abnormal label emphasizes difference and can lead to trauma. Understanding differences, however, can lead to the generation of new forms and thus, more sensitive differentiation and representation. Tension is created by exploring different bodily forms—a dialectic between form and essence. I am designing a space that visualizes and illuminates difference as a source of trauma and amplifying the tension by comparing figures that represent varying degrees of normalcy. This forms a critique of idealized form and …

The Classical Versus The Grotesque Body In Edith Wharton's Fiction, Joshua T. Temples

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In her landmark works The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton responds to earlier depictions of the classical, pure Victorian and Edwardian woman. Wharton's "inconvenient" women overturn popular stereotypes. Subsequently, they are barred from their social groups, but they are independent, unlike the complicit and obedient women of the classical body, most of whom ascribe to the trope of the "Angel in the House." The grotesque seeks to undercut the unrealistic expectations enforced by the classical through its embodiment of progression and humanity, and Wharton is drawn to …

[Insert Body Here], Katie Yun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The personal is political. Using humor and my individual narrative, I illustrate the main three factors that drive my work and relate them to corresponding theoretical frameworks: 1) My OCD tendencies and labor as art concept 2) Assimilation and the appeal of the White Cube 3) Reclamation of identity and Abject art. Through textual and visual research, I provide scholarly backing and precedents set by other artists to situate these personal narratives as part of a larger structural system of oppression, while being transparent of my culpability and participation in these structures. I posit that my work provides a nuanced …

It Takes A Long Time To Move, Issy Marie Cassou

Senior Projects Spring 2017

A doorway.

A grave.

A body.

A scar.

The hole was dug in my studio a month after I had moved in and the day after I burned my foot in the metal shop. A new navel sits on the top of my left foot and a raised scar marks an accidental grave in the ground of studio ten in Red Hook, New York. It came from water. A leaking pipe. Blueprints of the building did not point here as the source of the water main because there are no blueprints. Instead, a pipe in the corner and a shot …