Art and Design Commons^™

To Excavate An Absence, Margaret Compton

Graduate Theses

This thesis is an exploration of memory’s fluctuating aspects, utilizing natural materials and casting processes to create a sculptural body of work deeply rooted in materialized metaphor. Examining the relationship between mold and cast, part and whole, and interior and exterior, I utilize casting as a framework to understand the duality of remembering and forgetting. Memories, much like the natural landscape, are ephemeral, fading, and fracturing over time. Both external environments and internal mental landscapes share the common language of erosion, existing as present or absent, remembered or forgotten. Conestee Nature Preserve in Mauldin, South Carolina, serves as my “site” …

¡Mujeres Chéveres! – Cool Women!, Hernan A. Gonzales Mejia

LSU Master's Theses

¡MUJERES CHÉVERES! – Cool Women! is a body of work and writing that looks into the history of feminism and analyzes the activism of Colombian women, highlighting their resilience and spirit. Policarpa Salavarrieta, Maria Cano, Madre Laura Montoya, and Adriana Ocampo are a few examples of Colombian women’s contributions to social movements and gender equality. Movements like “Estamos Listas” in Medellín are discussed for their role in advocating for women’s rights and societal change.

As a self-identified feminist male, this body of work, draws from my upbringing among influential women to investigate the societal roles of Colombian women. This …

How To Forget, Jesse D. Hoyle

Theses and Dissertations

How To Forget was born from a need to give tangible form to the psychic residue left behind by a life lived. Through the use of silk-screening of red clay mud onto ink-jet photographs, archival textiles, and site-specific installations, I attempt to tie and/or divorce myself from my own and my family's extended history and examine the function of memory within the dynamics of the archive. How To Forget takes a non-linear, non-chronological approach to this examination, compressing decades of time and space through the manipulation of the archive and my own self-portraiture, designed specifically to deny myself from its …

Objects And Apparitions: A Portable Museum, Yesuk Seo

Masters Theses

My work transcends the boundaries between painterly printmaking and sculpture. Through hand-pulled silkscreen prints, I create abstract pixelated images depicting our constantly changing relationship with meaning and reality. Memories are often glamorized and distorted whether it is our childhood home, our neighborhood, or the city. My practice archives my family history and traces patterns in memory and space by using invisibility as a phenomena to render newer explorations of abstraction, in time and in urban landscapes. Objects & Apparitions: A Portable Museum, pairs moiré patterns of ghostly printmaking with wooden objects in specific arrangements. It captures my nomadic journey between …

Inevitable, Emilee Grummel

Student Projects

They say time heals all wounds, but in reality, time only Band-Aid's those wounds to make them more tolerable. Frank Richard Schadeck was the man who taught me how to go through life. From being my preschool teacher to teaching me how to defend and speak up for myself, he made me into the person I am today. He was not only my grandfather, but became my best friend, teacher, and mentor. Since his passing, change has become more prevalent and harder to accept.

When my grandfather was living with us, he built a miniature train set in the basement. …

Witness, Revival, Testimony, Laura Ann Schroeder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist, Laura Ann Schroeder, discusses her Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Witness, Revival, Testimony, which was installed at Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, TN from March 2, 2023 through March 31, 2023, with a public reception held on March 24, 2023. The exhibition consisted of a collection of sculptural works and installations that evoke scenes and memories from the artist’s childhood. This body of work deconstructs the traditional family dynamic and the private domestic space through recreations of everyday life. The artworks are primarily made with repurposed consumer textiles and techniques like stitching and quilting that have historically …

Bloodlines, Tyler Dallis

Master's Theses

Connections are valuable in everyday life. Bloodlines speaks about my personal connections to my biological, adoptive, and found families, along with my heritage and what it means to be a contemporary Indigenous artist. I am not much of a sentimental person when it comes to physical objects, but I collect memories of the people closest to me. Through the process of collecting memories, I am creating a mental Rolodex of experience, people, things, and events from my life. When building my pieces, I braid these memories into the clay as I coil the form to completion. Embedding them into the …

Fraz, Caitlyn Frazer

Master's Theses

Phrase /fraz/ noun:

A small group of words standing together as a conceptual unit, typically forming a component of a clause.

Frazer:

My last name. A word that encapsulates my family's stories, creativity, and legacy.

Fraz:

The title of my thesis show, it combines both the former words into one. Fraz is the idea of pulling family history and distilling it into visual storytelling through graphic design and creating the conceptual unit that is me. I am a unit that is multifaceted and strive to have work that is dimensional and encompass aspects of all different media including photography, sculpture, …

Choosing Penumbra, Christina Melchiorre

Graduate Theses

Amaranthine | adjective

am·a·ran·thine | \ ˌa-mə-ˈran(t)-thən , -ˈran-ˌthīn \

1a : of or relating to an amaranth

b : Eternally beautiful and unfading; everlasting, undying

2 : of the color amaranth; a shade of reddish-rose

My work explores the narrative I have with family in relation to who I am and how I have developed as a result of both positive and negative influences. Despite the dysfunctional dynamics that I experience with my family, I choose to remain connected to them and continue to endure and persevere through the obstacles that they create. I particularly experience these moments through …

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.

Creating Home, Ludovic Nkoth

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores and conceptualizes the idea of a world where my people were never colonized, a world where we are still existing with our culture, our powers and the idea of voodoo. I place myself, friends, and family in positions of power, in spaces the world took away from us due to the color our skin. This is the world my practice aims to create.

Home, It Turns Out, Is Always A Matter Of Paperwork, Leonardo Madriz

Theses and Dissertations

A meandering of life-thinking on notions of migration & diaspora, assimilation, place & home, family & loss, cruel optimism and new imaginaries - through text, film & video, installation, and expanded cinema.

The Good, The Bad, And The Unspoken: Complex Layers Of Motherhood, Casaundra R. Beard

MSU Graduate Theses

This body of work represents my frustrations about domestic life, by

communicating the raw, unfiltered side of how sometimes my anxiety and

motherhood coincide. By addressing the harsh stigmas society has towards both

anxiety and motherhood, I hope to normalize the reality rather than continue the

cycle of these idealized notions of what motherhood is supposed to be. Each piece

represents a small seemingly insignificant moment from my average day, but it is

when they start to accumulate together that results in an anxiety attack. The titles

of each piece are the positive mantras I repeat endlessly to convince myself …

Gratitude, Elizabeth Reimer

Master's Theses

Gratitude is a concept that has impacted my life in an enormous way. Along with being a key element in this exhibition, it blends in well with me as a person and my personal life. I am extremely blessed to have the heritage that I do from both sides of my family. Gerdy’s Community Market was built on that same family concept. The gratitude celebrated after a harvest with family and community is the foundation that Gerdy’s was built on. I wanted each of the pieces I designed to support that same foundation and highlight the culture surrounding my family’s …

I Thank You And All The Buildings That Make Me Feel So Small, Henry Holt Hull

Senior Projects Spring 2021

I use drawing and 3D animation to access memories of intimacy and distinctive spaces of privacy. Prior to this year I primarily worked with drawing and video, but always keeping them separate. However with my most recent project, I Thank You, and All the Buildings that Make me Feel so Small, I decided to combine my practice of drawing and 3D animation. I used adobe photoshop to convert my drawings from physical objects into 3D objects in the digital sphere.

The video you first encounter upon walking into my studio 400 Chambers and the video projected onto the ground Ivans …

United Families Through Interior Design, Marissa Heintz

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the current problems and support systems within the foster care system and how it could be improved upon. It studies the removal process of children from a hurtful home, the common reasons for placement within foster care, what some of the major problems within foster care are based surveys and existing research. Furthermore, this study seeks to understand the different perspectives of those involved in foster care including; biological parents, foster parents, children and social care workers. In order to better understand what would be best for all of the people involved, research also explores the effects …

Bodies Of Empathy, Eunyoung Rosa Jang

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Trauma is defined as the emotional and or psychological response to a deeply disturbing event. When looking at domestic, familial and generational trauma, however, it is not a singular event but a thread through a lifetime or even generations. When it accumulates and goes beyond one person or body, that trauma can embed itself deeply and go neglected and unaddressed. Despite this, trauma is not invisible, and it is not silent. It festers in the mind and surfaces on the body. In Bodies of Empathy, I discuss my body of work which attempts to come to terms with my …

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

Thanks To You, I'M Alive, Antonio Scott Nichols

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Antonio Nichols

Artist Statement:

In this project I am using figurative painting to explore the meaning of relationships/emotion and my connection to the people I am painting. I question what this means and how each individual’s identity ties to mine and why it may or may not matter. “Thanks to You, I’m Alive,” the title of this project, encompasses the message I am sending not only to the individuals I painted but also to the viewer because there is a certain exclusivity in who I decided to paint.

I want the connection I have with these people to not only …

Living Tangent, Cornelius Alexander Hugo

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

A living tangent is how I am known by many and how I have lived my life for some time. I think in tangents and my life and art seem to evolve through them. Everything I make is connected by multiple thoughts or tangent lines that run from something as simple as the color red, to the idea that I believe communism has invaded my family’s homeland. This then leads to the recollection of childhood games, taught to me by my family in Venezuela and the importance these games played in my psychological development and in my presence as an …

A Thesis Is Not A Diary And Other Myths, Erin Irene Wolf

Honors Papers

How do you write about a feeling you do not understand? How do you organize what is purposefully messy? How can you name a ghost of something that you push into the world with your hands? In this thesis, I will explain my practice, form, and material as a way to illuminate my art, along with various readings and philosophies that I use to guide the work.

Home Is, Jodie Masterman

LSU Master's Theses

As an exploration of family and personal history, Home is. aims not only to chronicle my own experiences and memories, but to touch upon the innumerable definitions of the word “home”. The objects are rooted in personal reflection, but each one refers to an aspect of play, identity, love, loss, or regret, inherent within any family. Although they do serve as a blueprint of my life, they are meant to stand as moments shared by all.

Polaroid Access, Becky Jane Rosen

Theses and Dissertations

In her thesis statement, Becky Jane Rosen discusses the relationships between photography, family, and the psyche through her recent paintings and artistic influences.

Light On, Baby. No Future, Shane Dollinger

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This project is a realistic depiction of the circularity of experience. As Images of ourselves and our experiences become increasingly inescapable, the repetitive and nonlinear nature of those experiences is amplified. This issue is explored in looking at contemporary artists/filmmakers whose handling of inundation in representation and narrative distinctly embraces multiplicity. Queering structures of representation, the work holds a mirror to the way that we experience living, encountering images, narrative structures and memories.

Transcendence Of Familial Expectations In Alison Bechdel’S Graphic Novels, Anna Priore

Honors Projects

This thesis focuses on the graphic novels "Are You My Mother?" and "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel. I discuss the ways in which Bechdel highlights her own family’s atypical structure and how the ambiguous presentation of familial roles causes readers to see that being in a “queer” family is actually ordinary, just as being in an “ordinary” family is queer.

"Perhaps," She Said, "Looking Itself Could Be An Antidote.", Sarah Moore

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Interface: Fringe Landscapes And Identity, Elizabeth T. Lewin

Theses and Dissertations

An MFA thesis that weaves together: virtual landscapes, escapism, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, utopia, family, and identity.

Desire And Fantasy Between Commercialism And Personal Room, Yukimi Otagiri

Theses and Dissertations

I apply two aspects of my life history to my art; my childhood experiences and my advanced studies in sociology. My work therefore combines a highly personal reading of my experiences of social interactions and my ongoing analysis of the nature of capitalism and socialism, commodification and media, especially in regard to the experiences of women in particular and consumers in general.

Descendants, Katie J. Sheffield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses the photographs in Descendants, her Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition which was held at Tipton Gallery, Johnson City, Tennessee from October 31, 2016 through November 23, 2016. The exhibit consisted of 19 large format color photographs. This body of work visually represents the artistʼs interest in those who participate in Civil War re-enactments.

The historical and contemporary influences discussed are in accordance to Sheffieldʼs photographs. Historical influences include Matthew Brady, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Walker Evans, and Helen Levitt, as well as those of contemporary artists; Martin Parr, Stacy Kranitz, and Anderson Scott.

Home Starts From Within, Joliza G. Terry

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Moving to Harrisonburg proved to be a culture shock for me because in the past, I had lived in areas where the levels of diversity were different and allowed me to feel more at ease. I faced the issue of feeling uncomfortable in a new-found environment and felt compelled to start a dialogue about my experience through my artwork. It was imperative for me to find a way to create a community for myself, and by doing so in my artwork, I have thrived from my experience of feeling out of place. I began making work about self-image, family and …