Art and Design Commons^™

Overlooked Modi Vivendi, Natalia Silva

Masters Theses

Traditional gender roles, performance of heterosexuality, marriage, parenthood, and a large variety of other societal expectations manifest themselves in the domestic realm, both intangibly and spatially. The design of domestic spaces has historically catered towards heteronormative living stereotypes, marginalizing people whose way of living challenges the norm. Even in the present day, designers with non-user clients — developers, investors, real estate firms, etc. — will design with heteronormative households in mind. The rise in feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements has allowed for non-heteronormative modi vivendi (ways of living) to be more vocally and visibly present in the sociopolitical and cultural …

Blueprints, Lauryn E. Welch

Theses and Dissertations

“Blueprints” is an open letter on chronic illness and its shaping of the artist’s partnership and painting practice. Through the framework of a house—foyer, kitchen, library, bedroom, garden—put in relation to the body, this paper examines the vibrant matter inside, as an alliance of parts including people, objects, and spaces.

This Key Won't Work, Grace Gordon Waring

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This Key Won’t Work

I like to play with objects that are thought of as mundane. Either I make mundane objects “un-mundane” by giving them deeper meaning, or I allow their mundaneness to become more conspicuous by putting the objects in extraordinary contexts or by giving them undue symbolic importance.

During the making of this project, I gravitated toward using symbolic or familiar imagery, and the inviting image of a house was a perfect candidate for a familiar image. That is why the subject of many of the drawings I made are houses--anyone can look at that shape with five …

Pressing: Where The Objective Meets The Subjective, Mariana Parisca

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Through this essay I describe the theoretical and anthropological ideas that led to the creation of the Cushing Series. An interest in the obsession with photography in popular culture leads to an understanding of the permeation of structured reasoning beyond scientific research and into everyday life. Taking evidence from photography, and philosophy of science I establish the limitations of structured reasoning, both as a way of perceiving the world and as an understanding of identity, and define surface and frame as its physical representation. Using Sartre’s existential theory and phenomenological anthropology I then describe the infinite subjective existence of …

Ties That Bind, Jessica Marie Orlowski

Art and Design Theses

I am fascinated by the inner thoughts, the memories, and the cumulative experience that make us each a complex physiological puzzle. From birth, sociological building blocks are constructed forming emotional walls and unexpected doorways, boundaries and comfortable passageways through the architecture of our personalities. My thesis work, which is comprised of ceramic figures and interactive toys, offers playful memory triggers and evocative spaces in which viewers can deconstruct the building blocks of their social persona.