Art and Design Commons^™

There Is Sometimes A Buggy: Queering The Cowboy, Kelsey Gavin

Art and Art History Honors Papers

For my honors thesis project and body of work for the Annual Student Exhibition 2022, I will be interpreting stills from David Lynch's movie Mulholland Drive, sourcing from a singular four-minute scene referred to as The Cowboy scene. I will be recreating this scene in various mediums focusing on three central parts of the scene: The Cowboy, The Skull, and Adam Kesher. This project will examine and delve into the overall theme I have been exploring in my studio practice over the course of the past several years about how film and painting intertwine. For the Annual Student Exhibition it …

Scene By Scene, Katita Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Katita Miller’s paintings and drawings depict quotidian scenes through the filter of an overactive mind. Populated by spectral figures and swirling portals, her interiors and landscapes fluctuate between the mundane and the fantastical. This paper explores the parallels between painting and theater and the context and process behind five paintings.

The Screen To Desire, Joseph Parra

Theses and Dissertations

Joseph Parra reflects on our often embellished online personas and their effect on our desires. Through luscious 3-dimensional painting Parra translates the seductive desire of the hypermasculine male-presenting figure through glorification and criticality. The tactile painting also acts as a rebellion to accurately represent “real” life on the digital screen.

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.

Don't You Want To Be Happy?, Mario Rocha Rodriguez Jr

Honors Capstones

My capstone project is an exhibition of my artwork using visual distortions to convey a message to the viewer. I created nine new pieces out of the original seven proposed over the course of the semester with themes all relating to firsthand experiences that I think people can learn from. For the exhibit, I displayed ten pieces with two works that were made prior to the current semester. In conclusion, I present ideas that I have been holding in for the past 4 years.

The North Mississippi Field Guide For Young Explorers, Olivia Wymore

Honors Theses

The North Mississippi Field Guide for Young Explorers is an interactive field guide to some of North Mississippi’s wildlife designed for a younger audience, ages six to twelve. The creation of this field guide is a culmination of my inspirations and interests as a child and my involvement and passions as a student at the University of Mississippi. Multiple times during my college experience I have had the fortunate opportunity to work with the local Montessori school, Magnolia Montessori School, by volunteering for various events and leading educational activities. After working with this school and learning about their teaching methods …

“Paint What You Hate”: Philip Guston’S Hooded Figures And The Postponement Of The Exhibition Philip Guston Now, Thomas Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis interrogates the postponement of the Philip Guston Now exhibition, examining the justification for the postponement, the actions taken by the National Gallery of Art, and the effects of the postponement. My research examines the museum’s choice to cite social justice as the main context for understanding Philip Guston.

Uncaring Universe, Jingqi Wang Steinhiser

Masters Theses

Depicting the mythical and chaotic, my work revisits traditional and pop-cultural icons. I borrow my framing of absurdity from Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. [...]This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”

I grew up as the only child in a family of diplomats, a learning journey that mutated across geographies. Born in China, I lived in Russia, Mongolia and Korea before coming to the USA. My world is an aesthetic amalgamation of dissonant …

An Exploration Of Bengali Identity With Material And Visual Artifacts Through Painting, Farah Billah

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Painting is and always has been, at its root, an exploration of identity for me. My current collection of work explores the stripping of Eurocentric beauty standards and presentation of the divine of the Brown Body to reveal my version of the human spirit. My drawings, paintings, and a hand-tufted rug all made with a surreal, colorful representation of the coming together of body and mind.

Transformation., Jingshuo Yang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My works mainly show my perception of life and my change of thought. The world is full of changes, and the pandemic has disrupted our lives. Many people, including me, are confused about the world. Philosophy and my observation and thinking about the world helped me to have a clearer understanding of the world. My paintings Licia, Butterfly Woman, and Live with Covid reflect my understanding of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's theory of empathy. Within my art, I also use another German Philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's theory of the culture industry to deepen my understanding of some social phenomena. My …

Proceed With Caution: Safety, Peace, And Collective Responsibility, Rebecca Potts

Honors College Theses

Throughout my childhood, my parents often took me out into nature to go hiking, camping, and just explore. Now when I am in nature, I am reminded of my childhood and reflect on the memories of safety and comfort that I experienced, but through the lens of the person that I am today. As I have learned about and engaged with people in my community, I realized that their experiences and views of being outdoors and in the environments that I grew up feeling comfortable in are much different than mine. These different experiences are based on factors such as …

Future Proof, Melanie Asalde-Smith

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My work can be distilled into two major points of inquiry: perception and technology. I render minimalist interactions between reflective planes, shapes floating in space, and portals into the void. Driven by color, light and space, my work warps its environment through the illusion of illumination and dimension, and invites viewers to lose themselves in the altered space. This work is reflective of my life experience, caught between the real and the unreal.

Technology is both a muse and a tool in creating my analog work. The screen both heightens and distracts from my anxiety. Like many in my generation, …

There Are Ghosts In The Machine, Jonathan Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are ghosts in the machine is a body of paintings that dare to dissolve the boundaries between my physical body, intimate desires, and paintings. Utilizing the aesthetics of leather lifestyles, the paintings express the transformational potential of desire and transgression. Oriented within my experience as a queer, transgender male, I call upon influences that range from the body horror classics by director David Cronenberg or the transgressive attitude of Nine Inch Nails, to theoretical works on the power of eroticism by Audre Lorde and Georges Bataille.Modified by hardware such as chains, zippers, and grommets, the paintings express the transformational …

As The Sun Yellows The Green Of The Maple Tree, Adam Fulwiler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree is a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation.

Reflecting on my childhood spent with my brother, Austin, who experiences sensory differences due to autism, I establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I invite the viewer into the act of slow looking—to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.

In the studio, I invent rules and aleatoric devices, mimicking …

Invisible Until, Markeith Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Invisible Until” explores my personal experiences while working full time at Tyson Foods in Pine Bluff, AR up until moving to Fayetteville for graduate school. The body of artwork comes from reflecting on past a present while drawing from inspiration from Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel, and more. Using history as a tool to break down the American struggle I used conversations amongst my high school classmates to pull from their direct experiences to convey life and what it means to come from Pine Bluff. By using real people and their life events of trying to achieve progress, …

A Place To Call Our Own, Todd Jones

Art + Design Masters Theses

A Place To Call Our Own explores residual cultural memory through the detritus of the ever decreasing life cycle of our identity-driven attention economy. Through processes of archaeological curation, accretion, and excavation, I create new objects that query the values of our current socio-political positions and examine implications for sustainability.

Discarded and mistint house paints are manifestations of culture as they are forgotten in basements, garages, closets, and left behind by previous owners. Mistint house paints are orphaned in hardware stores by customers who are not satisfied with their original color choices or when the store fails to create the …

Saturated Skies, Childhood Trophies, And Colorful Plants, Nicholas Norris

Theses and Dissertations

My work presents interiors through the guise of memory while focusing on the sentimental objects within them. Through metaphors and signs I give form to certain events, sensations and out-of-perspective observations. Saturated skies, childhood trophies, and colorful plants find their place alongside decorated walls, floors, chairs, tables, rugs and beds.

Trees And Trees And Trees In Me, Areum Yang

Theses and Dissertations

Painting is a recording of my current psychology, and a window through which I can visualize my inner self. My painting won't make my anxiety go away, but it will allow me to work with my emotion and put it in a specific place, so it doesn't control my life.

Theater And Spectacle Of The Inside, Dante G. Cannatella

Theses and Dissertations

Dante Cannatella’s work is about when the landscape reclaims the city, when the lines between inside and outside are blurred, and how lives play out against the truth of uncertainty and impermanence. His gestural paintings reflect growing up amidst the destruction and rebuilding of New Orleans. Set against a backdrop of acid yellows, muddy pinks and greys, the figures are caught in the powerful forces of nature, commerce, and mass thought that shape both their inner worlds and outer realities.

Detritus And The Icon, Brian Madonna

Theses and Dissertations

Detritus and the Icon highlights the relationship between the figure and the monument, contrasting between the gravity of earth and the lightness of the Divine. My thesis exhibition of seven paintings, comprised of thirty seven panels, brings the banal into conversation with the age old endeavor of monument building.

Long Time, Jacob V. Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Jake Reed’s work is driven by the idea that architectural ornament can be imbued with meaning not native to its construction or use. To find that meaning, he deconstructs and reassembles elements from the architectural and ornamental histories he studies, using the growing climate crisis as a generative framework.

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Hunting Rabbits, Bones Olson Gilmore

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I’m excited to extend an invitation to you to join me on a hunt for rabbits. I’ve only seen the rabbits that live in my parents’ backyard and I’ve never held a pet rabbit because I’m afraid of being bit. There’s a lot to learn from the distance between ourselves and the things that are right in front of us but blend into the background, things that are always running away, and things sitting in our lap that we’re too scared to hold. In Hunting Rabbits, the rabbit represents the parts of me that get away, and the paintings are …

Reclaiming The Appropriated Space Through Care, William P. Glaser

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis navigates the complex and (at times) frustrating experience of balancing caregiving and art making while attempting to converge both practices into one. The collaboration of caregiving and art making serves as a potential solution for those that struggle with the seemingly unreconcilable stratification of both activities.

Tangible Transformation: Change In Intangible Times, Rhonda R. Dass

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Pulling the intangible cloud to the forefront, this exhibition transforms the ethereal image of the cloud into the tangible paper and canvas representations that flirt between what is and what can be. I combine techniques from drawing, painting, and papermaking, to create clouds that leave the heavens and solidify and yet spark the imagination in new directions. Presented as my thesis exhibition, my exploration of the ever-shifting cloud scape helps express my understandings in and about a transforming world of change. Two years ago, when the world turned sideways, I was in the middle of a series of paintings and …

Evocation, William Robert Gary

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Evocation

When I began my time at Bard College, I was already deeply interested in children’s Art. The ideas supporting my senior project reach all the way back towards the end of my Freshman year. The last few years have consisted of practicing, preparing and researching for what would become my thesis. Evocation encompasses a large body of paintings, prints and sculptures inspired in part by my own childhood artwork. After discovering a box of nearly five hundred drawings from my childhood during the summer of 2021, I have sought to infuse my interest in the expressive and symbolic tendencies …

Common Thread, Isobella Rose Grubb-Kovach

Senior Projects Spring 2022

We are nature, and nature is everything. Our bodies reflect the patterns found in nature—our veins and cells mimic lichen and mold, roots, water, vines.

Painting does not require a message. It is independent of me, the artist; it stands on its own, a child made by my hand. It is sent out into the world alone, unaccompanied by my touch or comment, its only task to procure a visual experience, a collaboration between geometry and gesture, for those whose eyes rest upon it.

The mind is drawn to nature; we are endowed with the ability to connect our selves …

A Renaissance: The Absurd Retelling Of Mostly True Events, Erica R. Hitzman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Throughout the following you will be taken on a fantastical retelling of the exhibition A Renaissance, and some of what lead up to it. Through the eyes of various shifting perspectives you will explore the relationships between the artist, her art, and the viewer in the hopes of unveiling how the work plays into feminist theory, its place in the Zeitgeist, and the motivations behind it. Each perspective is formatted differently, to visually mirror the shift in perspective. Presented in the first person and aligned to the right, the account of the artist discusses the process, emotion, and inspiration behind …

Interrogating The Light Bugs, Ana C. Villagomez

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings engage with ideas of time, memory and displacement. Intricately painted works appear to cover other layers of information hidden underneath through the act of rubbing, masking and erasing with unconventional tools such as scour pads, toilet brushes and rags, creating a surface that resembles a complex topographical map. But unlike a traditional cartographer, I seek to map my inner world.

Stations Or There Goes Nothing, Jeremy D. Lawson

Theses and Dissertations

Jeremy Lawson uses bright, expressive, abstract painting in conversation with minimalist sculpture to encourage a meditation on the death of the self, the potential for it's transformation, and the struggle to maintain the tools beyond language necessary to experience the sublime.