Art and Design Commons^™

Hero Baby, Elizabeth J. Harney

Theses and Dissertations

With fiction and theory, the following pages give context to my most recent body of work called Hero Baby. The work in Hero Baby embodies an aesthetic of cuteness, as highlights the relationship between: aggression and protection, power and submission, war and commodity, nationalism and desire for love.

Shattering Taciturnity: The Use Of Visual Arts As A Method Of Communication And Expression, Jesmil M. Maldonado Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

Silence an action that conceals a person’s memories, thoughts, emotions, fears, and insecurities, making them crave a method of expression. In this case, the Visuals Arts serves as an approach to investigate, create, understand, accept, and confront the darkness within the artist's psychological and emotional state. Inspiration taken from vibrant colors and insects found within Puerto Rico's natural sources, how these interact, relate, and consume the human within. By creating a series of artworks, the artist starts to comprehend how silence has taken over her life. Taciturnity has become the flame that ignited the artistic flow that leads to the …

Oblivion, Angela V. Scardigno

Theses and Dissertations

I believe I am drawn to work with wood because of genetic reasons. My grandfather was a carpenter. I remember him as a hardworking and busy man. As something inseparable and equally inspiring, I remember his studio which was a small house that was full of creativity and great memories. My grandparents’ house is one of my first memories where I learned to create art and collage. I have started to notice, as I get older, that I am constantly trying to bring back an atmosphere that resembles that warm and safe place of childhood. I have also noticed that …

Non-Space: The Perception Of Reality, Carlos Limas

Theses and Dissertations

This is a formal study of real-world images that try to convey a clear approach to the way we look and relate to unexpected places that at first glance don’t exist in a metaphorical way or just don’t strike us as interesting or attractive. There’s no particular story to tell only the need to expose a different kind of beauty through my own personal subjective view and sensitivity expanding the criteria of my own esthetic values and context of a captured image in a particular scenario.

The perception of Non-Space relates directly to a well establish photography technique called Deadpan, …

So . . . We're Going For A Walk: A Placed-Based Outdoor Art Experiential Learning Experience, Priscilla Anne Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

Schools in the United States often emphasize making children competitive in a global economy while neglecting the importance of developing citizens who are ecologically responsible. Problems of climate change, loss of biodiversity, mass extinctions and degradation of the natural environment, are often ignored. Some researchers have suggested that children lack unstructured play time in nature, have an increased amount of screen time, lack mindfulness, and are insulated from the natural world. Many children rarely have significant experience with nature's wildness. It is common for people to experience a sense of placelessness in the hyper-mobility of present times where "globalizing" agendas …

To The Peaches, Jazmine Hayes

Theses and Dissertations

My work focuses on erased histories and the ways these histories are preserved through cultural traditions. I explore histories across the African diaspora with specificity on African American culture and black female subjectivity.

Imaging Exploitation, Complexity, And Paradox In Subaltern Labor Photography, Mahnure Janis

Theses and Dissertations

Imaging Exploitation, Complexity, and Paradox in Subaltern Labor Photography is an expanded cinema performance examining 'cheap' labor in the fast fashion industry through a self-reflexive diasporic lens. The images and narration explores the garment factories in Bangladesh and contains ‘a photographer’s cognitive meta-data’, including ethical dilemmas while taking the images.

Multiple Bodies As One, Valerie Skakun

Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by traumatic bodily injuries, physical therapy, muscle growth, breathing patterns, mental health, ways of supporting a disabled body, navigating the health care system, and exhaustion, the work described in this paper is a double meaning of the word "organ" and investigates the body as machine. The vital parts of a pump organ, the bellows and pipes, are extracted and re-configured into structures built for the performer's entire body to physically engage with in order to produce wind-driven sounds. Two of the sound sculptures require that two performers engage in play together, allowing them to audibly communicate through moving their …

Through The Looking Glass: Marie Antoinette, The Mafia And The Buddha, Craig G. Foisy

Theses and Dissertations

Through the Looking Glass: Marie Antoinette, the Mafia & the Buddhais a short documentary film that recounts six chapters from the autobiography of Marie Antoinette. No, not that last Queen of France who got her head chopped off. This Marie Antoinette lives in Woodstock, NY (“but I do like cake!” says Marie from inside her shop). And yes, Marie Antoinette is her real name. She is 78 years old and she sells what she calls “wearable art” out of a ramshackle and overstuffed boutique in town. Marie is facing the possible closure of her shop: her 100-year-old …

The Dream Of Being Totally Open, Frederick Greis

Theses and Dissertations

This essay details four major themes in the paintings of Frederick Greis: spiritual experience, nature, pleasure, and humor. These themes are described within the context of the artist's main goal, which is to create an experience of profound unburdening.

I Like To Watch: A Literal Rendering Of My Own Gaze, Jenna R. Gribbon

Theses and Dissertations

Much of the pleasure of encountering the human form in paint derives from the access granted by the artist to their subject. My work highlights my own role in looking, and aims to make the the viewer aware of the ways in which they are implicated when consuming figurative work.

Loop, Lap, Leap, Hannah Schutzengel

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings use slow, subtle gestures to create experiences of quiet emotion: casual warmth and comfort, playfulness, ease. My focus is the irregularity of a poured liquid; the slow release of an ironed crease; the push and pull of care against things drooping apart.

Trackable Painting, Jisoo Hur

Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes how I suggest a way to read images in painting by supposing that the gap between paintings can have a new role in the reading. This process consists of three parts that go through references and titles of my paintings.

Kiddush Levana, The Moon Is Your Handheld Mirror, Noa Ginzburg

Theses and Dissertations

Noa Ginzburg is weaving cast-off and hand-made objects, lights, reflections, spells, drawings, and an abundance of knots into site-responsive installations. In her thesis, Ginzburg addresses Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, the synergy of assemblages, repurposing of materials in the era of Anthropocene, and how notions of solidarity and indeterminacy influence her work.

Dismemberment Diaries, Elizabeth B. Englander

Theses and Dissertations

An investigation of the sculptures featured on HBO’s the Sopranos leads to a broader investigation of the work of Robert Graham, which in turn opens on to broader questions of fragmentation in the history of sculpture. A personal sculptural journey.

Game On, Theresa Loong

Theses and Dissertations

Game On is a 25-minute documentary about game designer Brenda Romero, a successful woman in a male-dominated industry. Brenda, whose career spans over thirty-five pioneering years, has contributed to almost fifty game titles, developing innovative video and board games. How is her life a game space?

The Wound Of The Malinches [Las Heridas De Las Malinches], Leticia Margarita Lowry-Garcilazo

Theses and Dissertations

Since the foundation of Mexico, the Mexican culture has leaned towards chauvinism becoming a cruel and coward spectator of the violence perpetrated against women. As a survivor of violence, I was overwhelmed and tired of being blamed and told that I deserved what my abuser did to me and needed to get over it. I was told that as a woman I needed to suffer in silence – just as La Llorona. Because, as women, we are las Chingadas, we are Eve, we are Las Malinches.

As a statement to fight against my impotence, I created The Wound of The …

My Culture Art In Healing Action, Fabian Chavarria

Theses and Dissertations

My Culture Art in Healing Action is the study of many visions, processes, and applications of art, the role of culture on the development on a personal, social, and multilevel of society development. Art has a major role in my life and my purpose as an artist is to advocate positive change on the lives of people around me, is my duty to promote the positive image of my people, by using my culture as a jump platform I would promote, family values, social structure, social conflict, social change, and the factors of personal development by incorporating my point of …

Retratos De Las Criollas: Fashioning An Identity In Eighteenth-Century Bourbon New Spain And Peru, Daniel F. Ymbong

Theses and Dissertations

This master's thesis will examine the iconographies of elite Creole women in Bourbon eighteenth-century New Spain and Peru. This paper is a comparative study of the colonial regal portraits of elite Creole women with emphasis on preferences in: dress, hair, and accessories.

Much of the pictorial format is informed by European styles and decorum, that is the Spanish and Italian Renaissance in materiality. The prevailing silhouettes dictated by the French Bourbons are adapted, but strategically morphed an identity for the colonial elites, as there were different preferences for colors, accessories, and hair.

Developing An Assessment Framework: Measuring Digital Literacy Of Interior Design Students In A Digital Drawing Course, Somang Yang

Theses and Dissertations

This exploratory study provides a foundation to measure students’ level of learning based on education theory for digital technology and meaningful technology theory for digital literacy. There has yet to exist an effective assessment tool that can evaluate students’ digital literacy. To provide initial insight into the digital technology integrated course development, Wacom pen-tablet and Autodesk Sketchbook were utilized to create an interior design curriculum for undergraduate college students. The findings of this study shed light on the necessity of assessing new technology for integration into coursework in higher education. There are five themes that an instructor must examine when …

Behind Closet Doors: Horror And Dislocation In The Queer Closet, Corey C. Allen

Theses and Dissertations

“Behind Closet Doors: Horror and Dislocation in the Queer Closet,” is composed of a collection of sculptures, videos, and sound works that are directly associated with themes of horror and anxiety derived from the precarious space of the queer closet as detailed in this thesis of the same name.

Umberto Boccioni's States Of Mind, Sonya Shrier

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Umberto Boccioni’s series the States of Mind (1911) and discusses how these works represent a breakthrough in the artist’s search to find a pictorial expression for concepts that occupied him throughout his career. The States of Mind exists in four complete iterations each comprised of three images: The Farewells, Those Who Go and Those Who Stay.The first set of oil paintings, begun in late summer of 1911, are in the Divisionist style and are in the collection of the Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan. A set of charcoal and contè drawings on paper, likely completed in …

Sex Is Always On The Table, Jordan D. Artim

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines my work parallel to the formal and symbolic qualities of Renaissance painting, specifically the work of Bronzino. Through understanding the visual representation of the queer community throughout art history, harkening back to specific artists such as Paul Cadmus and Robert Mapplethorpe, my work attempts to find new ways of representing queer experience that extends beyond eroticism and the sexual gesture.

Anywhere Out Of This World, Amanda C. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This essay discusses my paintings alongside Merleau-Ponty's theories of perception and the history of form and color in painting. The relationship between perception and color is examined in the work of Paul Cézanne, Hans Hofmann, and Luis Barragán, along with Henri Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary.

Warped Gates, Christopher Roberson

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in the ambient conditions that are filtered through our bodies and our relationships with the built structures positioning us. I am combining experimental material approaches with a sensitivity to the spaces around an artwork to create sculptural situations that are dissonant and precarious.

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.

North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell

Theses and Dissertations

North American Data fractures and reconfigures pre-existing narratives into new, unauthorized forms of storytelling. Core samples extracted from various narrative sources are reassigned new roles according to their proximity to each other. This paper functions as an introduction to the essential actors and their dramatic inclinations within fluctuating scenarios.

Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli

Theses and Dissertations

The content of this essay is a reflection on my practice as an artist. A summary of text includes an analysis of my attraction to certain materials such as drywall, cabbage juice and coconut oil, all materials are the extensions of my memory, intention and pleasure. From warm memories of bathhouses and the flesh of others to managing illness at home, my artwork distills a lived experience into material reality. These materials take the shape of sculptural networks that serve as biographical biomes. The architectural and organic components of the work are sourced from my own experience and the surreal …

Capitalism As Readymade: 5.5 Case Studies, Nathan S. Rayman

Theses and Dissertations

Rayman makes an argument to repurpose capitalist systems as readymade artworks to shift the existing flow of capital from speculator to art producer.

Expanding Experimentalism: Art And Popular Music At The Kitchen In New York City, 1971-1985, Sarah A. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores artists' engagement with popular music at the interdisciplinary alternative space, the Kitchen, from 1971 to 1985. It seeks a critical language to challenge institutional frameworks to account for the creative output of artists' bands and the relationship between parallel and hybrid popular music and avant-garde performance practices.