Art and Design Commons^™

Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

A Familiar House, William Lenard

Theses and Dissertations

The landscapes of my home in Connecticut are important to me. When I was young, I went to the woods for seclusion and comfort. While I wandered through the woods, I discovered a passion for storytelling. Now that I no longer live in New England, I miss the familiar landscapes of home. As a way to portray my sentiment, I write poetic narratives and create objects to illustrate natural landscapes.

I combine my interests of classic Americana art and literature with brutalist architecture and modern furniture to create immersive installations. I work with concrete and hardwood to materially bridge the …

This System Has Failed Us, Kate Murray Bickhardt

Senior Projects Spring 2017

When I go to a courtroom the only color I see is orange. I don’t want to talk down to people. The projection is level to the floor. There are 2,500 napkins. They are the people, the garbage, and the repetition of the excess, and my hope of giving them importance. There are roughly 2,500 people in the Orleans Parish Prison on any given day, but the system is bigger than them. It’s more consuming and this is not nearly the amount of napkins it would take to represent the people in even just one state's carceral system. The space …

Make It Point, Peter Avery Schreiber

Senior Projects Spring 2017

1. Finding a Willingness to Disappoint

Steel, latex paint, wood. An object that attempts to make a self-sufficient structure from a series of failed attempts. Hardware shows as an answer, but over and over, an answer isn’t enough. More than anything, each answer is the sum of its shape and weight, not its’ prescribed function.

2. My Own Sliding Self-Respect

Steel, enamel, latex paint, wood, light fixture, colored light bulb, extension cord. Scale is a measurement of self-worth. Some people know exactly how much space they take up, others lack a sturdy shape in their volume. And light takes up …