Art and Design Commons^™

The Reveal: A Technical Study And Conservation Treatment Of An Overpaint Portrait, Camille Ferrer

Art Conservation Master's Projects

A severely damaged 19th-century oil painting depicting a portrait of a woman was treated at Patricia H. and E. Garman Art Conservation Department. A typed letter provided by the owner mentioned that it has been previously restored yet returned with unsatisfactory results. After further examination, the painting appeared to have been previously treated multiple times by different people. There was overpaint distinctly present on the face and later discovered to be present overall. The full state of condition of the painting was initially unknown due to the sum of the surface being overpainted. However, there were evidence of paint loss …

Photography, Architecture, And Environment: An Architectural Analysis Of Edward Ruscha’S 26 Gasoline Stations, Rebecca Tonguis

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

This presentation explores Edward Ruscha’s photobook 26 Gasoline Stations through an architectural lens. Specifically, it treats Ruscha’s work as historic evidence of how consumption, industry, and commodity have infiltrated all kinds of environmental contexts through architectural manifestations. Known for being the first artist’s book, 26 Gasoline Stations ambiguously exists as both fine art and documentation of everyday conditions, with the overall graphic character highlighting its perceived focus on overarching narrative. Since gasoline stations are the primary subject of each of the 26 photographs, the subject of this work is arguably architecture, suggesting that the historic relationship between mass gas consumption—or …

Behind The Lens, Jolie M. Adams Miss

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

What Fuels Me as a Photographer?

Many photographers don’t realize their ability and opportunity to give back and make a difference. I believe photography extends beyond taking a series of photographs. For me, it is my way of serving others, connecting with people, and sharing their stories. I believe photography is a powerful tool to inspire change in communities—especially in those that are underserved. Photos are visual statements of humanity: an abstract of our failures, ignorance, arrogance, compassion, resilience, progress, and so much more. I want my photography to go beyond a small circle of influence. All of us have …

Photography And 21st-Century Migration, Sarah Bassnet, Blessy Augustine

Visual Arts Publications

No abstract provided.

Family, Diaspora, And The Politics Of Care In Griselda San Martin’S The Wall , 2015-16, Sarah Bassnet

Visual Arts Publications

This article examines a series of photographs by Griselda San Martin, a Spanish journalist and documentary photographer based in New York City and Mexico City. The series focuses on the experiences of people at Friendship Park, a bi-national park located in the border region of San Diego, United States, and Tijuana, Mexico. Working in Tijuana, San Martin engaged with families as they attempted to connect with loved ones across the border in San Diego. Many of the people she met at Friendship Park had become separated from family members after living as undocumented migrants in the US and then being …

This Memory Is Redacted But Not Gone, Wanda-Marie Rana

Art - All Scholarship

In this paper, This memory is redacted but not gone, I discuss how my artistic practice, my time in graduate school, and my own life experiences have led me to create my thesis project. The paper is split up into chapters describing the work I made while in graduate school along with my themes; memory, family, home, and identity, and methods; archive, collage, and investigation, of working. I then dedicate a chapter specifically to my thesis work before concluding the paper with my plans to continue my practice after graduate school.

Magic Mirrors, Jamie Ho

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

When a beam of bright light hits the convex and polished surface, an image is reflected back onto the wall. This is a description of a magic mirror, an object from the Han Dynasty (206 BC -24 AD), that embodies how Euro-America views China: both technically advanced and shrouded in mystery. The magic mirror also points to the history of photography, as this term was often used in the Victorian era to describe a camera. The image created by a camera is a mimic of reality, both all too familiar and unfamiliar.^[1] Like magic mirrors, the GIFs I create …

When Might We Break The Rules? A Statistical Analysis Of Aesthetics In Photographs, Justin Wang, Marie A. Lee, Thomas C.M. Lee

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

High-quality photographs often follow certain high-level rules well known to photographers, but some photographs intentionally break these rules. Doing so is usually a matter of artistry and intuition, and the conditions and patterns that allow for rule-breaks are often not well articulated by photographers. This article first applies statistical techniques to help find and evaluate rule-breaking photographs, and then from these photographs discover those patterns that justify their rule-breaking. With this approach, this article discovered some significant patterns that explain why some high-quality photographs successfully break the common photographic rules by positioning the subject in the center or the horizon …

The Artist's Artist, Katherine Cacopardo

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

My senior project is the creation of a brand identity that explores how sounds, words, and imagery work together to create a complete experience by illustrating the recorded music and lyrics of fellow honors student McCall Chapin. My project includes album/single artwork, one music video, one lyric video and lyric video concepts for each of the other songs, streaming strategy, social strategy, and supplementary photos and graphics for promoting the work on social media. The idea is to create a complete brand that not only fits who McCall Chapin is as an artist but also visually tells the story of …

Family, War, And Identity, Claire E. Smith

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

An exploratory mixed media project using photography transfers centered on my Ukrainian grandmother's immigration during World War II.

The Power Of Places, Sophie R. Lasher

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

My senior project is an art exhibition entitled The Power of Places that explores the places that have shaped me and how they have done so through photography-centered multimedia collages, cyanotypes, and physical artifacts. This theme was born from the intensity of the emotional tie that forms between person and place, between heart and home. I believe we are a collection of the places that have shaped us. These places hold our stories, our memories, and everything that makes us who we are; we don’t notice it happening, but these locations become ingrained in our lives. I believe we are …

Photography Is All We Need - Photography Is Never Enough, Lex Thompson

Art and Design Faculty Works

An essay about the exhibition Surface Tension, curated by Michelle Westmark-Wingard, at Bethel University’s Olson Gallery. Featuring four artists working with photography: Sophia Chai, Paula McCartney, Christine Nguyen and Letha Wilson.

Look Over Here: A Brief History And Exhibition Of Black Women In Photography, Millie Drury

English Presentations

This is an informative online photography exhibition. It contains a brief history of black women in photography before presenting ten black female photographers in chronological order according to years active with a short profile and examples of their work. This exhibition is meant to give students and faculty exposure to the work of black female photographers and understand the history behind their present status in the field.

To Shake, To Shatter, Sydney Whitten

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

To Shake, To Shatter is a photography project about memory, family and relationship with one’s self. All images are taken on large format film, in Nashville Tennessee and Whitten’s home town of Carlock, Illinois.

For this series, Whitten explored her family archives to gather film stills from her childhood. She turned those stills into 30 x 40 inch prints, which would later be placed around Nashville to be photographed. These stills provided a way for the past to entangle itself with the present. She found theses still to interact hauntingly and romantically with the light and the shadows of the …

With Kindest Regards To You And Miss Sparks, Claire E. Kelly

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

This work explores the life of a woman, Katherine Josephine Sparks, who lived in Nashville from 1910 to 1993. Vignettes of her life are revealed through the Katherine Sparks Collection at the Nashville Archives, in which over 18,000 items including letters, photographs, memorabilia, and legal documents house parts of her family’s story. Katherine lived an unassuming life, she never married, and she had no children. There is very little documentation of her life left other than what is held in this archival collection. Without the archive, this record would be lost—a small part of history that would go undiscovered and …

Photography & Visual Perception, Rachel Leigh Bell

Open Educational Resources

This online class introduces students to the basic materials, terms and methods of digital photography. Students will be introduced to the digital camera, including camera settings and controls, but can also work with any photographing device. This is a hands-on class and students will photograph subjects indoors and outdoors, upload, edit, and print image files. Students will complete photo assignments throughout the semester as well as a final project that incorporates the techniques and themes covered in the course.

Undocumented Migration And Political Community In Susan Meiselas's Crossings Photographs, Sarah Bassnet

Visual Arts Publications

In 1989, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) photographed irregular border crossings in southern California. At the time, it was relatively easy for undocumented migrants from Central America and Mexico to cross between ports of entry, even as there was growing pressure on American officials to address border security.1 One photograph in Meiselas’s Crossings series depicts a border patrol officer apprehending a migrant off the interstate near Oceanside (fig. 1). Two torsos fill the center of the image. The officer grasps the man’s clothing, propelling him toward the nearby vehicle. With heads cut off by the frame and backs turned, …

East Of Adams, Autumn Walter

Senior Honors Projects

East of Adams is a photography project that explores the conservationist messaging ofAnsel Adams’s historical work and translates this work into shooting the Acadia National Park in Maine. Adams is well known for his documentation of our national parks in the western United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Armed with his large format camera he created his images in order to speak to the importance of conserving the natural beauty ofAmerica’s unique wild lands. Inspired by Adams’s drive to use photography in order tomotivate conservation, East of Adams will focus on similar goals within the Eastern United States at …

Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond, Lauren Paljusaj, Anne Savage

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Creative Works Winner

Most of us know Nevada beyond the Strip. It’s a place of houses, of shopping plazas, of movie theaters, and grocery stores. A place of hotels that are also places of work. A place of basins, ranges, vistas, and nature. A place of personal history. For Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond, curators Lauren Paljusaj (ENG BA ‘20) and Anne Savage (CFA BA ‘22), draw on photographs found in UNLV Special Collections to uncover the intimate visuality of a Nevada of past centuries. The exhibition focuses on how the imaged built landscape of early 20th century Southern Nevada …

Alternative Processes In Photography, Maria Politarhos

Open Educational Resources

Course Description:

This class introduces students to unconventional photographic processes. Students will explore historic methods and materials that allow the extension of photographic imagery beyond the standard black and white or color print. The class will experiment with handmade emulsions and papers, incorporating photographic imagery into new and varied contexts such as drawings, paintings, and made books.

Francesca, Madison B. Jones

2020 Symposium Creative Works

Created using instant film, this piece was taken apart and destroyed before a new image was formed. Looking at the image from the back and scraping and sanding at the layers of chemicals was an attempt at finding some remnant of the original image. It is delving into the idea of the importance of content within an image and explores the resurrection of an image in a new way.

Art 400: Research Project, Katie Smith

Undergraduate Publications

No abstract provided.

“Polaroids From Heaven”: Collaboration Between The Marian Library And The Course, Alternative Photography, Jillian M. Ewalt, Carrie K. Chema

Marian Library Faculty Presentations

This presentation covers a collaborative project between the Marian Library and the Department of Art and Design at the University of Dayton.

Kai Duc Luong Interview, Stuart Hutson

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio Born in 1975 in Phnom-Penh, KAI-DUC LUONG fled the oppressive Khmer Rouge regime from Cambodia to Vietnam to France, where his family settled in Paris, in 1978. KAI-DUC operates between Chicago and Paris. His artistic projects include video (art / doc / film), photography, and mixed media installations. His unconventional path as a self-taught outsider artist, trained in digital communication & systems engineering, gives him a unique perspective, at times questioning subject matters through the understanding of transmission and systems (e.g. the primary emotions, the five senses, the stages of grief, the art industry). His works have been …

Kelvin Burzon Interview, Maya Boustany

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Kelvin Burzon is a Filipino-American artist whose work explores intersections of sexuality, race, gender and religion. He was born on March 26, 1989, in Bataan, Philippines. As a child growing up in a Filipino culture, Burzon’s initial ambition was to become a Catholic Priest. “I have always been interested in the religion’s role in culture and familial relationships and have been drawn to the religion’s traditions, imagery, theatricality, and its psychological vestige.” His work is inspired by cerebral influences growing up in and around the church. “My cultural and familial identity, my memories as a child, cannot be separated from …

Out Of Sight, Mei G. Buzzell

University Scholar Projects

Out of Sight, reveals the reality of the service industry that is often camouflaged from the front of the house. Over a two year period, my discoveries are the happenings of what transpires within communities that is repeated day and night all over this country. Only the text of my thesis book is displayed, the images can be found at my website at, meibuzzell.com.

Motherhood Story Project: Transforming Societal Perception Of Mothers Through Portraiture & Storytelling, Andrea Caresse Lewis

Masters Theses

In our modern western culture, there are two drastically different views of motherhood. Society often paints mothers as women who give up on their bodies and careers to pursue a life of seemingly purposeless identity. While the reality is that women devote their entire being to the growth and development of a new human, continuing the very concept of civilization as we know it. Because of this dichotomy and plurality of worlds, mothers often feel ostracized, alone, and completely unprepared for the new journey they have embraced. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the realities of motherhood and …

Exploring The Enneagram Through Visual Aesthetics: Profiles For Personal Home Décor, Sarah K. Casmass

Masters Theses

The home is an environment that is the prime center for self-expression, personal sanctuary, and solace. On a psychological level, the home is a representation of the individual and, therefore, that individual should identify and find pleasure in their personal home space. Decorative art has long provided visual solutions for our innate desire to accentuate our spaces and express ourselves. However, there is a need for a connection between the visual arts and the augmentation of our basic psychological needs through home décor. With countless resources available for an individual to become more self-aware, there is a deficit in the …

Painting Down, Claire Stankus

MFA Statements

No abstract provided.

Honors Journal 2019, University Of Maine At Farmington

Honors Journal

The work presented here from our five contributors addresses the theme of the unknown, which mirrors the process of starting a journal from scratch. In this edition, reader, you will see that there is uncertainty in what lies in a relationship once financial struggles cause strain, and there is the struggle to keep knowledge alive when other forms of it have been forced onto populations. There are questions in how we cope and how we heal; there are questions regarding if we survive, or if we burn. We are very fortunate to have had the opportunity to feature the work …