Art and Design Commons^™

Ambivalent Images, Beloved Objects: Building Bridges Between Picture Books And The Tangible World, Danielle Ridolfi

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

"Ambivalent Images, Beloved Objects" examines how pedagogical theories prioritizing objects and direct sensory experiences in early childhood can be applied to the creation of picture book illustrations. In doing so, it positions picture books as educational tools, and advocates for the importance of using them not to recreate nature, but to connect readers with the tangible world of natural and human-made objects that our digital-driven culture eclipses. It strives towards a unifying pedagogical and aesthetic philosophy that accomplishes what illustrator Eric Carle characterizes as a bridge between the tactile world of objects and the world represented in illustrations.

This exploration …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Genius Loci: Capturing The Distinctive Roman Spirit Through Pochoir, Carlee Mcguire

Interior Design Undergraduate Honors Theses

This capstone explores the concept of genius loci through photographic and artistic exploration and does so through a lens of study set on Rome, Italy. The first major goal of the process has been to discover the elements, moments, physical textures, and other design elements that comprise the genius loci of a city or space. The second goal has been to partake in a process that can be used by myself and other designers in efforts to make more conscious design decisions — gaining a better understanding of ‘sense of place’ can assist designers in straying from globalized, placeless design.

A Story Of The Social Life Of Yulupa Cohousing, Kayla Ho

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This capstone is a study of the lived social experience of one cohousing community. Cohousing communities are designed with the intention of fostering a community with a mixture of privately-owned units and publicly shared spaces and responsibilities. The study is conducted at a significant point in American history: these communities are a fast-growing phenomenon in the United States yet they remain unknown and/or unattainable to many Americans.

Qualitative information from the community’s current residents is gathered by using research tools of interviewing and photography. Interviews were completed virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Photographs were created during a three-day visit …

Made Of Water, Covered In Mud, Nicole Norman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My fixation on water as metaphor is a product of my cosmic design; Scorpio sun, Pisces moon, Pisces rising. I am made of water, begging to be held. Anything liquid has this same desire. I use my art practice to examine the fluidity of physical and digital spaces; how they transform almost constantly. This is only possible through the use of containers that give form to abstract ideas and make them easier to drink (read: digest). Containers can vary in size and shape, but their purpose remains the same. A drinking glass, a swimming pool, a creek bed. These are …

Glut And Guzzle, Ashley Kay Gardner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In Glut and Guzzle I explore my relationship with my partner, our sexualities and how to navigate these outside of the LDS faith of my childhood, and their struggles with gender, sexual expression and mental illness. This exploration landed on seductive and repulsive imagery of food and body. I use color, texture and size as a tool similar to visual tools of advertising to seduce my viewer. This is an exploration of how gender norms and the visual language of advertising that infiltrates daily lives and through media and religion can shape identity and gender roles. I utilize advanced 3D …

Journal, Untitled, Angelo Chammah

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This journal has no owner.
It is simply out there.
It belongs to me, it belongs to you.
It is about personal moments but universal experiences.
What do you see when you drive with the window open?
What can you find in your own house?
What light is on at midnight?

Angelo Chammah

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Modified Landscapes, Esther Nooner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modified Landscapes is a body of work that reflects serious thought regarding Nature and its future. My personal experience and beliefs are at the core of why I believe this subject to be of great importance and why it will sustain many artists’ investigations for the time to come. The influences that informed this process are explored through experiences I had traveling, reading and exploring the photograph as a material object. The manipulation of the photograph is meant to question the beautiful, untouched scene and break the Romantic gaze that is historically tied to representations of Nature and insist upon …

American Idyll: A Place To Call Home, Bowen Walsh Fernie

Senior Projects Spring 2018

I was raised in Italy from the age of five and when I returned to the United States at eighteen, I was surprised by the way I was affected by the landscape I had never known or explored. I found myself drawn to American culture as it is stereotypically represented in movies and TV - the quaint houses, the schools with cheerleaders and locker rooms, the drive-in movie theaters – and began to examine how those stereotypes are reflected in the real world. From this initial interest I began exploring the American space that I envisioned myself inhabiting throughout my …

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety, Rebecca Schroeder

Honors Projects

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety is a triptych video and artifact piece inspired by the abstract analysis of my dreams. It recognizes worries held within my subconscious and brings them to life through graphic design, photography, and video. The process of creating provides a new perspective of looking at both art and occupational therapy as methods of solving emotional distress.

I have recorded over 80 of my dreams in the past year. In these dreams, regret, grief, and anxiety are common themes. These themes are represented in three triptychs that cycle through past, present, and future problems. The cycling of …

Work It: A Study In Fashion Photography Portraiture, Dominic J. Iudiciani

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Fashion is a device with which the perception of one’s appearance is manipulated. It is a device that is used across all cultures to identify, symbolize, isolate, and appropriate. It is figuratively and literally woven into the fabric of humankind as a whole. Fashion has the ability to reinforce gender or create dissonance within it through androgynous silhouettes. It can express strength and confidence or emphasize vulnerability.

Through this study, the use of specific studio lighting techniques accentuates design elements of a highly curated collection of avant-garde, 21^st century garments. Drape, texture, form, and luster are but a few …

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 …

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …