Art and Design Commons^™

Snapping (Identities) Through Design Forward, Sara Iebole

IASDR Conference Series

«Social norms are powerful. People will mostly do what they see others do. It’s how the human animal learns to succeed. What we learn from the curricula of conventional education pales in comparison to what we learn by watching the actual behavior of the teachers and students around us.» (Mau, 2020). This reflection, in relation to design as a discipline capable of enacting transformative processes in society - defining it through the formalization of roles and possibilities, as well as to stereotypes and forms of oppression - offers an inspiring perspective of the subject matter. In fact, Design is a …

Expressive Arts Therapy To Support Positive Experiences Of Embodiment Among Rural Lgbtq+ Adults: A Literature Review, Ann Stromgren

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This paper investigates the use of expressive arts therapy to support LGBTQ+ adult clients in rural communities. Caring professionals in rural areas often lack training on how to work with LGBTQ+ clients, and best practices for clinical mental health counseling with rural LGBTQ+ clients have yet to be defined. Some evidence suggests that using “metronormative” best practices with rural clients may be irrelevant or cause harm (Giano et al., 2020). Although some recommendations exist for using expressive therapies with LGBTQ+ clients, they are rarely evidence-based, as very few empirical studies exist evaluating the effectiveness of expressive therapy interventions with LGBTQ+ …

Virtual Fantasy, Joey Petrillo

Masters Theses

Virtual Fantasy is a proposition in opposition to virtual reality. Fantasy is essential to queer survival; we daydream to escape the hetero-normative structures we’ve been forced to live in — imagining new futures without binaries, linearity, or traditional notions of success. By exploring immersion, escapism, and agency in our virtual worlds through a queer lens, VF offers a reframing of our relationship to VR — embracing digital spaces and their potential to imagine new futures and possibilities, while remaining present in the world around us, as we are here in our bodies, now.

A Presence Of P____ And W__Th, Riley Wilson

Masters Theses

This body of work examines the involvement of association as it relates to our cultural interpretations of natural phenomena. Flowers and animals, both real and imagined, have been used as symbols for human morality since the beginning of human history. Two sources with which I drew inspiration from are medieval bestiaries and the Victorian practice of flower language. By combining elements from these references, I aim to pair this idea about the human need for classification with my own considerations about my identity. In combination, I also aim to highlight the responsibility that is intrinsic to curiosity. When faced with …

Cultivar, Scott Vander Veen

Masters Theses

A memory palace is a mnemonic device that facilitates recollection by putting memory, that slippery substance, into a strictly structured mental geography. It is advisable to use a real place with which you are intimately familiar (perhaps your childhood home) as the scaffolding for the compartmentalization of whatever mental objects require organizing. Other objects, sensations, or atmospheric conditions are used to heighten the efficacy of the system—memory #1 may be found in the junk drawer in the kitchen, at dusk, nestled between a box of safety pins and a bundle of rubber bands. I am interested in the way this …

Queering Up For Battle, Alex Davis

MFA in Visual Art

In this text, I explore the potential for interwar European art to serve as a catalyst for the contemporary Queer rights movement. Drawing on the works of Remy Jungerman, LJ Roberts, michá cardenas, and Joar Nango, alongside the insights of Queer theorists Lisa Duggan and José Esteban Muñoz, I analyze my own artwork and the way I remix elements of both Russian Constructivism and Queer culture.

Amidst the current proliferation of anti-Queer violence and legislation, I highlight the importance of safeguarding Queer spaces and communities. To this end, I collect Queer objects and organize them into an arsenal of triangular …

Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao

Theses and Dissertations

Jordany's paper congregates their archival research into an art practice that examines the decolonial impulse to excavate the self and produce autonomy. Using ceramics to reference and re-animate Taino ritual objects found in museums, resulting in alternative museology, their work seeks to honor Caribbean ancestors by subverting colonial history.

Someone Will Remember Us / I Say / Even In Another Time, Paul Anagnostopoulos

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Anagnostopoulos’s paintings and vases use mythological melodrama in a contemporary context to portray vivid images of queer life in the wake of homophobic erasure and tragic loss. “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time” traces his aggregate interests in Greco-Roman cultures and art history.

Espacio, Edgar Perez Peña, Edgar Perez Peña

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Edgar Perez Peña (He, Him, His) is a Queer, Chicanx contemporary figurative painter, who lives and works in the Los Angeles County. A native of Los Angeles, California, his paintings, and assemblages are a strong combination of process, materials, and content that displays his fascination on how physical/psychological space (from where he resides), reflects on the Queer Brown body and its comfort/discomfort in relation to public and private space.

Peña looks at his artistic practice as an opportunity to explore the human condition from the Queer and Brown perspective as well the beginning of healing through the meditative process of …

Exploring The Influence Of Globalization And Self-Expression In Shaping The Vietnamese Lgbtq+ Community In Urban Vietnam, Minh-Thy Tyler

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The LGBTQ+ community is estimated to make up around 9% to 11% of Vietnam’s total population. Over the past few decades, Vietnam has undergone significant changes, marked by its increasing interconnectedness with the global community. These changes have also brought about a shift in perceptions and advocacy toward the LGBTQ+ community. Also bringing along a change in attitude towards the LGBTQ+ community in Vietnam is self-expression and fashion. Through drag or wearing gender-nonconforming attire, queer individuals are able to challenge the restrictive gender binary prevalent in Vietnamese society. Self-expression and fashion are also critical in helping queer individuals form and …

Mascs: Masculinity Reimagined, Josh Porter

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2023

MASCS: Masculinity Reimagined explores how performances of contemporary masculinities can counteract traditional binary understandings of gender. Justin Korver, John Paul Morabito, Betsy Odom, Moises Salazar, and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell expose, question, and subvert the ways that we culturally define masculinity by focusing on gender as performance. These artists not only critique cisgender, heteronormative binary understandings of masculinity, but also embrace the performative nature of gender and celebrate non-normative, alternative, and queer masculinities. By encompassing a range of gender and sexual identifications, these artists share their own personal experiences, interpretations, performances, rejections, and embodiments of masculinity. Breaking down the barrier created …

Elevating The Queer Body, Grant Mahan

Graduate Theses

Elevating the Queer Body is an art based exploration in removing objectification in the visual consumption of my own queer body. Throughout this thesis, I explain the experience of queer objectification, and how to overcome it through abstraction in a painting practice. This research comprises spiritual ideologies, as well as the history of abstraction, to inspire me in creating an ethically consumed representation of my figure. This is achieved through an abstract depiction and veiling of my figure. Presented compositions are overlaid with Islamic inspired devotion and ornamentation as a form of elevating the body itself.

Beauty Consumed, Erika Galvin

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

The Queer Dictionary, Mia Lew

Graphic Communication

With the government continually obstructing queer education in public schools, it becomes harder and harder for queer people to understand themselves than in turn, have the tools to explain what they are going through to others. This is a problem but in turn an opportunity. While there are queer literature and children’s books out there, they typically only encompass one story or one view on queerness. Thus, this project's main goal is to encompass queerness as a whole by using as many LGBTQ+ words as possible, people's stories under each word, historical graphics, highlights on the internationality of queerness, pronoun …

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 …

To Remember You By, Tesla Kawakami

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project is an illustrated zine memoir of queer love, dating, and growing up, framed by what was left behind. I explored my dating history through illustration, writing and material objects. Each section was about a different person, and was structured through a cut paper illustration of the item that they left behind at my house. I used a variety of different illustration techniques including cut paper, collage, painting, and found materials.

Indie Developers And The Queer Content Renaissance In Video Games, 2013-2017, Shane Michael Hansaruk Mr.

Major Papers

Queer content in video games has existed since the 1970s, but as time and technology have progressed, so too have the potential for queer content in video games. During the mid-2010’s, a sudden increase in the number of games with queer content began, lasting between the years 2013 and 2017. This research project examines this period in great detail to determine the cause of this drastic increase. Through examining queer games literature, two queer games databases, and two select titles from this period, I determine that independent, or “indie” developers, have a substantial impact on the increase of queer games …

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

Signs To Stop, Finn Tait

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Take this as a Sign-

At night it is so much easier to believe a story. There is a forgiveness at night, an expanding of what might be possible. I first learned how to tell stories in the dark, from listening to my dad's voice as I drifted off to sleep, from the whispered voices of my friends around a fire, from the car tape player on a long drive home. It is easy to imagine that something terrible stands just beyond the headlight's reach, looks back at you from your dark bathroom mirror, or lurks just behind your bedroom …

Party Of Immortals, Hyazinth S. Baumann

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I am the cook of a queer kitchen for characters. Who wants to come out? Where’s the seasoning? So far I’ve had a nonbinary Hebrew angel, a trans Dionysus, a drag dragon, and an agender winter spirit inhabit my physical form. Each mythic persona is meant to serve a new dish on the table. Lailah externalizes her/my spiritual awakening. Dionysus realizes his/my ideals of re-normalizing nudity. Darastrix serves in reaction to the history of womanhood and investigates the strange and magical beginnings of her/my childhood. Perchta practices durational performance and processes its/my Austrian heritage.

Zines are self-produced, self-published bodies of …

Ouroboros, Haley R. Biere

MSU Graduate Theses

My work uses both painterly and sculptural elements to convey my personal transgender experience. My work is for the little girl who I was, who was incapable of speaking out or expressing themselves. I create work for others that face similar situations, as well as for those who face feelings of gender dysphoria, as I did and still do by not conforming to the gender I was assigned. Working the way that I do is a way for me to rediscover myself after years of shoving my identity to the side for the sake of others. Growing up in rural …

Offerings, Diana C. Patin

LSU Master's Theses

These photographs and writing are a set of offerings, collected as part of an intensive examination of myself and my contentious relationship with self-image. I first established which traits in my personality represent me best. I landed on my fatness, my queerness, my southernness, and my penchant for caring. Then I took a deep dive into each of those four themes with the objective of uncovering both the areas of exaltation and spaces of hurt within them. The images that result are both confrontational and gentle. It is my hope that the uncompromising honesty within these offerings communicates that while …

From Marginal To Mainstream: The Queer History Of Camp Aesthetics & Ethical Analysis Of Camp In High Fashion, Emily Barker

Honors Projects

‘Camp’ has become a buzzword in fashion over the last few years, due to a rise in popularity following the 2019 MET Gala theme, “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” Based on Susan Sontag’s 1964 book “Notes on Camp,” the event highlighted many aesthetic elements of Camp sensibilities, but largely ignores the importance of the LGBTQ+ community in Camp’s development. In this piece, I highlight various intersections of Camp and queerness over the last century and attempt to understand Camp’s place in High Fashion today.

Neverending Loop, Joseph Nivens

LSU Master's Theses

The intention of NeverEnding Loop is to depict the trauma of queer adolescense contrasted by the shadow of the closet that follows LGBTQ+ children into adulthood. The reality for queer people is that coming out is a process that never ends and a task that can create a lonely existence for those that are different from the norm. The artwork aims to convey the very real and confusing struggle of finding your identity as a queer person existing in a heterosexual world.

NeverEnding Loop explores loops and cycles in short animations, sculptural forms with repeating imagery, and mixed media forms …

For|Rest, Jes Klass

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

In for/rest, players navigate a world built around an interpretation of the liminal space of grief. Glitching, blinking roots are all around an otherwise grey, empty space and as players destroy these roots they gradually resaturate the landscape. Each time a root is destroyed, the player will watch it disintegrate in front of them while some form of animal or plant spawns in the root’s stead. On rare occasions, instead of a plant or animal, a human will phase into the world as a root disintegrates. This human, Charlie, roams around the forest and offers the player a chance to …

Neale Tracy, Senior Art Exhibition, Neale Tracy

Senior Art Portfolios

This is a collection of posters and illustrations created for the senior art capstone and exhibited in the Senior Art Exhibition in the Bush Art Center Galleries in the spring of 2021.

War Of The Moon, Bibiana Medkova

Masters Theses

Space, in the post-World War context, was the new frontier of ‘global’ dominion. Space Race of the 1950s was a competition to signal technological capability and military strength. The objective of War of the Moon is to unpack the motivation for Moon race in 1950s. What did countries have to gain politically, economically, socially and technologically by conquering space and landing on the moon. At what cost? Who financed it, and where did the labor, land, and raw materials sourced come from. And how it was used to accomplish said landing. Space security is a massive aspect of all current …

Several Houses, Anthony L. Cudahy

Theses and Dissertations

Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the thinking that informed my painting practice fixated on the purgatorial temporal space of waiting, a questioning of utopian and apocalyptic impulses, and the preservation of deceased artists' archives.

Spit In My Mouth: Queer Intimacies, Material Intra-Actions, And Sensuous Becoming, Gm Keaton

Theses and Dissertations

This document describes my multidisciplinary art practice as it intersects with New Materialism, Queer and Affect theory, Ecology, and my embodied and experiential knowledge as a queer subject. The writing is divided into two categories. One is more theoretical, thinking through these different discourses. The other realizes them through relationships and intra-actions between my material kin and me. With these two modes of writing,I propose that embodied and felt knowing is as valid and illuminating as more traditional forms of knowledge. These sections are interdependent and resist linear logic, offering relational meanings to each reader as they find their way …

Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …