Art and Design Commons^™

Apotheosis, Zekiel Betzer

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Zekiel Dirk Betzer’s oil paintings are a visual representation of transfiguration – the elevation of daily life into myth. He believes that if we defer to monolithic ideologies to narrativize our life, we are prescribed a relationship with the transcendent, rather than discovering it, leading us down the path of ideological possession. He is principally interested in how we, as both artist and audience, invent meaning and how this invention informs the way we engage with reality; especially how objects or memories become sacred.

Ithell Colquhuon Taro As Colour Tarot Deck And Book By Ithell Colquhoun, Emily E. Auger

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

A brief note regarding Fulgur's release of Ithell Colquhoun's "Taro" deck (2022) with links to a full-length review of it and to other reviews of related publications about Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington's work with Tarot.

From The Invisible Object To The Void: An Examination Of Surrealism And The Lacanian Real, Isabela Fernandes Pinheiro

Theses

No abstract provided.

The Hidden Power Of Images: An Allegory Of Chaos And Performance In The Digital Age, Livia Xandersmith

MFA in Visual Art

Within this text, I explore the hidden power of images in American visual culture through painting-based installations. I investigate images of the past and present juxtaposed in a surrealist landscape. Through the use of images in the news, entertainment, advertising, and images within the home, I depict how the problems of the past bleed into our perceptions of the present. I find that this cycle of problem inheritance connects us as humans regardless of time, generation, and place. In my work, I explore the complexity of image culture and its shifting presence within the digital age. Using surrealist collage, I …

My Perception Of Reality Expressed Through The Arts, Amanda Dunker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis project will focus on the symbolism and artistic interpretation of how I perceive reality. This thesis project uses all artistic skills that I have acquired throughout my lifetime and combines them into one mixed digital media video. This is a mix between the two digital media formats 2D and 3D. Each animation and segment syncs with the music selected manually or technically. The process of creation for each segment and explaining which software I choose to use for each task. It also dives a little further, noting the artistic decisions and why. The symbolism used within the art …

Song From A Chamber, Miguel A. Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

My work weaves a biomythography through figurative reimagining of syncretist religious iconographies. This thesis installation is composed of a mural reliquary in which a collection of twenty works on paper is displayed. The project exposes abstract dimensions of body and spirit in relation to my experience as a gay immigrant.

Ethereal Axiom Paintings, Ophelia Cornet

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest

Ophelia Cornet is a painter, illustrator, and installation artist. She was born in Belgium to a family of musicians and designers. After a life-threatening car accident in her early 20’s, Ophelia moved to New Mexico for the dry climate which would assist her recovery. Equipped with knowledge in photography and painting from Rutgers University, she continued her artwork. Today, Ophelia pairs photographed images and oil paint to fête female protagonists in an intimate otherworldliness, creating dreamlike snapshots of the human experience.

Ophelia has been Lead Art Instructor at the Albuquerque Museum for the past 20 years. She has facilitated many …

Cosmic Desert Art, Mike Graham De La Rosa

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest

The Cosmic Desert are the designs inspired by chile hallucinations, desert creatures, and the long weird neon nights in the Borderworld. Made with love on the banks of the Rio Grande.

My family is originally from Northern Mexico but I grew up in Northern New Mexico down river of both where Al Hurricane and Nuclear Annihilation were originally created. Amongst chollas, rattle snakes, and river willow, the imagining of New Mexico permeates the landscapes. The Cosmic Desert is inhabited lowriders, taco trucks, neon adobe bars, cholas, native peoples, immigrants, punk rockers and cowboys. Just beyond the darkness, our imagination takes …

Goodbye Blue Monday, Savannah Maria Starkings

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Not All Dreams Are Nightmares, Not All Nightmares Are Dreams, Neal G. Polallis

MSU Graduate Theses

My art deals with mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), and addiction.

It is how I work out the problems in my relationships and within my head. My art is where I explore

ideas, alternate possibilities, my dreams, and my fears. Drawing inspiration from photographers such as

Jerry Uelsmann, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn; painters like Caravaggio, Picasso, and Bacon, as well as,

concepts from the Surrealists and the Futurists, the art I produce is dream-like: familiar objects in unrelated

places. The work that I create stems from years of working with patients in their most acute states. …

Vox Machinal : The Voice In The Machine, Phoebe Hiltermann

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

A radio play and foray into the psychosis of a woman through sound, dance, and puppetry.

Haunt : Casual Surrealism, Cara Buzzell

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to define, observe and create a feeling of surrealism through a series of design gestures. The process began with a question: If I, as a designer, immerse myself in a subculture that I have no interest in, will I become a fan of it? To attempt this, I created systems and tools to deeply investigate each subculture. I observed and recorded what I experienced. As a case study, the haunted attraction community captured my attention. I went to their conventions and took classes in the crafts of “the haunt.” While immersed in this community, I started to …

Things That Don't Work: An Exploration In Sculpture And Installation, Mark Tyler Frasier

Graduate Theses

This thesis statement will explore connections between my work and contemporary artists and its references to art movements including Minimalism, Dada and Surrealism, and Installation art. My thesis work explores the metaphors of current social and political constructs that seem to operate properly, but in reality, do not. My intention is to juxtapose constructed and found fragments of mixed media in such a way as to subvert their traditional associations in order to encourage viewers to question reality. My relationship to the materials and interest in the process are as important to me as the final product. No single piece …

Betwixt And Between: An Exploration Of Dream Imagery As A Means To Self-Discovery, Anastasia Netrebine

Graduate Theses

This body of work is an investigation of the memories and experiences of displacement. As a foreigner, I often find myself in a strange space between the familiar and the unfamiliar. I use various three-dimensional media to explore and depict these experiences, as well as dreams and memories related to Jungian archetypes, especially as they relate to my personal history. I overlap these dreams and memories, varying the media and shifting scale, so that the line between reality and dreams gets blurred and one becomes both a viewer and a part of the installation simultaneously. Through my manipulation of different …

Matter Under Mind, John F. Lause

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses the work for his Masters of Fine Arts exhibition, Mind under Matter, held at the Tipton Gallery in downtown Johnson City, Tennessee. Exhibition dates are from March 27th through April 5th 2017. ‘Matter under Mind’ explores the balance of control and non-control within the art-making process. This technique creates an automatic dialogue resulting in abstraction guided by the subconscious. The title ‘Matter under Mind’ is a slight play on the phrase ‘mind over matter’ emphasizing how matter/material is manipulated by the mind through the making of artwork, and within the mind’s eye or imagination.

The video installation …

Surrealism: Art Of Subconscious, Yiting Paung

Honors Theses

Surrealism establishes a bridge between the physical realm and the domain of dreams and illusions. In the surreal world, logic is paradoxical; physical principles and rules are defied, only limited by imagination. The expression is a reflection of the personal experience and psychological state of the creator. During my early works in thesis, I concentrated on studying the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Inka Essenhigh, and Julie Heffernan. In First Thesis Painting , I incorporated the creature in Bosch’s vision of limbo from Limbo and the dynamic form from Romantic Painting created by Essenhigh. I set the combined creature in a …

The Year-Long Adventures Of The Blue Shoes & Their Friends, Michael R. Hill

Zea E-Books Collection

While participating in a Teacher Workshop organized by Georgina Valverde at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, Michael Hill began a one-year artistic and pedagogical odyssey making original images (always featuring some aspect of one or more athletic shoes) and posting them daily to a visual blog he created to help kick-start writing projects among the many student athletes he tutored at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He started the year self-identifying as “scholar/teacher,” but at year’s end Michael looked in the mirror and said, OK, still “scholar/ teacher,” but also “artist.” Here are the workshop organizer’s foreword, the scholar’s …

Wax Bodies: Candles, Queerness, & Taking Up Space, Moya Shpuntoff

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My partner and collaborator Callaway Fox and I use queer surrealist installation, craft practices, and performance in order to address queer and disabled temporality, articulating our experiences as disabled queer femme artists through abstracted and literal exploration of femme bodies in space. In performance and installation works Hospital Performance: Part I and Hospital Performance: Part II, we responded to our experience of marginalization, medical malpractice, and emotional isolation, ultimately exploring queer and disabled temporality through queer surrealism. Hand-poured scented candles became metaphors for queer and disabled bodies, and along with other craft practices used in this work, are a …

Women Surrealists: Muses Or Seekers?, Noor A. Asif

Scripps Senior Theses

Surrealism has often been labeled as a misogynistic movement that sought to provide man with an avenue into a higher reality at the expense of the humanity of women. By perceiving the opposite sex as their muses, Surrealist men rendered women as mysterious sources of the marvelous, the name given to the higher realm, which they desired to attain. I propose that Surrealist women were empowered by the fact that ‘woman’, as an abstract concept, and femininity were synonymous with the marvelous. This entailed that Surrealist women had the advantage of being “sources of revelation, as provokers of wonder, dreams, …

Cute As A Button, Marta R. Finkelstein

Theses and Dissertations

Cute As A Button explores powerlessness, vulnerability, illness and addiction all wrapped up in tender buttons and a cute, cuddly creature. Using animation, sculpture, sound and an intimate space, I surround the viewer in a saccharine nightmare, one that references the dark underbelly of the cute and the sweet. The visual and aural elements are representative of the psychological and emotional states of powerlessness, which are overcome by the act of making and exploring a medium over which I can have complete control.

"Synthesizing Cubism And Surrealism: Wifredo Lam's 1940s Cuban Works", Kelsey Winiarsky

Africana Studies Student Research Conference

As a modernist artist, Wifredo Lam used issues of racial degradation and colonialism as a catalyst to create work that directly addressed issues of colonialism in Cuba. Akin to Picasso’s process of appropriating of African motifs within a modern, Cubist style, Wifredo Lam created and appropriated a pastiche of both Surrealistic and Cubist styles into his 1940s paintings. The utilization of these modern styles engendered Lam’s international reputation while providing him with a powerful, creative outlet to express his struggle as an Afro-Cuban. Through the use of African masks and the Santería religion in his paintings during this time period, …

Art From The Outpost, Field Notes, New Territory, And The Invisible Hamster, Dymphna De Wild

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The outpost installations I create reveal my choice to be inventive with mostly found materials that I discover on my walks. Calling myself an artist-archeologist, I write down field notes as I collect my art-bound specimens and make a descriptive inventory for each of the works. I often surprise my viewers (and myself) by creating something fabulously strange and compelling with things that were cast aside. I hope to increase my viewers’ abilities to find beauty in these forgotten and trashed items and to generate an innovative dialogue and an outside-of-the-box way of thinking.

The Rebirth Of Consciousness, Urszula Blaszak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Human beings encounter cascades of a plethora of experiences, one after another, every single microsecond of our lives. There are many things happening around. The world is full of events and occurrences. As they happen, the mind reacts to every individual input. This is a very exhausting and difficult. Thus, people have developed a process of self-defense against this horrible mishmash of information. Their minds have this amazing capacity of sorting them out and making sense out of them. Humankind's survival depends on that. If one does not sort all this information out, one might not be able to make …

Dynamic Force, Motion, And Life In Digital Design., James Michael Livingston

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to explore specific works that I have created as it relates to digital art and design. My works include abstract, organic objects that exist within surrealistic environments. First, I explain the dynamics of the imagery that has emerged from my career in broadcast television, my coursework in the Department of Art and Design at East Tennessee State University, and the works of fantasy, surreal, and abstract artists. In conclusion, the images discussed impose an idea of abstraction and surrealism with a sense of force, motion, life, and dynamic action.

Ross Caudill Mfa Sculpture 2006, Ross Steven Caudill

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis overviews my experience during graduate school making tangible,object oriented sculpture. I have been working formally to compose space in a way that develops a narrative between parts. The work is also a bridge between the fields of painting and sculpture, in terms of drawing with form and both painted and local, material color. My palette has mostly consisted of bronze casting, steel fabrication, fiberglass and epoxy resin, paint, the found object, woodworking, and mold making. This work is also conceptually based in showing the hand worked qualities of the materials, the transfer of meaning through casting, and my …

Dalí'S Musical Roundabouts, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Those familiar with Salvador Dalí's contradictory nature as well as his propensity to mask his own thoughts will not be surprised to learn that, publicly, he despised music, though obviously that was not the case at all. In fact, many witnesses say – Amanda Lear, for one – he was actually quite musical and, time and again, he could be caught off guard singing or humming Catalan folk songs, sardanas, zarzuelas, and cuplés – all folksy, kitschy, and, by most accounts, tacky popular songs. Dalí, however, went to a great length to conceal this spontaneous love for the simple, uncomplicated …

Daniel Serra-Badué: Dreamt Reality, University Of Richmond Museums

Exhibition Brochures

Daniel Serra-Badué: Dreamt Reality

1994

Marsh Art Gallery

Introduction

Daniel Serra-Badué is an artist of uncompromising vision who dwells upon memory as if it were tangible. "All that we see or seem - Is but a dream within a dream," wrote Edgar Allan Poe , and Serra-Badué seeks to place his audience within that dream. His evocative images compel us toward experiences that combine described reality with surreal impossibilities and dreamlike remembrances. Serra-Badué's world is a world of dreamt reality.

The lithographs in this exhibition, ranging in date from 1964 to 1992, demonstrate Serra-Badué's mastery of clarity of line, exactitude …

7 Days As A Surrealist Embryo : Or, The Liberation Of Loplop (Bird-Inferior), Brian Schorn, Fleet Library, Special Collections, Jan Baker

Letters

This book was completed for Jan Baker's artists' book class.

Sources For Neo-Satirical Drawings: Surrealist And Conceptual Processes, Douglas C. Brittain

All Master's Theses

This study was concerned with social conunent and the intensity of emotional expression. The work was not intended to be a sociological study with illustrations, nor as an over-literate approach to art, but rather as a study of fine art problems. The problems and questions raised were as follows: (1) How are contradictions resolved when strict definitions of fine art and caricature are combined in drawing? (2) How are surrealist and conceptual processes integrated with biomorphic and mechanical forms? (2) What are the possible symbols and techniques for expressing ideas and emotions about the "mechano-organic" theme? This study was intended …

The Weird World Of Surrealistic Painting, Barbara Battle

Honors Theses

When the topic Surrealism is introduced to the average conversation, the general knowledge concerning it is that Dali is supposedly the main Surrealist, and that the Surrealists painted nonsensical make-believe canvases. But the weird world of Surrealistic art goes much deeper than this, and its roots are far more attached to the importance of man's existence. The movement of Surrealism, though somewhat short-lived, was one of tremendous fervor and power. The men who developed it had an entirely new insight toward not just painting pictures, but toward building a new philosophy of life.

Two of the main characteristics of Surrealism …