Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Eco-Interoception: What Plants, Fungi And Protista Have Taught My Body, Sara Riley Dotterer

Art Theses and Dissertations

To me, ecology is the relational, full-body awareness that I am made up of and deeply connected to everything around me; and for better or worse, this is reciprocal. I form ecotones, an ecological transitional zone between two ecosystems, with the world around me. I use this ecotonal lens to blur binaries and dissolve boundaries between me and the world “outside my body.” During my Masters of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University, I have continuously explored and represented the lives of various more-than-human species outside of my body, including plants, fungi and protista through an ecotonal lens. Although these …

Heretic Territories: Spells For Fracture, Mia Greenwald

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This monograph accompanies the MFA thesis exhibition, Heretic Territories: spells for fracture. The show uses video, weaving, clay, and bacterial/fungal bodies in three main bodies of work: Inter; Lost, remain, fracture; and For, Of Them. The pieces, and the relationship between them, explore themes of magic, the body, and land in contradiction and opposition to colonial and capitalist structures. I approach the artificial hierarchies that subjugate people, non-human creatures, and land while trying not to replicate the mistakes of posthumanist scholarship that bypasses the fact that not all people are afforded full access to the category …

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.

Dirt Circus: Queering Sports And Home Through Filth, Hannah Patteson

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This monograph accompanies the MFA Thesis Exhibition, “Dirt Circus”. I outline the history of circus and carnival culture and the ways in which queer identities are expressed through these artistic modes. I describe the nonconforming expressions of gender in these arenas through bearded ladies, aerialists, clowns, and the freak show. I then explore various groups from the 70’s to present day, including Bread and Puppet Theater, The Cockettes, and Split Britches, who utilize performance to further their ideologies of gender freedom, anti-capitalism, and sexual liberation. I compare our differing uses of cheap art and public engagement within the realm of …

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness, Megan Kenyon

MFA in Visual Art

I am a Midwestern, Christian, and feminist artist. I make work about the beautiful, broken, and absurd ways in which American evangelical culture influences lives, especially women’s lives. I’m dragging everything into the light by deconstructing and critiquing the world in which I live, move, and have my being. I do this by harnessing prophetic imagination and incarnational space to shine a light on how patriarchy infects evangelical Christian theology and practice. Using prophetic imagination through photographic self-portraiture and text (my own and found texts using the Bible), I seek to make plain the effects of white, Christian patriarchy on …

Elsewhere: In Defense Of Daydreaming, Alex Braden

MFA in Visual Art

Much like music, organic life is an absurd, improbable, and serendipitous instance. I set circular, electric, acoustic, and magnetic forces in motion and allow them to coalesce freely in the hopes of synthesizing unexpected moments of beauty, connection, and harmony.

Uni_Form Space: Exploring Environment Through Fashion+Architecture, Alanzo Price

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Henry Van de Velde advocated for the German concept, ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ which translates to ‘total work of art’. This concept became popular during the Art Nouveau Movement around the 1890s when architects began utilizing their knowledge of scale to design fashion and other everyday objects like silverware. Though this concept has produced intriguing designs, architects still shy away from design processes that seem ornamental assuming that they will not produce work that is ‘architectural’. The goal of this project is to create an architectural environment by curating designed elements that use a recognizable design language present in fashion and architecture. The …

Tied Together, Eiko Nishida

Theses and Dissertations

The paper is about a site-specific installation that questions a viewer’s norms and perspectives, through the use of multilingual newspapers as a sculptural material.

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 …

Uncanny Evolution, Will Baca

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

I like to think about reality and simulacra in the internet age as then and now. Then being everything before a conscious awakening and now being anything between consciousness and reading this. The image is an arranged landscape divided into thirds from right to left, similar to a timeline. I tried my best not to use square images, cutting out only the important objects or symbols. My image uses little to no negative space, somewhat of a sensory overload. All the images are different sizes and I used layer arrangement to embed smaller objects into any negative space. From the …

Integrating Art And Design With Environmental Science, Laura D. Hinson

The Confluence

This article demonstrates how combining art and design and environmental sciences would benefit both fields by analyzing how utilizing art and design in environmental sciences can help enhance aspects of the teaching process and environmental studies, specifically those dealing with climatology and pollution. Additionally, by taking an ecocritical approach to analyzing art and its creation, this article will detail how artists can become more conscious of the impacts creating certain types of art has on the environment while also noting environmental changes documented through art.

Transcendence: Exploring The Connections Between Transgender/Gender Non-Conforming Identities And Experiences Of Nature Through Art, Mc Jackson

Undergraduate Theses

“Transcendence: Exploring the connections between transgender/gender non-conforming identities and experiences of nature through art” is the written portion of a creative thesis revolving around an immersive art installation and short film. Transcendence, the installation, was created to promote connection by exploring the overlap between transgender and gender non-conforming (GNC) experiences and experiences of nature. Part of this installation is a short film of interviews conducted with transgender and GNC individuals about nature, their gender experiences, and the transcendent nature of the two. The written thesis analyzes existing literature on nature as a restorative, therapeutic, spiritual setting, offers insight into …

Inner Portraits, Bethany Salisbury

Graduate Theses

This paper investigates the many interconnected layers of women’s mental health through portraiture and how animal and plant symbolism can represent the way women's hormones and bodily health affect their mental health. I reveal how the artwork created presents these connections and inner mental health narratives to the viewer, creating a space of empathy, destigmatization, and self-reflection. This body of portraiture art connects five women through a series of both two-and three-dimensional portraits based on interviews using my own adaptation of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoots’ (1983) portrait methodology.

Women and non-binary individuals have always dealt with difficult interactions of bodily and mental …

Refigured: Separations In Portraiture, Caroline Myers

All Theses

Utilizing traditional painting techniques embedded with digital syntaxes, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, serves as a catalog of my experiences with communication in a hyperconnected world. Processing illegible information caused by my hearing loss informs the process of imposing similar boundaries within my paintings. Like a technical glitch, these obstructions create an illegible visual experience, with evidence of my process remaining as a clue for the viewer’s understanding of the image.

Though personal in nature, I expand from my experience with auditory communication to employ pertinent explorations into the sustained unpredictability of today’s ever-expanding medium that is technology. My paintings …

Destabilize (Achtung) Baby: Performance Text, Phenomenon, And Writing As A Condition For Radicalizing An Historically Bourgeois Artform, Jeremy Kadetsky

Theatre Thesis - Written Thesis

The author seeks to define the preconditions for creating performance text that has the possibility to not only create exciting compelling performance; but also has the affordance to radically change the way in which dramatic theatre is produced. In creating their own dramaturgy, Jeremy Kadetsky draws inspiration from the post-structural linguistic writings of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva; the queer theory espoused by Jack Halberstam and Sarah Ahmed; and the written and realized work of contemporary American playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks, Sibyl Kempson, and Agnes Borinsky. Ultimately, they find a working criteria for writing in a way that promotes fecundity, jouissance, …

The Siren Of San Francisco, Emily Gage

Whittier Scholars Program

The Siren of San Francisco is a story I have been interested in telling for the longest time focusing on the coming of age of the main character, Mia, and how she deals with change through gaining the power of shapeshifting. A lot of the graphic novel explores the relationships between Mia, her mom, and her close friends and how her relationships with them change during this transitional period.

The driving force behind this story was my enduring interest in relationships, identity, feminism, and how people can shape the people around them, including themselves. I approached this particular story from …

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 …

Someone, Stop Her! The Musical (The Gallery Show): The Thesis Document., Hannah Dewitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis document accompanies a body of work that is radically vulnerable, personally political, and emotionally complex. Through my work, I challenge myself and my audience to sit with discomfort and create an environment suitable to generate a nuanced appreciation of pain that approaches its acceptance through humor, confessionalism, and the subversion of tropes against themselves as an act of counter-mimicry. This document situates my work within art-historical context with a primary focus on performance art and applies insight from each artwork referenced to further analyze and defend my own work. Additionally, I use texts relating to Camp sensibility, binary …

The Cult Of The Nymphs: Identity, Ritual, And Womanhood In Ancient Greece, Ivana Genov

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Examining archeological and epigraphic evidence in its historical context, in this thesis I explore the Cult of the Nymphs venerated across ancient Greek poleis. I analyze the nymph’s profound cultural and historical impact that is often overlooked in the study of ancient Greece. Nymphs were female deities thought to embody ecological sites, such as fountains and springs, and became fundamental to polis identity. Their locations were often central to city plans, and their faces, depicted on coinage, became representative of the city itself. In the community, nymphs were integral to rituals for major life events, most often in the lives …

Personal Details, Ben Nathan

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

In 2022 I lost my Paternal Grandmother. I found that in addition to the loss of a dear matriarch I mourned everyday things lost to the past. From furniture to childhood relationships, I was made keenly aware of their absence. As I longed to spend more time in the past, I created a studio practice of printing and drawing, whereby I enable myself to spend hours a day in quiet introspection, just drawing and reflecting on my life as expressed by personal details.

My work melds renderings of everyday spaces and objects from memories of childhood and my present experience …

I Come Creeping: Remembering The Battle Of Blair Mountain In Graphic Narrative, Ellie James

Senior Honors Theses

Between August 24 and September 4 of 1921, approximately 10,000 West Virginia coal miners marched to Blair Mountain in Logan County in a militant stand for their right to unionize. Despite its status as the largest labor uprising in United States history, few know or understand the impact of the Battle of Blair Mountain today, even within the borders of West Virginia. This creative project aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to memorialize this period of the West Virginia Mine Wars through the creation of a 10-page comic, titled I Come Creeping, which depicts and is informed by the …

Creating Character, Alexa Tenney

Honors Projects

This project explores the relationship between merchandise development and narrative development, with a specific focus on the creative development between dolls and animation. Through exploration of these creative mediums, I began to question: How does the creative process combining animation and merchandise develop, and what is the impact on the final product? This concept is broken down even further to focus specifically on characters, and how creative characters are developed for dolls. This project provides an overview of the history of animation and merchandising beginning with Felix the Cat in the 1920s. Felix represents an instance of an animated character …

Art Therapy And Internal Family Systems For Adolescents At A Therapeutic School: A Qualitative, Arts-Based Study, Emma Pici-D'Ottavio

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Adolescence is an important developmental period marked by a search for identity and an increase in impulsive behaviors and intense emotions. The current study explored how a combined art therapy and Internal Family Systems (IFS) model is beneficial and appropriate for adolescents in a school setting. A brief art therapy group was facilitated with students at a therapeutic high school. The intervention integrated IFS approaches, including externalization and guided visualizations, with the goal of understanding parts and increasing self-compassion. Three main themes emerged based on observations of the sessions: 1) the concept of parts encouraged self-understanding and reduced shame; 2) …

Am I Another You?, Laura Diane Cobb

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

On my birth certificate are the names of my parents, though the name of my father stands in opposition to my genealogy. The script of his signature conceals my birth as donor conceived (DC). The truth of my origin would lay dormant for years behind his scrawl, burying my true heritage beneath the stories of my social father’s ancestry.

Learning the truth, I began to reevaluate my identity. Searching for myself along waterways, I explored the shores of the Platte River as if by knowing its sandbars, flora, and fauna, I would come to know myself. In searching the land, …

Ideation And Iteration For Creatives, Sandee M. Chamberlain

KSU Distinguished Course Repository

This course addresses the development of visual literacy including concepting, initial approaches of creating an encompassing aesthetic, creating timelines for production, and exploring the refining aspects of creative production. Students will devise an advanced creative problem and provide a documented account of their creative journey to present as a process journal at the end of the course.

How Do Arts Contribute To Educational Research? A Book Review Of Arts-Based Research In Education: Foundations For Practice, Niroj Dahal

The Qualitative Report

I write this review as a recommendation for potential readers: those who are new to and veterans with respect to arts-based research. Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice is edited by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund, with contributions from 22 authors and a cover artist. In addition to providing some information from a usual structure around contents, central themes and concepts, intended audience, genres of writing styles, strengths and weaknesses, and uniquenesses, I primarily focus on the content of the chapter entitled “Four guiding principles for arts-based research practice” which I found extraordinarily significant in the second edition of …

Inspiration: The Cogs Of Our World, Casey Libuda

Honors College

This creative thesis consists of a 5-minute animation created with digital drawings, in-between animation, traditional, and procedural animation to analyze and visualize the significance of inspiration. Inspiration drives people to discover and create, and strong feelings of hope can cause it. The psychology of inspiration is the foundation for this short film; the final result intends to inspire other people with its visual storytelling and sound design. Additionally, the animation utilizes Muse mythology and animal symbology to universalize and symbolize the connection between an artist and their source of inspiration.

Climate Action At The University Of Maine: A Documentary Short Film, Santiago Tijerina

Honors College

Fossil fuel divestment is central to the discourse surrounding climate change, nevertheless, it is a movement driven by student activists and it is a sign of institutional change at a global scale. Climate Action at the University of Maine, written and directed by Santiago Tijerina and created in collaboration with the University of Maine and the Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR), is a documentary short film driven by the research objective of understanding the rise of student activism at the University of Maine and the recent decision of the Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels.

The subject matter …