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Full-Text Articles in Art Practice
Past And Future Winds, Alicia Ehni
Past And Future Winds, Alicia Ehni
Theses and Dissertations
Ehni’s thesis reflects on the role of wind to connect and transform. Looking at science and invisible forces like Earth’s magnetic field, her "Oculus" sculptures evoke old tools for orientation & migration. Birds, insects, plants, roads and sand, appear in a video and an experimental 16mm pinhole film of her bike journey along the Hudson River, NY. “Coordinates”, a magnetic drawing installation, addresses impermanence, attraction to land and fragility. Tracing memories of the Paracas desert in Peru, this thesis follows her interest in alchemy, ecology and the cosmos.
Ripe Spoils, Yan Cynthia Chen
Ripe Spoils, Yan Cynthia Chen
Theses and Dissertations
Chen’s practice primarily focus on sculptures and installation. She explores the interplay between the idea of nature and the constructed environment, by examining how language informs what we know. The central thesis, "Ripe Spoils", employs citrus fruits as symbols for bodily experiences and personal identity, investigating their cultural and historical significance. Her sculptures summon the qualities and embedded meanings in materials like paper pulp and clay, wax and citrus fruits, often resulting in abstracted forms evocative of the human body. This thesis paper and exhibition reflect on themes like mortality and the essence of self.
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A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera
A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera
Theses and Dissertations
This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.
Water Bearer, Whitney Harris
Water Bearer, Whitney Harris
Theses and Dissertations
My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.
Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei
Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei
Theses and Dissertations
This article elaborates Xiong Wei's inspiration and experience from different cultural, political, social systems and art environment as a Chinese artist living in the United States, and the logic and methodology of how he went from a social realist sculptor to a contemporary artist.
Long Time, Jacob V. Reed
Long Time, Jacob V. Reed
Theses and Dissertations
Jake Reed’s work is driven by the idea that architectural ornament can be imbued with meaning not native to its construction or use. To find that meaning, he deconstructs and reassembles elements from the architectural and ornamental histories he studies, using the growing climate crisis as a generative framework.
Yellow, Sisi Chen
Yellow, Sisi Chen
Theses and Dissertations
The following paper is a constellational unpacking of yellow through notes on critical race and feminist theories, myth, science, science fiction, disparate histories, cyborgs, biography, virtuality, materiality, fungi, porcelain, language, internalization, melancholia, smells, sounds, tastes, feels, and more feels.
The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic
The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic
Theses and Dissertations
I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.
An Open Bag, Matilde Benmayor
An Open Bag, Matilde Benmayor
Theses and Dissertations
What do we take with us? How much space should we leave in the bag for what we might find? This paper is a journey from under the rug and onto the pavement. Sowing spiderweb maps I try to make a new city my own.
Kiddush Levana, The Moon Is Your Handheld Mirror, Noa Ginzburg
Kiddush Levana, The Moon Is Your Handheld Mirror, Noa Ginzburg
Theses and Dissertations
Noa Ginzburg is weaving cast-off and hand-made objects, lights, reflections, spells, drawings, and an abundance of knots into site-responsive installations. In her thesis, Ginzburg addresses Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, the synergy of assemblages, repurposing of materials in the era of Anthropocene, and how notions of solidarity and indeterminacy influence her work.
Behind Closet Doors: Horror And Dislocation In The Queer Closet, Corey C. Allen
Behind Closet Doors: Horror And Dislocation In The Queer Closet, Corey C. Allen
Theses and Dissertations
“Behind Closet Doors: Horror and Dislocation in the Queer Closet,” is composed of a collection of sculptures, videos, and sound works that are directly associated with themes of horror and anxiety derived from the precarious space of the queer closet as detailed in this thesis of the same name.
Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres
Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres
Theses and Dissertations
I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.
Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli
Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli
Theses and Dissertations
The content of this essay is a reflection on my practice as an artist. A summary of text includes an analysis of my attraction to certain materials such as drywall, cabbage juice and coconut oil, all materials are the extensions of my memory, intention and pleasure. From warm memories of bathhouses and the flesh of others to managing illness at home, my artwork distills a lived experience into material reality. These materials take the shape of sculptural networks that serve as biographical biomes. The architectural and organic components of the work are sourced from my own experience and the surreal …
North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell
North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell
Theses and Dissertations
North American Data fractures and reconfigures pre-existing narratives into new, unauthorized forms of storytelling. Core samples extracted from various narrative sources are reassigned new roles according to their proximity to each other. This paper functions as an introduction to the essential actors and their dramatic inclinations within fluctuating scenarios.
Dress Up, Ye'ela B. Wilschanski
Dress Up, Ye'ela B. Wilschanski
Theses and Dissertations
Dress Up (Performance, 40 minutes) is a dress that functions as a floor, blanket, tablecloth, book and walls. It tells a visual story about domestic care giving rituals, referencing different times and places.
Lotion In Your Lungs, Raul H. De Lara
Lotion In Your Lungs, Raul H. De Lara
Theses and Dissertations
This is a document explaining in detail my artistic practice from childhood to the day I graduated VCU. It will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already felt such ways, or similar ways – words and ghosts are mostly invisible.
A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King
A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King
Theses and Dissertations
Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …
Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang
Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang
Theses and Dissertations
I aim to excavate source material from the past and reinterpret its significance in the present through art. I merge history with the contemporary through acts of appropriation and material exploration, creating conditions for the viewer to grapple with colonial legacies in an affective space of visual experience.
Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin
Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin
Theses and Dissertations
Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.
After The Big Wind Stops I See Gentle Waves, Eunji (Jubee) Lee
After The Big Wind Stops I See Gentle Waves, Eunji (Jubee) Lee
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis covers my reflections on the inspirations and the motivations behind selected works including my candidacy exhibition; Resonance and my thesis exhibition; after the big wind stops I see gentle waves. It contains my life throughout my MFA studies and the development of my art practice. Through its story-within-a-story method of narration and my describing streams of my thoughts, I am attempting to explain the processes of my development and the discoveries I have made, the little things in my daily life, and the big turning points that inspired me. My work and this document have been strongly determined …
So Much Apparent Nothing, Emily Mcbride
So Much Apparent Nothing, Emily Mcbride
Theses and Dissertations
This document contains reflections on motivations behind selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition so much apparent nothing. Through journal excerpts and analysis of my own psychology, I attempt to put into words my thoughts concurrent to my making, indirect as they may be. The following text shares my personal conflicts and ideologies surrounding art-making, the permanence of objects, and the acceptance of an identity in flux.
The Curiosity Of Con, Petrified Breath, And An Accident Known As Blue., Steven Randall
The Curiosity Of Con, Petrified Breath, And An Accident Known As Blue., Steven Randall
Theses and Dissertations
My thesis installation emerged from an interest in visualizing breath. The resulting work came to exist at the intersection between art, biology, and performance.
The unicorn tapestries were used as a generative point of departure to explore the preservation and transformation of images through time, by time, and with time. Reproductions of the six tapestries were each etched into paper and then submerged into solutions of Phenol Red dye, Ferric Ferrocyanide (also known as Prussian Blue), and various forms of sodium chloride. Exhaled breath was used to encrust these images of the tapestries into physical objects which gradually crystallized and …
Expanding Eco-Visualization: Sculpting Corn Production, Jennifer E. Figg
Expanding Eco-Visualization: Sculpting Corn Production, Jennifer E. Figg
Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation expands upon the definition of eco-visualization artwork. EV was originally defined in 2006 by Tiffany Holmes as a way to display the real time consumption statistics of key environmental resources for the goal of promoting ecological literacy. I assert that the final forms of EV artworks are not necessarily dependent on technology, and can differ in terms of media used, in that they can be sculptural, video-based, or static two-dimensional forms that communicate interpreted environmental information. There are two main categories of EV: one that is predominantly screen-based and another that employs a variety of modes of representation …
Belt Melon Grass, Andrew M. Francis
Belt Melon Grass, Andrew M. Francis
Theses and Dissertations
This essay was written largely after the completion of my thesis exhibition which shares its title. An integral aspect of the work was the after-hours maintenance it required. Below I describe the unforeseen personal significance that labor came to hold and the way in which it functioned as a healing ritual. Through this work, and those leading up to it, I have a reinvigorated awareness of the importance of therapy as an aspect of my artmaking, of which this thesis is a testament.