Art Practice Commons^™

From Here To The Ground, Courtney Mccracken

Masters Theses

Art, for me, is a thinking process. It is also a process of connection to body and place. It directs my fractured attention toward the things I care about. As I labor through process, I am gifted with a moment of attentiveness. In a time where everything feels urgent, and our perspective can be warped by the endless flood of information, making art is a chance to stop, to think, and to feel.

It is a space for holding, and a space for being held.

Recently, I have been working primarily in animation and sound design, experimenting widely across media …

Confronting Contemporary Mythmaking: On Artists’ Engagements With Popular Culture, Jonathan Case

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

This paper begins by outlining an understanding of how the culture industry operates in American culture and explores ways to counter the transmission of modern mythmaking through art. As described in Roland Bathes’s Mythologies, mythmaking in the contemporary context serves to sever current systems of power and coercion from the historic processes of their creation; to naturalize the current neoliberal order and make it seem like the only way things could ever be. This sort of mythmaking is transmitted through popular culture, and many artists have responded to it through their practices. Herein I describe several different artists’ approaches, including …

Fractured Selves, Gearoid Dolan

Theses and Dissertations

Fractured Selves is a self-portrait that examines the histories and points of conflation and diversion of my four public personas. In the style of a Zoom meeting, they chat with a host against animated backgrounds. Interactivity creates non-linear consuming of the content and user directed navigation through four timelines

Dead Weightless, Isaiah Schwartz

Senior Projects Spring 2021

There is more than convenience embedded into my attraction to the unrefined materials that I work with. Shopping cart (baby size), palette, cheesecloth, bucket, and window. Each is rich with an individual history that expands beyond the use it was intended for. Suspending them in the air is my observance of the sanctity of their mundane uses. To create something new, also out of these unrefined materials, and to refuse to polish it. To have resolution in a thing that is also ambiguous. I can find intrigue in a million different things as soon as I pay attention to them. …

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

Failed Starts, Anna Maria Peneva

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Artist Statement

This piece is an animation that looks at the struggles of a young girl attempting to make her way in the art world while battling against the pressures of self doubt and her own ability to be distracted.

As a student artist, I am currently bound to the institutional framework of Bard College’s Senior Project program. In order to graduate each student must produce a cohesive body of work throughout the year -because the four years of classes and the ten of thousands dollars in loans isn’t enough already. However, because of the fact that I …