Art Practice Commons^™

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …

New Mapping, Dowon Yoo

Masters Theses

Tools determine the shape of most of the worlds that are manufactured or measured. Taking the Earth as an example, territory is shaped and transformed by the tools of the earth's plate movement, the sea, and humans. A map, a recognized territory, is represented through numerical instruments, mathematical formulas, and visual devices such as lenses.

The instrumental perspective is one of the powerful lenses that will work effectively into the past, present, and future. So I started to apply an instrumental perspective to digital space. Digital space which is Non-physical has become one of the most important worlds for contemporary …

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

Moretheless, Abdelghani Alnahawi

Masters Theses

material investigations becoming questions with interjections

Entrelazados, Agustina Markez

Masters Theses

Entrelazados is composed of a series of photographs from my trip to Argentina summer of 2022. I explore my immigrant Argentine identity and displacement in relation to turmoil, thinking about political disruption of everyday life, within the passage of time This work aims to give an inside look on the mundane daily life of my family, capturing the quiet moments in our everyday life. I used film and collage to have a closer connection to the medium I was using to capture these moments. Through sewing, inks, and physical collage of materials, I got to form an intimate relationship with …

Soul Furnace / فرن الأرواح, Isa Ghanayem

Masters Theses

“This is the good washing, this is (the washing) which separates the dirty body from the pure body. This is like silver mixed with lead, it is separated from it by this (process): one makes for it a cupel of bones, which is what is called the “head of the dog” and of which the common name is kūja-which is the crucible—and this must be made of burnt bones. One melts the silver in it, one gives it a strong fire: the cupel will absorb and receive the lead, the fire will make its subtle (part) fly away and extirpate …

Step 10, Jinhong Cai

Masters Theses

Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through

abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am

proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning

on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:

narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.

While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or

personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them

because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in

learning more about the motive behind this creation.

The questions I bought into the thought and creation

process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring

out …

Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit

Masters Theses

As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. …

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 …

Letting The Body Lead, Amanda Boggs

Masters Theses

Letting the Body Lead is an exhibition and workshop series that focuses on embodiment in social context and invites attendees to engage with the work, both as viewers and active participants. Embodiment in social context refers to the understanding of lived experiences in the body. Within my creative practice, I explore the body's creativity, knowledge, and agency while bridging and brining together the fields of fine arts, movement-based and socially just art making. I believe in the transformative potential of how movement and contemplative practices can support a more liberated way of being both within an individual and, by extension, …

Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Emma Hollows to produce a realist production of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s musical Sophiatown at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts in May 2020. Sophiatown follows a household forcibly removed from their homes by the Native Resettlement Act of 1954 amid apartheid in South Africa. The paper discusses her attempts as a costume designer to strike a balance between replicating history and making artistic changes for theatre, while always striving to create believable characters.

Heavy Light: Transformation Of Matter In Relation To Growth And Decay, Lauren A. Bennett

Masters Theses

Through my artwork I explore the cyclical relationship and inherent inevitability between the processes of growth and decay. I engage notions of place, memory, fluctuation, and ephemerality. Drawing inspiration from an abandoned house and its many atrophying, accumulated contents, I examine the human impact upon our ecological surroundings and personal domains, tied to notions of finality and sustainability. Using light and time as both narrative elements and the physical components to cultivate images, I create hybrid prints that weave a story of our ever-changing territories. I present visual works that challenge our idealized views of life, and call attention to …

Summoning The Body That Acts, Brendan M. Mccauley

Masters Theses

Seven series of artworks; painted, drawn and performed. These works are presented as affective incorporation exercises, that test modes of aesthetic communication in response to varying political contingencies. The constitutive processes used to develop the work also function as a methodology for my own political radicalization. As an artist I am wagering how to talk, as an activist I am preparing to act. The artworks discussed occur at the crossroads of these desires as enactions of futurity within the subjunctive mood.

Navigating The Interim, Joseph E. Saphire Jr

Masters Theses

Navigating the Interim attempts to build a framework for the ways in which visual art, media studies, and forms of social practice might intermingle within a career in the arts, as well as within a thorough art education curriculum. From broad theoretical analysis to the specificity of technical exercises and prompts, this paper serves as a roadmap for the ways in which production, teaching, and organizing might begin to merge into a single holistic practice. The author’s projects provide an anchor from which to analyze the various conceptual trajectories of art that have stemmed from modernism throughout the 20th century, …