Art Practice Commons^™

The Unveiling Of Us, Alexis Parra

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The Unveiling of Us is an affirmation by, of and for wom^n of color. In this collaboration, we - subject and photographer - seek to reclaim the performance, production and beauty of individual identities that are informed by collective pasts. Everyday acts of performance are emphasized in these images through objects and gestures that reference the day to day practices of black and brown wom^n based on our histories, our cultures and our senses of self. This is our space to claim: the viewer looks, but the subjects hold the gaze as they declare power through a notion of beauty. …

Heaven On A Bun, Eleanor Gibney

Senior Projects Spring 2018

We are told from a young age, how to act, what is polite, what is acceptable; we start living within restrictions, within boundaries. This causes our conversations to become limited and our interactions tense. To escape from these restrictions we escape to our thoughts, our own private haven where judgment is not passed.

In this project, I explore a world of my creation where the space between our physical world and mental world is bent, or in other words, the bending of fantasy and reality. Being placed in the middle of this other world, things and interactions don’t seem quite …

Xx Openings, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

XX Openings represents my dual sculpture and photography practice. The title comes from a 70’s domestic frame, with 20 openings of varying sizes for family pictures. Half of the slots were filled with stock pictures of smiling family scenes, while the others just had measurements for the openings themselves. The object struck me as alienating, and oppressive. I didn’t see any scene within those openings I felt connected to.

The frame came to symbolize varying perspectives, ways of seeing, and ways of being. As my sculpture practice has weighed more heavily on my work as a photographer, I feel tensions …

I Have Never Stepped In The Same River Twice, Madison Hailey Emond

Senior Projects Spring 2018

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

I never knew that I would learn to walk the Sawkill River in moonlight, that I would come to know its contours and the depths of its waters so well. I never expected that the tree roots and rocks that lay in my path to its banks would know my gait so fully.

This project began as a reaction to the hurricanes that struck the Caribbean last fall. It felt apt to question landscape imagery and how …

American Idyll: A Place To Call Home, Bowen Walsh Fernie

Senior Projects Spring 2018

I was raised in Italy from the age of five and when I returned to the United States at eighteen, I was surprised by the way I was affected by the landscape I had never known or explored. I found myself drawn to American culture as it is stereotypically represented in movies and TV - the quaint houses, the schools with cheerleaders and locker rooms, the drive-in movie theaters – and began to examine how those stereotypes are reflected in the real world. From this initial interest I began exploring the American space that I envisioned myself inhabiting throughout my …

Enact In Disappearance, Stephanie Demer

Theses and Dissertations

Enact in Disappearance excavates the unseen through the medium of photography in order to chart a new strategy for knowing and communing with a complicated world.

Digital Photography As Experience Artifact, Ryan V. Brennan

Theses and Dissertations

Through the screen interface, the boundary between personal and collective experience is being redefined both spatially and temporally. Here, memories are given independent mediated existence, taking form in digital photographic artifacts that can be communally shared and manipulated into a synthetic continuum.

Departing From Photography. Place, Space, Non-Place, And The Quotidian: Painting From Pictures Of The Everyday, Mathew A. Tucker

Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates the relationship between photography and painting. It explores the way in which Mathew Tucker's paintings have been informed by his photographs of everyday places and the ways that they depart from those images and express new and different meanings.

Lara Salmon, Thesis Statement, Lara Salmon

CGU MFA Theses

My art brings together materials and ideas inspired by personal experience that do not usually exist side by side. My body is the primary mechanism with which I make work, incidentally making me the subject matter of the work. I use my physical self as an instrument to coalesce and transform other materiality. Through live performance and photographic installations I create tension and balance between crude biology and bright, polished formalism. This body of work focuses on Millennial Feminism and the Middle East.

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.

New Australian Plants And Animals. An Exhibition - And - Physiology, Phenomenology And Photography: Picturing The Indeterminate Within An Australian Art Practice. An Exegesis, Michael Gray

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This practice-led research project investigates indeterminate aspects of perception related to human vision and postcolonial conditioning. Through an inventive range of lens-based artworks, the research draws parallels between preconscious visual phenomena and the subjective experience of non-indigenous Australians of multiple generations.

The resulting body of creative work, New Australian Plants and Animals, can be seen to approach preconscious visual phenomena derived from the physiology of the human eye through the use of primitive photographic lens technology. This process is applied to the subject matter: introduced plants and partially naturalised migrants. This synthesis of subject and materials creates new insights …

Hand-Eye, Michael S. Pszczonak

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This integrated article thesis has two distinct chapters: The first chapter is a case study on a selection of works by German artist Sigmar Polke using Hal Fosters writing on the historical and neo-avant-gardes. The study traces the way Polke revisits the first avant-garde project and comprehends its attempted traumatic rift from dominant ideologies for the first time. The second chapter is a comprehensive artist statement which simultaneously outlines the theoretical underpinnings of my work as well as the process leading to the body of work on display at McIntosh Gallery. The research sets out to answer the following question: …

The Misconception Of Knowing, The Invention Of Time; Curiosities & Introspections Of Vernacular Photography, Patricia D. Drummond

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The Misconception of Knowing, the Invention of Time; Curiosities & Introspections of Vernacular Photography is a body of work that combines photography, artist books, and alternative processes in a series of pieces that explore the synergy between the act of creating vernacular or common photography, the photograph in its many forms, and the interaction with the photographic image at all the stages of its existence. It also exists in conjunction with this written monograph, which supports and gives insight into the work. Through the use of poems, sketchbook musings, the history of photography, critical theory and social norms within photography, …

Enduring Peripheries, Anna Yeroshenko

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

In the 80s when Russian state-sanctioned architectural production consisted of standardized buildings that deplored any unnecessary ornament or decoration, an architect functioned only as an interpreter of numerous limiting factors. As an act of protest against the stagnation in architecture, a group of young architects began to create projects that existed only on paper. For them ‘Paper Architecture‘ became a way of bypassing restrictions and dissenting, a way to critique the dehumanizing nature of the architectural style that prevailed at that time. Spatial compositions, which were hard to comprehend visually, elements of inverse perspective, and impractical, idealistic environments depicted a …

Tales From The Fells, Anne Elder

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Our relationship with the natural world is complicated and under scrutiny as we make irrevocable changes to the earth. We enter the woods to get lost, and to find ourselves. We walk there to find thrills, peace, inspiration; to hear ourselves think, to be surprised, to make profit. Our childish fears may have changed from bears, monsters and getting lost, replaced by adult fears (bears, unsavory humans, getting lost). The woods may frighten us or be a place of comfort, but it is rarely a neutral experience. When we lose access to these spaces, it affects our ability to find …

Turning To See Otherwise, Jennifer L. Martin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier, in combination with an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery, considers whether an archival collection can generate an alternative narrative other than that which may already exist in the original film and photographic documents. Rather than represent a singular truth, I seek to articulate the transformative realities of collective memory by re-orienting the material for broader viewer identification. I have mined photographic and filmic materials from a personal family archive to focus fragments that specifically record the gesture of the turning face—the turning towards the observer. This “turn” then includes both the turn towards the initial film-maker embedded …

A Photographic Ontology: Being Haunted Within The Blue Hour And Expanding Field, Colin E. Miner

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What are the current boundaries of the photographic and how can an ontology of photography take form as a material and conceptual program of research? Responding to the difficulty inherent in any definitive attempt to grasp photography, this dissertation places emphasis on the less determined act of evoking as a model of dialogue, and engagement, with the photographic. This dissertation is composed of two parts that engage both the question “What is photography?” and the ontological anxiety that shadows it. These lines of questioning are pursued in two ways: directly through considering the qualities of the photographic as elucidated by …

Familial Dialects, Amanda King

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Using the framework of scientific investigation, ‘Familial Dialects’ explores the languages – systems of signs and codification of those signs - of individual members of my family, and the metaphors that arise from their interaction with pieces of the natural world. Each of the pieces combine an inherent form and an organizing action as a means of representing an individual’s form of expression. These familial dialects are created and translated using the methodologies of a naturalist - collection, dissection, observation, and classification. The pieces draw meaning from the connotative associations built from familial connections as well as from broader cultural …

Cultures Of Practice Within Design: An Exploration Of The Differences And Similarities Between Photography And Painting As Representational Practices, Alun John Price

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Contemporary designers and photographers face many challenges as the profession rapidly develops. This is especially the case in in the Western Australian context. A review into the recent history of the Western Australian design profession is evidence that designers and photographers are consistently shifting between commercial and self-expressive practice. However, the urge to keep up with technological advancement has masked conscious development of this shift, which is a key to self-realisation and improvement for a designer and photographer. This lack of conscious questioning limits holistic development in design practice. This research reflects on myself as a designer developing a response …

Imagining The Unknown, Angelina Kidd

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

It is true that there is no scientific proof of life after life or of the human soul. However, I believe there is a soul and that it is energy manifested as light. Our lifetime is a mere pulse when measured against the evolution of earth. We are connected to the cosmos through the very calcium in our bones and the iron in our blood, which originated from stars that died billions of years ago. My belief is that the earthly body is separate from the soul and that our light energy returns to the cosmos. Energy will not cease …

Fabricated Perceptions, Monique E. Perry

All Student Theses

This thesis is a personal exploration through playful and childlike imagery. I draw on historical and contemporary artistic influences to the creation of my concepts. Themes of visual metaphor, trompe l’oeil, diorama, and contrasting spatial relationships of objects are explored. Each piece carries its own interpretation that is kept open ended for the viewer. My goal for this art series is to amuse, provoke imagination, and encourage individual interpretation.

Preconciousness, Michael James Ripp

All Student Theses

Preconsciousness ... Explores the topographical model of the mind through the deconstruction of accepted realities. Blurring the boundaries of consciousness and unconsciousness. Embracing and accepting the abstract view of the mind as “realms” independent of each other. Surreal, yet familiar spaces and environments become a gateway to the preconscious and a deeper awareness. These unique spaces become a catalyst for a physiological journey to the unconscious. Complex views and interpretations of oneself and ones experiences come to the surface. Engaging memories and emotions such as anxiety ... joy… tranquility………manifesting as physical space as spaces become representations of unconscious. Minds are …

All That I Am Or Hope To Be, I Owe To My Angel, My Mother, Pamela Planera

All Student Theses

All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel, my mother. A quote that binds the relationship my mother and I will always have, through life, death and the paths I choose for my future to fulfill a promise. A promise I intend to keep and fulfill until we meet again… on the other side…

All dilapidated architectural buildings of my series are considered symbolic spaces. They become tangible - representing a venue of dreams where we become deeply affected, by our behavior, our environment, our society and ourselves. Each venue spawned an identity - it’s …

Invisible Cities: Photographic Fictions Of Architecture, Maria Levitsky

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The artist's process in which she examines the built environment through the medium of black and white photography. By tracing the trajectory of her awareness of architecture from her early career as a dancer, to the making of photographic images, the artist illuminates the process of deconstructing architectural and pictorial space into fragmented yet illusionistically convincing photographic montages. Influenced by the urban localities in which she dwells, she tells the story of being captivated by the post-industrial landscape of Williamsburg, Brookyn, NY, followed by landing in New Orleans and her fascination with post-Katrina architecture. Grounded in the analog techniques of …

Exegesis., Christopher Shawne Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses the work in Exegesis, his Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee from October 29 through November 2, 2007. The exhibition consists of 19 large format color photographs representing and edited from a body of work that visually negotiates the photographer's home in East Tennessee.

The formulation of a web of influence is explored with a focus on artists who continue to pertain to Brown's work formally and conceptually. Included are photographers Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, William Eggleston, and Mike Smith as well as the artist Joseph …

Street Photography: An Approach To Strangers: Casual, Close And Personal Encounters, Flavia M. Schuster

Theses : Honours

Street photographers can either camouflage or reveal their identities to the strangers they photograph. By choosing to remain anonymous, photographers often create images in which only their subjects are exposed. By unveiling their identities however, they often create images in which their interaction becomes evident in the resulting images. Casual Encounters looks at the mechanisms employed by photographers that choose to remain anonymous in contrast to the myth of the flâneur. Close Encounters looks at the mechanisms employed between strangers to deal with their daily interactions in urban environments. Personal Encounters serves to explain my own approach to the strangers …

The Flowering Rhinoceros: An Extension Of Photography Into Other Media, Lawrence Leslie Bullis

All Master's Theses

This paper develops, in a literary form, thematic material derived from fourteen photographically etched metal pieces, two photo-serigraphs, and six photographically produced intaglio prints. The narrative takes the form of an allegorical fantasy which contains a practical attitude toward photographic alchemy. New insights are provided into the origins and nature of the photographic medium in the light of the symbolic context of the artwork.

Illustrations of the artwork from which this paper derives are provided.