Art Practice Commons^™

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

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.

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

The Nature Of My Nature; A Story About Relationships, Andrew Mcilvaine

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

As a second generation Hispanic, I am a painter whose work is informed by my personal experience of displacement and longing to belong. In turn, I hope, this longing inspires an important dialogue about place, memory, otherness and belonging. I work in small, intimate scale, evoking narratives of vastness yet also of solitude. The landscape and the natural environment I represent, become populated by anonymous creatures. Both animal and human, posed in semi-natural and semi-artificial settings.

I was born in Texas and grew up in Missouri. The images I produce are often tranquil and surreal yet are grounded through …

Representation Of Settler Colonial Violence In Palestine, A Thesis In Support Of The Multi-Media Exhibition Choreographies Of Resistance, Rehab Nazzal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project-based dissertation emerges from my engagement with theories of representation, settler colonialism, and genocide, as well as involvement with direct engagement through embodied experience of the Palestinian reality in the colonized West Bank during 2015–2017. The artworks and written components of this project seek to represent shards of the multilayered Western-Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine through a focus on the struggle and resilience of the Palestinian people and the endurance of their land. Land seizing as the aim of settler colonialism and the colonised bodies as sites of oppression and sites of resistance are central to the various …

Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon

Theses and Dissertations

This paper attempts to provoke an Israeli American dialogue that comes through profanity of conventional architecture. I am creating this dialogue by displaying two main subjects in proximity to each other: border architecture from Israel and institutional architecture or non-places in New York.

Supernova: Performing Race, Hybridity And Expanding The Geographical Imagination, Raheleh Saneie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis attempts to explore the many socio-political, temporal and spatial factors that contribute to the formation of cultural identity. Through my video work, SuperNova, I examine how race is performed and the discursive structures that contribute to the process of racialization. The core question that is central to this thesis is how race is performed and the potential benefits and drawbacks of this performance. In chapter one, I explore how whiteness is performed and how racial hierarchies are maintained through performance. I critique the Aryan race discourse that is a part pf Iranian nationalist discourse of identity. In …

Secret_Menu, Charles K. Mai

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.