Art Practice Commons^™

Damned Ol' Dirt, Molly Morningglory

All Theses

damned ol’ dirt centers mindfulness and embodiment practices to foster relationships with the self, each other, and the land. These relationships intend to collectively imagine and then build an emotionally and environmentally sustainable and joyful future. My practice foregrounds clay with digital video, photography, and fabric dyeing, recording the imprint of performance. I use my hereditary understanding of clay and fibers, a trained attunement to the natural world, and my background of performance in craft (via demonstration of tactile techniques) to transfer knowledge and skill to the viewer. Through the creation of tableaus and documents of rituals based in materiality, …

Your New Best Friends: An Exploration Of Furby, Siri, And Other Sociable Electronics, Avery Forbes

Masters Theses

Your New Best Friends: An Exploration of Furby, Siri and Other Sociable Electronics is focused around interactive electronic systems and the effect these systems can have on our human psyches. My work focuses on two particular periods of development: the late 80’s to early 90’s, and the 2010’s to present. One period represents my childhood and the other my early adulthood. By comparing the two I can examine trends in the ways we engage with robotics and can better understand the ubiquity of electronically mediated interactions today. I utilize these new understandings to manipulate the capabilities of devices from both …

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. …

The Systemic Punches: Displacement Experience Of Vulnerable Immigrants, Eric Andre

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"The Systemic Punches: Displacement Experience of Vulnerable Immigrants" focuses on the impact of systems of state control such as immigration laws, policies, and practices that have been institutionalized and that have marginalized immigrants. In my thesis, I pay specific attention to inhuman acts of exclusion and discrimination resulting from the systemic barriers perpetuated by xenophobic and nationalist ideologies.

From this standpoint, my thesis exhibition employs interactive space, which includes visual art (drawing, sculpture ceramics), projection, video, and sound, as a means to explore the effects of the exclusive and discriminatory immigration policies and practices. Furthermore, it is designed to explore …

Compromised Values: Charlotte Posenenske, 1966–Present, Ian Wallace

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fabricated in unlimited series and sold at cost, the sculptures produced by Charlotte Posenenske between 1966 and 1967—modular wall reliefs, interactive cubic structures, and tubular geometric units whose installation requires collective decision making—were meant to confront both the artwork’s commodity status and the limitation of its consumption to a privileged elite. Nevertheless, Posenenske’s work has been effectively recuperated by the art system: first, in the 1980s, through a series of exhibitions and publications organized by her estate; and second, with her inclusion in Documenta 12 in 2007, which reintroduced her work to the market. Since the artist’s death in 1985, …

The Art Of Heritage And Mortality, Barbara Johanna Mileto

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through my art I explore the formation of cultural and personal identity addressing the importance of heritage, ancestors, and religion in Latin-American culture, while I develop my unique deities and spiritual space, creating my own iconography. The pieces are strongly autobiographical, using my family members, and frequently lived experience as a subject. Furthermore, I am drawn to the circle of life and productive failures - beginnings, deaths, and transitions. - My work integrates two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums, ranging from photography and printmaking to assemblage and textiles, video and digital.

Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The absence of happiness, the absence of nature, the absence of justice, the absence of absence, which is presence. My desire is to make these voids visible and sensible by connecting to and with others, from our intimate and collective life experiences, with empathy, and by sharing. Through a hybrid of sculpture, installation, and performance, I move within this tense in-between space, asking myself about that void, if it is possible for it to be filled, or if it is perhaps too big, or if it is perhaps too late.

Earth Our Body: Expanding Ecofeminism With The Divine, Isolde Finney

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

If the Earth is Divine, then is harming Her not sacrosanct? If She is a god, or rather goddess, then is pollution, deforestation, climate change, and environmental degradation not blasphemy? Divinity and sacredness can be used to define societal values and ethics. In this body of work, I bring my experiences and beliefs as a practicing Pagan to the concepts of ecofeminism, a social and academic movement started in the 1970’s that sees a connection between environmental degradation and the oppression of women. I call my work Divine Ecofeminist Art. It attempts to utilize goddess imagery and nature worship as …

Appropriation Of The Highest Order: A Study Of Harry Smith’S Master Work, Film No. 18 Mahagonny In Relation To The Brecht-Weill Opera The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny And Duchamp’S The Large Glass, Rose V. Marcus

Theses and Dissertations

Harry Smith’s Film No. 18, Mahagonny, 1970 – 1980, is a transmutation of the original Brecht-Weill opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a 1930, into a feature-length experimental film. This paper shows how the original opera and Duchamp's The Large Glass prove inherent to Smith’s double-pronged homage to both original works of art. The failure in the opera narrative and the chance shattering of The Large Glass inform Smith’s complex methodology to approach and spatialize cinema. Harry Smith’s use of the tools of the screening apparatus are traced in order to study Mahagonny in detail. The …

And All The Things That Grew On The Ground, Sarah E. Phillips

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This is a document archiving and describing my work for the years 2019-2021 as part of the completion requirements for the Master of Fine Arts degree. As a whole, this work investigates the paradox and negotiations of access to the self, the history, and to the landscape you occupy. It asks questions about authorship, valuing, sacred and sacrament, but retains the gravitation, umbilical tie to memoir and narrative. Ritual, habit, and transformational cleansing are recurring themes in the work. Body, breath-- access to the invisible. Preservation of the uncertain. Fragility carries weight, and importance, destruction and negotiation as vessels of …

A Draft: Up N’ Upper Or Sisyphus Lounge; Notes, Poems & Essays From The Road & The Cabin, Andrew M. Foster

Theses and Dissertations

This text imagines a reconciliation where the slick, sterile nature of contemporary objects and conditions might offer a sort of soft retreat. Sisyphus Lounge, a modular installation of light, near-defunct-technologies and carefully cluttered “stuff,” attempts to locate and explore value systems fogged by dis/information and the impossibility to articulate is-ness.

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.

Heartwork, Lance Taylor Loftin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heartwork is a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the many ways identity is shaped by familial histories and personal memory. Focusing on my time growing up on a pine tree farm in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 90s, Heartwork explores gender, religion, regional traditions, family, and art. Through conversations and collaborations with my family, painting acts as an impetus for strengthening relationships. By reevaluating the past, I am able to create a web of interconnected narratives that inform and shift my understanding of the present.

Unmentionables, Madeleine F. Grotewiel

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text explores the capacity for shamed bodily materiality to narrate the complexity of healing from sexual trauma while rape culture persists. Because rape is discussed so little in public, sexual healing often takes place under a meaty layer of shame, placed on the survivor’s body. Their truth is frequently interpreted as too much/gross/ugly/unspeakable for the public, and it is simultaneously not enough to be discussed/accepted/pursued as an actual issue. This uncomfortable teeter-totter comes from the patriarchal boundaries drawn between what is privately or publicly acceptable. There are plenty of depictions of sexual violence in popular culture and the canon …

The Line Of Dichotomy: Standpoints And Meaning In Anne Truitt's Art, Charles J. Parsons

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Some of Anne Truitt’s formal strategies—such as using the separate faces of the work to force the viewer to engage in it sequentially—build or depend on real or literal facts of the “situation” of the artwork. If this is the case, how do such works escape being reducible to their objecthood, their literal properties of size and shape? And how do they produce effects that are not mere experience or mere affective response? The answer I offer is that they depend on conventions and interpretation.

Much of my analysis focuses on the ways Truitt makes her intentions visible through form, …

Time. Moves. Things. Change., Jennifer Wester

Art Theses and Dissertations

In this paper I discuss my art making principles and their physical representation in some examples of my most recent work.

Having started my artistic practice during a particularly transformative period of my life, this paper reflects on my artistic evolution, it’s influences, and the principles I’ve acquired along the way. In it, I explain and analyze the function of failure and mmy relation to manipulation. I show, through image and descriptions, the ways in which a spectrum of pieces converge to substantiate my claims of intent to outcome. And I illuminate synergies between my practice and historical artists such …

The Passing Show, Kathryn Fanelli

Masters Theses

The Passing Show, examines the interface between contemplative practices and the destabilizing effect of the carnivalesque. A repurposed early 20th century merry-go- round is reconfigured as a conceptual vehicle for renewing our attention to removing hindrances. The site-specific installation, titled Vimoksha, is viewed through the lens of the radical imaginary, investigating notions of karmic inheritance through a heuristic approach to material processes, personal history, kinetics and sound.

Geometric Times, Linguistic Spaces, Johanna Strobel

Theses and Dissertations

If the loop is the trademark of our times and truthiness the reversal of the uncanny, what is the correlation between logic and information? This writing investigates the role of repetition and motifs in the production of meaning, how kitsch and neutrality function as modes of signifiers and how authenticity relates to the banal.

Stranger’S Window, Nation’S Mirror, Kyoko Hamaguchi

Theses and Dissertations

In this text, I consider my identity as a Japanese immigrant in the United States during a global pandemic and its impact on my understanding of home as a liminal space. In particular, I discuss notions of home in relation to my work as an artist including two works that utilize the home-sharing platform Airbnb and three works that deal with the dichotomy of inside and outside.

Membranes And Frames, Nurya Chana

Theses and Dissertations

Nurya Chana (b.1988, Bronx, NY) paints, sculpts, and performs to grapple with discontinuities between self and other, the inner and outer self, physicality and feeling. Her practice aims to expose the non-mental voices of the body, reconciling life sciences with the complexity, enormity, and potency of livingness.

Sacred Industry, Joshua Heimsoth

Master's Theses

Thesis show revolving around the design concepts found in religious art and in the functional beauty of industrial design with observations on the beauty and hypocrisy in both power structures.

Ex-Tensions: Material Entanglement And Intensities, Zohreh Galdizadeh Garmeh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of the intrinsic capacity of matter and material formations and utilization of art as a mode of inquiry. Ex-tensions: Material Entanglement and Intensities investigates the animism and vibrancy of objects and the hidden interplay between materials and intensities that flow through and around within the spaces that confine us. In this body of work, all forms of material configurations are understood as animated and agential and as different representations of the same substance that are only formally diverse.

Beside| |Between, Brooke J. Armstrong

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Beauty and the grotesque both induce physical sensations in the body. Pleasure and displeasure are two points on the same line. They are not mutually exclusive. Like the body and the vessel, like the self and the other all things exist in reciprocity. The capability of holding brings agency, breaking down perceptions of of subject-object relationships. The works presented in this paper represent a merging and a transformation of perceived separate entities. Craft history and processes inform the work present in the thesis exhibition, Beside| |Between.

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. …

Self && Self, Shuang Cai

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Seldom before the COVID-19 pandemic have so many people simultaneously had their lifestyle drastically changed in the same way. The forced physical isolation is, ironically, a communal experience. The sickening quarantine left everyone nothing but time to confront and reconnect with themselves. Another inevitable result of corporal isolation is the predominant awakening awareness of digital existences and connections. Evoking the shared sensitivity and delicacy, studying the tectonic activity of the digital world, the project documents the endured contemplation in the upcoming resurgence.

The Public Administrator’S Role In Public Art Collaborations: A Case Study Of Public Art In Minnesota Communities, Kurtis Ulrich

School of Business Student Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The public Administrator’s Role in Public Art Collaborations:

A Case Study of Public Art in Minnesota Communities

By Kurtis G. Ulrich

Hamline University 2021

This study focuses on the planning and implementation of public art in small cities, and the public administrator’s role in public art collaborations within that context. The research highlights the public administrator’s role in public art collaborations and analyzes how public art projects are implemented and sustained in small cities. The study methodology relies on the qualitative case study method to describe the subjective real-world experiences of city managers in public art collaborations within three …

Straight Through My Heart, Raul A. Aguilar Canela

Theses and Dissertations

Straight through my heart is an exhibition that explores the concept of heartbreak as a socio-political phenomenon. Through the affect of sadness the thesis analyses the way in which subjects are formed under cognitive capitalism. Paying particular interest to the collateral effects of neoliberal culture —hyper-stimulation, self-exploitation, competition, and obsession with productivity—and the pathologies they create —depression, anxiety, body aches, fatigue— this work shifts the burden of sadness from the individual to the community. By doing so it proposes heartbreak as a public feeling.

Earth Tone Sigh Spell, Martha Glenn

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to the artist’s thesis exhibition titled Earth Tone Sigh Spell, conceived during the years 2020-21 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from May 1–15, 2021.

The following thesis explores themes of personal memory, geo-theory, myth, symbol, and historical event. The artist uses research and stream of consciousness writing methods as a way to weave these concepts together and tie them back to her own practice with installation, sculpture, and new media.

An Escapist Utopia, Sara Eh Denney

Theses and Dissertations

As an active pursuit of avoiding excellence, my work acts as a space for failure, play, experimentation and imperfection. This document and final installation acts as a pause along a lifelong journey of object-making, creation, and spirituality. My work, specifically my working practice, rather than any one object or moment, is an escapist utopia for myself. My work is the process, the journey, not the ending or the completion of any one thing. The repetition, distortion, and production that I engage throughout my working practice acts as a spiritual exercise of meaning—making through creation. I fall deeply in love with …

Reanimator/Reflection: 
Creating Mirrors Through Time 
With Ai, Sound, Video And Live-Generated Art In The Dark Age Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Eric Millikin

Theses and Dissertations

For my MFA thesis exhibition entitled Reanimator/Reflection, I used artificial intelligence to create three new works of sound and live-generated video art, each based on mirror reflections and 100-year-old racist post-pandemic horror literature by early 20th century American author H. P. Lovecraft. The themes of these writings mirror the issues of our current time. The primary works of Lovecraft that I referenced in the exhibition are “Herbert West: Reanimator,” (1922) a serialized tale about graduate school experiments which attempted to return the dead to life during a plague, and “Nyarlathotep,” (1920) a prose poem that suggests even our dreams …