Art Practice Commons^™

Don't Mess With Magic, Anna K. Nieman

CGU MFA Theses

The art is more of an event than a discrete object. The gallery is a set. It is one large piece, not a collection of sculptures. It’s very clear what is going on but the connections are vague and misleading.The room feels smaller but the projections feel expansive. The images have been recorded and re-cut and copied so many times that it’s barely a film. It becomes just a shifting image. An intoxicating scent fills the room. It’s a bit of a spectacle. The moment is memorable but in a deceiving kind of way. The piece is most effective as …

Harbor Island, Joe Lloyd

CGU MFA Theses

Paintings within this body of work evolve from themselves. Looking at the previous painting, I start a new painting. I stopped using photo references because I realized that I already knew what I wanted to paint and that my intuition is more important than images that already exist in the world. As a result, the paintings continue to move away from observational space towards something more artificial. The paintings become about the two-dimensional place on the canvas rather than some real place out in the world. This transition is seamless for me because geometry equally exists in two-dimensional and three-dimensional …

Kathleen Melian Mfa Thesis - Lalaland, Kathleen Melian

CGU MFA Theses

I am interested in the struggle in our culture to project an image and the burden of that endeavor. This preoccupation with image creation permeates our society as a whole and is not bound by social or economic status. In this body of work, I wish to expose a sense of the emotional fallout of such existence, and the truth beneath the fiction.

A twist to this narrative, is that the falsity is also a source of pleasure and enjoyment. This creative reinvention of self, although fraught with desperation and anxiety, offers intense satisfaction as participants take roles like actors …

Being-There, Atilio A. Pernisco

CGU MFA Theses

I blend figures with backgrounds to define pensive areas of focus and delve between figuration and abstraction. These paintings connect the viewer with the strangeness of the ordinary world. This is the moment of unconsciousness. It is then where elements of a narrative emerge. I depict the figure in movements of awkwardness. Images of the familiar environments of children involved in some kind of work-play activity, the inheritors of generational trauma, reoccur in my work--a parade of daydreamers in direction to witness the uncertain.

The Darkness Is Passing, Grace Heeeun Park

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about the interplay of light, darkness and space. I express illumination of space and penetrating light with abstract painting. I use the white of canvas and thick application of black paint to create frames and to break rules of defined dimensions. Through my paintings, I challenge the perception of space and question the boundaries between two and three dimensions.

Ed Lai Interview About Grace Lai, Thomas Matt

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Grace Lai painted downtown Chicago in concrete and steel bloom, for two decades producing vibrant montages of skyline-shaping buildings as they climbed. An "on-site" artist who didn't seriously take up painting until nearly 60 because of a promise made to her deceased husband, Mrs. Lai donned a hard hat and was unafraid to board construction elevators for rides high into the sky to complete her work. In winter she'd wrap herself in plastic garbage bags and substitute rubbing alcohol for water in her paints, so they wouldn't freeze.

Artist Bio taken from the Chicago Tribune (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-03-17/news/ct-met-0318-lai-obit-20100317_1_paintings-materials-train-stations)

To learn …

Kingo "Melvin" Fujii Interview, Andrea Duke

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Kingo Fujii was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi where his parents were deeply involved in the Kabuki theater. His father was a director/actor, artist, and chief choreographer for the original Hawaiʻi Kabuki Theater Group. His mother was a teacher of traditional Japanese musical instruments. Kingo Fujii attended the Honolulu Academy of Arts School, The Chicago Art Institute, the University of Hawaiʻi and Instituto Allende, Mexico. He works in a variety of media such as oil, watercolor, lithography, jewelry and sculpture. As a fine artists he addresses himself through surrealism, semi-impressionism and traditional or neo-orientalism. As a scientific …

Tutti Frutti, Damaris G. Rivera

CGU MFA Theses

Mark making is equivalent with making a place one's own. Demarcation of a site is not solely a negative act. The negation of a space is pre-transcribed, presupposed. The point is to take the negative and invert it. It’s not a one-way street. In order to change the building you have to move through the building and let the building move through you. Once the building lives in the occupant the experience of the building can be altered. Total absorption of architecture and its environment can provide a means to live in a unified expressive way. It’s about the person. …

Amy Lee Segami Interview, Bianca Rodriguez

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Amy Lee Segami (See-gah-me) is an artist of transformation. As a former mechanical engineer, she applies her technical knowledge to revive the ancient art of Suminagashi (Sue-mee-nah-gah-shee). Inspired by the physics principles and the Eastern philosophy, Segami exercises her artistic license to share the possibilities of imagination.

Artist Bio taken from http://web.mac.com/amybasic/iWeb/Segami%20Studios/Segami.html

The Threes, Clifford Eberly

CGU MFA Theses

In the physical world I explore and gather regenerative clues that vivify the installations I build. The harshness and unforgiving power of nature’s nature, combined with the infinity of the cosmos, inspires me to cobble together sculptures that defy absorption into a finite, descriptive category. Like our beings change from second to second, I work diachronically, chugging along, shifting the purposes of supplies until they manifest like organisms that pulled themselves together from shiny and dirty matter or arrived from an extraterrestrial playground. By reusing and layering a complex blend of materials, I blur the ambiguous origins of the objects …

G-Plex Psi, Jacques Louis David

CGU MFA Theses

Monumental metal sculpture that incidentally creates sound. Heaviness and lightness displayed via large, heavy, metal sculptures of abstract geometric forms suspended from the ceiling by seemingly fragile wires that not only appear to defy gravity but provide tonal expression when plucked, hammered, or bowed. Further conversation associated with the micro to the macro is easily revealed when the sounds and shapes are compared to the vibration of life identified with imagined subatomic movement.

Spatial Phases, Eric Schott

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Baa Baa Black Sheep, Olan Quattro

SPECS journal of art and culture

No abstract provided.

Stephen Chang Kim Mfa Thesis Statement, Stephen C. Kim

CGU MFA Theses

Stephen Chang Kim Thesis

The End Of Histories, Joshua Field

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This M.F.A. thesis paper and exhibition explore the ephemerality of relationships as they are redefined by contiguity and recontextualization. My work derives from an investigation of alternative interpretive structures while retaining an overarching sense of narrative. This approach to painting relies on the human propensity to create organization in order to contend with chaos or overwhelming amounts of information. Traced back to curiosity cabinets or wunderkammers and forward through museums and encyclopedias, the organization of knowledge in both its diachronic and synchronic forms serves to collapse time and space. Geography and chronology become obsolete as relationships between images and objects …

Go Big Or Go Home, Concepcion M. Sanford

CGU MFA Theses

My work embodies my response to the American Dream. Big houses, flashy cars and glamorous lifestyles are what many of us work for. Coming from a military family, I grew up moving often without an idealized connection to a single structure. In response to this, I use artwork to create translucent, ephemeral sculptures of these items, revealing them as tangible, hollow shells of their former selves. Clear plastic and packing tape sculptures leave a ghostlike reflection of what was. These shells of inanimate objects are personified through their creation, a process similar to what I compare to mummification or embalming. …

Potential Space, Jocelyn R. Grau

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Flotsam & Jetsam, Nicolas S. Shake

CGU MFA Theses

My work is pastoral and post-apocalyptic with one foot firmly planted in historical painting and the other in traditional still-life, so it is entropic and sanguine, gleeful, despondent, and matter of fact. It comes at a point in time when the fiction of Nature as a refuge is no longer viable, persuasive or convincing. But rather than rehash this fact, my work celebrates the pastoral’s everyday ordinariness, the capacity for the viewer to experience something wondrous amidst decline. I focus on the cast-off household and utilitarian items that show up in the desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The …

Front, Jennifer Mitchell

CGU MFA Theses

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Here's Looking When, Erica Ryan Stallones

CGU MFA Theses

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Nano Rubio Mfa Thesis, Armando Rubio Jr.

CGU MFA Theses

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Agnes Chou Interview, Frankie Lacoste

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Agnes Chou, also known as Jua-Ling Chou, is an artist of the Lingnan style of Chinese painting. Agnes began her work at the age of seventy when she began taking classes from Andy Chan. Her work is primarily composed of botanical arrangements in water color on rice paper. Agnes Chou is now eighty-one years old having participated in an international exhibition eight years ago in Japan where her work can now be found in the Murphy Hill gallery. She now uses painting as a hobby and teaches at Oakton Community college.

A Matter Of Taste., Charles E. Haskins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper supports the Master of Fine Arts exhibition at the Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, from March 14th through March 18th, 2011. The exhibit is composed of nine oil paintings depicting an invented story about two characters who create a soup for a cooking competition. The show A Matter of Taste chronicles an allegory concerning the evaluation of creative works. Through Gaudie and Baudie's "odd" recipe this work illustrates the ways in artists and art audiences interact and determine artistic value. The work is inspired by techniques in distortion and narrative painting. The following expands on the …

Confabulation: Photographs, Memory, And Painting, Erin Cunningham

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is in regards to paintings created by Erin Cunningham for the completion of her MFA in Visual Arts at Boise State University in the spring of 2011. She primarily discusses the tenuous connection between photography and memory. Examining ideas developed by Roland Barthes, she set out to prove that while there is a distinct difference between the factual language of photography and the fictive language of memory, that the two have a type of symbiotic relationship. Particularly in regards to familial photography, the paintings she has developed from this concept examine the construction of memoir using images that …

Andy Chan Interview, David Escobedo

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: [by David Escobedo] Andy Chan is a Chinese immigrant that does a new style of Chinese traditional painting. His art career began in Hong Kong where he attended the Lingnan School and learned the Lingnan style of Chinese painting. Andy Chan is a well-known and established artist in his community in Chinatown Chicago. His art is beautifully done in composition and rendering. Andy is currently facing struggles with his health, which imposes on his ability to create large works and plans to make large art shows.

A Meditative Art, Lori White

All Student Theses

My artwork symbolizes the idea of meditation through the true and organic forms. I paint a space where my mind is at ease. A place where all the chaos of the world around me stops and become beauty. In my artwork, the organic forms that I produce reflect the meditative power of natural forms. My mind sees the environment in a simple abstract appearance that mirrors a sense of peace and harmony. By painting with smooth, organic, and soft lines my artwork helps me get to a point of relaxation. Through the process of letting go of the world that …

Claudia Carballada Mfa Thesis Statement, Claudia Carballada

CGU MFA Theses

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Erin Payne Mfa Thesis Statement, Erin B. Payne

CGU MFA Theses

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Copy Of A Sculpture, Dinesh Manandhar

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Taft, Anne Celine (Fa 15), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 15. Interviews conducted by Anne Celine Taft with Zeleme (Brashear) Cottrell, about her weaving. Cottrell discusses the weaving process in depth and how it has affected her life.