Art Practice Commons^™

America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah

Masters Theses

There is a version

of America

that exists

only in dreams,

a kind of folklore,

shrouded in images,

technicolor interiors,

wrapped in plastic,

ghosts of recent past

to haunt and guide;

a constant reminder.

Wishful thinking

a constructed imaginary,

one I can hold in my hand.

Popular culture and spectacle, America and the domestic ideal, capitalism and the collective unconscious of a national identity. As an artist, I am interested in the myriad images that manifest for a viewer when they think of the spectacle of American pop culture, its domestic archetypes, and the material worship it revolves around. My …

The Day The Door Flew Open, Clara Delgado

Masters Theses

A journey is a chance to better oneself, to go and come back anew. This kind of pilgrimage does not only happen in the spectacular realm of far-off travels. Often it happens where the soles of one’s feet comprehend the curvature of the land. Then, without forewarning, time opens a sliding door that appears on the recognized ground. Stepping in, the world is realized in a new way.

The writings that strike my tongue with ravishing bittersweet flavors are fictional narratives, with voyages that sail through day and night, disguised as lovely prose while critically probing the world. This written …

[W]Hole: Journey To Fullness, Joni P. Gordon

MFA in Visual Art

My work raises critical questions about Black history, race, gender, beauty, and privilege. My practice also highlights the intersectionality of colorism and racism. I use materials such as cardboard rectangles with handwritten words, brown paper, doors defaced by scratches, fire, printed images, newspaper, and projected photographs to ask and answer those questions. I also use Work and Travel documents, broom and brush bristle, mop fiber, towels, and audio recordings of oral histories to exhibit invisible scars wrought by racist actions as physical and material manifestations.

My practice began after experiencing racial discrimination for the first time on a US work …

Reclamation: The Towns Of The Virginia Coalfields, Craig Owens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses his work in Reclamation: The Towns of the Virginia Coalfields, a Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibit held at the Tipton Gallery from February 12th through February 23, 2024. The exhibition focuses on coal towns located in the southwestern part of Virginia. The exhibition consists of 20 framed, archival inkjet prints. Each framed work is 36” x 24” and is representative of the artist’s exploration of the towns. A catalog of the exhibit is included at the end of this thesis.

Owens examines formal and conceptual artistic influences, both historical and contemporary. Historic and contemporary photographic …

Double Exposed Perspectives, Michael J. Leeson

Student Projects

Humans have always stumbled through time, whether each person lived or not is another question. Connecting, experiencing, and feeling dissolve existence into living. Inspired by artists Richard Mosse and Cara Romero who use alternative methods to present perspectives, Michael Leeson uses 35mm film in collaboration with friends from around the United States to do the same.

Leeson ships a variety of black and white film types and a film camera if they do not have one to his collaborators (some who have never shot film before) giving them a wide direction of “shoot your everyday life and vulnerability”. Leeson refuses …

How To Forget, Jesse D. Hoyle

Theses and Dissertations

How To Forget was born from a need to give tangible form to the psychic residue left behind by a life lived. Through the use of silk-screening of red clay mud onto ink-jet photographs, archival textiles, and site-specific installations, I attempt to tie and/or divorce myself from my own and my family's extended history and examine the function of memory within the dynamics of the archive. How To Forget takes a non-linear, non-chronological approach to this examination, compressing decades of time and space through the manipulation of the archive and my own self-portraiture, designed specifically to deny myself from its …

Confined By Darkness, Alyssa C. Sweeney

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In addition to my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, this dossier is arranged with an extended artist statement, documentation of a photographic series, a case study on artist Brian Ulrich, and a curriculum vitae. These portions of the thesis exhibit the themes and pursuit that inform my studio practice in photography. The comprehensive artist statement describes the attachments and personal background that informs my overall approach. The second chapter consists of a series of images titled, Confined by Darkness, which is an archive of significant spaces documented at night that evoke nostalgia or are prominent in my everyday …

Photography And 21st-Century Migration, Sarah Bassnett, Blessy Augustine

Visual Arts Publications

No abstract provided.

Family, Diaspora, And The Politics Of Care In Griselda San Martin’S The Wall , 2015-16, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

This article examines a series of photographs by Griselda San Martin, a Spanish journalist and documentary photographer based in New York City and Mexico City. The series focuses on the experiences of people at Friendship Park, a bi-national park located in the border region of San Diego, United States, and Tijuana, Mexico. Working in Tijuana, San Martin engaged with families as they attempted to connect with loved ones across the border in San Diego. Many of the people she met at Friendship Park had become separated from family members after living as undocumented migrants in the US and then being …

Contact Sheet, Jiwoong Jang

Theses and Dissertations

Jiwoong’s thesis paper is a field guide to how he navigates his curiosity with photography, sound, sculpture, ceramic, and installation. Connecting fragments through narrative vignettes, he underscores how chance, walking, light, time, and uncertainty inform his art.

Ni De Aqui Ni De Alla..., Jc Santistevan

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Ni de aqui ni de alla navigates the complexities of belonging to two cultures-Mexican

and American-while not fully identifying with either. By visualizing liminal spaces,

migratory patterns, and quotidian subject matter the work serves as a metaphor for

the Latinx experience in the United States-an experience defined by conflicts between

conformity and resistance, individuality and community, spirituality and secularism,

alienation and belonging. "Black and white are the colors of photography…..they

symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair," Robert Frank once said, and it is

through a nonlinear installation of black and white imagery that I seek to describe the

push …

Magic Mirrors, Jamie Ho

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

When a beam of bright light hits the convex and polished surface, an image is reflected back onto the wall. This is a description of a magic mirror, an object from the Han Dynasty (206 BC -24 AD), that embodies how Euro-America views China: both technically advanced and shrouded in mystery. The magic mirror also points to the history of photography, as this term was often used in the Victorian era to describe a camera. The image created by a camera is a mimic of reality, both all too familiar and unfamiliar.^[1] Like magic mirrors, the GIFs I create …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Personal Equation, Nicholas Hobbs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The body of this paper is a formatted version of text which exists natively on the web and is accessible at www.personalequation.art. Its non-linear narrative is meant to accompany and mirror, not describe, the artwork in the exhibition. The following two paragraphs are copied from the exhibition statement accompanying Personal Equation, which is on view in the Reading Room at the Fayetteville Public Library from April 3 to June 30, 2023: A personal equation is one that attempts to account for the inevitable role of subjectivity in scientific observations. The term was coined by astronomers in the 18th century who, …

Light Leaf: Observations Of Leaves In Light, Paul Kelley

The STEAM Journal

For me, spending time in isolation yielded some interesting findings, as I began to closely observe the various leaves that engulf my backyard. Every new day brought with it a new detail, a subtlety with every shift in light, revealing an endless array of abstractions, textures and colors. I was seeing the hidden life of leaves dancing in the sunlight. Naturally, I began documenting my observations.

See How Man Was Made, Lilian C. Smith

Senior Projects Spring 2023

First there was Chaos, the gaping abyss. From Chaos came the Earth and soon after darkness and Night, from which came Day and Light. To be her husband, Earth created Sky. They made many children together, the Nymphs of the hills, the Hekatonkheires, the Cyclops, and the Titans. When Earth and Sky’s youngest Titan son Cronus overthrew his father, he castrated him, sending bits of the sky into the sea where Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty was born. Cronus ruled until he himself was overthrown by his own youngest son, Zeus.

See How Man Is Made is a project …

Gordon Parks: “Homeward To The Prairie I Come” Digital Exhibition Catalog, Aileen Wang, Mark Crosby, Linda Duke, Katherine Karlin, Cameron Leader-Picone, Sarah Price, Karin Westman

NPP eBooks

This open access digital exhibition catalog is part of the Kansas State University (K-State) Gordon Parks Project, initiated by the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art and K-State English. It presents new research about Parks’s activities in Kansas based on materials found in participating Kansas institutions, including 128 curated photographs donated by Gordon Parks to K-State. The contributions in this volume illuminate Parks’s relationship to his home state of Kansas as a source of reference and inspiration. They debunk the myth that Kansas was merely the place where Gordon Parks was born before moving on to greatness elsewhere.

This book …

Woven Weeds, Michelle Usha Mandoki

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

Representing The Ali'i And Monarchy: Dress, Diplomacy, And Featherwork In Hawai'i, Tess Anderson

Scripps Senior Theses

When Native Hawaiians and haole (foreigners) first met, both participants belonged to fashion systems unknown to the other, composed of different materials, styles, tastes, standards, and construction techniques. As the outside world was introduced to the cultural heritage of Hawaiian hulu manu (featherwork), kūkaulani (chiefly fashion), and European skewed conceptions of Hawaiian indigeneity; the ali‘i (chiefs) and kama‘āina (commoners) received and adapted to incoming materials, technologies, and information. When these encounters transitioned into “prolonged contact” and settlement, dress and adornment proliferated in new ways. Analyzing the case studies of historic pā‘ū, holokū, ‘ahu'ula, and military uniforms shows the significance of …

Offerings, Diana C. Patin

LSU Master's Theses

These photographs and writing are a set of offerings, collected as part of an intensive examination of myself and my contentious relationship with self-image. I first established which traits in my personality represent me best. I landed on my fatness, my queerness, my southernness, and my penchant for caring. Then I took a deep dive into each of those four themes with the objective of uncovering both the areas of exaltation and spaces of hurt within them. The images that result are both confrontational and gentle. It is my hope that the uncompromising honesty within these offerings communicates that while …

The Other Neighbour Of El Otro Lado, Anahi Gonzalez Teran

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This written thesis is in support of a Master’s of Fine Arts degree at Western University. The thesis dossier explores themes of Mexican migration in Canada engaging with ideas of human labour and various indexes of Mexican culture, trade, and economic exchange. The thesis also consists of documentation of public exhibitions and other various creative production components including videos, photography and multi-media installations. This thesis is separated into three major sections. The first is an extended artist statement which outlines my artistic research and my creative process as an artist. The second is a portfolio of photographic documentation of artworks …

But Also Full Of Seeds For A Future That Could Have Turned Out Differently., Megan Marie Bickel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the relationship between "illusion," "allusion," and their relationship to contemporary images which announce, shield, or reference information. Beginning by discussing Casualist and Post-Digital Painting discourse, two styles I work within, we see connecting tissue in announcing and shielding of meaning. We look at the meaning of marks, and in the parallel exhibition, marks that utilize camouflage strategies appear as a metaphor for illuding to information which appears as conveying depth when there is none, and using paintings' symbols in objects that are not paintings. The work 'alludes' to what the viewer has seen before and relies on …

Made Of Water, Covered In Mud, Nicole Norman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My fixation on water as metaphor is a product of my cosmic design; Scorpio sun, Pisces moon, Pisces rising. I am made of water, begging to be held. Anything liquid has this same desire. I use my art practice to examine the fluidity of physical and digital spaces; how they transform almost constantly. This is only possible through the use of containers that give form to abstract ideas and make them easier to drink (read: digest). Containers can vary in size and shape, but their purpose remains the same. A drinking glass, a swimming pool, a creek bed. These are …

Do You Want To Be Tender?, Leah Grant

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, you will find a body of writings and artworks that reflect Leah Grant’s art practice and research. Throughout the paper, you will see Leah alternate back and forth between her artwork and writings. Leah Grant addresses her personal experience as a Black woman and what it means it explore vulnerability through understanding how the relationships around her affects the relationship she has with herself. Leah has created a collection of poems, prints, and video and audio collages that assist her with revealing and concealing.

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.

Undocumented Migration And Political Community In Susan Meiselas's Crossings Photographs, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

In 1989, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) photographed irregular border crossings in southern California. At the time, it was relatively easy for undocumented migrants from Central America and Mexico to cross between ports of entry, even as there was growing pressure on American officials to address border security.1 One photograph in Meiselas’s Crossings series depicts a border patrol officer apprehending a migrant off the interstate near Oceanside (fig. 1). Two torsos fill the center of the image. The officer grasps the man’s clothing, propelling him toward the nearby vehicle. With heads cut off by the frame and backs turned, …

Optics In Art: Ways Of Seeing, Christian J. Baker

P-12 Lesson Plans

In this lesson, which relies on art from the ZMA Collection and the exhibition it's your world for the moment displayed in fall 2020, students will learn about the basic mechanics of the eye and its similarities to the camera, explore the history of the camera obscura and its use in art and early photography, learn about perspective as a principle of photography, and learn to relay information on major artists by way of their relationship or impact on photography as an artistic medium.

Traditions And Transformations In The Work Of Adál: Surrealism, El Sainete, And Spanglish, Margarita J. Aguilar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Nuyorican movement was a cultural and intellectual movement beginning in the late 1960s through the 1970s that coincided with the era of civil rights struggle in the United States. The artists, writers, poets, and others in the movement were of Puerto Rican descent and resided in New York neighborhoods such as El barrio or Spanish Harlem, Loisaida or the Lower East Side and the South Bronx. The term “Nuyorican” was embraced as a badge of honor and pride by New York’s Puerto Rican community. It was during this time that cultural-specific institutions such El Museo del Barrio, Taller Boricua, …

Francisco Perez, Francisco Perez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Masters of Fine Art work by Francisco J Perez. Artist statement, samples of work, writing requirement, Thesis exhibition, dept approval signatures. Photographer as historian

East Of Adams, Autumn Walter

Senior Honors Projects

East of Adams is a photography project that explores the conservationist messaging ofAnsel Adams’s historical work and translates this work into shooting the Acadia National Park in Maine. Adams is well known for his documentation of our national parks in the western United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Armed with his large format camera he created his images in order to speak to the importance of conserving the natural beauty ofAmerica’s unique wild lands. Inspired by Adams’s drive to use photography in order tomotivate conservation, East of Adams will focus on similar goals within the Eastern United States at …