Art Practice Commons^™

Vida En Sombras, Tommy Canales Burns

CGU MFA Theses

Verisimilitude. What is reality? Subconsciously we are acting out and absorbing information collating data and in turn responding with instincts. Learning processes to view and shape this world. I think of the Hermann Hesse’s doppelganger, the idea of a shadow self. Group identities can also have strange shadow selves. It is bizarre to look back at history and see the changing context of social norms, fashions, traditions, scientific, philosophical, and political thought. Art is a sign of the times, creating space for the inner dialogue of collective consciousness to be purged and hashed out.

When I'M With You, Jenny Ziomek

CGU MFA Theses

Everything I make is related to books. My artwork functions as visual storyboards or is used directly in books. Props and videos are inspiration for drawings. My paintings are meant to feel like pages from a larger narrative. Often, the formats through which stories are told are as important as the stories themselves.

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.

Tapestry, Alana Medina

CGU MFA Theses

The wall pieces are intentionally left to be crude, unrefined, and raw. A look at the world with a border, walking backwards to a beginning, what it was like before the traffic of the mind. Itinerant qualities along with an objective dissidence bring about an experience of tribal nomadic earthy hues. The paintings stay close to my interpretation of the earth, similar to the sculptures. Like twins born in the same embrace with contemporaneous qualities they exist together with a connection in materiality. There is a relationship between my paintings and sculptures; a mutual dependence seen and experienced together that …

Transforming Body, Angelina Prendergast

The STEAM Journal

This is a reflection about the use of balls for body therapy.

Engaging The Community: Reflections On A Steam Institute, Dennis Doyle, Yat-Long Sam Poon

The STEAM Journal

Staff at an elementary school working with artists from a non-profit arts integration professional development organization developed a highly engaging full day STEAM Institute to engage the community in experiential STEAM learning practices and to leverage the experience for systemic impact. This reflection considers the outcomes that went well beyond the original goals.

Gary Brewer - Dark Matter Series, Gary Brewer

The STEAM Journal

In the Dark Matter series of paintings I am abstracting images from NASA’s efforts to map dark matter using the Hubble Space Telescope. From these abstractions I create diaphanous veils of blue that convey a sense of movement; the movement suggests primal forces: wind, water air and fire.

The figure in the foreground is one of the elements: gold, copper, silver, which develop into a variety of fantastic shapes. The ‘elements’ which are the foundation of life on earth, are born in the heart of a star and explode out into the universe upon its death and collapse. The force …

Cold Hard Facts, Paul Kelley

The STEAM Journal

COLD HARD FACTS is an ephemeral installation composed of a projector, digital images and ice. The work continues my interest in having the viewer slow down to have a more thoughtful and absorptive experience with the work and surrounding space. With a short-lived duration, the piece considers the transitory nature of things and how truths can be misconstrued as facts, whereas truths are malleable and facts are not. They are cold, hard and indifferent.

Pineapple, 022, Conversation – Behind The Cover Art, Jesse W. Standlea

The STEAM Journal

Many sources date the pit-firing process as a 30,000 plus years-old ceramic firing technique. Every year I take my AP 3D Design class to the beach to fire ceramic pieces using this method. Being a contemporary sculptor who shows in Los Angeles I have always appreciated pit-fired pieces but never used one in my own art practice until now. A connection between the first method of firing ceramics and my art practice seemed unrelated. The title for my piece might add to the disconnect; and yet these seemingly unrelated elements force the work into a place where the artistic process …

Stratum, Raneem Fadul

CGU MFA Theses

My work is an expression of the relationship between my own culture, and the American culture and way of life that I have had a chance to interact with, observe, and reflect on throughout the past few years. My concepts were inspired by the industrial nature of the area that I live in, where I gradually realized that I was surrounded by dozens of workshops and garages. Given that my home is the spiritually-rich, fairly traditional, and non-industrial Saudi Arabia, this typical American experience has been, to me, one with much room for reflection, due to the extreme contrast. The …

Kimono, Elizabeth D. Hoffman

CGU MFA Theses

Globalization opens up opportunities for the international community to push for freedom of expression. It is precisely because the history of kimonos is a multi-cultural one, invented by the Chinese, then adapted and adopted by the Japanese, then altered by Western colonialists and changed as it permutated from the aristocracy to the middle class and to laborers, that I felt that it was relevant to today and the cross-cultural influences of globalization. This summer, I purchased two authentic Japanese kimonos, (one an everyday cotton one to use as a model for my drawings, and the second, an elaborate silk one …

20,082,026, Ruoxi Li

CGU MFA Theses

The whole idea of my work came from me questioning about the relationship between industrialization and human beings. Our generation look and think conforming to a public standard. When being asked question our answer is not based on our preferences, but whether it matches what we’ve been taught.

Sharon Si-Chen Ye Artist Statement, Si-Chen Ye

CGU MFA Theses

Everyone is a separate individual. When individuals become aware that they are alone in this world, they can spend more time getting along with themselves and listening to the voice coming from the depths of their heart. This is the main idea of my works. I want to build a silent world with many creatures to make people feel and know that they are alone without feeling lonely.

Aesthesia, Cindy G. Garcia

CGU MFA Theses

My art practice in itself, is first and foremost about me as a Human on this planet. Second, I am drawn to the cognitive dissonance that happens within each individual, this is key to the majority of my work. For this show I really wanted to emphasize; A: The textural, corporal involvement that I personally really enjoy and get satisfaction out of. B: The color of Life. C: The beauty in very introspective particular instances that happen in day to day life.

A Crocodile Passed By Today, I Said Hello, He Said Hello, That Annoyed Me, Mayra A. Villegas

CGU MFA Theses

The creatures in my paintings are vastly invested in catering to my sensibilities. Emotional cowardice, impulsive politeness: through them, I am relieved of those personal culprits. They lend ropes, take blame, spit in eyes, and color my streams of consciousness. Furthermore, they manifest personal and social arrays of vexing scenarios. Suffocating hierarchies, the monotony of existence, my paintings aim to offer respite from such malaise.

Ultimately, my paintings are resolving, absolving even, personal and societal grievances.

Unfettered, Doraelia Ruiz

CGU MFA Theses

My life has been built on high wire tensions between the two vastly different worlds I live between. I live somewhere between illusions of minority success and harsh realities of not having a trust-fund in an elite world. I’m neither here nor there. Painting is my one refuge where I can combine the vastly different worlds I exist in and between. My works are the only semblance of a home that doesn’t vanish .

Lili Zhong Artist Statement, Lili Zhong

CGU MFA Theses

Appreciating beauty, the universe’s natural essence, is an innate and indispensable human ability that helps us learn about the world. Everyone has their own definition, even on the degree to which beauty represents something abstract or realistic. It could mean elegance or romance, be from an audio or visual source, pertain to religious wisdom or even human value. Regardless, art always address beauty.

Lei Shen Artist Statement, Lei Shen

CGU MFA Theses

I believe that all things have contradictory side, and development is built on contradictions. In fact, the contradiction is the most frequent thing which is in my CGU’s life. Different culture, different habit of life, different learning styles, different educations. These are all contradictory to me. But also let me have a different way to think. I think it is a good thing for me. Because it makes to understand a thing become more comprehensive. So I want reflect this idea in my work. I want tell people contradictory actually can make progress. I want to say there are tow …

Threshold, Kristin King

CGU MFA Theses

My work explores the nature of interiority and exteriority, the relationship between the centered inner self and the peripheral, the physicality of occupying the inside of a space or viewing that space from the outside.

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.

Contact Points, Megan A. Mcgrain

CGU MFA Theses

My practice investigates intimacy and connection over time.

Enekas, Shabnam Yousefian

CGU MFA Theses

My works are all a reflection of my own life, beliefs, experiences and goal. For me art is an oasis of opportunities. It allows me to utilize my innate abilities and imaginations without any obstructions.

I am drawn to painting because of its capacity to reflect the world I live in. My goal is to demonstrate the fact that what is done in life has a reflection on us as well as our surrounding environment. My paintings are abstractions of the real places. Reflection implies clarity; however it is unclear at the same time. To me reflection is clearer than …

Creative Connections: Engaging Students And Faculty Through A Library Artist In Residence, Alexandra Chappell

Library Staff Publications and Research

It can be challenging to forge connections between an academic library and undergraduate art students, who are often heavily engaged in beginning studio practice and may only associate the library with the more traditional research done by other disciplines. One way to overcome this challenge is to change their perceptions of the library through programming that demonstrates that the library can be a site for exploration, inspiration, research, and innovation by artists. At the Claremont Colleges Library, we partnered with a member of the art faculty to create a Library Artist in Residence (LAIR) program, which has the twin goals …