Art Practice Commons^™

Half In Dream: The Tangle In The Grid, Abbey L. Paccia

Masters Theses

Half in Dream: The Tangle in the Grid discusses the form and content of a physical art installation by the same name. The site-specific installation is a large three-dimensional collage of natural ephemera collected from the area around Amherst, Massachusetts, which interacts with natural lighting conditions to illuminate a gallery-facing image of ever-moving light and shadow. The written work elaborates some of the many details within the structure of the artwork, and reveals the philosophies, embodied practices, and methodologies that informed the visual work's creation. Woven throughout are reflections on phenomenology, walking practice, General Systems Theory, collective making, narrative arts, …

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. …

Mantle, David Hannon

Masters Theses

Through a large-scale installation called mantle, I explore how the queer body becomes uncanny to the home through a human sized dollhouse and using scenic design ideas. Home for many is a safe place, but for queers, it can be a difficult one, wrought with not belonging in a childhood of heteronormativity. Being stuck in that heteronormative space is what I communicate through a stage set, composed of four theater flats, printed and collaged wallpaper, free-standing photos mounted on MDF, a giant necklace in a separate room, and impromptu pieces made in the space.

Primate Aesthetics, Chelsea L. Sams

Masters Theses

A cultural, historical, and scientific survey of the phenomena of primate pictorial behavior, presented in a series of interconnected vignettes. What do primates find visually appealing? What is their motivation when creating images? What are the implications for art and for science? By drawing explicit and implicit connections between science, art, case studies, research, and personal narrative, I attempt to weave together what we know, and what we may never be able to know about this complex field.

Unstable Systems Or Why Is My Junk So Raw?, David Musgrave

Masters Theses

Unstable Systems or Why Is My Junk So Raw? is an exploration in the raw aesthetics of exposed electronics; showing the complicated systems that make our everyday electronics work using the visual language of formalism to display these “broken” consumer electronics as art. The work in my thesis show explores the creative potential of death and impermanence through the failing of technology. The work in the exhibition combines my interest and childhood fascination in electronics as well as my experience with my father’s illness. Accidentally and intentionally broken TV’s and electronics are producing live glitches which emphasize the instability of …

Summoning The Body That Acts, Brendan M. Mccauley

Masters Theses

Seven series of artworks; painted, drawn and performed. These works are presented as affective incorporation exercises, that test modes of aesthetic communication in response to varying political contingencies. The constitutive processes used to develop the work also function as a methodology for my own political radicalization. As an artist I am wagering how to talk, as an activist I am preparing to act. The artworks discussed occur at the crossroads of these desires as enactions of futurity within the subjunctive mood.

Navigating The Interim, Joseph E. Saphire Jr

Masters Theses

Navigating the Interim attempts to build a framework for the ways in which visual art, media studies, and forms of social practice might intermingle within a career in the arts, as well as within a thorough art education curriculum. From broad theoretical analysis to the specificity of technical exercises and prompts, this paper serves as a roadmap for the ways in which production, teaching, and organizing might begin to merge into a single holistic practice. The author’s projects provide an anchor from which to analyze the various conceptual trajectories of art that have stemmed from modernism throughout the 20th century, …

Heard Or Dreamed About, Priya Nadkarni

Masters Theses

ABSTRACT

HEARD OR DREAMED ABOUT

MAY 2014

PRIYA NADKARNI, B.F.A. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

M.F.A. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Directed by: Professor Shona Macdonald

One Breath/ One Line, Theresa Antonellis

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The scale of the body, the accretion of marks, the pace of the breath and a list of rules, underlie the work. These are parts of the process. I give myself over to the process. The drawing is evidence of the process. During process, there is constant struggle for dominance between the points of attention. Limitations of the body, habits of the mind, observation of the breath, and action of drawing compete for dominance. When are equal, the state of meditation arises. To me this is ultimate freedom. The intention is the viewer will also find freedom in contemplative viewing …

The Unfixedness Of It, Kerry O'Grady

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

My drawings contemplate the unfixed nature of my experience. I draw from a state of uncertainty about the relationship between self and space, between a moment of experience and the one that follows it. My process involves intuitive mark-making in which instances of perception are indeterminate and discontinuous. I draw from the experience of unhinged moments, from silence and stillness, and from the indefinable, inarticulable, interstitial moments of perception between those that can be concretely described.

The immediacy of drawing, the direct engagement with the mark on the surface, is central to my work. Intuitive mark-making is a way of …

Different Ways To Record Light, Ryan P. Feeney

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Different Ways to Record Light is a series of photographs, videos and objects that explore the affect that popular culture has on how I perceive, and make sense of the world around me. By using light as a thematic and metaphoric subject this work opens up a discourse about the role that images and technology play in our perceptual lives. This thesis paper will give a theoretical, contextual and historical framework for the concepts explored in my studio practice.

Run Stitch Remembrance, Lyndsey N. Baldwin

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

In an effort to process my grief associated with the death of my grandmother, I created a series of drawings, documenting my daily life in Massachusetts. This body of work constitutes my thesis. In total, I made one thousand and sixty one drawings, each undergoing a series of identical, repeated processes, which represent the number of days lived there. The simplicity, detail and sheer volume of drawings in the installation chronicles a relatable story through complex means. Creating the drawings was a methodical act of remembrance, the practice allowing quiet reflection on each day and its respective history. This body …

Regalia And Repetition, Deborah I. Karpman

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

My thesis investigates some of the conceptual ideas related to my studio work, both in terms of theory and contemporary practice. This thesis focuses how the visual images formally operate, as well as the larger framework of discourse that surrounds my practice. In my work, the habitual, incessant process of cutting and extraction and the subsequent meticulous reconfiguring use the strategies of repetition and labor. These sustained, ongoing acts have the possibility to be generative or transformative rather than simply repetitive. This thesis also explores the found object, complicating the classification and knowledge systems of the source image with odd …

Hey, Whats Up?, Justin Kemp

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

My work does not aim to answer a question or solve any problems; it tries to activate a conversation around the content. I intend to keep things playful and entertaining because not only is that how I relate best to the subject, but I find it helps animate aspects of culture that people enjoy responding to and thinking about. Like “The Real World,” or Facebook, my work entertains me, but it has a way of slowing down certain aspects of life, letting someone take a breath, have a conversation and maybe LOL.

Vision And Contemplation: An Exploration Within The Medium, Mica Y. Pillemer

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis is an exploration of various issues concerning composition in painting. In it I take a step by step approach to advancing the compositional thought process. Within that exploration the central issues of painting are confronted and expanded upon.

Bang!, Kimberly C. Hennessy

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

BANG! is a thesis paper presented in conjunction with a visual art show that is made up of paintings, sculptures, and site specific installations. Primary ideas explored with the body of work are those of growth and expansion, energy, contradiction, excess, collection, play, drama, and nostalgia, specifically relating to color relationships and physical material.