Art Practice Commons^™

Drowning In Our Tears, Kelley-Ann A. Lindo

Theses and Dissertations

Drowning in our Tears is a series of works – installation, print media, and sculpture that explores themes of precarity, ephemerality, collective memory, and vulnerability. The need to create and preserve an archive has been the of the driving forces behind the works. I am interested in this notion of creating new language and perspectives from past trauma and hardships. The archive presents us with a site where excavation of meaning can occur, identities preserved, and new identities formed. In my work, I try to bridge the gaps, using the fragments of memory, the past and present experiences to create …

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.

Difficult Paintings, Hao (Damien) Ding

Theses and Dissertations

The sublime as a concept has a fraught and racist history. However, it remains the single most helpful idea in describing the deeply felt state of being when one comes across something ineffably powerful. From an art-making perspective, this thesis, and the accompanying exhibition of installations and paintings, proposes an alternative construction of the concept of the sublime. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual point of departure, a painter can manipulate the relationship of the viewer and paintings to create paradoxical moments of simultaneous intimacy and distance, which interact to create an alternative path towards the sublime. Through descriptions of …

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.

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 …

Beyond The Social: Artist Project Spaces, 2003 To 2016., Clare L. Van Loenen

Theses and Dissertations

This research examines storefront project spaces in the early 2000s that offered alternative approaches to the programming, organizing, and archiving found in conventional museums. I propose that such sites impacted participatory visual culture by offering a reformulatory role for arts’ practices, one that organized itself across disciplinary boundaries, chose a collaborative rather than competitive approach, and processed the ideological implications of their group work. Focused on three specific sites—Machine Project in Los Angeles, Elsewhere in Greensboro, and Mess Hall in Chicago—this study details the museological, pedagogical, and archival challenges of these artist-convened organizations. My interdisciplinary investigation offers a reference point …

Shape Shifting: Bodies, Sound, And Queerness, Cordylia B. Vann

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual and sonic thesis, Performing Ourselves. The paper examines the relationship between the labor of creating a queer body in how it moves and feels to the creation of choreography, sound, and graphic scores

Heavy Hold: A Physical Score, Alexandra Velozo

Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of essays, stories, and fictional interviews that are in conversation with my performance, teaching, and sculpture practice. My research and work considers chronic illness, disability, the historic cultural connection between swamplands and illness, the medical industrial complex, medical theater, the medical gaze, disabled performers, metatactile space, sensory learning, and access.