Art Practice Commons^™

Pan Shot!, Samuel Robert Gaston Mattax

Theses and Dissertations

Sam Mattax's practice is aimed at working through what he has lived and what he is living. They are self-involved diaristic building blocks of marking time and release. The layered drawings negotiate Sam's history and his day to day, distorting one another into a place of unrecognizable space and condensed energy. It is a process of attaining a loose understanding of his life and forgetting it all at once. Sam's work is survival.

This Life Is A Constant Rehearsal, Alex Schmidt

Theses and Dissertations

Alex Schmidt’s conceptual practice explores the artist’s precarious condition as an affective freelance worker; a utopian parasite. Schmidt employs paintings as props, performance as muse, and writing on transactional care as a metaphor for this cobbled life.

Art In The Age Of Algorithmic Automation And Artificial Intelligence, Milly Skellington

Theses and Dissertations

The 21st century is examined in order to understand how the artists tools have gained unprecedented autonomy.

Someone Will Remember Us / I Say / Even In Another Time, Paul Anagnostopoulos

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Anagnostopoulos’s paintings and vases use mythological melodrama in a contemporary context to portray vivid images of queer life in the wake of homophobic erasure and tragic loss. “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time” traces his aggregate interests in Greco-Roman cultures and art history.

Emotional Landscapes, Jin Young Jeong

Theses and Dissertations

“Emotional Landscape” delivers a sense of gravity, openness, and breathing space through oil paintings on linen of abstracted bodily forms. The imagery in the works generates an atmosphere where one can feel rooted and anxiety-free. The paintings invite a close read of the complexities of compounded affects.

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Scene By Scene, Katita Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Katita Miller’s paintings and drawings depict quotidian scenes through the filter of an overactive mind. Populated by spectral figures and swirling portals, her interiors and landscapes fluctuate between the mundane and the fantastical. This paper explores the parallels between painting and theater and the context and process behind five paintings.

I Crawled Out From The Palimpsest Crater, Jessica Willittes

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is a dissection and examination of my art-making practice through the analogy of the palimpsest landscape found in Arizona’s Meteor Crater. I attempt to elucidate the process by which a “palimpsest artwork” is made through an unfixed cycle of scavenging, rupturing, joining and offering.

Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores painting through the ideas of dust, mist, and haze as specific atmospheric metaphors that could be used to describe ontologies of space, time, memory, and history.

The Screen To Desire, Joseph Parra

Theses and Dissertations

Joseph Parra reflects on our often embellished online personas and their effect on our desires. Through luscious 3-dimensional painting Parra translates the seductive desire of the hypermasculine male-presenting figure through glorification and criticality. The tactile painting also acts as a rebellion to accurately represent “real” life on the digital screen.

Buzz Buzz, Sarah Heinemann

Theses and Dissertations

Taking the form of a series of notes and notations, this document serves as an account of color in my painting practice as it intersects through personal memory, research, and my studio and professional practices.

Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes, Pol Morton

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores ideas of transness, chronic illness, and injury. Through assemblage and repetition, my larger-than-life paintings address the dissociation and fragility of a body that is unmapped by society. These autobiographical works attempt to locate the self when it is trapped, whether in a bed, in the home, or within the body itself.

A Liquid Line, Sofía Del Mar Collins

Theses and Dissertations

My practice searches for fertility amidst cultural and material detritus. This paper outlines flows embedded in becomingness. My thesis exhibition included Liquidscapes, a series of suspended and wall hung paintings on plastic, Nursery of the Brave, a group of hanging vessels shaped from waste textiles, and Glass City, a video.

Long Time, Jacob V. Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Jake Reed’s work is driven by the idea that architectural ornament can be imbued with meaning not native to its construction or use. To find that meaning, he deconstructs and reassembles elements from the architectural and ornamental histories he studies, using the growing climate crisis as a generative framework.

Not Again, Victor M. Perez Iii

Theses and Dissertations

Victor Perez explores personal narratives involving artifice, domesticity, and patriarchal harms through paintings which use a hybrid of digital and hand applied painting.

Always Wednesday, Danielle Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

Danielle Roberts’ work explores personal narratives. The spaces she paints radiate, simultaneously dark and luminescent. Resembling the kind of archetypes of place used in film her cinematic compositions invite the viewer into the frame. Her figures capture feelings of alienation illuminated by the unnatural existential glow of constructed contemporary light.

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.

Wildfires In The Uncanny Valley, Jenna Beasley

Theses and Dissertations

My work considers our affectual relationship to a rapidly changing environment through ideas about the philosophy and representation of nature, materiality, and the uncanny. In this text, I trace my artistic explorations of notions of apocalypse and catastrophe as they lead me to a deepened ecological viewpoint.

Memories As Old As Outer Space, Nicholas Benfey

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings draw from personal memory, as well as the nostalgic longing and nightmarish foreboding of the irrational psyche. Cosmic ruptures, cliffs, cemeteries, and parking lots appear alongside snowglobes and canopy beds. I aim to suggest things to be wary of, while giving space for optimistic fantasy and reflective wonder.

It's Messy, Polina Tereshina

Theses and Dissertations

My work is a way of thinking through things. Each painting, or object is usually a boiled down vision of something I’m learning, observing or remembering, as I make it. Everything becomes a compression of several ideas with a unique mood and temperature.

From Here And Now: Monuments Of Today And Everyday, Adam Shaw

Theses and Dissertations

The arc of my educational narrative was drawing to a close. I was a month out from my thesis exhibition, the culmination of a three-year experience. The studio was full of an energy I had been longing to feel. I was just beginning. Then came the Pause.

L, M, N, O, P, Matt Jones

Theses and Dissertations

A meditation on my painting and drawing practice in relation to the work of Philip Guston, Nancy Spero, and Frank Moore, among others, just before and during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some Way In Between, Noah D. Stitt

Theses and Dissertations

Merging the subjective and objective through paintings and small objects, my work uses humor, subtlety, and suspension to create specifically ambiguous images that encourage a narrative reading.

Bitter Fruit, Ronald J. Green

Theses and Dissertations

Pain is a phenomenon like fear, belief, and love -- among the forces that determine the course of our lives long before we are born. These conditions generate the layers of the human soul, marrying one life with others past, present and future.

There is an unconscious consensus on the linearity of time. Our lives, memories, dreams and reflections constantly present a challenge to this general agreement. Life, like time, is a series of interlocking awarenesses. Paths intersect, the actions of individuals deposit change into an internal pool of collective experience. Freud once believed that the past is not fixed …

The Potency Of Emptiness, Kennedy L. Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

I investigate language and neurology by integrating intangible personal experiences with painted manifestations of rupture within structures. I utilize a hyperbolic translation of white and black to investigate the dismantling of a structure as an explicit quotation of space, matter, existence, and mind.

To See Again: Vision And Revelation In American Poetics, Emily C. Raabe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this project, I am arguing for a particularly American visual poetics that dwells in the state of suspension implied by attention, quivering between wonder and contemplation, immobility and unfixity as it seeks to reveal, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his 1945 The Phenomenology of Perception, the world which is “always ‘already there’ before reflection begins — as an inalienable presence.”^[1] Grounded in visual theory, the project pairs poets and artists, searching not for similitude, but rather examining resemblance, difference, and most important, relation. Susan Howe, one of my guides for this project, writes that, “immense perspectives …

All The Small Things, Talia E. Levitt

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings engage with the history of the still life as a marginalized and antiacademic genre. Rather than fool viewers into believing that there are real objects in front of them, as is the historical intention of trompe l’oeil, I use realistic rendering to emphasize the painting and painter.

Monsters And Mayhem And Laughter, Staver Klitgaard

Theses and Dissertations

Being an image-maker was always going to be a part of my life. As a child, I had a speech impediment and in order to communicate with my parents, I would use drawings I created to let them know what I was feeling or trying to say. Image making saved me again when I grew older; I was not a star student. But, when I was in art class, I felt like I suddenly could breathe. The minute I realized there was something I could master and have a handle on—a place of creating, learning the history of other artists—I …

The Dream Of Being Totally Open, Frederick Greis

Theses and Dissertations

This essay details four major themes in the paintings of Frederick Greis: spiritual experience, nature, pleasure, and humor. These themes are described within the context of the artist's main goal, which is to create an experience of profound unburdening.

Into The Glitch, Natalie Birinyi

Theses and Dissertations

My work uses Google Earth to generate imagery which is then faithfully observed and reproduced in oil paint. I sneak inside skyscrapers, paragons of capitalistic power, and trick Google Earth into showing me the unrendered innards. Buildings break down into glorious shards of abstract shapes and lines that gesture toward structure, turning a tower into a portal. In this paper I discuss surveillance, the cultural meaning of skyscrapers, cyborgs, drone perspective, painting from observation, science fiction, and the future.