Art Practice Commons^™

Itafdaloo, Janan Abdelmuti

CGU MFA Theses

My works are autobiographical. In them I explore the unconscious and conscious aspects of my life as a heterosexual cis female. My works function as a form of journaling. The repetition of lines, stitches, and patterns stand in for the repetition of different tasks. I try to submerge the onlooker into my emotional experiences through the use of pop culture references and familiar materials and objects. The inadequacy of life and lack of fulfillment has led to the creation of chromatic spaces. Pieces are void and then filled with silent moments. The quiet restlessness of inner turmoils combined with the …

Chaos Coordinate System, Shuai Xu

CGU MFA Theses

我目前的作品聚焦于看不见的世界，我的很多灵感都来自于我的梦想。我对人类与宇宙的关系感兴趣，尤其是当它在地球上发生时，个人与自然之间的关系。我希望在向外扩展的同时更深入地探索我的内部世界，以参与社会和超越。

My current works focus on the invisible world, and much of my inspiration comes from my dreams. I am interested in humanity's relationship to the cosmos, particularly as it plays out here on Earth, in the relationship between individuals and nature. I hope to explore my interior world more deeply while expanding outward, to engage society and beyond.

Rhythms Of Light, Jessica R. Csanky

CGU MFA Theses

My works are visual expressions of a true love for movement, rhythm, and saturated color. In making art, I present lived experiences that are rendered abstract. These formal representations originate from an energetic space or sensory association and express a connection to places I have been, whether physically or emotionally.

Integral to my practice is the uninhibited exploration of materials and tools. I am committed to deepening my understanding of what paint can do when combined with drawing and installation techniques.

My compositions address architecture, landscape, memory, as well as psychological and physical spaces that we move through during our …

Hot, Water, Mud: Some Attachments, Dianne Dillingham

CGU MFA Theses

The works in my thesis show came out of an investigation into what it means to really know something. To have such intimate familiarity with a place or object that the shape, smell, and touch becomes unforgettable; the dirt under your nails, smell easily recalled, the carved outline of a bedpost after years of touch. These things are unremarkable in their everydayness; but they can also hold power over time. They can become attachments – motifs that resurface and repeat - that have agency.

Quiet Moments, Deitra Charles

CGU MFA Theses

I am a figurative artist who focuses on ordinary people and everyday objects. I paint moments. A moment of peace, a moment of tranquility, a moment of contemplation. It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of day-to-day life – that they give you the opportunity to experience life differently, stirring within you some sense of peace.

It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of …

Secrets, Todd Mccaffrey

CGU MFA Theses

What does it mean to be human and how does art help us in answering this question.

Raw, Jian Liang

CGU MFA Theses

My work is an exploration of the body in obscurity. The understanding of my own cultural identity, gender, and sexuality lead up to the work in this show. The work is a metaphor for the complex identity that I experience, and a discovery of the queer, marginal space that I am in as a person, as a painter, as an artist.

The term “raw” refers not only to the sensuous bodies depicted in my work, but also the body of the physical material. The paintings question the intimate relationship between bodies, and the bodies’ internal as well as external spaces. …

Zooairyland- Xinjie Yin Mfa Thesis Show, Xinjie Yin

CGU MFA Theses

During the process of discovering myself in my art world, I have determined to use cuteness as a way to express my worldview, values, and experiences. Cuteness is my own philosophy and language in the interpersonal communication. I intend to make cuteness meaningful to me as well as to the rest of the world. I believe cuteness contains a power to bring people back to their original simplicity regardless of their age, it is the idea of innocence. Cuteness is like a shield for me to protect myself from the tough, scary and crazy reality; and it is a positive …

In Visible Grounds, Jennifer Simms

CGU MFA Theses

Jenni Simms - In Visible Grounds - Show Description

I am interested in finding ways to make visual art that positions the viewer between advocation and negation, or possession and estrangement with the natural world and human presence. As an artist I am most satisfied when I can include all of these ideas together: a sense of time, edges of some kind, a sense of mystery alongside just enough of the known and signs of human presence and the natural world.

For In Visible Grounds I began my focus with color, or the visible light spectrum.is includes all of the …

"Some Kinda Alchemy", Chelsea Boxwell

CGU MFA Theses

Multiple pieces and paintings come together in “Some kinda Alchemy” to create one large-scale painting environment that increases your interaction and perception of two- dimensional painting. The sculptural aspect is solely a means to an end, to allow the viewer to see more. I want everyone to see as much as possible- as much of the physical painting as possible and as much of the process and actions as possible. There’s more than just a front and 4 sides to my paintings. This structure also inhabits the space the way it does in order to direct you all the way …

Tony Larson: 2017 Mfa Thesis Exhibition, Tony Larson

CGU MFA Theses

I am interested in altering the modes of communication to which I am subjugated. I am open to participating fully in the world around me, especially in the arms of technology. With every new media channel directed at changing consumer behavior and every new gadget at its dedicated servitude, there are new cracks and chasms to inhabit. These spaces are where new propositions are made. I discover and expand these empty spaces by sticking to a regimented set of processes and self imposed limitations to the way I approach painting. My work proposes that the space of art is uniquely …

Daughter, Wife, Mother: Women As Emblems Of Indian Authenticity Throughout The Diaspora, Saloni Kaur Kalkat

Scripps Senior Theses

It has been over a century since the maternal side of my family has resided in the natal land of our cultural heritage and religious proclivities – Punjab, India, where Sikhism was established. As an American I continue this extension of our roots from their source. Through the process of shifting location, cultural confluence, and passing time the experiences of the women in each successive generation of my family have altered significantly through our diasporic existence. However, even in the aftermath of colonization and immigration, the enduring responsibility of women is reliant upon their relation to family.

This ideology is …

Trauma And Recovery: A Confessional Process, Mia Siracusa

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper is about a confessional painting series, which appropriates Abstract Expressionist techniques, and is on geometric canvas reliefs. The main focus through out the series is the process of my recovery from a traumatic event and the process of the creation of a language through abstraction.

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 …

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.

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 .

Jack Wilson Mfa Thesis 2014: Chasing The Unicorn, Jack T. Wilson

CGU MFA Theses

More than anything, my art practice is about overcoming the proclivity to collude with stagnation. Somewhere in the middle of the endless pugilistic battle between consciousness and unconsciousness lies my work, positioned in between the tension of the known and the unknown. The line and the absence of it. The edge and the center. Instinctively, we surround the unknown/other with fear. When encountering a dark shape lying in my path, I automatically jump. The stick might be a snake. Although my survival mechanisms have built walls between the light and the dark, through my work I wish to illuminate things …

Le Corps Propre, Andrea M. Breiling

CGU MFA Theses

Le Corpse Propre, is a series of large scaled paintings; performative archaeological stripteases through which layers of material stratigraphy reveal themselves through a deliberate process of revealing and concealing.

Sally Bruno, Sally Bruno

CGU MFA Theses

My investigation starts with an examination of color, form and line. It continues with an examination of how these elements collide and collude to form objects both abstract and representational. What interests me is the intersection between formal abstraction and representational imagery. My goal is to combine these practices in a rigorous, epistemological inquiry into how human beings make sense of their surroundings, using our minds and our bodies, our perceptions and our expectations, to come to understand the visible world and our embodied relationship to it.

Rope-A-Dope, Gabriel L. Perez

CGU MFA Theses

I create from everyday items, coming from everyday people. I do not think that what I create is too difficult for anyone to understand but I know that although I created it, it eludes me. Plastic containers, disposables, and clothing reach out to eyes that see them differently. I’m not trying to make people see things differently; I’m just trying to make you look. Call it theatrics but with a history of various performance experiences, I am not above pulling a cheap trick to get your attention. Nor will I shun the lingo and logic of decoration since I am …

Paradise Maintenance Department, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin

CGU MFA Theses

Based on personal and artistic research in Samoa, Polynesia, Oceania, and the South Pacific Islands, "Paradise Maintenance Department" investigates the contemporary colonial relationship between the U.S. Territory of American Samoa and the United States, while engaging in a poetic expression of f'a'afafine queer Samoan life.

Kind Of Blue Artist's Statement, Leslie Love Stone

CGU MFA Theses

Leslie Love Stone is a conceptual painter whose work often focuses on the models we build to make sense of the world and ourselves. The beauty of order is exemplified through the geometric abstraction of statistical information; complicated content is eloquently transparent with her use of negative space, repeating patterns, and color.

Verdurous, Adrian R. Culverson

CGU MFA Theses

Adrian Culverson is a painter and sculptor who uses mixed media to create installations that focus on splices of real and imagined worlds.

Bringing Back Color, Bringing Back Emotion: Exploring Phenomenological Empathy In The Reclamation Of The Female Nude In Painting, Sophia R. Forman

Scripps Senior Theses

At the nexus of the seemingly disparate art-theoretical topics of color and the female nude is a critical consideration of phenomenology in both one of its most basic senses—as the first-person experience of perceived phenomena—and as a larger philosophical position which, through its abstraction of perception to subject-object relationships, implicates the painted figure. Specifically, this paper conflates the phenomenology of color with the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in investigating empathy. Structured as a dialectic, it establishes the most prominent views of both color and the female nude—the nude as a symbolic figure, color as perceptual experience—before …

Don't Mess With Magic, Anna K. Nieman

CGU MFA Theses

The art is more of an event than a discrete object. The gallery is a set. It is one large piece, not a collection of sculptures. It’s very clear what is going on but the connections are vague and misleading.The room feels smaller but the projections feel expansive. The images have been recorded and re-cut and copied so many times that it’s barely a film. It becomes just a shifting image. An intoxicating scent fills the room. It’s a bit of a spectacle. The moment is memorable but in a deceiving kind of way. The piece is most effective as …

Harbor Island, Joe Lloyd

CGU MFA Theses

Paintings within this body of work evolve from themselves. Looking at the previous painting, I start a new painting. I stopped using photo references because I realized that I already knew what I wanted to paint and that my intuition is more important than images that already exist in the world. As a result, the paintings continue to move away from observational space towards something more artificial. The paintings become about the two-dimensional place on the canvas rather than some real place out in the world. This transition is seamless for me because geometry equally exists in two-dimensional and three-dimensional …

Kathleen Melian Mfa Thesis - Lalaland, Kathleen Melian

CGU MFA Theses

I am interested in the struggle in our culture to project an image and the burden of that endeavor. This preoccupation with image creation permeates our society as a whole and is not bound by social or economic status. In this body of work, I wish to expose a sense of the emotional fallout of such existence, and the truth beneath the fiction.

A twist to this narrative, is that the falsity is also a source of pleasure and enjoyment. This creative reinvention of self, although fraught with desperation and anxiety, offers intense satisfaction as participants take roles like actors …

Being-There, Atilio A. Pernisco

CGU MFA Theses

I blend figures with backgrounds to define pensive areas of focus and delve between figuration and abstraction. These paintings connect the viewer with the strangeness of the ordinary world. This is the moment of unconsciousness. It is then where elements of a narrative emerge. I depict the figure in movements of awkwardness. Images of the familiar environments of children involved in some kind of work-play activity, the inheritors of generational trauma, reoccur in my work--a parade of daydreamers in direction to witness the uncertain.

The Darkness Is Passing, Grace Heeeun Park

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about the interplay of light, darkness and space. I express illumination of space and penetrating light with abstract painting. I use the white of canvas and thick application of black paint to create frames and to break rules of defined dimensions. Through my paintings, I challenge the perception of space and question the boundaries between two and three dimensions.

Tutti Frutti, Damaris G. Rivera

CGU MFA Theses

Mark making is equivalent with making a place one's own. Demarcation of a site is not solely a negative act. The negation of a space is pre-transcribed, presupposed. The point is to take the negative and invert it. It’s not a one-way street. In order to change the building you have to move through the building and let the building move through you. Once the building lives in the occupant the experience of the building can be altered. Total absorption of architecture and its environment can provide a means to live in a unified expressive way. It’s about the person. …