Art Practice Commons^™

Winding Down River Road, Gillian Harper

LSU Master's Theses

As a mechanism to explore my temporary home in Louisiana, Winding Down River Road is a collection of artworks that integrates natural materials collected from landscapes in southern Louisiana with steel and petroleum-based products. My interest in researching environmental issues, ecology, and industry has shaped my vehicles for observation and how I generate data. Through a variety of methodologies, I am considering how climate change is forcing many of us to re-contextualize how our home can be affected by the very industries we rely on. Personal engagement with residents living in the dystopian atmosphere of southern Louisiana’s industrial corridor and …

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

An Examination Of The Myriad Of Skills Properties Artisans Utilize And How They Are Attained, Crystal L. Hayner

LSU Master's Theses

This study is intended to provide resources for those looking at becoming a prop artisan in the theatre industry. It is meant to provide aspiring artists with everything they need on their journey to becoming a competitive hire in the field, to aid in increasing one’s chances of finding work in the theatre industry, and to have a successful career as a prop artisan by compiling the multiple types of skills that prop artisans use and how they attain those different types of skills. The central research question of this study examines the myriad of skills prop artisans utilize and …

Offerings, Diana C. Patin

LSU Master's Theses

These photographs and writing are a set of offerings, collected as part of an intensive examination of myself and my contentious relationship with self-image. I first established which traits in my personality represent me best. I landed on my fatness, my queerness, my southernness, and my penchant for caring. Then I took a deep dive into each of those four themes with the objective of uncovering both the areas of exaltation and spaces of hurt within them. The images that result are both confrontational and gentle. It is my hope that the uncompromising honesty within these offerings communicates that while …

Sulfur And Sage, John Swincinski

LSU Master's Theses

Sulfur and Sage is a body of abstract paintings created out of memories of time spent immersed in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains and the Yellowstone Caldera during the summer of 2020. The paintings reflect specific places, experiences, and insights, which occurred as I sought solitude by returning to the one place where I feel most at peace with the universe – the woods.

Each painting is augmented by a written vignette, describing the occurrence it is based on. Should the viewer choose to include these short stories as they encounter the artwork, they provide the jumping off point …

Homeward Bound, Kyle Peruch

LSU Master's Theses

This paper explores agency and opposition as the underlining themes in the artworks of Homeward Bound. Both doctrines are important religious teachings that I have used to explore artistic ideas such as tension, balance and perspective. Each artwork displays a point of view on how I have confronted opposition in my lifetime. The sculptures are also meant to offer a sense of encouragement and hope to the viewer as they analyze each piece of art.

Alternative Methods, Hunter Stabler

LSU Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

In the realm of precognitive artmaking, the artist’s role is that of an antenna. One must be receptive to the subtle, invisible flow of creative novelty in order to participate in the involuntary channeling of new ideas, new processes, and alternative methods of creative production. Carving out new territory within the realm of static art is a primary objective for my artistic process. By utilizing digital fabrication tools, paired with my affinity for intricate craft and optical metagrobolization, I have created a body of work that invents alternative processes and unique aesthetic languages.

Digital imaging, digital modeling and digital …

Creating Coping Mechanism: An Anatomy Of A Gallery-Based Installation And Performance Work, Jamie M. Kutner

LSU Master's Theses

The project described in this paper is an exhibition of gallery-based durational performance art, and resulting three-dimensional artifacts, that was created through a tangled process of relapse and recovery from mental illness. The first section of this paper peers into the parameters of ephemeral artistic practice. I discuss the process of merging my recovery and creative practice through performance art, and then parse the discussion of the work into the categories of performer, audience, site, and time. Section II details various aspects of spectator experience through a second-person narrative tracing the crowd flow of the exhibition. I conclude with an …

Parallel Tracks: Three Case Studies Of The Relationship Between Street Art And U.S. Museums In The Twenty-First Century, Erin Rolfs

LSU Master's Theses

An examination of three case studies involving U.S. museum exhibitions of street and graffiti art in the twenty-first century. This thesis covers the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Graffiti” show in 2006, Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Art in the Streets” in 2011, and the 2012-2015 activities of the Baton Rouge Museum of Public Art. These events offer a chronological and geographical range to provide a broad scope of investigation into the pitfalls and opportunities of museum’s exhibiting graffiti and street art. The heart of this research is not to prolong the debate about whether museums endanger their authority when …

Scattered Feathers, Dason Sebastian Pettit

LSU Master's Theses

Scattered Feathers is the story of a ghost that lives in the imagination now: the ivory-billed woodpecker. Those that know this bird call it the God Bird or Grail Bird because of its mythic stature. This thesis is also a story about the loss and obsession that can fuel human pursuits. It is a study in observation and subsequent mythmaking, an examination of extinction and preservation. Perhaps most of all it is a chronicle of entropy and the cyclical nature of our existence. The visual work herein examines the mythos of the ivory-billed woodpecker, its once pristine environment and the …