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Full-Text Articles in Art Practice
Ripe Spoils, Yan Cynthia Chen
Ripe Spoils, Yan Cynthia Chen
Theses and Dissertations
Chen’s practice primarily focus on sculptures and installation. She explores the interplay between the idea of nature and the constructed environment, by examining how language informs what we know. The central thesis, "Ripe Spoils", employs citrus fruits as symbols for bodily experiences and personal identity, investigating their cultural and historical significance. Her sculptures summon the qualities and embedded meanings in materials like paper pulp and clay, wax and citrus fruits, often resulting in abstracted forms evocative of the human body. This thesis paper and exhibition reflect on themes like mortality and the essence of self.
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Scattered Fragments: Art, Architecture, And Archives In Revolutionary Urban Cairo, Mounira M. Makar
Scattered Fragments: Art, Architecture, And Archives In Revolutionary Urban Cairo, Mounira M. Makar
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyzes how revolutions impact urban Cairo and its communities, specifically within artistic, architectural and archival practice while acknowledging the central role of public spaces in giving way to such revolutionary practices. Fundamentally, this paper highlights the foundational nature of such practices in developing urban communities.
Politics Of Being A Lover: In Art, (Space) And Kink, Rabeeha Adnan
Politics Of Being A Lover: In Art, (Space) And Kink, Rabeeha Adnan
Theses and Dissertations
Politics of being a lover: in art, (space) and kink explores my relationship with my practice through observations and stories that draw parallels with romance and kink. Narrated as love affairs turned into complex commitment, it shuffles through logics of structural power, control, and communication in the context of praxis and art institutions.
Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao
Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao
Theses and Dissertations
Jordany's paper congregates their archival research into an art practice that examines the decolonial impulse to excavate the self and produce autonomy. Using ceramics to reference and re-animate Taino ritual objects found in museums, resulting in alternative museology, their work seeks to honor Caribbean ancestors by subverting colonial history.
Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana
Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana
Theses and Dissertations
Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.
(Not) Knowing, Jared Friedman
(Not) Knowing, Jared Friedman
Theses and Dissertations
Jared Friedman’s work creates monuments out of banal common objects. Through acrylic paintings on- Astroturf, burlap, canvas, and upholstery fabric- he explores the ambiguity of the unremarkable, such as the condenser coils on the back of a refrigerator. In, (Not) Knowing, he parses the difference between knowing and understanding.
Laying Out A Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions Of The Soul, Erin D. Yerby
Laying Out A Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions Of The Soul, Erin D. Yerby
Theses and Dissertations
Laying out a Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions of the Soul, arises out of my artistic practice, and thoughts behind my current project and MFA exhibition, Spectral Geographies.
Linking the problem of the world ‘out there’ or external space, to inner experience through painting as both medium and practice, my work expresses what I call inner geographies, spaces where intimate immensities, folding inside and outside, find expression. I think of my paintings as beginning with this gesture of laying out a between-space where the intimacies of waking dreams and visions are opened by, and grow into, actual places, …
Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman
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 …
A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera
A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera
Theses and Dissertations
This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.
Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy
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
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.
The Sole Result Is The Game, Julia Taszycka
The Sole Result Is The Game, Julia Taszycka
Theses and Dissertations
I address the idea of the game understood both from the perspective of the art world and the socio-economic system. My recent projects have been based almost entirely on found objects, bearing strong traces of damage, deterioration, and destruction.
Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen
Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen
Theses and Dissertations
Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …
A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen
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.
Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry
Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry
Theses and Dissertations
Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.
Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon
Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon
Theses and Dissertations
This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.
Drowning In Our Tears, Kelley-Ann A. Lindo
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
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.
Beyond The Social: Artist Project Spaces, 2003 To 2016., Clare L. Van Loenen
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 …
Martian Mother, Elizabeth Mcgrady
Martian Mother, Elizabeth Mcgrady
Theses and Dissertations
This paper examines the relationship between humans and land, through the lens of the scientific and religious, bridging the physical realm with the spiritual. It acts as accompanying material to the project titled Martian Mother, supplementary information to the visual work, and an extension of the proposal, the center of the work. The proposal exists to send myself, or a like-minded individual, to Mars with artificial insemination equipment to give birth to the first Martian, becoming the first Martian Mother. This work is rooted firmly in speculative fiction, creating a nonlinear future framework for a new society and space exploration.
Kiddush Levana, The Moon Is Your Handheld Mirror, Noa Ginzburg
Kiddush Levana, The Moon Is Your Handheld Mirror, Noa Ginzburg
Theses and Dissertations
Noa Ginzburg is weaving cast-off and hand-made objects, lights, reflections, spells, drawings, and an abundance of knots into site-responsive installations. In her thesis, Ginzburg addresses Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, the synergy of assemblages, repurposing of materials in the era of Anthropocene, and how notions of solidarity and indeterminacy influence her work.
Big Sister Enterprise: Just Be There, Wai Ying Zhao
Big Sister Enterprise: Just Be There, Wai Ying Zhao
Theses and Dissertations
Wai Ying Zhao, an artist and curator, instituted an American company named Big Sister Enterprise in 2018. BSE is a Delaware registered LLC that imitates briefcase companies implemented in order to foster a community of emerging artists with the intent of exhibiting and promoting their works. Zhao’s initiative stems from the awareness that many artists are struggling to continue their studio practices because of unstable income or being overworked in jobs such as art handling, gallery sitting and bartending. Through openings and events held in spaces in both New York and Shenzhen, she aims to create a community where emerging …
Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres
Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres
Theses and Dissertations
I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.
Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray
Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray
Theses and Dissertations
The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.
The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane
The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane
Theses and Dissertations
The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …
Lifetime, Emily E. Kuchenbecker
Lifetime, Emily E. Kuchenbecker
Theses and Dissertations
Time is my bully. Time marks the start of something, as well as the end. We are all carrying out the inexorable passing of time as it relates to our impending mortalities.
I do not fear death.
The awareness of my body’s impermanence employs me to feel that much more connected to the vessel containing that of which I am.
But what am I? Am I my body- or is it much deeper?
Through the work executed during my graduate research, I have attempted to quantify my existence through the archiving my time and body. This document ushers you through …
Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang
Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang
Theses and Dissertations
I aim to excavate source material from the past and reinterpret its significance in the present through art. I merge history with the contemporary through acts of appropriation and material exploration, creating conditions for the viewer to grapple with colonial legacies in an affective space of visual experience.
“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales
“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales
Theses and Dissertations
After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.
Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon
Profanation, Tsahi Zac H. Hacmon
Theses and Dissertations
This paper attempts to provoke an Israeli American dialogue that comes through profanity of conventional architecture. I am creating this dialogue by displaying two main subjects in proximity to each other: border architecture from Israel and institutional architecture or non-places in New York.
Xu Zhen & Madein Company: The Phenomenon Of Artist-Company, Qianfan Gu
Xu Zhen & Madein Company: The Phenomenon Of Artist-Company, Qianfan Gu
Theses and Dissertations
The thesis is about the phenomenon of "artist-company" -- commercial methodologies employed by contemporary artists are determining their artworks. Taking XuZhen as a case study, it attempts to understand the phenomenon through aspects including art autonomy and institutional theories. It argues that "artist-company" is a continuation of institutional critique.