Art Practice Commons^™

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.

We Miss Each Other, As In We Are Missing Each Other, Lily L. Randall

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in the way metaphors efface the terms of their comparison and what utility COVID-19 has when positioned within a metaphor. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, metaphors touch the subject, symbolized by the plus sign (+) or the crossing of the signifier into the signified. In the fall of 2019, I presented a performance in which three participants strategically shared saliva, nasal, ear, and vaginal swabs to therapeutically address my chronic illness. Currently in 2021, our conceptions of bodily sharing revolve around the extreme contagiousness of COVID-19. There is a demand to visualize this contagion as if “respiratory droplets” were …

The Curtain Fell, Opal M. Ong

Theses and Dissertations

Opal Ong’s paintings and drawings are rooted in but larger than memory. The work is flat and graphic. With this practice, Ong makes do with the living memories that haunt her. This process is not nostalgic or sentimental. Instead, it is a meditation on a kind of loss without resolve.

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.

Interview, Elizabeth Naiden

Theses and Dissertations

An exploration of work by Liz Naiden in the form of a conversation discussing light and dark, attention and proprioception, and design and architectural theories of space in installation works. Addresses the role of voice, speech, and reading and speaking aloud, performing for oneself, and performing for others.

Fractured Selves, Gearoid Dolan

Theses and Dissertations

Fractured Selves is a self-portrait that examines the histories and points of conflation and diversion of my four public personas. In the style of a Zoom meeting, they chat with a host against animated backgrounds. Interactivity creates non-linear consuming of the content and user directed navigation through four timelines

Signal To Noise: Harmonic Temperaments And Patterns Of Interference, Dylan A. Marcheschi

Theses and Dissertations

An audio/visual exploration of historical tuning systems. Most contemporary Western audiences will seldom if ever encounter harmony outside of post-Renaissance tuning conventions. This presentation highlights some of those pre-orthodox harmonic relationships which existed throughout most of history. The corresponding paper documents correlates in recent advances of acoustic ecology.

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.

Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The absence of happiness, the absence of nature, the absence of justice, the absence of absence, which is presence. My desire is to make these voids visible and sensible by connecting to and with others, from our intimate and collective life experiences, with empathy, and by sharing. Through a hybrid of sculpture, installation, and performance, I move within this tense in-between space, asking myself about that void, if it is possible for it to be filled, or if it is perhaps too big, or if it is perhaps too late.

Appropriation Of The Highest Order: A Study Of Harry Smith’S Master Work, Film No. 18 Mahagonny In Relation To The Brecht-Weill Opera The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny And Duchamp’S The Large Glass, Rose V. Marcus

Theses and Dissertations

Harry Smith’s Film No. 18, Mahagonny, 1970 – 1980, is a transmutation of the original Brecht-Weill opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a 1930, into a feature-length experimental film. This paper shows how the original opera and Duchamp's The Large Glass prove inherent to Smith’s double-pronged homage to both original works of art. The failure in the opera narrative and the chance shattering of The Large Glass inform Smith’s complex methodology to approach and spatialize cinema. Harry Smith’s use of the tools of the screening apparatus are traced in order to study Mahagonny in detail. The …

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.

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.

A Draft: Up N’ Upper Or Sisyphus Lounge; Notes, Poems & Essays From The Road & The Cabin, Andrew M. Foster

Theses and Dissertations

This text imagines a reconciliation where the slick, sterile nature of contemporary objects and conditions might offer a sort of soft retreat. Sisyphus Lounge, a modular installation of light, near-defunct-technologies and carefully cluttered “stuff,” attempts to locate and explore value systems fogged by dis/information and the impossibility to articulate is-ness.

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.

Errantry, Simon A. Benjamin

Theses and Dissertations

Errantry, Simon Benjamin's current body of work, named after Édouard Glissant’s theory, is comprised of a series of multi-channel video installations and related works. Errantry is centered on the polyphonic rhythms of coastal space, the Caribbean sea, and the life sustained by it in a non-linear narrative that raises questions about time, labor, environmental degradation and the ongoingness of colonialism.

Yellow, Sisi Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The following paper is a constellational unpacking of yellow through notes on critical race and feminist theories, myth, science, science fiction, disparate histories, cyborgs, biography, virtuality, materiality, fungi, porcelain, language, internalization, melancholia, smells, sounds, tastes, feels, and more feels.

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.

Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis

Theses and Dissertations

Where similarities in class struggle have historically operated as a unifying force globally, the American crafted mythos isolates the individual and dehumanizes those that do not fall within the parameters of the cowboy archetype. The national protagonist is turned into a class traitor and an extension of government power.

From Criticism To Complicity And Back Again: Criticality, Audience, And Desire In The Art Of Sherrie Levine And Jeff Koons, Kelly L. Jost

Theses and Dissertations

Despite strong similarities in Sherrie Levine’s and Jeff Koons’s art, a comparative exploration of their work has never been undertaken. To draw a comparison between Levine and Koons, while redressing the critical and public perception of their art, I reconsider the nature of three pivotal concepts—criticality, audience, and desire.

Giglife.Nyc: Blood, Sweat, Tears And Glitter., Erik B. Slavin

Theses and Dissertations

In New York City there's a community of artists who have rejected the obvious choices that the world has offered them and pursued a life of performance and glitter, of bright lights and fire and sensuality.

These performers are extraordinarily compelling. They're artists with lives crafted to entice and delight our gaze. GigLife.NYC: Blood, Sweat, Tears & Glitter is an observational documentary film that invites the viewer, drawn in with the promise of titillating spectacle, to discover the object of their desire is engaged in artistic, romantic, political and economic struggle.

In Order To Escort Her, Kimberly Baglieri

Theses and Dissertations

In Order To Escort Her is a thirty-five minute hybrid-documentary in which Lila, my great-aunt, converses with her niece, my mother, about various supernatural creature encounters and spirit visitations from relatives. This is interspersed with a “visitation” from another close relative, communicating from a different time and space dimension. By weaving together supernatural stories and matter-of-fact accounts of resilience and survival, a magical world is created where boundaries between the material and the invisible realms blur. The main thematic concerns of this film are love, care, presence in joy amidst terror, and the journey of the soul.

The Gridded Time Of Waiting; Or Is Not Aristotle’S Metaphysics; Or A Kind Of Idealist Trap; Or In My Secret Life, Olivia Divecchia

Theses and Dissertations

Theoretical musings, descriptions, articulations of process, quotations and anecdotes form a constellation of thoughts about the trappings of the grid, ontology, the subject, the window, translation and other things.

Geometric Times, Linguistic Spaces, Johanna Strobel

Theses and Dissertations

If the loop is the trademark of our times and truthiness the reversal of the uncanny, what is the correlation between logic and information? This writing investigates the role of repetition and motifs in the production of meaning, how kitsch and neutrality function as modes of signifiers and how authenticity relates to the banal.

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.

Stranger’S Window, Nation’S Mirror, Kyoko Hamaguchi

Theses and Dissertations

In this text, I consider my identity as a Japanese immigrant in the United States during a global pandemic and its impact on my understanding of home as a liminal space. In particular, I discuss notions of home in relation to my work as an artist including two works that utilize the home-sharing platform Airbnb and three works that deal with the dichotomy of inside and outside.

Membranes And Frames, Nurya Chana

Theses and Dissertations

Nurya Chana (b.1988, Bronx, NY) paints, sculpts, and performs to grapple with discontinuities between self and other, the inner and outer self, physicality and feeling. Her practice aims to expose the non-mental voices of the body, reconciling life sciences with the complexity, enormity, and potency of livingness.

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 …

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

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.