Art Practice Commons^™

Working Title, Nathanael Thomas Little

CGU MFA Theses

(Working Title) is an exploration into the interaction of the idea spaces of installation art and the theme park, through Nate Little's narrative environment of Arboria. Plush Characters populate an environment that fills the gallery space.

Dab Shunt Spoor, Jen Grabarczyk

CGU MFA Theses

My work functions as an act of bearing witness. In it, I process consciousness, memory, narrative and time through the choreographed integration of cerebral representations and bodily movement. Through forms both strange and elegant, I seek to activate a viewer’s memory and consciousness–psychologically and corporeally.

Kyla Hansen Mfa Thesis Statement, Kyla M. Hansen

CGU MFA Theses

My work traces the migration of meaning, mashing up cultural signifiers of place to create absurd objects and physical spaces that employ the hazy nature of belief, memory, and nostalgia. I’m interested in the exportability and malleability of experiences both culturally (through objects in movies, music, and media) and personally (through memories that change over time). My work explores the elusiveness of realness, creating slippery spaces, where the real and fake overlap, and certainty and uncertainty intermingle.

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 …

Lumen Essence, Brian Thomas Jones

CGU MFA Theses

I am intrigued by power relationships among the physical, psychological and political realms of experience. The various ways we respond to both the voluntary and involuntary restrictions of power ignite the ideas behind my investigations. The examination of power dynamics utilizing scale, spectacle and theatricality is what excites my process.

By providing an environment for immersive visceral participation, I invite the visitor to collaborate in the process of art-making through their human interaction with the formal constructions of the exhibition. Engaging the visitor in an activated, sensate experience is the artistic objective. The visitor's willingness to slow down the art …

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.

White Light, Tessie Whitmore

CGU MFA Theses

The work is about nothing and everything. It is about belief systems engaged with everyday, monotonous theories of repetitious acts that will deliver freedom and freewill or acceptance and enlightenment. These acts become systems, which are bought into with ridiculous dedication. What is left is the void, potential death, fleeting mortality.

I use the highway as a place of investigation and motivation building a relationship between its physical and psychological aspects. I focus on moments from the drive: tension, the possible crash, monotony, and the trance state. I use materials from high culture and low culture to form a cultural …

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. …

A.F.M., Adam P. Mason

CGU MFA Theses

Sculpture happens.

The Threes, Clifford Eberly

CGU MFA Theses

In the physical world I explore and gather regenerative clues that vivify the installations I build. The harshness and unforgiving power of nature’s nature, combined with the infinity of the cosmos, inspires me to cobble together sculptures that defy absorption into a finite, descriptive category. Like our beings change from second to second, I work diachronically, chugging along, shifting the purposes of supplies until they manifest like organisms that pulled themselves together from shiny and dirty matter or arrived from an extraterrestrial playground. By reusing and layering a complex blend of materials, I blur the ambiguous origins of the objects …

G-Plex Psi, Jacques Louis David

CGU MFA Theses

Monumental metal sculpture that incidentally creates sound. Heaviness and lightness displayed via large, heavy, metal sculptures of abstract geometric forms suspended from the ceiling by seemingly fragile wires that not only appear to defy gravity but provide tonal expression when plucked, hammered, or bowed. Further conversation associated with the micro to the macro is easily revealed when the sounds and shapes are compared to the vibration of life identified with imagined subatomic movement.

Spatial Phases, Eric Schott

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Travis Novak, Travis Novak

CGU MFA Theses

Flawed memory is a tool that allows an altered reality to exist in the disconnect between a past reality and a present fiction. My work starts with scenarios that evolve into things bigger than themselves, going beyond nostalgia to become celebrations, landmarks, or memorials. Exaggeration, embellishment, adornment, stylization, modification, and customization are methods I use to move through these scenarios and often arrive at a transformative shift...

This preservation process begins the moment a thing dies. Its optimum resides in the past allowing the function of the memory to operate as a preserver. This is the human longing for greater …

Stephen Chang Kim Mfa Thesis Statement, Stephen C. Kim

CGU MFA Theses

Stephen Chang Kim Thesis