Art Practice Commons^™

You Are A Weird Bird., Natalie H. Mclaurin

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

How a person is treated because of their gender is potentially very frustrating. I use bird plumage patterns to illustrate humans as animals and idioms in language to illustrate these ideas.

The artworks by Natalie McLaurin mentioned in the paper are You didn’t see me, Untitled. Nancy Horne, Don’t be such a Nostradamus Wild Beast, Don’t be such a Nostradamus Man Beast, Don’t be such a Nostradamus Air Beast, Don’t be such a Nostradamus Domesticated Beast, Ballet Lessons, Throwing a Fit and Falling in it, Gravel Kick, Cocksure, Peckerhead …

Psychotic Diagnosis And Artist Pathology: Schizophrenic Art’S Influence On The Identification Of The Disorder, Danielle Watson

Honors Projects

The use of artwork created by schizophrenic individuals is unique in its contextual elements, including bizarre imagery, strong border lines, and desexualized features. The uniqueness of schizophrenic art lends itself to the possibility of being identified as such, therefore, opening the possibility for it to be used as a diagnostic tool in the clinical setting. Presently, schizophrenic art is used in art therapy, but is not widely employed in diagnostic practices. The current study aimed to test the possible identification of schizophrenic art in contrast to normal art and no art. Three questionnaires were created and randomly distributed to participants. …

Study Of Creative Processes That Lead To Successful Visually Narrative Art Products, Denissa U. Kiehl

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The success of an artist’s work depends upon a few key factors. No matter which field of study you pursue as an individual it is important to examine and understand previously collected knowledge and works developed within that field. Once an artist has learned from the successful “Old” methods and examples of artworks he or she may then combine the “Old” with some of his or her “New” methods and ideas. When it comes to visual narrative art there is a large variety of visual art and other creations to learn from. Factors related to decision making will change with …

Comics And Illustration From The Written; The Conversion Of A Story From Prose To Graphic Depiction., Kayla A. White Ms.

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This is a thesis that details the process of writing a short 30 page novel, and then converting the subsequent story into a graphic format via illustrations and into a comic book layout. The story itself deals in reworking our learned assumptions of good and evil, specifically in the supernatural and human possibility for both. The comic book format is an exploration of my reader’s different responses to the written and the graphic.

Conscience And Context In Eastman Johnson's The Lord Is My Shepherd, Amanda Melanie Slater

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis considers the experiences that motivated the creation of an 1863 painting by American artist Eastman Johnson entitled The Lord is My Shepherd. An examination of the painting—which depicts a black man reading a Bible—reveals multiple artistic, social, political, and spiritual influences. Created in the midst of the American Civil War, the painting's inspiration derived from Johnson's New England childhood, training in Europe, encounters with the Transcendentalist movement, and his abolitionist views. As a result, The Lord is My Shepherd is a culminating work in Johnson's oeuvre that was prompted by years of experience and observations in an age …

A Space Without Memory: Time And The Sublime In The Work Of Janet Cardiff And George Bures Miller, Margherita N. Papadatos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The central question of my investigation is: how do artists present the unpresentable when presentation itself is impossible? Concentrating solely on Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s artworks Opera For a Small Room (2005) and The Killing Machine (2007), I redevelop Jean François Lyotard’s concept of the sublime as put forth in his The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, in order to ask how Cardiff and Miller give shape to the unpresentable in their work. Opera and Killing are works that dynamically problematize and play with ideas of presentation, subjectivity, memory, and time. Thus, I explore my central question of …

Heard Or Dreamed About, Priya Nadkarni

Masters Theses

ABSTRACT

HEARD OR DREAMED ABOUT

MAY 2014

PRIYA NADKARNI, B.F.A. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

M.F.A. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Directed by: Professor Shona Macdonald

The Newlywed, Lauren E. Kohne

Masters Theses

This text is a written articulation of my M.F.A. Thesis show titled, The Newlywed wherein description of the work produced and my artistic process is present. This body of work is explored through a fictional character, a newlywed, who acts as an outlet for my recent experiences living in western Massachusetts. The sculptures are made up of collections of the everyday, mundane objects that surround me and that propel me to contemplate where they came from, and what their histories were. The objects then become instruments for the creation of new stories.

Turning To See Otherwise, Jennifer L. Martin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier, in combination with an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery, considers whether an archival collection can generate an alternative narrative other than that which may already exist in the original film and photographic documents. Rather than represent a singular truth, I seek to articulate the transformative realities of collective memory by re-orienting the material for broader viewer identification. I have mined photographic and filmic materials from a personal family archive to focus fragments that specifically record the gesture of the turning face—the turning towards the observer. This “turn” then includes both the turn towards the initial film-maker embedded …

The Things We Know But Cannot Explain: An Inquiry Into The Nature And Significance Of Artistic Knowledge As A Subset Of The Larger Category Of Tacit Knowledge, David Kemp

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is an inquiry into the nature and significance of artistic knowledge, as a subset of the larger category of tacit knowledge. Art, both in its production and reception, encompasses many diverse forms of knowledge, so by artistic knowledge I am referring to the intangible components of art that do not conform to traditional notions of codified, propositional or explicit knowledge.

Such forms of qualitative and subjective knowledge are undervalued within our current Western context, which is dominated by a rational, objective and scientific mode of thought. This is primarily due to the impossibility of quantifying such intangible knowledge, …

A Photographic Ontology: Being Haunted Within The Blue Hour And Expanding Field, Colin E. Miner

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What are the current boundaries of the photographic and how can an ontology of photography take form as a material and conceptual program of research? Responding to the difficulty inherent in any definitive attempt to grasp photography, this dissertation places emphasis on the less determined act of evoking as a model of dialogue, and engagement, with the photographic. This dissertation is composed of two parts that engage both the question “What is photography?” and the ontological anxiety that shadows it. These lines of questioning are pursued in two ways: directly through considering the qualities of the photographic as elucidated by …

Just As It Should Be: Painting And The Discipline Of Everyday Life, Jared R. Peters

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this Master of Fine Arts Thesis dossier, I focus on contemporary painting’s capacity to question and challenge the roles and behaviors expected and directed by the social order. I am specifically concerned with the production of a normative subjectivity through the organization and configuration of domestic spaces and objects. Through a Case Study of Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, in a Comprehensive Artist Statement of my own art practice, and in examples of my work in the Practice Documentation section, I demonstrate how the discipline of painting can reveal and resist the everyday disciplinary procedures of contemporary society. Through its …

Caroline Murat: Powerful Patron Of Napoleonic France And Italy, Brittany Dahlin

Theses and Dissertations

Caroline Bonaparte Murat created an identity for herself through the art that she collected during the time of her reign as queen of Naples as directed by her brother, Napoleon, from 1808-1814. Through the art that she both commissioned and purchased, she developed an identity as powerful politically, nurturing, educated, fashionable, and Italianate. Through this patronage, Caroline became influential on stylish, female patronage in both Italy and France. Caroline purchased and commissioned works from artists such as Jean-August-Domonique Ingres, François Gérard, Elizabeth Vigée LeBrun, Antonio Canova and other lesser-known artists of the nineteenth century. Many of these works varied in …

Fallen Womanhood And Modernity In Ivan Kramskoi's Unknown Woman (1883), Trenton B. Olsen

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis investigates Ivan Kramskoi's well-known work Unknown Woman (1883). In reviewing the criticism concerning Unknown Woman written in the wake of the eleventh peredvizhniki exhibition in which it was first shown, Kramskoi's painting attracted praise, perplexity, and condemnation. One of the major interpretations (though not commonly discussed) was that this work was meant to allude to female sexuality or prostitution in Russian society. The purpose of my thesis is to reinstate the pertinence of this reading, one which has been obfuscated or ignored in the majority of ensuing twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship. The second purpose of this work …

Parallel And Allegory, Kody Keller

Theses and Dissertations

Parallel and Allegory is a series of four pieces that look deeper into specific Christian beliefs. Most directly addressed those that dealt with specific parallels and allegorical relationships. Specific symbols such as nails, hammers, wood, trees, people, fruit, a cup, knife a rope and a stone were the focus of the pieces in the exhibition. Four combinations of these symbols were created to create dialogue and introspection.

Development Of A New Guidewire Torque Device, Erika Rigaud

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Guidewires have been used in many operating rooms by vascular surgeons to assist them in positioning and maneuvering through a tortuous stenosis or lesion to a desired location, and to be used as a guide for the implantation of a catheter. Surgeons are tasked with having to insert a guidewire inside a small cavity, which requires a high level of skill and patience. The insertion of the guide wire is controlled by a torque device, which allows a surgeon to advance, rotate and grip the wet hydrophilic coating of the guidewire. Despite its many advantages, the torque device does, in …

The War That Does Not Leave Us: Memory Of The American Civil War And The Photographs Of Alexander Gardner, Katie Janae White

Theses and Dissertations

In July of 1863 the photographs A Harvest of Death, Field Where General Reynolds Fell, A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep, and The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter were taken after the battle at Gettysburg by a team of photographers led by Alexander Gardner. In the decades that followed these images of the dead of the battlefield became some of the most iconic representations of the American Civil War. Today, Gardner's Gettysburg photographs can be found in almost every contemporary history text, documentary, or collection of images from the war, yet their journey to this iconic status has been little discussed. The …

Mariko Mori's Sartorial Transcendence: Fashioned Identities, Denied Bodies, And Healing, 1993-2001, Jacqueline Rose Hibner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination of contemporary artist Mariko Mori's use of fashion in her work from 1993 to 2001. Contained within her sartorial phrasing is an involved relationship with the body, female and Japanese, as it exists within technological modernity. Tumult characterizes Mori's body as she images it early on in her career. This highly alienating space in which she positions herself gradually transitions to a space of respite for the performative body of another actor by 2001's Wave UFO. Wave UFO creates a mediated space for healing the modern body plagued with isolation through transcendence provided by technological …

From 'Means To Ends': Labour As Art Practice, Gabriella Solti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis discusses labour from three different historical and theoretical viewpoints, namely Karl Marx’s perspectives on labour, Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Action and Jacques Rancière's radical view of workers as an aspirational class, including how their respective philosophies influenced discourse on labour in contemporary art. To examine the aesthetic consequences of these labour theories, my discussion of each writer is accompanied by a case study of a contemporary artist whose work operates in dialogue with the philosophical ideas presented. In conclusion, I bring these theories together by focusing on how they implicate art making as labour, and I point to …

Infinity, Carmen Fodoreanu

CGU MFA Theses

My current paintings are not finite objects. They test the quantum world of possibilities by exploring the idea of continuity and change. They generate, with each viewer, a state of self-reflection that in exchange promotes a wide range of unpredictable feelings and reactions that became thoughts and beliefs. For a painting of mine, there are multiple or infinite solutions and I, along with the viewers, search for answers. To suggest this state of infinity I extend the paint from the actual canvas onto the walls that host it. My paintings present no borders, no frames: just fluidity.

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 …

Seth Czaplewski Thesis, Seth P. Czaplewski

Graduate School of Art Theses

My work investigates the history of production and how human interactions have been affected by shifts in production over the course of the past two hundred years in the United States: the pre-industrial, Industrial Revolution, and the post-industrial age. The changes that occurred in society as a result of how production shifted from era to era informs my artistic practice and productions, which address areas neglected in the wake of progress. At the onset of each era, the technological advances initially appeared to be beneficial to society and people shifted from being locally oriented to being globally oriented.

My historical …

Keep It Up: The Things Within And Without, Vanessa R. Centeno

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art explores my attraction and repulsion to a commodity driven society. Paint Thing and Saint Thing are characters that I created to push my boundaries as a painter and question my process within painting. Working through my agitation, feeling of loss and confusion, I find that two parts need to be present: a belief in the process and the fear of it coming undone.

I use painting, sculpture and video to question the materiality of canvas and paint. I incorporate plastic objects, glittery materials, and things that have ephemeral qualities. I am attracted to synthetic forms and objects when …

Turtle Beach, Weizhong Huang, Weizhong Huang

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper thoroughly examines the production of the thesis film, Turtle Beach. Each area of the film’s production is carefully dissected, including the writing, production design, cinematography, directing, editing, sound, technology, workflow and visual effect. Specific attention has been paid to writing and cinematography, and how they affect editing.

The Hat Lady Equation, Lauren Capone

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Hat Lady Equation is a collection of poems by Lauren Capone. As influences she cites Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, among the exquisite minutiae of day-to-day living. The poems explore works of visual art by Alberto Giacometti, James Taylor Bonds, Chris Dennis, Blaine Capone (her brother), and creatures of the natural world including fish, the rhinoceros, a lettered olive shell. . . . Lauren shows a preoccupation with disassembling through the poems whether it's her identity, art, or happenings of everyday life.

Paiting, Lucas Page

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My work is motivated by the painting “as such” – as an inquiry into and intervention upon what constitutes a painting, how they are constructed, how they function, etc. Through an investigation of painting as a genre, both in its historical canon and contemporary forms, I deconstruct the formal and cultural elements surrounding the field. Four major axes serve as the basis for my inquiry and intervention of painting: Painting, Abstraction, Representation, Control. Taking as a point of departure the comment, “Your work is a representation of abstraction,” I aim to figure out how “the painting” (in all of its …

The Thing You Are Looking For, Jessie Shinn

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis document explores the influences and content of visual artist Jessie Shinn’s work, in particular the photography she has done as part of her Master of Fine Arts degree program at Washington University in St. Louis. Ideas discussed include phenomenology, phenomenophilia, affect, defamiliarization, the everyday, space, emptiness and boredom. Important artists and movements mentioned are Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner and Romanticism; Alfred Stieglitz and Modernism; and contemporary artists Hiroshi Sugimoto, Uta Barth and Wolfgang Tillmans. Writers and philosophers Samuel Coleridge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rei Terada, Kathleen Stewart, David Markson, David Foster Wallace, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze are …

Wouldn't It Be Funny If, Taryn Sirias

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Examining both historical comedic development and personal conceptions of comedy in art, “Wouldn’t It Be Funny If…” explores the validity of the joke as a means of critical inquiry and communication between artist and viewer, and attempts to figure my own artistic practice in this larger tradition.

Experiments In Remix And Worldmaking, Jesse Firestone

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

The rate of consumption is at an all time high and cultural attributes are endlessly appropriated in order to make fresh, new products. The market can bring the marginalized into the mainstream and expedite the process of assimilation; however, in the process, cultural symbols/ideas/identities are depoliticized and removed from their origins, leaving only a hollow shell. In Gimme $helter, Jesse Bandler brings together clothing, posters, blankets, and chackis, effectively turning the Des Lee Gallery into a place of commerce. Gimme $helter is able to seamlessly occupy two distinct spheres of culture: within the gallery, Gimme $helter offers an intimate critique …

Painting And Stuff, Lol, Sopearb Touch

Graduate School of Art Theses

Our own human experience is a distinct realm which can never be precisely duplicated in another lifetime. It frames our whole view of existence and, as artists, affects our art making process. The theory of the Tabula Rasa functions as the inspiration of my work and this writing examines my personal view of growing up in the internet age and America, and how my view of life, as well as artistic practice, is shaped by a consumerist culture that has gone global. Additionally, as a figurative painter, I create a context with other artists who create work about their own …