Art Practice Commons^™

Step 10, Jinhong Cai

Masters Theses

Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through

abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am

proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning

on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:

narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.

While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or

personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them

because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in

learning more about the motive behind this creation.

The questions I bought into the thought and creation

process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring

out …

A Part From You, Kenneth Rick Briggenhorst Jr.

MSU Graduate Theses

I invite empathy through art that is technologically assisted to find alternative interpretations for nontheologically informed faith. The sudden passing of my dearest friend, Jimmy, encouraged me to dig through my archives of data, to cherish all the bytes that remain of him. In this endeavor, I find that death is not the end, but a post-physical state of being. I express this sentiment in a part from you, where the work utilizes inanimate constructs to place your faith in, to make sense of the complexities of grief in a digitally tethered way of life. This life that allows many …

Half In Dream: The Tangle In The Grid, Abbey L. Paccia

Masters Theses

Half in Dream: The Tangle in the Grid discusses the form and content of a physical art installation by the same name. The site-specific installation is a large three-dimensional collage of natural ephemera collected from the area around Amherst, Massachusetts, which interacts with natural lighting conditions to illuminate a gallery-facing image of ever-moving light and shadow. The written work elaborates some of the many details within the structure of the artwork, and reveals the philosophies, embodied practices, and methodologies that informed the visual work's creation. Woven throughout are reflections on phenomenology, walking practice, General Systems Theory, collective making, narrative arts, …

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …

Woven Weeds, Michelle Usha Mandoki

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit

Masters Theses

As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. …

Capacity, Rachel Baydian

CGU MFA Theses

This Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition by Rachel Baydian is an installation of ceramic sculptures that function as a stand-in for the human body, touching on relationship, interconnectivity, and imperfection. Using abstracted forms that derive from the earth, these art objects are sculpted to mimic nature and its processes. The work highlights our human connection to nature as integrative and vital. Through experience and tactility, there is more of an awareness of space and heightened senses. The work taps into the awe and seduction of the mystery of nature through seemingly ordinary elements of the physical world.

The Dream Of Being Totally Open, Frederick Greis

Theses and Dissertations

This essay details four major themes in the paintings of Frederick Greis: spiritual experience, nature, pleasure, and humor. These themes are described within the context of the artist's main goal, which is to create an experience of profound unburdening.

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 …

Liminal Surfaces, Georgina E. Grenier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The poet Ben Okri wrote: “Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.” (Stibbe)

In the early 21st Century we are facing numerous environmental problems that are being caused by human activity. This era is termed the Anthropocene , a time when accumulated pollutants are causing detrimental ecological change. Ocean creatures are threatened by increasing seawater temperature, acidifying pH levels and melting ice. On land we are experiencing droughts, alteration of biomes, extinctions and an atmosphere that contains less oxygen per breath than …

Invisible Forces, Sarah E. Mullin

Theses and Dissertations

I seek abstract forms evocative of the underlying structures in nature. I paint sensations of vibrating light, deep space, and vast scale in an imagined image. These paintings combine an inner abstract dimension with landscape imagery to communicate to the viewer that we are a part of what we sense in nature.

Perspective, Karie D. Cooper

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

As an artist, I am interested in understanding how and why humans interact with the natural world. I examine my own individual behaviors and practices and research impacts made on nature by humans as a whole. I am drawn to nature for a multitude of reasons, including aesthetic beauty, psychological wellness, unraveling the mysteries of the universe and trying to understand the origins of life. As an artist I explore the dialectic relationship between everything we perceive outside of ourselves as the environment, and the way we think of ourselves in relation to that environment. I believe in the interconnectedness …

Old Wet Paint, Michael G. Hansen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Contemporary living can cause stress that is detrimental to creativity. Most of the world’s population has grown dependent on technology to connect us to, and keep track of daily, monthly, and hourly actions. Our plans fill us with the illusion of control over random events. I do not trust technology to help me find my way in the world. I want to find my way in life using limited technology. My art practice is an example of this trajectory and has become my way of embracing random events. The logic I use to employ order in the pandemonium of everyday …

Postcession, Evan D. Pomerantz

Theses and Dissertations

This is a series of daily writings. Each day consists of a new topic and is closed at the end of the day. The ideas presented are philosophical, humorous, rambling, lamentations, incantations, doubt-ridden, aesthetic pep talks which combine into an affective representation of my studio practice’s becoming. There will be little congruency, some stories, and a lot of parallels because that is who I am.

What Crawls Beneath, Brent L. Gneiting

Theses and Dissertations

Nature is full of mysterious creatures which fascinate and spark imagination. In my final project, What Crawls Beneath, I take a closer look at what drives my interest in creatures that simultaneously attract and repel. Drawing on inspiration from parasites and dinosaurs, I was able to create a piece that represents the danger and beauty that nature so masterfully brings together. The importance of process is discussed as I consider the traditional methods of working with clay and how they affect the outcome of the artwork.

Water Riot Territory, Dominique Ovalle

CGU MFA Theses

The old world has fallen away; we look for the New World now. I entreat you with symbols, signs and code-talking—a new language I’ve learned while prowling the jungles of angst in this “Romantic Life,” which is utterly unromantic. Sometimes I run away, and enter into emptiness. Inside darkness cannot comprehend the light that searches for us. On the bottom of the ocean, light must be generated from within. But something does not come from nothing. What was something born of?

My paintings operate as a map to strange destinations—charting weird trips through swampy, melancholic emptiness, as well as encounters …

Dislocation, Kevin E. Moore

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Earth Forms, Janelle Marie Tullis Mock

Theses and Dissertations

Earth Forms narrates and explains the Masters Project Exhibition by the same name. The sculptures included in the exhibition, Earth Forms, use a variety of personal symbols centered on one stylized human head. Some of the symbols included are antlers, branches, coral, leaves, plants and stones. Each of these symbols represents personal ideas of balance, growth and decay. They also represent the earth from which we are formed and the earth to which our bodies will return at the end of life.

The Nature Of Making Sense, Allison Alford

CGU MFA Theses

My interest is to breed the mystical with the mundane, producing informational systems that coalesce knowledge, ambiguity, logic and fantasy. The species that populate my imagery are totems that could function as heroines, monsters or shapes that elude and inform us. The work functions as a stage upon which, pixels, paint and mystical figures coexist. Each panel acts as a composite of multiple frames of a video: figures combine with paintings, drawings, symbols, and landscape. Though ultimately singular in image, the pictures imply multiplicity. The lineage of the work can be traced to influences such as François Dufrêne, Max Ernst’s …

Taken Of The Land., Charlesey Lee Charlton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis supports the Master of Fine Arts exhibition at the Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University from April 28-June 25, 2009. The exhibition is comprised of 19 monotype prints on paper. The exhibition presents the artist's investigation using natural materials combined with traditional printmaking techniques. Subjects discussed include ideas, methods, influences, and process of integrating natural materials that evoke a sense of place, earth, and memory.

Dairy Culture: Industry, Nature And Liminality In The Eighteenth-Century English Ornamental Dairy, Ashlee Whitaker

Theses and Dissertations

The vogue for installing dairies, often termed "fancy" or "polite" dairies, within the gardens of wealthy English estates arose during the latter half of the eighteenth century. These polite dairies were functional spaces in which aristocratic women engaged, to varying degrees, in bucolic tasks of skimming milk, churning and molding butter, and preparing creams. As dairy work became a mode of genteel activity, dairies were constructed and renovated in the stylish architectural modes of the day and expanded to serve as spaces of leisure and recreation. Dairies were often lavishly outfitted to create a delicate and clean atmosphere, a fancy …