Art Practice Commons^™

Cultivar, Scott Vander Veen

Masters Theses

A memory palace is a mnemonic device that facilitates recollection by putting memory, that slippery substance, into a strictly structured mental geography. It is advisable to use a real place with which you are intimately familiar (perhaps your childhood home) as the scaffolding for the compartmentalization of whatever mental objects require organizing. Other objects, sensations, or atmospheric conditions are used to heighten the efficacy of the system—memory #1 may be found in the junk drawer in the kitchen, at dusk, nestled between a box of safety pins and a bundle of rubber bands. I am interested in the way this …

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.

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

Someone Will Remember Us / I Say / Even In Another Time, Paul Anagnostopoulos

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Anagnostopoulos’s paintings and vases use mythological melodrama in a contemporary context to portray vivid images of queer life in the wake of homophobic erasure and tragic loss. “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time” traces his aggregate interests in Greco-Roman cultures and art history.

Espacio, Edgar Perez Peña, Edgar Perez Peña

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Edgar Perez Peña (He, Him, His) is a Queer, Chicanx contemporary figurative painter, who lives and works in the Los Angeles County. A native of Los Angeles, California, his paintings, and assemblages are a strong combination of process, materials, and content that displays his fascination on how physical/psychological space (from where he resides), reflects on the Queer Brown body and its comfort/discomfort in relation to public and private space.

Peña looks at his artistic practice as an opportunity to explore the human condition from the Queer and Brown perspective as well the beginning of healing through the meditative process of …

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-- …

Signs To Stop, Finn Tait

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Take this as a Sign-

At night it is so much easier to believe a story. There is a forgiveness at night, an expanding of what might be possible. I first learned how to tell stories in the dark, from listening to my dad's voice as I drifted off to sleep, from the whispered voices of my friends around a fire, from the car tape player on a long drive home. It is easy to imagine that something terrible stands just beyond the headlight's reach, looks back at you from your dark bathroom mirror, or lurks just behind your bedroom …

Party Of Immortals, Hyazinth S. Baumann

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I am the cook of a queer kitchen for characters. Who wants to come out? Where’s the seasoning? So far I’ve had a nonbinary Hebrew angel, a trans Dionysus, a drag dragon, and an agender winter spirit inhabit my physical form. Each mythic persona is meant to serve a new dish on the table. Lailah externalizes her/my spiritual awakening. Dionysus realizes his/my ideals of re-normalizing nudity. Darastrix serves in reaction to the history of womanhood and investigates the strange and magical beginnings of her/my childhood. Perchta practices durational performance and processes its/my Austrian heritage.

Zines are self-produced, self-published bodies of …

Offerings, Diana C. Patin

LSU Master's Theses

These photographs and writing are a set of offerings, collected as part of an intensive examination of myself and my contentious relationship with self-image. I first established which traits in my personality represent me best. I landed on my fatness, my queerness, my southernness, and my penchant for caring. Then I took a deep dive into each of those four themes with the objective of uncovering both the areas of exaltation and spaces of hurt within them. The images that result are both confrontational and gentle. It is my hope that the uncompromising honesty within these offerings communicates that while …

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.

Heavy Hold: A Physical Score, Alexandra Velozo

Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of essays, stories, and fictional interviews that are in conversation with my performance, teaching, and sculpture practice. My research and work considers chronic illness, disability, the historic cultural connection between swamplands and illness, the medical industrial complex, medical theater, the medical gaze, disabled performers, metatactile space, sensory learning, and access.

War Of The Moon, Bibiana Medkova

Masters Theses

Space, in the post-World War context, was the new frontier of ‘global’ dominion. Space Race of the 1950s was a competition to signal technological capability and military strength. The objective of War of the Moon is to unpack the motivation for Moon race in 1950s. What did countries have to gain politically, economically, socially and technologically by conquering space and landing on the moon. At what cost? Who financed it, and where did the labor, land, and raw materials sourced come from. And how it was used to accomplish said landing. Space security is a massive aspect of all current …

Promiscuous Waves, Xuan Zheng

Theses and Dissertations

For the project, I invited friends, lovers, and mentors to share their experiences and memories of cruising in public spaces. Growing up in China, I never had the chance to publicly discuss my concerns with my sexuality, and the sense of liberation in the West had always served as a source of hope. Only after I came to the United States, did I realize that the liberation was nothing more than an illusion. I made two road trips across America to take photographs and embrace a sense of freedom, but on the trips, I ended up having sex with many …

Ghost Signs Are More Than Paintings On Brick, Eric Anthony Berdis

Theses and Dissertations

My work embraces a maximalist aesthetic that incorporates, archival research, personal secrets, and pubescent gay boy glamour. I seek to create a stimulating yet jarring experience, while building a world that is both familiar and inherently strange to the viewer. Thrift store cast-offs, hobbyist craft supplies, and saturated drawings are reassembled into a cast of characters and costumes that balance on the line between ghosts, creatures, and friends. While we often think of costume and even art installations as meant to cover bodies and walls, my work tends to reveal more than conceal. I aspire through this work to shine …

^A Weather Of Her Wake—Should Something Be Missing?, Chip Chapin

Theses and Dissertations

Conciliating an economics of care, support, and desire through the languages of state control, commodity, and shared resources ^A Weather of Her Wake confronts unspoken exchanges endemic to relationships in capitalist society, choreographing relationships that invites both performer and audience to negotiate architectures charged with intimate memory.

Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …

Work And Work, Rebecca M. Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

work and Work chart tracks my work/job and my Work/art to see how one can change the other.

Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli

Theses and Dissertations

The content of this essay is a reflection on my practice as an artist. A summary of text includes an analysis of my attraction to certain materials such as drywall, cabbage juice and coconut oil, all materials are the extensions of my memory, intention and pleasure. From warm memories of bathhouses and the flesh of others to managing illness at home, my artwork distills a lived experience into material reality. These materials take the shape of sculptural networks that serve as biographical biomes. The architectural and organic components of the work are sourced from my own experience and the surreal …

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 …

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Private Rainbows, Mikey F. Estes

Theses and Dissertations

I make art that refers to how the self is mediated through structures, objects, and images — a kind of self-portraiture that circles around its subject, reflecting a state of simultaneous formation and disintegration. Over the past few years, I have used my iPhone as a tool to make images of everyday life. As the user of this device, I am defined by both my presence and absence. I am interested in the process of locating the self within the scattered yet ordered space of the screen.

Mantle, David Hannon

Masters Theses

Through a large-scale installation called mantle, I explore how the queer body becomes uncanny to the home through a human sized dollhouse and using scenic design ideas. Home for many is a safe place, but for queers, it can be a difficult one, wrought with not belonging in a childhood of heteronormativity. Being stuck in that heteronormative space is what I communicate through a stage set, composed of four theater flats, printed and collaged wallpaper, free-standing photos mounted on MDF, a giant necklace in a separate room, and impromptu pieces made in the space.

Welcome To My Dream – Quasi Queer Fiction, Christian A. Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Roseate and bodacious, the hand formed surfaces of Christian Rogers' paintings explore gay culture and history though a quasi-fictional lens. While utilizing folk like imagery, Christian depicts dramatic moments of love, lust, sex and violence as he takes us to queer realms.

Light On, Baby. No Future, Shane Dollinger

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This project is a realistic depiction of the circularity of experience. As Images of ourselves and our experiences become increasingly inescapable, the repetitive and nonlinear nature of those experiences is amplified. This issue is explored in looking at contemporary artists/filmmakers whose handling of inundation in representation and narrative distinctly embraces multiplicity. Queering structures of representation, the work holds a mirror to the way that we experience living, encountering images, narrative structures and memories.

My Flesh Is Your Pasture, Dakota Noot

CGU MFA Theses

Painting my body frees it from the limits of reality. My body exists in a collaged state between man and woman, human and animal, abstract and figurative. By embracing my body’s power as an object, it isn’t limited to being a representation of myself. My painted body can be owned or identified with. It can be feared, hated, and lusted after. I submit my body, blasting it with horror, humor, and a sheer sense of enjoyment.

Bodies In Repose, Christopher Aque

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines my artistic practice and its intersection with histories of homosexual desire and exclusion, contemporary surveillance, political complicity, and the legacies of Minimalism. As the cultural landscape has shifted post-AIDS, so too have the strategies to police, regulate, and control bodies.

Navel Gazing, Andrew J. Macasil

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to present work that disrupts the heteronormative binary that has dominated the representation of the human form in painting. The navel is employed as a bodily metaphor to address the universality of unique bodily experiences, which are tied to one’s identity.

A Performative Script: Play With(In) Me, Erik Patton

Theses and Dissertations

Patton continues his interest in the body, its relation to material, the notion of abstraction (specifically related to queerness), and the phenomenological with this performative script. Enter the bath first; you must wash your dirty asshole, as you shat only two hours ago. Collect your body in the Silver Pond.

Paradise Maintenance Department, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin

CGU MFA Theses

Based on personal and artistic research in Samoa, Polynesia, Oceania, and the South Pacific Islands, "Paradise Maintenance Department" investigates the contemporary colonial relationship between the U.S. Territory of American Samoa and the United States, while engaging in a poetic expression of f'a'afafine queer Samoan life.