Art Practice Commons^™

Pan Shot!, Samuel Robert Gaston Mattax

Theses and Dissertations

Sam Mattax's practice is aimed at working through what he has lived and what he is living. They are self-involved diaristic building blocks of marking time and release. The layered drawings negotiate Sam's history and his day to day, distorting one another into a place of unrecognizable space and condensed energy. It is a process of attaining a loose understanding of his life and forgetting it all at once. Sam's work is survival.

Tied Together, Eiko Nishida

Theses and Dissertations

The paper is about a site-specific installation that questions a viewer’s norms and perspectives, through the use of multilingual newspapers as a sculptural material.

Contact Sheet, Jiwoong Jang

Theses and Dissertations

Jiwoong’s thesis paper is a field guide to how he navigates his curiosity with photography, sound, sculpture, ceramic, and installation. Connecting fragments through narrative vignettes, he underscores how chance, walking, light, time, and uncertainty inform his art.

Dear Everything That Feels,, Oga Li (Oga L)

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores painting through the ideas of dust, mist, and haze as specific atmospheric metaphors that could be used to describe ontologies of space, time, memory, and history.

Long Time, Jacob V. Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Jake Reed’s work is driven by the idea that architectural ornament can be imbued with meaning not native to its construction or use. To find that meaning, he deconstructs and reassembles elements from the architectural and ornamental histories he studies, using the growing climate crisis as a generative framework.

Accumulations Of (Not) Doing, Richenda Cope

Masters Theses

As I encounter life during a global pandemic, caused by a virus that has us all homebound, I continue my own struggle with a different virus that keeps me not only homebound, but bed bound as well. In this thesis project, I make my way around and through the questions of chronic illness, self-worth, productivity and a changing relationship to time that arise in this dual viral experience - situating the personal within a larger social/political context.

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.

Bitter Fruit, Ronald J. Green

Theses and Dissertations

Pain is a phenomenon like fear, belief, and love -- among the forces that determine the course of our lives long before we are born. These conditions generate the layers of the human soul, marrying one life with others past, present and future.

There is an unconscious consensus on the linearity of time. Our lives, memories, dreams and reflections constantly present a challenge to this general agreement. Life, like time, is a series of interlocking awarenesses. Paths intersect, the actions of individuals deposit change into an internal pool of collective experience. Freud once believed that the past is not fixed …

Kavana: Photography, Jewish Storytelling, And Memory, Hannah Altman

Theses and Dissertations

Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches - when my mother grabbed my wrist pulling me across the intersection, when my great-grandmother’s fingers went numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, when Miriam’s palms enduringly poured water for the Hebrews throughout their desert journey - this is how the Jew is able to fathom an ache. Because no physical space is a given for the Jewish diaspora, …

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 …

Slower Than Time Itself, Matthew S. Trueman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This paper is combined with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, Slower Than Time Itself. There is a significant discontinuity between how duration is measured by clocks and how it is perceived by the individual. This discontinuity generates pressure both on the individual and the environment. The concept of dualism constructs a dichotomy between people and nature, devaluing that which can not be measured. In Slower Than Time Itself the thesis, sculptural and video works aims to dissolve this dichotomy not by rejecting technology but by embracing it. Can one use clocks to escape time itself? I investigate the …

Ghost Water Exhibition, Michael G. Sharp

Theses and Dissertations

The Ghost Water exhibition of artworks by Michael Sharp was comprised of four main works titled: 30 x 60 Minute Grid Series, Suspension, History/Prehistory, and Lake Bonneville Remnants. The artwork was created as a reaction to the land that once held the prehistoric Lake Bonneville and to its current remnant Great Salt Lake. The work explores the dialogue between absence and presence.

Departing From Photography. Place, Space, Non-Place, And The Quotidian: Painting From Pictures Of The Everyday, Mathew A. Tucker

Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates the relationship between photography and painting. It explores the way in which Mathew Tucker's paintings have been informed by his photographs of everyday places and the ways that they depart from those images and express new and different meanings.

Cold Lapse, Tressa Jones

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

cold lapse addresses the abstract notions of time and loss while conveying the value of observing the present. The postmodern view of time, the grid’s vernacular, and the aesthetics of postminimalism are my foundation for communicating time’s passage and its consequential sensations of absence. The duration of a slow drip, the cycle of breath and the sequential motion of a hand folding paper each mark passing moments. By observing these signs the phenomenon of time may be appreciated. Care and ephemerality in the work require the viewer’s sensitivity when encountering and witnessing it, much like the demands of observing the …

Tiktak, Fang Li

CGU MFA Theses

TikTak

My works present the inherent nature of space and light. A chemical process is approached in a way, which has similarly quality to a natural process. I’m interested in how the material can change itself and how I can manipulate that change.

I use a wide range of materials as much as to match my ideas and the form. They are presented in simple, unified or repeating forms. There is a physical, innermost satisfaction in the activity of working with simple materials. I materialize them and allow them to be both real and imaginative: visually compelling, intellectually intriguing and …

Tiktak, Fang Li

CGU MFA Theses

TikTak

My works present the inherent nature of space and light. A chemical process is approached in a way, which has similarly quality to a natural process. I’m interested in how the material can change itself and how I can manipulate that change. Transparency, reflection, pattern, harmony, and movement are engaged.

I use a wide range of materials as much as to match my ideas and the form. They are presented in simple, unified or repeating forms. There is a physical, innermost satisfaction in the activity of working with simple materials. I materialize them and allow them to be both …

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 …

Ritual Process, Kevin A. Baer

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art is a means for investigating the passage of time, the decay of physical things, and the truth of mortality. I explore these concepts through process-oriented sculptures that emphasize ritual and material. The process is communicated with the creation of relics, often existing as drawings or the remains of degenerated sculptures. These relics bear witness to the process. I focus on themes of temporal change and death because they remain central to our metaphysical and physical existence. I see a diminished reverence for the power of death in our culture, and through my work I aim to pay homage …

Inside, Outside, In-Between., Aurora Maria Pope

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Inside, Outside, In-Between, held at the Carroll Reece Museum on the campus of East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee, from February 26 through March 13, 2008. The works included in this exhibition are a collection of paintings that employ the use of traditional and non-traditional materials to explore the connections between place and memory.

These pieces are investigations into materiality and process, combining local beeswax, sticks, garden soil, charcoal, and ashes together with oil, shellac, oil pastel, pencil, and other traditional artist's materials.

Ideas discussed include materiality, process, composition, …