Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

"I Need To Fight The Power, But I Need That New Ferrari": Conspicuous Consumption, New-School Hip-Hop And "The New Rock & Roll", Emmett H. Robinson Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

2017 marked the year in which hip-hop officially became the most listened-to genre in the United States. This thesis explores hip-hop music’s rise to its now-hegemonic position within the music industry, seeking to provide insight into the increasingly popular sentiment that hip-hop is “the new rock & roll”. The “new-school” hip-hop artists of the last six years or so have also been the subject of widespread critical disdain, especially for their heightened degree of emphasis on conspicuous consumption. This study will track hip-hop’s ascent from the mid-1980s through to its current position as both a political vehicle and a commercial …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

Reading Boredom In Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, And Christina Rossetti, Rebekah Ann Lamb

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Focusing on the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poetry and paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the early poetry of William Morris and the poetry and prose of Christina Rossetti, this thesis examines how boredom emerges in Victorian aesthetic culture. Drawing from writings in visual culture, gender studies, social history, and recent returns to new formalism in Victorian studies, this thesis attends to how renderings of boredom open up our understanding of the relationship between poetry, art, temporality, embodiment, and explorations of everyday life and living in Victorian England.

Chapter One of my thesis is an introductory explanation of boredom …

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 …

Liquidation, Amanda A. Oppedisano

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier is an accompanying document to my MFA thesis exhibition, Liquidation (2014). Within my dossier, I articulate the formal and material considerations of my art making practice in which everyday household goods acquired primarily from the dollar store are manipulated in order to consider the “abject” qualities inherent to these items. Observed through the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva in her essay, Powers of Horror, the “abject” as a term is critically and historically applied to the art objects I create in order to explore the dollar store as the basis for my material selection, but also as a …

Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma And The Viewer In Contemporary Autobiographical Art, Matthew Ryan Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the communicative relationship between contemporary autobiographical art and the viewer. By analyzing the work of six artists, Richard Billingham, Jaret Belliveau, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Lisa Steele and Bas Jan Ader, I maintain that lived experience and personal history condition the way viewers respond to autobiographical art. I turn to literary theory as a critical methodology to argue that autobiographical art operates as a catalyst for identification, memory and self-discovery. I use affect and trauma theory to demonstrate how artwork produces meaning and discourse through the viewer’s feelings, emotions and bodily sensations. Consequently, I survey the importance …