Fine Arts Commons^™

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

Both Human And Holy: A Veneration Of Personhood Through Mythic Means, Abigail Porter

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

Mythology acts as a reflection of humanity, a connection of personhood and storytelling that spans through history. This essay covers how the ideas of myth, personhood, archetype, and portraiture remain central to my work. The nature of mythology is innately human in all aspects, centering on ideas being both fictitious and truthful - which allows the ideas of the dualistic aspects between the personhood and mythos with the figures worked with. My work is about people; I elevate the figure into mythic while using those myths to discuss the aspects of identity. My work leans heavily upon my own fixation …

The Hospitality Of Doubt, Ian Grieve

Art Theses and Dissertations

This paper discusses the last two years of research toward a Master of Fine Art in Studio Art. I mainly address my painting practice, but while in the program, I have worked in collage, ceramics, intaglio printmaking, and sculpture. My paintings are thick, multilayered, and often contain ambiguous narratives. The pictures develop through engagement, openness, and response within the work. I seek and embrace connection with viewers of the work. The spectator ‘completes’ the art and enhances or alters the artworks meaning by observing it and applying their individual perspectives. I seek to incorporate a sense of nostalgia and familiarity. …

Artistic Representation And Self Esteem, Brianna Davis

Honors College Theses

Dependent upon the constructs of the perception of self and the viewpoint of others, humans base the value of their self esteem on outer perspectives rather than internal ones. For this thesis in particular, the outer perspective to be examined is representation in the field of the arts. This thesis project explores the process of self esteem, artistic representation in the arts, how one affects the other, a history of the correlation between the two, and ways to inform and educate the masses with the tools necessary to advance representation in the arts thus raising the self esteem of its …

The Beehive, The Favela, The Castle, And The Ministry: Race And Modern Architecture In Rio De Janeiro, 1811–1945, Luisa Valle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation deploys a multidisciplinary and decolonial framework to investigate the architecture of cortiços, the Favela Hill, the Castelo Hill, and the Ministry of Education and Public Health (MES) building as constitutive of the history of modernization and modernity in the Centro (city center) of Rio de Janeiro, 1811-1945. The first three chapters investigate the distinct geographies, formal and material qualities, and populations of cortiços, the Favela Hill, and the Castelo Hill, as well as their racialization and essentialization by the “unsanitary” and “degenerate” labels bestowed upon these landscapes by the state. Traditional narratives and practices of modern architecture and …

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

Gut Feeling, Shelby Fleming

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Through curated space and abstracted sculptures that reference the viewer’s body, Gut Feeling, acknowledges the viewer’s experience as the focal point of the exhibition. I designed the whole gallery as an art object using both positive and negative space. The sculptures act as one unified system that guides the viewer through the exhibition in a counterclockwise rotation inward. The viewer follows the forms as they puncture through the walls of the gallery, while considering their own body’s relationship to the forms being seen. The viewer directly engages with the scale of the forms, sculptural placement, and sensory experience; these elements …

Contemporary Handicraft, Textile Art, And Feminist Social Critique, Kaitlynn Blow

Honors Theses

My thesis looks at the work of female contemporary artists who use what has historically been considered “women’s craft” such as embroidery, knitting, stitching and other various textile arts. Since the Women’s Art Movement of the 1970s, women have used these creative outlets to express discontent and injustice in their lives revolving around gender and identity. In my research, three main themes emerged as addressed in each chapter. The first theme addresses the topic of domesticity and memory including unseen female labor, such as domestic chores and motherhood, and how fabric holds memories. Chapter two covers gender politics- specifically the …

An Exploration Of Provenance And Ownership History And The Critique Of Curatorial Practice., Sacra J. Fallen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the art world, the artwork is under evaluation to determine its worth from its historic value to its monetary value. One of the primary strategies used to evaluate the artwork is the work's provenance which can be broken down into the work's collector history and the authenticity of its authorship. The first question to be addressed is: does knowing an artwork's collector history and provenance add to its historic value? The second question to be addressed is: does knowing an artwork's collector history and provenance add to its monetary value? These questions will be supported by two case studies …

Thesis/Thesis Document 2, Jessamyn Plotts

Art Theses and Dissertations

Thesis/thesis document 2 explores the subversive power of the painted image, made by a physical performative act. Such acts are not confined to the production of the art object, but expand across the landscape, involving the minds, bodies, and things of culture adjacent to the making process. Following the thinking of Maurice-Merleau Ponty, Thesis/thesis document 2 understands painting not as the container of a finite, legible message, but as a physical platform for the conveyance of perceptual, personal, and experiential ambiguity. Made in this way, painted images offer a powerful alternative to the proliferation of propaganda and advertisement …

The Home As An Object: Material Culture In The Age Of Ikea, Maxwell Harling Fertik

Senior Theses and Projects

The curiosity of everyday objects looms large in every human’s life. And naturally, these objects are almost as diverse in character as the person who bought them. This variation can be in style, period, shape, origin but also in the arrangement it is given in relation to other objects or persons in a space. On one level, the objects we surround ourselves with are meaningless, purely functional, utilitarian and banal. Especially on a budget, one may not consider aesthetic or design issues at all and purely buy a toaster because they want toast. Why would one buy a SMEG+Dolce and …

Enchantment: A Teleology, Nathanael S. Toth

Senior Honors Theses

Despite the highly developed nature of his fictional world, Middle-earth, Tolkien never formally laid out a tabulated magic system for his fantasy creation. Nevertheless, unlike many stories by others in the fantasy genre, the magic he does include is far from just a shallow, world-building mechanism. Instead, it encapsulates the core theme of his fiction and the purposes which Ilúvatar (the God of Middle-earth) has given to the story’s many characters.

This paper will examine the nature and function of this magic from many angles: the identification of good magic with art and evil magic with domination; the delineation between …

Reworking The White-Masculine Ideal, Steven H. Gonzalez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This text functions as an exploration of self through artistic practice, a designated space for reflection on contemporary Queer experience. In looking specifically at the permeation of the idealized-white-masculine figure as found within Western visual culture, social media and gay pornography become isolated as sites where these figures are commonly found. This line of inquiry defines how the ideal is reified through these differing digital platforms and the social implications the homogenized male form has on raced individuals. In addition to determining the image of the perfect masculine physique through research, this text expands on how its' imaged representation becomes …

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray

Theses and Dissertations

The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.

A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In A Document that Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction and Reality, I first present a historical analysis of photography that complicates traditional assumptions of how photographs operate in the world. Rather than functioning as merely an objective record, the photograph takes on a dual status as both a document and an abstraction from reality. The photograph’s ability to selectively decontextualize the origins from which it came from and present itself as something other than what it simply records becomes the core of my artistic practice. This paper will also discuss my conceptual investigations into how we perceive photographs when they …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Gaslight, Melis Agabigum

Theses and Dissertations

Gaslight is an exploration of the psychological phenomena of “gaslighting” in abusive relationships. Sensations of disorientation, insecurity, and the overwhelming feeling of being trapped are metaphorically imbued in the soft sculptural objects installed within the confines of the gallery space. In conjunction with the crocheted soft sculptures, the use of fabricated shadows also manipulates the viewer into questioning the physical truth of the art objects.

Reality is further blurred as the objects extend their capacity of occupying space, drawing the viewer in to inspect whether or not the shadows that they are seeing are true projections or ghosts from previous …

The Space Of Art In The Digital Age, Ellie Isaacs

MA Projects

This journal article looks at the space of art in the digital age in order to establish whether virtual art practices will eventually render the physicality of art as obsolete. The article draws focus on the construction of virtual spaces to investigate the possibility of a consequential collapse in real space. Two key aspects that I have concentrated on are the social experience of these modes of artistic practice and the inversion of public and private spheres.

Benign Imperialists: Ethnographic (Mis)Representation By German Painter-Adventurers, 1840-1890, Sarah Hermes Griesbach

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the mid to late nineteenth century, a new group of academic painters trained in Germany emerged as self-appointed ethnographic experts who sketched and painted heroic visions of a wild American West, and a similarly wild North Africa and Middle East. This group of artists, like their literary analog, traveled to the places they depicted. Artists Adolf Hoeffler (1825-1898), Carl Wimar (1828-1862), Friedrich Frisch (1813-1886), Adolf Schreyer (1828-1899) and Eugen Bracht (1842-1921) fused their artistic personae with their subjects to present themselves as ethnographic experts depicting scenes that asserted their own empirical authority as observers. They not only exhibited their …

To Each His Own Reality: How The Analysis Of Artistic Exchanges In Cold War Europe Challenges Categories, Mathilde Arnoux

Artl@s Bulletin

How to reconstruct artistic relationships among four European countries, situated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, during the period that commenced post-Stalin and lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall? This is one of the questions that faces the research program To Each His Own Reality: The notion of the real in the art of France, West Germany, East Germany and Poland between 1960 and 1989, which was initiated in January 2011. The paper discusses syntheses of the questions that the research team is facing, descriptions of its methodology, an analysis of preliminary results and what they allow …

Dreamcatcher From Mao's Last Revolution: My Venture Into Creative Social Documentary Video, Christopher Shea Howard

Student Publications

Dreamcatcher From Mao’s Last Revolution is a filmmaking venture into creative social documentary production undertaken by this filmmaker as his own experimental departure from narrative feature film production and the fiction genre. This thesis report not only describes aspects of this film production that are specific to the methodology of documentary film production, but also describes the film’s cinematic expression of memory and the filmmaker’s telling of the story. Some cinematic and conceptual aspects of the story are related to the film’s influences, specifically to those theoretical concepts and techniques employed by documentary filmmaker, Werner Herzog.

The documentary story is …

Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Photographs of Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 were then and continue to be part of the construction of indigenous identities, both by Anglo-Americans and Natives. This thesis analyzes the ramifications of Rinehart’s portraits and those of his peers as well as Native American artists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries who have sought to re-appropriate these images to make them empowering icons of individual or tribal identity rather than erasure of culture.

This thesis comprises two sections. In the first section, the analysis is focused on the historical …

The Evolving Role Of The Exhibition And Its Impact On Art And Culture, Anna C. Cline

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Art As "Night": An Art-Theological Treatise, Gavin W. Keeney

Gavin W Keeney

Art as “Night” proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge (a-theology and theology, at once) crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of formalism, this “night” is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency.

Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as “Night” restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in …

Book Review Of Philip Pothen's "Nietzsche And The Fate Of Art", Murray Skees

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pointed Pairings: The Valuing Of Art, Bowdoin College. Museum Of Art, Katy Kline

Museum of Art Exhibition Catalogues

Catalog accompanies the exhibition of the same name held April 5-June 9, 2002 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Essay by Katy Kline.