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Defining Moments / A Life Portrait, Timothy Haerens

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Defining Moments / A Life Portrait

In his MFA Thesis Exhibition, Defining Moments / A Life Portrait, Timothy Haerens explores and celebrates our connectedness to one another as members of the human race. “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” Haerens chose this quote from the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, as the inspiration for his show because it affirms his belief that we are linked to one another by virtue of our humanness.

Through his abstract paintings on canvas and plexiglass, as well as through his prints and collagraphs, Haerens …

Meta Me On An Ecstatic Walk With Hansel And Gretel: A Reflection Of Dispensed, Reclaimed And Reframed Existence, Laura White

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This synthesis revolves around a rendition of Hansel and Gretel, in which I am exiled from innocence through the chaos of life. I recollect my breadcrumb clues in the form of thoughts and beliefs that I have held for as long as I remember. The breadcrumbs lead to open-ended questions about habits of mind for meaning making. My process of self-examination uses an adaptation of Action Research and I connect my current life to where I began using an Intersecting Processes analysis. I observe and document the unfolding of my life while studying it, using self-expression and thinking made visible …

The Person-Less Portrait, Katelyn Ledford

Masters Theses

In an age of digital technologies, contemporary portraits look different than their predecessors did. Portraiture does not have to continue to rely only on the idea of physical likeness, even though that is generally how portraiture is conceived. Through our virtual lives, we build new versions of ourselves, gain an abundance of information, and consume technological visuals. These newfound engagements and understandings shape the portraits we build of ourselves and of other groups at large. In my painting practice, portraiture is a way to explore the contemporary landscape around me as a woman and a painter who engages in digital …

Personal Analysis Of The Relationship Of Artist To The Subject In Figurative Painting, Zuhal Feraidon

Masters Theses

The work for my thesis includes a series of medium-scale paintings on wood panel in oil and acrylic. In these, I depict my friends, my relatives, and myself in full-body portrait style. I use a complementary color palette. The humans within my paintings are presented within an environment that has shallow spatial depth. The backgrounds in the paintings exist through flatness, serving as wallpaper behind the figure. The landscape backgrounds in my paintings are not specific to identifiable locations. The relationship between the figure and the ground is questioned through the overall composition. Both the background and the figure are …

Spontaneous Laughter, Laughter Without Reason, Evan Gilbert

Masters Theses

What is the function of humor in today's society? What is the role of the comedian in increasingly clownish times? How does humor challenge power structures in contemporary life and art? How can painting deploy these methods in an effective manner?

The archetype of the trickster has appeared in myth and literature around the world for many centuries. In all instances it represents the disruptive side of the human imagination, a being that lives outside the rules of conventional behavior who seems to have hidden knowledge or secret understanding of how society truly functions. The archetype of the trickster can …

The Line That Splits, Zahra Jewanjee

Masters Theses

The body of work I have created since beginning my MFA has been informed and impacted by my research into various inter-connected subject matters: subcultural spaces, the behaviours of crowds, micro and macro and territories and systems. These have been the philosophical and conceptual rationale of my studio practice. Meditation on these concepts is an important part in the preliminary stages of my process and the praxis of my studio work has been to interpret and implement these ideas. In many ways, this process suggests its own direction. I had no exact endpoint in mind but wanted to be driven …

Where We Are : Where We Thought We Were Going, Nathan Prebonick

Masters Theses

In this thesis I will discuss ideas of place, space and repurposing as they relate to my paintings. By tying these ideas back to specific hometown sites, I will trace the evolution of ideas back to their genesis to provide context for the aesthetics of the work. I reference the texts of Robert Smithson and Tim Cresswell, who wrote about transitive notions of place, as well as David Joselit, who’s “Painting Beside Itself” essay focused on painters concerned with the question of how painting enters a network. I hope to use these texts, in conjunction with personal descriptions of sites …

Addicts Of Nostalgia, Samuel Robert Campbell Drake

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I will reflect on issues of nostalgia through a series of work based upon the landscape where I grew up. I discuss how my paintings stage themes and negotiate criticality towards memory. The writing analyses my engagement towards the collaging of documentary and fictional sources: and how my paintings seek to dispel legibility and embrace slippage. Alongside discussions of personal experiences, I talk about the relationship of distancing in my practice, concerning tangible and geographic detachment. The thesis expresses my adoration for the history of British painting, and my efforts to internalize its traditions. Moreover, this investigation …

Icarus : How To Survive The Fall, Emile Stark-Menneg

Masters Theses

In this writing I will explore several films, videos, performances, and photographs from the past century that resist capitalism’s tendency to crush hubris, exaltation, and indetermination. But first, I would like to reimagine the Greek myth of Icarus. How has the myth shaped our understanding of escape? Daedalus, Icarus’s father, attempts to escape exile from the island of Crete by building his son a pair of wax wings. He warns his son not to fly too close to the sun because the wax will melt, and not to fly too close to the sea because the wings will become waterlogged. …

Picturing Things, Matthew J. Bivalacqua

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My creative process is a ritual I use to examine my personal narrative. Digital photography is a way for me to mine an object or environment with an obsessive emphasis, and extract an image that signifies something relatable. By employing tropes derived from my personal narrative, and filtering them through image manipulation software; I am able to dramatize aspects of perspective and scale. With an automatic mark guided by printed images and projections of digital panoramic images, the surface and resulting picture comes into focus. This is a way for me to move past my experiences. Achieving this level of …

Quiet Moments, Deitra Charles

CGU MFA Theses

I am a figurative artist who focuses on ordinary people and everyday objects. I paint moments. A moment of peace, a moment of tranquility, a moment of contemplation. It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of day-to-day life – that they give you the opportunity to experience life differently, stirring within you some sense of peace.

It is my hope that my paintings will incite a feeling of warmth, presenting the possibility of thoughts that take you away from the stresses of …

Journey To My Roots, Ainura Ashirova Barron

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This autobiographical body of work is a visual journey that involved the investigation of my personal identity and roots as well as the exploration of my cultural history through a process that relied on photographs, stories and family traditions, such as crafting. I consider this process and practice to be my passage into a globalized society while simultaneously finding my niche in my newly adopted country of America.

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

For Cheryl: The Long And The Short Of It, Rachel Lebo

Graduate School of Art Theses

Short stories are an indirect way of creating a truth by showing instead of telling. They are a way to observe and communicate a single idea. A short story for me is a vehicle for hiding my truth behind a character, exploring myself in the safety of an identity that is not my own. When I read Chunky in Heat, author A.M. Homes and I hide together behind her character, Cheryl, and find solidarity.

The following writings, paintings, and sculptures are collaborations between myself and the women of short story fiction. Those women being the authors, the subjects, and …

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.

Loop, Lap, Leap, Hannah Schutzengel

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings use slow, subtle gestures to create experiences of quiet emotion: casual warmth and comfort, playfulness, ease. My focus is the irregularity of a poured liquid; the slow release of an ironed crease; the push and pull of care against things drooping apart.

Downing, Joseph Dudley, 1925-2007 (Sc 3428), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 3428. Letter to WKU faculty member Frances Richards from artist and Kentucky native Joe Downing, Paris, France, regretting his inability to see her during a 1962 visit to Bowling Green, Kentucky. Includes various notices and catalogs of Downing’s art exhibits.

Enmesh: The Art Of Trauma And Recovery, Joanna Pottle

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Liminal Space is an artistic installation within the ongoing, interdisciplinary creative/research project "Enmesh: The Art of Trauma and Recovery.” Utilizing a combination of research methods, creative processes, and cultural inspirations, this project asks the following questions: how can the artistic process (this project serving as a preliminary case study) parallel various modes of recovery and healing? How can this objective be visually communicated through a mixed media approach of drawing, painting, and printmaking and how can this approach be an effective tool of communication? What can we conclude from both modes of work (solitarily or collectively)? How do they accomplish …

Over Certain Undecidedness These Heartstring Intimations, Martha Hemingway

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

over certain undecidedness these heartstring intimations is the culmination of a two-year-long abstracted cycle of textured conversation, internal eye contact, and endless playlist-making. Hemingway’s work is based in process-oriented reflections on habitual behavior, manifestation of sentiment, and sense of self. Her paintings draw inspiration from the ways in which we approach and avoid our internal and external routines – how degrees of our subconscious considerations affect how we extend ourselves to others. Individual auditory preferences of different colliding souls have carved a space for her in a language of empathetic abstraction – attempting to elaborate the curious beauty and pain …

White Noise, Chris Cohen

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

White Noise investigates moments when white supremacist ideology injects itself into the conversation about American Identity and American History in an attempt to co- opt those definitions and control the conversation. The exhibition considers the effects of this identity crisis on American identity, white identity, American history, and family unity. The exhibition looks at these issues through the lens of the Virginia Historical Markers program, Civil War Re-enactment, contemporary white identity politics and supremacy, monuments, educational history museums, and the artist’s personal narrative about white supremacy as it relates to his own sense of loyalty and connection to his family. …