Tightrope Walking On The Red Lines,
2018
Rhode Island School of Design
Tightrope Walking On The Red Lines, Arghavan Khosravi
Masters Theses
My work is deeply connected to my own personal experience of the culture and politics of my homeland of Iran. I was born and raised in Iran in a nonreligious family. I experienced the first decade after the 1979 Islamic Revolution as a child. The hardliners had taken power, society suffered tremendous suppression, and Iran was at war with Iraq. My memories are filled with so many occasions in which the dominance of the oppressive regime affected my daily life, from being forced to wear a headscarf in elementary school, to being required to pray and recite the Quran at …
In A Distant Land,
2018
Rhode Island School of Design
In A Distant Land, Ohad Sarfaty
Masters Theses
For the past few years I have avidly collected oral histories, family memories and imagery as a way to better understand and contextualize myself, my roots, and my own personal path. My recent paintings reference my first-hand experience as an immigrant, as well as my family's long and complicated history with displacement. The paintings were put together much like a game of telephone, their narratives transmitted through generations, stretched and skewed by family members and friends, rendering them fragmented yet crystallized. In the process of painting, seeing parallels between the past and the present has been frustrating and disturbing. The …
Left Hand Stories,
2018
Rhode Island School of Design
Left Hand Stories, Saif Mhaisen
Masters Theses
I draw people and paint things. Sometimes I paint people and draw things, but mostly I draw people and paint things. I work from life. The process – painting or drawing – is not mediated. That is the primary fact concerning the current work.
I see a mediator as anything forced in between a subject and myself. Following that, the work doesn’t involve Internet searches or photography or printing or projection or tracing or elaborate set ups or still lives or prep drawing or under painting.
The current work is defined by the current context: a graduate school art studio …
Pienso En Ti,
2018
Rhode Island School of Design
Pienso En Ti, Gina Gwen Palacios
Masters Theses
Representation signifies social existence, and the lack of Mexican American representation in media, art and the mainstream American narrative is a clear dismissal of a people and their history. I grew up in South Texas and my world was filled with fields of cotton, an open horizon line, and a mismatch of Mexican and American identities and languages. I have listened to my parents’ stories of picking cotton, being punished for speaking Spanish, having their first names changed and later being forced to drop out of school. As I grew up I realized the rows of cotton we passed daily …
Yes We Can Can,
2018
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
Yes We Can Can, Eliseo Angel Casiano
LSU Master's Theses
Yes We Can Can is a compilation of paintings and short stories that depict my placement and role among substantially white rural communities in the South. Through portraiture in painting, I interpret family and biographical events that examine representations of race, family relationships, and my maneuverability through a space of otherness.
Casiano, 2018
On Memory And The Radical Black Imagination,
2018
CUNY Hunter College
On Memory And The Radical Black Imagination, Todd Thomas
Theses and Dissertations
On Memory and the Radical Black Imagination is an exploration of the personal, sociological, and historical elements contained within the art of T. Eliott Mansa (Todd Eliott Thomas) Mansa examines the memorialization of black death and the radical black imagination. included are illustrations of specific art works and descriptions.
Listen! The Earth Speaks,
2018
Wilfrid Laurier University
Laboratoire DéBerlinisation: Art, Finance, And The Legacies Of Colonialism In Contemporary African Art: An Interview With Mansour Ciss Kanakassy,
2018
Technological University Dublin
Laboratoire DéBerlinisation: Art, Finance, And The Legacies Of Colonialism In Contemporary African Art: An Interview With Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, Conor Mcgarrigle, Marisa Lerer
Articles
Mansour Ciss Kanakassy (b. 1957) is a Berlin-based Senegalese artist whose practice addresses the legacy of colonialism in contemporary Africa, in particular as it is expressed in the financial systems of the former Francophone colonies of West Africa, where the currency, the CFA franc, historically tied to the French franc, is now pegged to the euro. The acronym CFA originally stood for Colonies Françaises d’Afrique – French Colonies of Africa – and now Communauté Financière Africaine – African Financial Community. In 2001, Ciss Kanakassy created the Laboratoire Déberlinisation (Déberlinisation Laboratory), a multifaceted project that traces contemporary African issues to the …
Private Rainbows,
2018
CUNY Hunter College
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.
Double Splinters,
2018
CUNY Hunter College
Double Splinters, Theresa M. Daddezio
Theses and Dissertations
Awareness of matters outside oneself can be heightened by a repetitive task, one that requires a meditative focus on the rudimentary of movement. The construction of a line is a projection from a fixed point that creates a multiplicity of lines, synapses, and connective fabric in the mind that project outward to any possible or arbitrary point. When assembling our reality, our eyes operate as the mediators of such points, drawing in visual clues to the world around us. Sight is composed from the movement of light particles alongside of individual and collective memories that construct what is.
Painting Through Time And Space,
2018
CUNY Hunter College
Painting Through Time And Space, Michelle O'Connell
Theses and Dissertations
By questioning painting-as-object, I arrive at capturing painting in time. Digital editing and projecting onto paintings and screens in space creates an overlapping of timecodes. With this environment, I aim to create an experience of painting and travel that is non-linear and multi-directional.
The Artwork As A Surrogate For Living,
2018
CUNY Hunter College
The Artwork As A Surrogate For Living, Julia Christina Korneffel
Theses and Dissertations
The picture plane is a lived experience in which I aim to arrive at a precision of forms and colors that reveal the process, result and content of my reductive sensibility in painting. My thesis discusses my work relative to the influences of Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin and Mary Heilmann.
A Caprine Carnival: Goats At The Vālaikkāl Vāyil,
2018
CUNY Hunter College
A Caprine Carnival: Goats At The Vālaikkāl Vāyil, Madhini Nirmal
Theses and Dissertations
Madhini Nirmal uses Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnival to imagine a goat-led subversion of political and social dogma in the context of the South Indian city of Chennai. She uses the mediums of monotype, painting and collage to create these artworks where the undoing of hierarchies is a result of the natural and bodily.
Construction Narratives,
2018
Cuny Hunter College
Construction Narratives, Pablo M. Diaz
Theses and Dissertations
The whiteness of this work proposes a state of preparation for the painting to begin. However, it is the lighting of the room that completes it, adding a wider range of tones. The white wall of the gallery is also incorporated into the work by the opening slit. Additionally, the slit becomes a contrapposto pose, showing the space between bent knees as found in paintings of Saint Sebastian.
Four Sights Of The Patient (Ophelia),
2018
Washington University in St. Louis
Four Sights Of The Patient (Ophelia), Cecily Ann Fergeson
Graduate School of Art Theses
I make work in a variety of media, largely dealing with the imagery and material of the human body. My current work attempts to reckon with the following subjects: a reclamation of the notion of the so-called medical gaze and its historical record in photography; the idea that receiving the medical gaze transforms patients’ bodies; the idea of illness as an uncanny and intimate experience; and, finally, the act of metaphorically retracing the body’s material journey through the medical institution as it exists today. In this text, I discuss my practice in the context of critical theory, a recent observation …
Unmaking As Making,
2018
Washington University in St. Louis
Unmaking As Making, Viola Bordon
Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers
Artist Viola Bordon examines the processes of touch, unmaking, and materially dictated aesthetics regarding her studio practice. The philosophical ideas of absence are used to establish a purpose for undoing, which is then explored as a learning process. This process is complicated by the sense of touch, resulting in formal aesthetics that are materially inspired.
Observance | A Passage,
2018
Washington University in St. Louis
Observance | A Passage, Charis Schneider Norell
Graduate School of Art Theses
My art practice consists of drawing with fibers within handcrafted frame looms. I position these drawings as expanded, three-dimensional “drawing spaces,” creating medium-scale installations. I wish to expand drawing’s definition beyond its traditional material limits to simply be the process of leaving marks. Fiber is my medium, and the space within the frame loom’s warp and weft becomes my support. I see the drawing process to be the gestural residue of thought, and call these works my “fiber drawings.” While I use traditional weaving methods and materials as I work, I do not call myself a weaver. I see myself, …
Mediated: An Investigation Of Print Media's Impact Of Self,
2018
Washington University in St. Louis
Mediated: An Investigation Of Print Media's Impact Of Self, Rachel Hertzman
Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers
In the 21st Century print media is often overlooked for the masses of images available at everyone’s fingertips on the internet. This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which those original forms of mass produced images, specifically fashion/ beauty magazines and newspapers, alter one’s sense of self. The magazines have a proven negative effect on women consumers who internalize the singular thin beauty ideal persisted in this media. A similar internalization happens with the constant viewing of news papers, creating a sense of shared cultural memory. The Artist takes an in depth look at how these ideas …
Strange Woods,
2018
Washington University in St. Louis
Strange Woods, Song Park
Graduate School of Art Theses
I am interested in searching for images of women that have not been adequately represented in visual art. As a visual artist, I am directed by my sense of sight to investigate and know something. I like to challenge myself to visualize things that do not already have a visual representation. It has been frustrating for me to create images of women, and I have experienced a deep ambivalence in response to the different images of women I have encountered. The socially and culturally constructed images of women that I have internalized and those that have developed from my own …
Misassembled Monsters,
2018
Washington University in St. Louis
Misassembled Monsters, Jenn Brown
Graduate School of Art Theses
This thesis is a narrative of personal and material history. Through my work in painting, sculpture, and installation, I seek to share my story of emotional armoring in an attempt to connect to an audience. In my work, I look to my personal memories of growing up in a small, midwestern town and armoring myself with emotional barriers against its social construct of “normalcy.” Inspired by Medieval suits of armor and the characteristics of Goth culture throughout history, I employ my work to present the stage of a theatrical battleground. Creating each of my pieces is a fight for the …
