Sculpture Commons^™

Visual Feast, Makaili J. Taylor

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This body of work, Visual Feast, explores the infatuation we have with sweets. Throughout my thesis, I discuss how this universal shared experience contributes to the art world, explaining how our culture today has turned a simple requirement to survive into a source of entertainment. I use my work to show the absurdity of our desires to overindulge, and the ways we fetishize food. By creating a visual feast for the viewers, my goal is to challenge perceptions of what is acceptable and what is absurd.

Fabrications, Molly V. Rivera

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The objects that surround us tell a story of our past, and act as physical stand ins for a person, place, or experience no longer present. My work explores the significance of objects and how we use them to preserve our memories and make them tangible. Memory is ephemeral and changes over time, simultaneously growing weaker and stronger. I use clay to accentuate this relationship, visually depicting both preservation and decay.

Inspired by my personal narrative, I recreate specific objects of significance by hand. This results in subtle variations of the original, much like the changes in our memory over …

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo, Luis A. Vasquez La Roche

Theses and Dissertations

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo is a series of works--sculpture, installations, and performances--that explore themes of shame, failure, commodity, ephemerality, ritual, resilience, erasure, race, and death. The research and interest in these themes stem from a page of the Trinidad and Tobago Slave Registry. I use the research that surrounds this document to highlight different moments in history, in my personal life, and to imagine near futures.

Moving Parts, Andrew Lowrie

Theses and Dissertations

Material bodies, human and non-human, exist in a constant state of doing and undoing. As bodies change over time, so too do the objects they wear. In this way, a jewelry object is never finished and is constantly being made. In contemporary art practice, this is described as relational ontology by Amelia Jones, who reaches this terminology through the eco-political writings of Jane Bennett and Karen Barad. Through this framework we are able to understand the way artists like Gabriel Orozco and Helen Carnac resist the notion of a finished object or artwork. By engaging with the ways that process …

...And Yet The Devil Exists, John Hee Taek Chae

Theses and Dissertations

...And Yet the Devil Exists is a project that explores the ways in which ideology determines reality. It is an installation that plots and connects the historical and personal narratives that have defined my sense of identity–narratives in which perceptions of reality shatter, mutate, or hybridize when confronted with power, opportunity, or coercion. The installation component of the project consists of three parts. The first is an infrastructure made of wooden beams upon which paintings and images are installed; I call this the lantern. In the center of this is a round table on top of which is a nonsensical …

Coalescent: A Collection Of Defining Life Experiences, Stephanie A. Dishno

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Coalescent: A Collection of Defining Life Experiences, reflects on my experiences and curiosities of important life events that a person may use to construct their narrative identity. In this paper, I discuss my reflections, influences, and materials used to create my thesis exhibition, Coalescent. I describe my work as a collection of life experiences that are used to construct a narrative identity.

Dredge The Foundry | For Dirt And Era, Woody Stauffer

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Billions of years are past us and billions of years await. Shaping earthen material into sculptural abstractions is my way to sense and convey the lethargic natural progression of the planet. Fossilization, rot, dirt, plant growth, animal existence, and rust are aesthetics I endow with new perspectives and form through mold making and casting. The dichotomy between the eons of time behind us and the endless possibility of a technological future has inspired the addition of a science fiction aesthetic. To rust these computerized constructed geometric forms demonstrates how futuristic ideals will also wither away. In many ways we are …

Memory Bread, Nisiqi

Art + Design Masters Theses

Memory Bread, constituting a daily performance ritual and the post-action objects, seeks to address the generational decline of mother language use in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a post-colonized province of China. I chose to eat sliced white bread in the performance and later casted concrete sculptures as the extension of the action for both substances’ capitalistic nature. Being an invasive material that took over the traditional architectural lifestyle, the use of concrete mirrors the pervasive cultural and ethnic assimilation in China. Meanwhile, the materiality of concrete being a mixture of various substances also metaphors the mixed culture that Chinese-Mongolians …

Untitled, Unknown

Morehead State University Art Collection

An untitled, undated stone sculpture that stands outside ADUC by an unknown artist.

Untitled, Unknown

Morehead State University Art Collection

An untitled, undated piece of a paratrooper jumping from a plane done by an unknown artist

Accumulation, Erin Mccarty

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This written Thesis is the supporting documentation for Accumulation, a Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition at West Virginia University. This exhibition creates an environment in which a viewer can enter. This installation environment is created based on formal elements combined with fantastical elements from the imagination of the artist. The formal choices in the work provoke a positive otherworldly and whimsical response in the viewer. The environment is designed to provide relief from problems in the everyday world through patterns, forms, colors and surfaces. These elements are harvested from the natural world and recombined in a fantastical way. …

Resilience, Resistance And Revival In 20th-Century Yoruba Art, Charles Mason, Andie Near

Kruizenga Art Museum Exhibition Catalogs

Kruizenga Art Museum, Hope College Catalog for exhibition: “Resilience, Resistance and Revival in 20th-Century Yoruba Art”. Exhibition dates: January 17—May 16, 2020. Charles Mason, author; Andie Near, photographer, designer; Lisa Barney, editor; Cecilia O’Brien ‘21, typographer.

Kruizenga Art Museum Online Collection - Exhibition Gallery

A Girl Is A Girl Is A Girl, Paige Lizbeth Morris

Theses and Dissertations

It is well known that Western society uses men’s visual pleasure as a means to determine womxn’s value; her success is dependent on her compliance with culturally determined beauty standards. This process turns womxn into commodities and reinforces notions of gender complementarity, perpetuating a lifetime of servitude to patriarchal ideologies. It reminds the non-male that she is incomplete, insufficient, insignificant, and so easily dismissable. It forces her to be dependent, to shut up, to sit down, and to enjoy it.

In an effort to reject these presumed histories and narrow connotations of womxn, I have analyzed my gender performance in …

About Time: Visualizing Time At Burning Man, Gordon D. Hoople, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Nathaniel Parde, Diane Hoffoss, Max Mellette, Rachel Nishimura, Virginia Gutman

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

About Time was a 30 foot long, 3000 pound wooden sundial that went up in flames at Burning Man 2019. The piece reflected on the role time plays in our lives. We organize our lives around time—are enslaved to time—and yet we know so little about it. Physicists and philosophers continue to grapple with deep puzzles of time—Is time a fundamental quantity, independent of human actions or observations or is it an emergent property of our perception? This installation projected time using two sundials: a horizontal dial which swept time out across the desert floor and an …

Nonautomata, Jeremy Haynes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is a formal examination of the exhibition titled “NonAutomata” by Jeremy Haynes, as partial fulfillment of requirements for a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stephen F. Austin State University.

By examining the psychological influences within my artwork, I question the assumption that we are all just organic machines built with the same parts although we are all assembled and wired differently to perform specific tasks in society. I recall my personal experiences and how these influence my reactions to everyday life. While using clay with traditional and non-traditional processes, I have been …

Loloda In Three Ternate-Dutch Treaty Manuscripts In 19th Century, Tommy Christomy, Rias Suharjo

International Review of Humanities Studies

The impact of the relationship between Ternate and Europe affected the relation between Ternate and its surrounding area. As a result of the socio-political dynamics with the colonial, Ternate did not easily positioned itself as a sultanate which was neutral from the Dutch and the interest of its surrounding kingdoms, especially its neighbouring sultanate. Ternate was dragged into alliance with Dutch in order to secure access toward the natural resources needed by both parties. One of the tools used by Dutch in 19th century to secure access toward natural resources was the treaty. The treaty between Ternate and Dutch became …

Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …

Promoting Healing With Therapeutic Use Of Clay, Jennifer Fortuna

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

Alice McCall Smith, occupational therapist and artist based in North Carolina, provided the cover art for the Summer 2019 issue of The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). The piece, titled “Mother and Child,” is an 8-1/4” tall sculpture made from clay. Alice grew up on a hill sheep farm in the Scottish Highlands. She has used many of the skills learned on the farm in everyday life and in occupational therapy practice. After being diagnosed and treated for depression, Alice turned to sculpting to cope with challenging emotions. The therapeutic use of clay was a meaningful part of her …

Phantasmatic: Interrogating The (Im)Materiality Of Bodies Through Wool And Clay, Alexandria J. Arceneaux

LSU Master's Theses

Phantasmaticis an exploration of materials and materiality which relies on the concept of the phantasmatic body elucidated in Gayle Salamon’s work Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. This thesis is an exploration of these ideas. In my work, I use wool and clay to represent the material (known) and phantasmatic (sensed) bodies in an effort to explore an expanded understanding of the body at large. My work is also an effort to expand my own understanding of my phantasmatic body and its relationship to (my) materiality.

Mes-Ti-Zo, Aeleen Jacinto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Meztiso is an exploration of the artist’s identity as an individual born and raised in Guatemala; which is a country rich in natural resources where the majority of the population is native Maya yet the ruling class is majority white and poverty is widespread. The artist takes on this stunning contradiction using her own influences and views which were shaped by the political and economic upheaval and instability of her youth in Guatemala. The artist comments on her own identity as a person of mixed ancestry, a Meztiso, and because of her own family’s involvement in the capitalist government that …