Art Practice Commons^™

Algorithmic Aesthetics: Redefining Traditional Islamic Art, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

The recent exhibition, “Reverberating Echoes: Contemporary Art Inspired by Traditional Islamic Art,” organized by the Center for the Arts & Religion at the Graduate Theological Union afforded an opportunity for me as curator to reconsider the definition of ‘traditional Islamic art.’ This effort led to the identification of an algorithmic aesthetic of pattern that characterizes artistic production in all media from the 9th through the 12th centuries in what were then Islamic lands, centered in Baghdad, but extending from Spain across North Africa through the Middle East and Iran to Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.

Reframing Islamic Art For The 21st Century, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

The celebrated Islamic galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reopened in 2011 as “Galleries for the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia.” Other major collections of Islamic art have been reorganized and reinstalled in Berlin, Cairo, Cleveland, Copenhagen, Detroit, Kuwait, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Singapore, and new museums of Islamic art have been established in Doha, Qatar; Honolulu, Hawaii; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Sharjah, U.A.E. In addition, the first museum in North America dedicated to Islamic art recently opened in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This article explores this global phenomenon, …

Alloys And Architecture: Periodic And Quasiperiodic Patterns In Sinan's Selimiye In Edirne, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

The marble minbar of the Selimiye mosque in Edirne that was designed by the Ottoman architect, Sinan, and completed in 1575, bears a circular medallion of carved and pierced openwork in each of its triangular framing walls. The carved circular patterns are unusual in having radial symmetry with local five-fold and ten-fold rotations, but no periodic repeat. This contribution explores the relationship of this late 16th-century design to a similar array generated by X-ray diffraction of aluminum alloys, identified as a quasiperiodic pattern, which garnered the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The 16th-century appearance of this pattern in an architectural …

It's Hard To Kill, Fatemeh Baigmoradi

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

In this project, I have collected photographs from other famailies and reproduced them, before treating them with fire. I make them look convincingly original, and I try to establish a realtionship between the real world and the prosthetic world.

Daughter, Wife, Mother: Women As Emblems Of Indian Authenticity Throughout The Diaspora, Saloni Kaur Kalkat

Scripps Senior Theses

It has been over a century since the maternal side of my family has resided in the natal land of our cultural heritage and religious proclivities – Punjab, India, where Sikhism was established. As an American I continue this extension of our roots from their source. Through the process of shifting location, cultural confluence, and passing time the experiences of the women in each successive generation of my family have altered significantly through our diasporic existence. However, even in the aftermath of colonization and immigration, the enduring responsibility of women is reliant upon their relation to family.

This ideology is …

Spreading Seeds: Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds And His Performative Personality Received In The West, Wei Wu

Scripps Senior Theses

In 2010, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds made its debut in Tate Modern, which promoted Ai to be one of the most famous and respected contemporary Chinese artists. This Conceptual art work has multiple layers of meanings, which all corresponds to the Western expectations for a successful contemporary Chinese artist. In fact, the Western art world has long held bias and stereotypes towards international artists. Ai chose to perform his personality to conform to the expectations and Western ideologies, which brought him international fame. On the other hand, other Chinese artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Zhou Chunya, don't totally agree with …

Synchronous Communication And Its Effects On The Collaboration Of Professional Workplace Employees Engaged In A Problem Activity, Michele R. Rochester

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

SYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE COLLABORATION OF PROFESSIONAL WORKPLACE EMPLOYEES ENGAGED IN A PROBLEM ACTIVITY

by

MICHELE R. ROCHESTER

December 2017

Advisor: Dr. Monica W. Tracey

Major: Learning & Design Technology

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Asynchronous communication may have a profound impact on employee collaboration and productivity in the workplace due to the loss of face-to-face interaction and the relationships these opportunities may foster. However, as broadly defined within the literature, synchronous communication is a rich media that supports this type of collaboration and social interaction. Synchronous communication methods that encourage collaboration lead to deeper level learning, …

Plantiod Planet, Roxana Hojat

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines my studio practice and research during my studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Photo & Film MFA program, which has culminated into my thesis exhibition. Through traditional portraiture and landscape photography that utilize contemporary photographic practices such as digital processing and material studies, my work in Plantiod Planet creates a fiction which examines plant intelligence and the gendering of landscape.

Skinface, Islam Shehab

Theses and Dissertations

Throughout history, skin manipulation was primarily practiced for cultural, tribal, or religious purposes. In the contemporary landscape, skin manipulation has been objectified and commercialized. This is exemplified through bio-upholstery, foreign materials under our skin and changing the skin structure.

This thesis investigates skin manipulation, with the intent to focus experimentation on the skin’s lines of cleavage, a topographical map drawn on our skin and used to define the direction where skin has the most and least flexibility. The aim is to connect and explore materials that can be used as a second skin, while at the same time examining and …

Sub For More, Chelsea Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This written thesis unpacks the thoughts and motivations behind the decisions I have made in my artistic practice that have ultimately culminated in my M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition: Sub for More. By merging images of my own work as well as internet sourced images of the culture that drives my work, I have created a platform to begin to understand my experience during graduate school. This text examines and explores my belief in the inherent power in pop culture, my obsession with fame, celebrity, and my self-identity as a participant in current pop-culture.

Burroughs's Folios As An Archival Machine For Artistic Creation, Tomasz D. Stompor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Burroughs's Folios as an Archival Machine for Artistic Creation" Tomasz D. Stompor discusses the significance of archival material as a scholarly resource for the analysis of William S. Burroughs's cut-up experiments. Stompor retraces the history of the author's filing system as both a referential repository and a device for documentation and investigates its function as an eperimental machine for the production of cut-up texts and layouts

Interface: Fringe Landscapes And Identity, Elizabeth T. Lewin

Theses and Dissertations

An MFA thesis that weaves together: virtual landscapes, escapism, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, utopia, family, and identity.

Fear And Nostalgia In Immigration, Daniel A. Matthews

Theses and Dissertations

Fear and Nostalgia in Immigration is a project that uses re-occuring memory and experiential memory to help us understand our common histories. The projects asks individuals to first share a re-occuring memory by writing it on a chalkboard. The next step is to then write an experiential memory about immigration, this can be a story you might have heard or it could be something from your own family history. These two tasks are done on a communal table where several individuals are engage in the same task at the same time. This aim of this exercise is to have something …

Deaccessioning The Studio, Ayla Rexroth

Theses and Dissertations

I have created several micro-businesses that provide tools and facilitate experiences to help people meet their potential. The form of the businesses has ranged from a street based art gallery inside the drawers of a modern dresser to a business that sews more and bigger pockets into women’s outerwear.

Private Conversation, Gahee Park

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis paper "Private Conversation" discusses the themes, contexts, and influences relevant to paintings and drawings I made during my MFA studies.

Vida En Sombras, Tommy Canales Burns

CGU MFA Theses

Verisimilitude. What is reality? Subconsciously we are acting out and absorbing information collating data and in turn responding with instincts. Learning processes to view and shape this world. I think of the Hermann Hesse’s doppelganger, the idea of a shadow self. Group identities can also have strange shadow selves. It is bizarre to look back at history and see the changing context of social norms, fashions, traditions, scientific, philosophical, and political thought. Art is a sign of the times, creating space for the inner dialogue of collective consciousness to be purged and hashed out.

When I'M With You, Jenny Ziomek

CGU MFA Theses

Everything I make is related to books. My artwork functions as visual storyboards or is used directly in books. Props and videos are inspiration for drawings. My paintings are meant to feel like pages from a larger narrative. Often, the formats through which stories are told are as important as the stories themselves.

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.

Gauguin's Savage Document Work: Understanding As Function, Tim Gorichanaz

Proceedings from the Document Academy

We tend to think of documents as things that provide answers, but documents can also provoke questions. This can be seen clearly in the study of art-making as document work, since the power of art is not in how it can represent reality, but how it can pose questions to reality. In this paper, I examine the work of 19th-century artist Paul Gauguin, which proceeded through iterative abstraction and productive reproduction. Gauguin's document work was a mode of questioning with the epistemic and communicative aim of understanding.

Tapestry, Alana Medina

CGU MFA Theses

The wall pieces are intentionally left to be crude, unrefined, and raw. A look at the world with a border, walking backwards to a beginning, what it was like before the traffic of the mind. Itinerant qualities along with an objective dissidence bring about an experience of tribal nomadic earthy hues. The paintings stay close to my interpretation of the earth, similar to the sculptures. Like twins born in the same embrace with contemporaneous qualities they exist together with a connection in materiality. There is a relationship between my paintings and sculptures; a mutual dependence seen and experienced together that …