Art Practice Commons^™

David Tanimura Interview, Ryan Richter

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: From Chicago Illinois, David Tanimura has created a truly unique style all his own. What began as just fun on his fathers computer at a young age has turned into a passion for art and so much more. It’s not just collage, it’s Digital Collage.

~Ryan Richter

To learn more about David, visit: http://www.musashimixinq.com/

Spelling Gratitude: An Aesthetic Exploration, Lily Anna Burgess

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis is founded in the positive psychological theory of gratitude, the experience of thankfulness and its benefits on both the individual and the community. My explorations via personal journaling, careful reflection, and engaging in craft, led me to cultivate a new definition for gratitude: present moment awareness. Using sheer fabric and the meditative act of embroidering, the language of gratitude was relearned and cultivated. My piece aims to incite further explorations in thanks.

Walking Los Angeles, Zoe R. Carlberg

Pomona Senior Theses

This paper is about my experience walking through Los Angeles County. My principal motivations were to explore what it means to be a pedestrian in an urban landscape that generally does not recognize walkers and to give value to often overlooked spaces. The paper includes a brief history of the Los Angeles region, methodology, an analysis of some other art projects that have been done about walking, and a vignette of the experience.

Kyla Hansen Mfa Thesis Statement, Kyla M. Hansen

CGU MFA Theses

My work traces the migration of meaning, mashing up cultural signifiers of place to create absurd objects and physical spaces that employ the hazy nature of belief, memory, and nostalgia. I’m interested in the exportability and malleability of experiences both culturally (through objects in movies, music, and media) and personally (through memories that change over time). My work explores the elusiveness of realness, creating slippery spaces, where the real and fake overlap, and certainty and uncertainty intermingle.

Lumen Essence, Brian Thomas Jones

CGU MFA Theses

I am intrigued by power relationships among the physical, psychological and political realms of experience. The various ways we respond to both the voluntary and involuntary restrictions of power ignite the ideas behind my investigations. The examination of power dynamics utilizing scale, spectacle and theatricality is what excites my process.

By providing an environment for immersive visceral participation, I invite the visitor to collaborate in the process of art-making through their human interaction with the formal constructions of the exhibition. Engaging the visitor in an activated, sensate experience is the artistic objective. The visitor's willingness to slow down the art …

Being-There, Atilio A. Pernisco

CGU MFA Theses

I blend figures with backgrounds to define pensive areas of focus and delve between figuration and abstraction. These paintings connect the viewer with the strangeness of the ordinary world. This is the moment of unconsciousness. It is then where elements of a narrative emerge. I depict the figure in movements of awkwardness. Images of the familiar environments of children involved in some kind of work-play activity, the inheritors of generational trauma, reoccur in my work--a parade of daydreamers in direction to witness the uncertain.

White Light, Tessie Whitmore

CGU MFA Theses

The work is about nothing and everything. It is about belief systems engaged with everyday, monotonous theories of repetitious acts that will deliver freedom and freewill or acceptance and enlightenment. These acts become systems, which are bought into with ridiculous dedication. What is left is the void, potential death, fleeting mortality.

I use the highway as a place of investigation and motivation building a relationship between its physical and psychological aspects. I focus on moments from the drive: tension, the possible crash, monotony, and the trance state. I use materials from high culture and low culture to form a cultural …

Harbor Island, Joe Lloyd

CGU MFA Theses

Paintings within this body of work evolve from themselves. Looking at the previous painting, I start a new painting. I stopped using photo references because I realized that I already knew what I wanted to paint and that my intuition is more important than images that already exist in the world. As a result, the paintings continue to move away from observational space towards something more artificial. The paintings become about the two-dimensional place on the canvas rather than some real place out in the world. This transition is seamless for me because geometry equally exists in two-dimensional and three-dimensional …

Don't Mess With Magic, Anna K. Nieman

CGU MFA Theses

The art is more of an event than a discrete object. The gallery is a set. It is one large piece, not a collection of sculptures. It’s very clear what is going on but the connections are vague and misleading.The room feels smaller but the projections feel expansive. The images have been recorded and re-cut and copied so many times that it’s barely a film. It becomes just a shifting image. An intoxicating scent fills the room. It’s a bit of a spectacle. The moment is memorable but in a deceiving kind of way. The piece is most effective as …

Kathleen Melian Mfa Thesis - Lalaland, Kathleen Melian

CGU MFA Theses

I am interested in the struggle in our culture to project an image and the burden of that endeavor. This preoccupation with image creation permeates our society as a whole and is not bound by social or economic status. In this body of work, I wish to expose a sense of the emotional fallout of such existence, and the truth beneath the fiction.

A twist to this narrative, is that the falsity is also a source of pleasure and enjoyment. This creative reinvention of self, although fraught with desperation and anxiety, offers intense satisfaction as participants take roles like actors …

The Darkness Is Passing, Grace Heeeun Park

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about the interplay of light, darkness and space. I express illumination of space and penetrating light with abstract painting. I use the white of canvas and thick application of black paint to create frames and to break rules of defined dimensions. Through my paintings, I challenge the perception of space and question the boundaries between two and three dimensions.

Women And Video Games: Pigeonholing The Past, Allison Perry

Scripps Senior Theses

Academic work dealing with the overlap between video games and female representation is limited in both volume and proper research. Most texts agree on three supposed flaws with video games: they alienate female participants, there are no games for female players, and female players cannot relate to female characters. This thesis sheds light on these points, not only citing specific counter-examples, but also showing how many of these issues reflect on a larger societal problems.

Gabriel Bizen Akigawa Interview, Joe Ondrey

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Gabriel Bizen Akagawa is the Assistant Director of Academic Advising and recently former Academic Advisor in the Office of Student Affairs and Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Sculpture department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He exhibits regularly as a Chicago-based artist. He has been awarded Artist-in-Residencies at the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art in Kelowna, British Columbia, at Crabtree Farm in Lake Bluff, Illinois, and at Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, Michigan. His curatorial projects include an ongoing and changing series he initiated in 2005 called “Faketure” (fake nature), which lead to founding the Faketure Consortium …

Jacob Hashimoto Interview, Madeline Barnabee

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Jacob Hashimoto was born in Greeley Colorado 1973 and grew up in Walla Walla, Washington. He Currently lives in New York City. He received his Bachelors degree in fine arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hashimoto “redefines Japanese screen painting with his assemblages of paper "kites" in undulating, interactive compositions.” Jacob is represented by Studio La Citta, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Galerie Forsblom and Mary Boone Gallery. – Bio from http://jacobhashimoto.com/bio-cv/

Ed Lai Interview About Grace Lai, Thomas Matt

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Grace Lai painted downtown Chicago in concrete and steel bloom, for two decades producing vibrant montages of skyline-shaping buildings as they climbed. An "on-site" artist who didn't seriously take up painting until nearly 60 because of a promise made to her deceased husband, Mrs. Lai donned a hard hat and was unafraid to board construction elevators for rides high into the sky to complete her work. In winter she'd wrap herself in plastic garbage bags and substitute rubbing alcohol for water in her paints, so they wouldn't freeze.

Artist Bio taken from the Chicago Tribune (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-03-17/news/ct-met-0318-lai-obit-20100317_1_paintings-materials-train-stations)

To learn …

Kingo "Melvin" Fujii Interview, Andrea Duke

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Kingo Fujii was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi where his parents were deeply involved in the Kabuki theater. His father was a director/actor, artist, and chief choreographer for the original Hawaiʻi Kabuki Theater Group. His mother was a teacher of traditional Japanese musical instruments. Kingo Fujii attended the Honolulu Academy of Arts School, The Chicago Art Institute, the University of Hawaiʻi and Instituto Allende, Mexico. He works in a variety of media such as oil, watercolor, lithography, jewelry and sculpture. As a fine artists he addresses himself through surrealism, semi-impressionism and traditional or neo-orientalism. As a scientific …

A Spectacle Of Great Beauty: The Changing Faces Of Hagia Sophia, Victoria M. Villano

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Tutti Frutti, Damaris G. Rivera

CGU MFA Theses

Mark making is equivalent with making a place one's own. Demarcation of a site is not solely a negative act. The negation of a space is pre-transcribed, presupposed. The point is to take the negative and invert it. It’s not a one-way street. In order to change the building you have to move through the building and let the building move through you. Once the building lives in the occupant the experience of the building can be altered. Total absorption of architecture and its environment can provide a means to live in a unified expressive way. It’s about the person. …

Dante Gabriel Rossetti And The Romance Of Loss, Jane N. Cooper

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Through paired poems and paintings, Dante Gabriel Rossetti explored the nature of Love—both physical and spiritual—as made evident by distance or absence. Influenced early by his familiarity with Dante Alighieri and a confluence of changing social and artistic attitudes, Rossetti transformed the dialogue around him to a more personal internal conversation, revealed by pen and brush. This paper examines the dynamic of that pervasive thread in Rossetti’s work through a discussion of the influences upon the artist, the artist’s effect upon important figures of mid- to late nineteenth century England, and the important relationships that shaped his discourse. In addition, …

Moss Mural, Chelsea Fredrikson

Senior Honors Projects

Moss Mural: Bridging the Arts and Sciences

Chelsea Fredrikson

Major: Fine Arts

Advisor: Robert Dilworth

Advisor Department: Fine Arts

Date 5-2012

Abstract

When we are young, in elementary school, we are encouraged to learn subjects together. Fine arts, science, math, and literature all work as one, and overlap to teach us valuable lessons and tools we can use as we grow. But as we become older school systems segregate subjects, forcing students to chose a direction. Do I have a creative mind, or a logical mind?

As an art student I’ve tried over the course of my college …