Visual Studies Commons^™

I Come Creeping: Remembering The Battle Of Blair Mountain In Graphic Narrative, Ellie James

Senior Honors Theses

Between August 24 and September 4 of 1921, approximately 10,000 West Virginia coal miners marched to Blair Mountain in Logan County in a militant stand for their right to unionize. Despite its status as the largest labor uprising in United States history, few know or understand the impact of the Battle of Blair Mountain today, even within the borders of West Virginia. This creative project aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to memorialize this period of the West Virginia Mine Wars through the creation of a 10-page comic, titled I Come Creeping, which depicts and is informed by the …

Menetekel: Ishmael's Black Whale And The Semiotics Of Doom, Todd Tyner Cronkhite

English Language and Literature ETDs

This study employs the narrator of Moby Dick, Ishmael, as a focal critic to interpret several potential examples of ominous writing on the wall, or menetekel. It concludes that the message of such writing, owing primarily to its irrevocably deictic relationship with the surface it is written on, is fundamentally apocalyptic in nature, regardless of its explicit content. The physical walls of the “kingdom” are incorporated into the grammar of the menetekel as object, so that its elemental message, “I was here,” becomes not only an admission of criminal trespass, but also a direct threat to the current order and …

Pathos, Spring 2023, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Stephanie Gresham

The Migrant Communities Of South Sioux City, Graciela Deanda

Honors Thesis

The Migrant Communities of South Sioux City is a photographic series that showcases the individual stories, intimate spaces, older generation insights and hopes for their future lives. Stories are a great way to connect with, inspire, and influence humans. Personal storytelling—the kind that reveals who we are and what we care about— are the most potent and effective ways to connect with the world around us. This project seeks out the stories of migrant workers living in the same region but from different countries. In this series, I ask questions to hear everyone’s stories and allows others to hear and …

Baraka: A World Without Words: A Guided Meditation, Wanda E. Avila

Journal of Religion & Film

Baraka: A World Beyond Words (1992) is a guided meditation that aims to induce the transcendent experience in the viewer. Through the eyes of a Zen Buddhist monk, the viewer is invited to meditate on the various phenomena that testify to the existence of the transcendent (the first eight chapters), to experience the everyday world where the transcendent is painfully absent (the next eleven chapters), and to finally arrive at stasis (the last two chapters). This paper is a description of and commentary on each of the 21 chapters of the film.

The Owl House: Queerness And Witchcraft In Modern Media, Gray E. Takahashi

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

The Owl House is a groundbreaking television series on Disney Channel created by Dana Terrace. The show follows Luz, a young human, as she makes a new home for herself in a magical realm called the Boiling Isles. (Vorrasi-Banis 102). Within the series, there are many queer elements, in terms of literal LGBTQ+ representation as well as in a more expansive and critical sense. The Owl House is unique because of its willingness to break and queer a multitude of social conventions. This paper examines the evolution of the witch as both figure and trope of patriarchal resistance as well …

Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes a diffractive, onto-epistemological approach to everyday practices with salt in order to articulate an expanded understanding of meaning making and knowledge production. This research reckons with and challenges dominant modes of knowing that engage a Cartesian perspective to situate knowing as the exclusive domain of the mind in both form and topic of inquiry. This research acts simultaneously as both a direct practice of and metacognition about knowledge production by examining 1. the embodied (including sensory and emotional aspects) and 2. the relational (including interpersonal and socio-cultural) dimensions of experience as visceral knowing. This articulation of …

Animal Imagery In Eastern Han Tomb Reliefs From Shanbei 陝北, Leslie V. Wallace

Visual Arts

Wild and fantastical animals climb, fly, scamper, and prance across pictorial stone carvings decorating Eastern Han tomb doors in northern Shaanxi. Alongside dragons and other mythical animals, bears felicitously dance, tigers grin opening their mouths to roar, and other wild animals frolic in swirling cloudscapes. While the same animals can be found in Eastern Han tomb reliefs and mortuary art in other regions, their frequency, emphasis on plasticity and movement, and combination with the yunqi 雲氣 motif are unique to the region. Originating in a hybrid style of art that was created during the Mid-Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE), …

Sitting Here With You In The Future: Reimagining The Human Through Digital Art, Jared Z. Sloan

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This paper presents a novel construction of the Human that arises from digital art. Taking an interdisciplinary approach incorporating perspectives from queer theory, afropessimism, science and technology studies, and more, I analyze the works of three digital artists: Lucas LaRochelle, Arafa Hamadi, and Natalie Paneng. I chart the ways in which these artists negotiate borders between the physical and digital, human and non-human, and real and fantastical to challenge hegemonic Western ideas about humanity and the individual. I claim that by restricting the information available to the user in various ways, the picture of the Human that emerges from each …

The Influence Of The Abraham Accords On The Visual Coverage Of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict In Arab Media: A Comparative Analysis, Mona Alsaba

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the influence of the official signing of the Abraham Accords on the Arab media visual coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This study operationalized visual frames in terms of the human-interest vs technical frame and peace vs war frame, and explored the use of graphic portrayal as a framing device, in order to compare between the Arab media visual framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before and after the official signing of the Abraham Accords to examine the impact of foreign policy on the coverage among news outlets of different Arab countries. A comparative analysis was conducted relying on …

Metamorphis, Luca Lee Sobarzo Faust

Theses and Dissertations

Web3D interactive experience that explores time, communication, and transformation, from a personal storytelling perspective. Hosted on a web platform, the experience displays three environments: Metamorphis, Cuir AI, and Hain. These spaces propose a fragmented narrative that seeks to interrogate both the characters and the viewer’s perception on the linearity of time

Developing Mexico: History, Architecture, Photography, And Esther Born’S The New Architecture In Mexico, Tyler Considine

Theses and Dissertations

Esther Born’s The New Architecture in Mexico (1937) presents the first survey of Mexican modern architecture and documents early works by Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, among other Mexican modernists. This thesis examines Born’s architectural photography alongside that of Lola Álvarez Bravo, Guillermo Kahlo, and other photographers and within discourses of modernity, history, and representation.

Gallery Film And Contemporary Chinese Art : On Yang Fudong’S Beyond God And Evil-First Chapter And Endless Peaks, Bingxi Wang

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Gallery films are cinematic installations assembled and displayed in an art gallery as a combined exhibition of moving images and contemporary art. As such, a gallery film signifies the evolution of film presentation from a black-box screen to a white-cube space, a characteristic of contemporary art. This research examines Yang Fudong’s (b. 1971) two exhibitions Beyond GOD and Evil-First Chapter (Suzhou Museum, September to December 2019) and Endless Peaks (ShanghART Gallery, November 2020 to January 2021) by employing theories from art history as well as film and media studies, including theories of Chinese landscape painting, discourses on the picturesque and …

Rodcon, Program, 2023, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Contents:

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--- What's That?: Event Descriptions
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Rescue Politics: Richard Mosse’S Thermal Imaging And The Containment Of Migration, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

This article focuses on a body of work by Mosse that includes the multichannel video installation Incoming, shown as a 52:12 minute three-channel video installation with 7.3 surround sound, and the photographic series Heat Maps (2015–2017) (Fig. 1). While Incoming concentrates on migration routes, Heat Maps portrays the architecture of refugee camps.4 I consider how the artist’s use of thermal imaging and his immersive mode of documentary complicates tropes used to represent migration. I reflect on the way Mosse’s artwork intersects with a long-standing interest by practitioners and theorists of film and photography in the idea of the camera as …

Magic Show: Themed Experiences Utilizing Animation, Emma Cuitino

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Magic Show is an animated short film created in the Unity game engine that follows a mischievous fairy named Faye, who attempts to deceive her human audience, the viewer, into believing she can do magic. My goal in the program was to create a themed entertainment experience. I created a point-of-view animated film as an alternative to traditional theme park 3D/4D attractions that typically take place in a theatrical setting with large audiences. This allows for a more intimate experience and accessibility in the absence of a physical theater. The storyline itself is a study of imposter syndrome. Instead of …

Uno Sguardo Oltre I Bordi Della Fotografia Coloniale, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Interface: Technology & Portraiture, Mullins Sydney

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2023

In Interface, five Kentucky-area artists explore a new language of representation with the aid of digital tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automatic Facial Recognition Software (AFR). Some artists use algorithms to alter celebrity faces beyond recognition, others feed data sets of existing art to AI models in an attempt to generate portraits of no one in particular. Others still create tools for understanding the very act of facial recognition or obfuscation. All have one thing in common: they wish to stretch the limits of and critique the genre of portraiture, as well as to cause viewers to question …

Rodcon, Flier, 2023, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

RodCon
Saturday April 1, 2023
10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Free & Open to the Public
Rod Library, UNI Campus

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Mascs: Masculinity Reimagined, Josh Porter

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2023

MASCS: Masculinity Reimagined explores how performances of contemporary masculinities can counteract traditional binary understandings of gender. Justin Korver, John Paul Morabito, Betsy Odom, Moises Salazar, and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell expose, question, and subvert the ways that we culturally define masculinity by focusing on gender as performance. These artists not only critique cisgender, heteronormative binary understandings of masculinity, but also embrace the performative nature of gender and celebrate non-normative, alternative, and queer masculinities. By encompassing a range of gender and sexual identifications, these artists share their own personal experiences, interpretations, performances, rejections, and embodiments of masculinity. Breaking down the barrier created …