Fine Arts Commons^™

Gloria Rehearsal (Excerpt) A Feminist Mechanism For Metabolization, Eleanor Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Weaving embodied trauma studies with feminist theory, non-hierarchical creative structures, and research in dance improvisation, this thesis paper written by Eleanor Smith contextualizes the dance performance gloria rehearsal (excerpt). The performance piece was choreographed and performed by Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith, who have been co-choreographing feminist dances since 2006.

Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative, Jess Shane

Theses and Dissertations

Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative is a 4-part creative non-fiction podcast that problematizes the use of personal stories in the documentary industry and examines the power dynamics between documentary-makers and their subjects. The series features a story within a story: it follows me, documentarian Jess Shane, as I craft short documentaries about four individuals’ lives— individuals who have applied to participate in my project by responding to an online ad. It also dives into the behind-the-scenes decisions required to tailor individuals’ life experiences to conform to industry standards of what makes a “good story.” In tandem, these two narratives— of me producing …

Death Of A Salesman: A Treatise On Technical Direction Practices, Stephanie Schlosser

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Theses, Student Research, and Creative Work

The Nebraska Repertory Theatre, in partnership with the Johnny Carson School of Theatre, Film, and Emerging Media Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, chose to produce Death of a Salesman, directed by Jacqueline Thompson, for the second show of their 2022-2023 season. Death of a Salesman was produced on the Howell Stage, a 300-seat proscenium theatre located in the Temple building on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. The graduate faculty assigned the role of Technical Director to me in May 2022. As technical director I was responsible for budgeting materials and labor, drafting and engineering scenery, managing personnel, maintaining …

A Pastor's Fine Art Collection: From Down-To-Earth To World-Renowned, Lily Hampton

Undergraduate Theses

Art collecting and the methods of acquiring art are constantly changing with the times. While some world-class collections are filled with a wide range of art types-- paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs--the public has little knowledge of how these pieces are chosen and accumulated. Competition in the art scene is undoubtedly a factor, but an argument can be made about whether some collectors choose works for highly personal reasons. The subject of this thesis is a local fine art collection, the Mary and Al Shands Collection of the Great Meadows estate based in Crestwood, Kentucky. This stunning in-home art gallery is …

Fragmented Relationships, Drew M. Dzurko

Student Projects

Relationships are often viewed through a binary lens. This greatly oversimplifies their intricacy, yet they can be one of the most challenging human experiences to navigate. Drawing on the symbolisms of memories Drew created digital images that embody these memories related to lost relationships. Using a binary image converter Drew created a visually simple image made up of only two colors down to each pixel. He then brought these images into a text editor on a computer which would display the raw code of an image. This revealed long strings of machine learning code that are indecipherable to the human …

A Poor Third? A Reexamination Of Manuscript And Print Markets In Fifteenth And Sixteenth-Century Rouen, Kate Hodgson

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

Manuscript and print scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have deemed Rouen a ‘poor third’ to the workshops in Paris and Lyon. Lacking the cultural status and political influence of these two major centers of book production, Rouen’s manuscript tradition has been coined an “eclectic” group of illuminators who were limited to a local, discontinuous demand for books and whose regional role hardly even bears examination. However, Between 1419 and 1449, Rouen was an epicenter of political and economic exchange between Normandy and England. The city’s manuscript ateliers experienced a period of unparalleled patronage from an international, elite clientele, …

Death Like Dreaming, Junli Song

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This written dissertation accompanies my thesis exhibition, Death Like Dreaming, which took place in Sculpture Gallery in the spring of 2023. This show was the culmination of my MFA at the University of Arkansas and centered around my most recent zhenmushou sculpture. I began making these mythical beings from my mythology in the summer of 2022. This essay will provide theoretical, historical, and personal context to the work, expanding upon my artistic journey and exploration during my degree. I will focus on my conceptual and formal decision making, areas of research, and discuss the world building and personal mythology that …

Personal Equation, Nicholas Hobbs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The body of this paper is a formatted version of text which exists natively on the web and is accessible at www.personalequation.art. Its non-linear narrative is meant to accompany and mirror, not describe, the artwork in the exhibition. The following two paragraphs are copied from the exhibition statement accompanying Personal Equation, which is on view in the Reading Room at the Fayetteville Public Library from April 3 to June 30, 2023: A personal equation is one that attempts to account for the inevitable role of subjectivity in scientific observations. The term was coined by astronomers in the 18th century who, …

From An Unlikely Place, Brittany Borcher

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From an Unlikely Place, a collection of eight ambitious paintings created while in residence at the University of Arkansas, examines the intersections of landscape painting, gendered gaze, feminine experience and the language of abstraction. One of the challenges I faced while working on this project was finding points of connection between verbal and visual language. As an artist, I consider where vulnerability, sensitivity and generosity intersect my work and am curious about the strange potential an individual's visual language; in my case, a concoction of abstract and figurative forms has to communicate the quality of experience. When placed together on …

Failure To Appear, Trent Harlan Bozeman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Failure To Appear is a series of photographs and collaged works that explores my layered connections between memory, unknown legacies, and knowledge of self. This body of work is not tied to any location or specific event. It is attributed to my returning to the South, returning to the institution, returning to my childhood residence and the perceived agnosia that occurred while working on a long-term project based in the Arkansas Delta.

Apotheosis, Zekiel Betzer

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Zekiel Dirk Betzer’s oil paintings are a visual representation of transfiguration – the elevation of daily life into myth. He believes that if we defer to monolithic ideologies to narrativize our life, we are prescribed a relationship with the transcendent, rather than discovering it, leading us down the path of ideological possession. He is principally interested in how we, as both artist and audience, invent meaning and how this invention informs the way we engage with reality; especially how objects or memories become sacred.

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Someone, Stop Her! The Musical (The Gallery Show): The Thesis Document., Hannah Dewitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis document accompanies a body of work that is radically vulnerable, personally political, and emotionally complex. Through my work, I challenge myself and my audience to sit with discomfort and create an environment suitable to generate a nuanced appreciation of pain that approaches its acceptance through humor, confessionalism, and the subversion of tropes against themselves as an act of counter-mimicry. This document situates my work within art-historical context with a primary focus on performance art and applies insight from each artwork referenced to further analyze and defend my own work. Additionally, I use texts relating to Camp sensibility, binary …

Autoethnography As Self-Portrait: An Autoethnographic Analysis Of Trauma-Sensemaking Through Art, Kally Werning

All Theses

This project thesis is centered around coping with early onset childhood trauma through an autoethnography of narrative and art creation. The goal of this project is to understand more deeply how the art making process synthesizes or disrupts trauma sense-making through the introspective lens of the artist as scholar. The project consists of an interactive art exhibit and this written scholarly analysis of the creation and display of this exhibit. This includes an introduction to my life as a trauma survivor and Greek-American woman, informed by communication scholarship and other relevant fields regarding narrative theory, Greek history, religious and trauma …

Refigured: Separations In Portraiture, Caroline Myers

All Theses

Utilizing traditional painting techniques embedded with digital syntaxes, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, serves as a catalog of my experiences with communication in a hyperconnected world. Processing illegible information caused by my hearing loss informs the process of imposing similar boundaries within my paintings. Like a technical glitch, these obstructions create an illegible visual experience, with evidence of my process remaining as a clue for the viewer’s understanding of the image.

Though personal in nature, I expand from my experience with auditory communication to employ pertinent explorations into the sustained unpredictability of today’s ever-expanding medium that is technology. My paintings …

One-Person Show: Field Notes On Writing, Producing, And Performing My Own Work, Riley Newsome

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an examination and journal for my process of writing my full-length one-person show Isolation, the organization and steps of producing it from scratch, and the preparation and performance of the show. It will also include the version of the Isolation used in the performance, a statement of artistry, some of my current acting materials such as a link to my website, a headshot, and a resume.

Wanderer, Andrew Mcallister

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

These photos are the result of having pursued an MFA during the COVID pandemic. I chose a mode of photography that would keep me away from people and I focused on what I could capture “on the road.” These 30 photos explore visual tropes related to movement, thresholds, barriers, and symbolic encounters. They capture moments of joy and contemplation. Each photo works individually, but I have edited and arranged them in the gallery to create something between a narrative and a non-narrative that approximates the experience of what traveling to capture them was like, both on foot and in motion, …

On Autonomy: Personal Agency Under Late Stage Capitalism, Levi Gentry

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Personal agency is the feeling of control over one’s actions. Capitalism is deeply etched into the fabric of America and the world at large. In this paper, I propose that late stage capitalism has forever altered the means by which personal agency manifests, that it has left no room for alternatives on account of its far-reaching scope. My work, through its subject matter and medium, refers to the lack of autonomy under escape or embrace. Failure and futility are both key ideas, as complacency is intrinsic to our current moment, which is evocative of the ongoing metamodern art movement.

Sad Socks Without Sole Mates, Shaelee Comettant

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Portrait of A Hundred Heartbreaks is a series that uses the unmatched sock as a symbol to speak about the experience of losing and grieving a relationship. Positioned as a series of memorials, the project facilitates spaces for viewers to bring their own life experiences to the project as well as empathize with those presented in the series. The use of the unmatched sock, an inanimate object, allows for it to be projected onto and melded into the specific and individualized narratives that viewers bring to the works. In its ability to access a level of specificity for each viewer, …

Ritual And Digital Craftsmanship: Imprudent Practices, Mik Patrik Mcdonnell

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This essay explores the role of traditional and digital craftsmanship in my art practice as it relates to provocative imagery. I tackle the question of how my practice is influenced by my audience. My process and products both aim to agitate the ascetic individual. The argument opens on a poetic, personal note, before defining craft/craftsmanship and its social reception according to scholarship. I outline the intended audience for my work being those akin to my mother: christian, middle-aged, and leaning conservative. Because I employ devotional, virtuosic craftsmanship I argue my work is effective at provoking dialogue with these persons who …