Fine Arts Commons^™

Meet And Run, Gia M. Binner

Theses and Dissertations

A defense for Gia Binner’s MFA Thesis, Meet and Run, argues that accessible art, known in this paper as commercial dance, is a meaningful vehicle for social change and that it has the ability to dismantle the outdated, European concert dance dominance by modeling the interdependency of both worlds.

Sandstorm Spring 2022, Leslie Malland

Sandstorm: A Journal of Arts and Letters

Full Manuscript

Reruns, Devann Donovan Gardner

Graduate Theses

My thesis explores memory from the perspectives of both the adolescent and the adult. I find there are a multiplicity of truths that live within each memory. I am a visual artist who creates immersive installations and artworks that explore the plurality of truths held within memory. I offer a childlike whimsy in my visual aesthetic to invite the viewer in and pose a question for their adult side to consider. I question where the line is drawn between the child's memory and the adult's knowledge, and allow the viewer to decide which of those to believe. Imaginary landscapes and …

There Are Ghosts In The Machine, Jonathan Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are ghosts in the machine is a body of paintings that dare to dissolve the boundaries between my physical body, intimate desires, and paintings. Utilizing the aesthetics of leather lifestyles, the paintings express the transformational potential of desire and transgression. Oriented within my experience as a queer, transgender male, I call upon influences that range from the body horror classics by director David Cronenberg or the transgressive attitude of Nine Inch Nails, to theoretical works on the power of eroticism by Audre Lorde and Georges Bataille.Modified by hardware such as chains, zippers, and grommets, the paintings express the transformational …

Meet Everyone With Art At Location And Time; M.E.A.L.T. Phase 1, Michael Louis Leblanc

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As an artist who participates in socially engaged arts, it is paramount in my practice to cultivate the balanced power relationship between the audience and artist by providing an ongoing safe environment, accessible subject matter and venue location, and a mechanism that not only calls for participation from the audience but empowers them through direct action. Meet Everyone with Art at Location and Time or M. E. A. L. T. Phase 1 is a mobilizable art exhibition with the long-term goal to meet the audience where they are and to offer an alternative to traditional person-to-person interaction and socializing.

M. …

Crying At Nothing But Colors, Maryalice Carroll

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

crying at nothing but colors is an installation of ceramic works that explores the abstraction of feelings, both physical and emotional. The installation itself is a house made out of tension cables that stretch wall to wall in the gallery space. Inside the house are 7 ceramic objects placed on wooden pedestals paired with tufted rugs.

Throughout this essay, I will describe the abstract ceramic objects as Beings. They are colorful and have textured glaze on the surface with a gloopy opalescent glaze oozing out of holes that cover each piece. They are an extension of myself. They are the …

As The Sun Yellows The Green Of The Maple Tree, Adam Fulwiler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree is a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation.

Reflecting on my childhood spent with my brother, Austin, who experiences sensory differences due to autism, I establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I invite the viewer into the act of slow looking—to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.

In the studio, I invent rules and aleatoric devices, mimicking …

Boring Magic, Madison Svendgard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Boring Magic encompasses an interest in labor, boredom, and exhaustion. Simultaneously, I am exploring what relief and escapism from these things look like. Escapism acts as the core of my work- what escapism looks like and what creates the need for escapism. I create narrative pieces that are always slightly removed from reality as a way to reflect on what I view as present-day dystopias. The worlds built to create this work are a combination of my lived experiences and invented characters and stories, which culminate in an alternate timeline set in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Relating to …

Invisible Until, Markeith Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Invisible Until” explores my personal experiences while working full time at Tyson Foods in Pine Bluff, AR up until moving to Fayetteville for graduate school. The body of artwork comes from reflecting on past a present while drawing from inspiration from Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel, and more. Using history as a tool to break down the American struggle I used conversations amongst my high school classmates to pull from their direct experiences to convey life and what it means to come from Pine Bluff. By using real people and their life events of trying to achieve progress, …

Nba: No (Anti-) Blackness Allowed, Rontaye M. Butler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper serves as the foundational pillar in my art practice. This paper combines my experiences, influences, motivations, hopes, dreams, methodologies, historical research and contemporary analyses into a single document ripe for revisions. This document lives and breathes; its contents are constantly evolving, and should be continually challenged and evaluated for relevancy and validity. Part memoir, part manifesto, and part artist statement, it establishes where my work sits in the canon of fine art, even as I don’t know yet what that means. My writings, visual artworks and all other creative actions are tethered to this document and vice versa. …

Me Tengo Que Ir, Eddy Leonel Aldana

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In Spanish, me tengo que ir means “I have to go.” “I have to go” as in go home, or back to one’s home country. As in leaving home for the unforeseeable future, hang up the phone, or pass away. me tengo que ir is also the name of a song by Adolescent’s Orquesta — a song about love, loss, and heartbreak over time that was always played at family parties when I was growing up.

In me tengo que ir, I use world history and personal memory to examine my family’s place within the Guatemalan diaspora. Diaspora is …

..., Claire Alfonso

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Words are fickle, easily misunderstood, and often put us at a loss... but we all have so much we feel we need to express. This begs the question: Is there any safe way of communication? Can anything ever really be communicated how you mean it? Will you ever see the reflection of what you feel, think, and dream outside of yourself? In response to this existential dilemma, I imagine an alternative language of images, sounds, color, feelings, and non-identification. My thesis is a meditation on the issues with standard language and the idea of alternative language. In my argument I …

Next Gen: Guiding Dads As They Spiritually Guide The Next Generation, Deylan Michael Smith

Masters Theses

The spiritual development during the teenage years are pivotal in determining the religious and spiritual values as teenagers transition into adulthood. As serious as this stage of development is, there is a lack of involvement in the faith development of teenagers on the part of parents, specifically Christian fathers. With this lack of paternal support during faith development, the percentage of those leaving the church during adolescents and early adulthood is rapidly increasing. The aim of the research was to understand important milestones in spiritual development of teenagers, why Christian dads are uninvolved in this development, and best strategies for …

Data Narratives: Aesthetic Activation Of Urban Space Through Augmented Reality, Conor Mcgarrigle Dr., John Buckley

Books/Book Chapters

This chapter discusses Data Narratives, a commissioned augmented reality artwork resulting from a period as artist in residence with Dublin City Dashboard. Data Narratives focused on working with city data to create hybrid artistic representations of Dublin’s ongoing housing affordability crisis, acting both as activist artistic engagement with the socio-political-economic space of the city and aesthetic activation of urban space through augmented reality. As data describes and defines so much of our digital every day, the project and residency programme asked how it could be leveraged as a medium for artistic creation and how could art supply new insights …

Home/Sick, Elizabeth P. Fontenot

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper is a supporting document that discusses the conceptual and technical aspects of the artworks in the accompanying exhibition, HOME/SICK. The work in the exhibition consists of selections from different series of work that are inspired by related subject matter. The content driving the work responds to anecdotal experiences of people living in communities near oil refineries and chemical processing plants and how events at these facilities affect their way of life. Many times, these are communities of color which strive to voice concerns and protect homes from harmful toxins. In one series, original and appropriated imagery serves as …

The Met Costume Institute: Evolution, Metamorphosis, And Cultural Phenomenon, Shelby Kanski

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

Line As Site And Material, Analise Minjarez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This paper recounts my artistic practice over the last three years. I will describe the places, artists, artworks, and processes that have been meaningful to me in this time as I pursued my MFA and worked to understand my relationship to the living world. In the thesis Line as Site and Material, I respond to materiality and site through installation, sculpture, drawing, and video. I work with clay harvested from my hometown of El Paso, TX to connect to the personal histories of the borderlands and geological time. In the Second River Series, I walk in the empty riverbed of …

The Reading Of Sir Toby Belch: A Queer And Black Exploration Of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night., Jahi E Bogard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This MFA thesis explores queer, black representation in William Shakespeare’s drama and in the University of Louisville’s Department of Theatre Arts Fall 2021 production of an adaption of Twelfth Night (1601). Directed by Jennifer Pennington, the repurposed script and non-traditional casting targeted a modern audience. Cast as Olivia’s drunk uncle, Sir Toby Belch, I aimed to discover if my identify as a black, queer, cis man could be incorporated into Shakespeare’s text. Sir Toby Belch’s raucous, heterosexual, and sometimes violent, traits are often imagined today as innately masculine. I argue that Shakespeare’s plays can be appropriated by queer, black actors …

Transformation., Jingshuo Yang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My works mainly show my perception of life and my change of thought. The world is full of changes, and the pandemic has disrupted our lives. Many people, including me, are confused about the world. Philosophy and my observation and thinking about the world helped me to have a clearer understanding of the world. My paintings Licia, Butterfly Woman, and Live with Covid reflect my understanding of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's theory of empathy. Within my art, I also use another German Philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's theory of the culture industry to deepen my understanding of some social phenomena. My …

Rituals Of Belonging, Trecha G. Jheneall

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This ensemble is a (geo)autobiographical affirmation of the activities of water bodies, fiberboard drum barrel containers, and sound as well as their attendant rituals of belonging amongst People of Sub-Saharan African descent, particularly those belonging to the Caribbean diaspora.

Water as an ever-present life source serves as a dynamic metaphor for Caribbean people’s instinctive travel in and outside of the region’s soluble boundaries. The barrel container, often in transit analogizes the apprehension of displacement, congregation, arrival, or destination towards the desired feeling of security or place.

Elements of ritualistic practices located in migratory movement, music and labor are means of …