Fine Arts Commons^™

Transcendentalism, Art, And Social Change: An Overview For A New Generation, Nidra Kilmer

Theses - ALL

The purpose of this study is to investigate the philosophy, art, methods, and outcomes of the Transcendentalist movement in 19th century America, with the aim of identifying strategies for creative practice that may inspire artists and educators in the 21st century. In the introductory section, the need for such an inquiry is established. Correlations are drawn between transcendental art from China, India, and America, in order to enrich the conversation by examining how ideas of transcendentalism, art, and social change are approached from different cultural perspectives. The historical context and philosophical roots of the American Transcendentalists is summarized, followed by …

Mourning Earth; Ritual Expressions Of Ecological Grief, Katlyn Brumfield

Theses - ALL

This thesis considers the potential of grief and mourning to foster meaningful engagement with global ecological crises. I explore this potential through my own studio practice, positioning artworks and creative processes as vehicles for articulating collective experiences of loss, anxiety, and bereavement. To create these artworks, I draw from scientific knowledge, regional folkways, geologic history, and intergenerational experience with an emphasis on local culture. By forming sustained confrontations with the negative emotions of ecological destruction and loss, I advocate for the acceptance of grief as a reality of our time and as a possible means of imagining different ways of …

I Bloomed In The Dark, Izzy (Kiara) Narvais

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

We come from different places and different backgrounds. Our lives are a constant trial and error. Our past lives on and makes us bloom into the people that we are today. I want to share my story to create a safe place to talk about our trajectories. In a place of darkness and sadness that I sat in for so long, a bright light and a flower grew through it all within me. I have been bullied, abused, and sexually assaulted. I take that as not a place of weakness but a place of strength. I stand strong to be …

The Anxiety Of Presenting Identity, Savannah Fleming

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

This work explores aspects of Queer identity, historical reflection, and acceptance through painting, printmaking, and collage. Savannah Fleming's artwork intends to reclaim art history and alter it to include those excluded from its canon. Through the use of prints, paint, and collage, they create works that address the bias of art history, while tackling contemporary problems of identity and acceptance. References and alterations to art history are her way of addressing the erasure of Queer and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) from the art historical canon, while battling with modern-day confines on individuality.

Flesh And Circuit: Rethinking Performance And Technology, Conor Mcgarrigle, E L. Putnam

Articles

The live, embodied, material, and interactive qualities of performance have made it a notable means of exploring the creative potential of technological engagement, acting as a critical vector for revealing and resisting the technological colonisation of everyday life. The innovative collaborations of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) during the 1960’s with artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Robert Rauschenberg, Stelarc’s extreme body modifications, Dumb Type’s intermedia performance, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena and La Pocha Nostra’s poetic and speculative imaginings, have mapped the advances in technology and opened new creative fields to explore embodiment. However, there are still some significant oversights …

Interview, Elizabeth Naiden

Theses and Dissertations

An exploration of work by Liz Naiden in the form of a conversation discussing light and dark, attention and proprioception, and design and architectural theories of space in installation works. Addresses the role of voice, speech, and reading and speaking aloud, performing for oneself, and performing for others.

An Investigation Of The Impact Of Covid-19 Infection Control On Visual Art Installations In Hospitals With Pediatric Patients, Shannon Kimich

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the impact of COVID-19 infection control on visual artwork in pediatric hospitals and hospitals caring for pediatric patients. The study involved five hospitals in three southern America states and addressed visual artwork and art installations. The researcher administered an internet-based survey to participants in job functions related to hospital administration, environmental services, and project management across the facilities and received participation from 18 respondents. Additionally, telephone interviews were conducted with three participants with the job titles project manager/analyst, child-life specialist, and environmental services director. Survey questions were designed to examine visual art programs in selected children’s hospitals …

Sulfur And Sage, John Swincinski

LSU Master's Theses

Sulfur and Sage is a body of abstract paintings created out of memories of time spent immersed in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains and the Yellowstone Caldera during the summer of 2020. The paintings reflect specific places, experiences, and insights, which occurred as I sought solitude by returning to the one place where I feel most at peace with the universe – the woods.

Each painting is augmented by a written vignette, describing the occurrence it is based on. Should the viewer choose to include these short stories as they encounter the artwork, they provide the jumping off point …

Coast After Fire, Linda J. Kuckuk

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

none of this work has appeared in print or online

Jet Of Blood, Elizabeth S. Goins, Andy Head, Thomas Davis

Frameless

A virtual production of Antonin Artaud’s 1925 play, Jet of Blood.

Insight Ar. Relating Virtual Sculptures To Real Places., Volker Kuchelmeister

Frameless

InSight AR is a site-specific Augmented Reality project and mobile phone app produced for the popular Sculptures by the Sea Bondi exhibition, to be held in Sydney Australia in 2021. It forms uncanny relations between virtual sculptures, visitors, the environment and the art on site. The project is comprised of three parts: an outdoor work using AR plane detection and geo-location, AR image and spatial tracking for an indoor exhibit and a 3D map of the coastal walk, also presented in AR. The work is designed to be playful, fun and it encourages its viewers to share their experience on …

Holes In Fences, Matthew John Apol

Theses - ALL

This thesis relates my experiences associated to hardcore music (a sub-genre of punk rock) to the aesthetics, intentions, and motivations of guerrilla artwork with my practice as a visual artist. I apply the intentions, motivations, and activation mechanisms from these two art forms to work in conjunction with personally significant images and materials to create space and affectations to consider alternative systems of value. The format of the paper is explored through two distinct voices. One is a "formal artist voice" used for the explanation of research. The other is an "inner voice" describing my train of thought during different …

To Romp The Sky, Katherine Elizabeth Curlee Hamblen

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This is a creative thesis consisting of a collection of poetry divided into three sections. The poems explore themes of womanhood, motherhood, mental health, loneliness, and healing. The first section deals with childhood and family of origin, the second section is about the move into adulthood, individuality, and loneliness. The third follows the narrator into having her own children, creating her own family, and finding healing.

Discovering Caroline, Jon Meyers

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

DISCOVERING CAROLINE is the script for an ensemble, a feature-length supernatural drama, set in 1899. Caroline, presumed dead at birth, returns forty years later to the scene of that tragedy, a university nursing school training hospital, where her birth mother still works as a lunch lady. Surrounded by a dozen other characters (thirteen if you count the pig), played against a backdrop of a handful of supernatural events, this script explores familiar love, romantic love, inappropriate love, truth, deceit, death, and the consequences on others when these life events intertwine throughout seventy-seven scenes. Included here is an introduction as well …

Passing Savage: Poems, Bradley Murff

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This creative thesis is a collection of poetry. Many of the poems are personal in nature, but several deal with important social issues. The style of the poems varies from free verse to formal. Many of the formal pieces are sonnets, but there are other formal arrangements as well, such as “Mammoth Cave,” “Dawn Chorus,” and “A Staircase in Jamacia, Queens.” All of the poems were completed while I was a student here at Western Kentucky University.

Age, Ty Barnes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Age is a body of work that uses open ended, multi-directional narrative, economical craft, body positioning, and disorder to create situations for curiosity to take hold and rekindle a sense of naivety. Intentionally pedestrian material choice and playful, curious methodology work in tandem with the visual language of play to create a world building opportunity for the participating viewer. The objects are anchors or starting points with spaces in between for flexible narratives and imagined and reimagined worlds with no prescribed beginning or end point.

The exhibition and written thesis represent a conglomeration of connected-by-association ideas, a Rube Goldberg machine …

The Systemic Punches: Displacement Experience Of Vulnerable Immigrants, Eric Andre

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"The Systemic Punches: Displacement Experience of Vulnerable Immigrants" focuses on the impact of systems of state control such as immigration laws, policies, and practices that have been institutionalized and that have marginalized immigrants. In my thesis, I pay specific attention to inhuman acts of exclusion and discrimination resulting from the systemic barriers perpetuated by xenophobic and nationalist ideologies.

From this standpoint, my thesis exhibition employs interactive space, which includes visual art (drawing, sculpture ceramics), projection, video, and sound, as a means to explore the effects of the exclusive and discriminatory immigration policies and practices. Furthermore, it is designed to explore …

Cannibalizing The Popular Work Of Barbara Wagner, Beatriz Arcoverde De Oliveira

Theses

This project offers an analysis of the appropriation of popular culture aesthetics and imagery in contemporary art through a critical examination of the work of Brazilian artist Barbara Wagner. Wagner’s work contributes to an understanding of this increasing tendency, and also fosters the possibility of a discussion about its consequences in the social world, in creating a paradox of both challenging colonized sensibilities, and also working to maintain a structure of social inequality. Her work is also a good way to discuss the expanding contemporary definitions of popular culture

< Justice > And < Open Debate >: An Ideographic Analysis Of < Freedom Of Speech >, Emily Ann Spackman

Theses and Dissertations

< Freedom of speech > is a foundational ideograph in the American and more broadly, Western, tradition. Yet this term is not static in its meanings or commitments to social action. The current debate around cancel culture is the site of renegotiation of < freedom of speech > in relation to other terms such as < open debate >, < justice >, < marginalized >, < tolerance >, < democracy >, and < power >. This study is an ideographic analysis of two artifacts that represent two sides of the < freedom of speech > discussion: “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” and “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” Following McGee’s theory and method, this research examines the diachronic definition of < freedom of speech > through the U. …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …