Fine Arts Commons^™

Imaging The Great Irish Famine: Representing Dispossession In Visual Culture, Preface & Introduction, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

‘Niamh Ann Kelly's lavishly illustrated book throws new light on the visual culture commemorative of hunger, famine and dispossession in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. Located within the discipline of International Memorial Studies, the text and images both challenge and extend our understanding of Famine history. Examining the visual culture since the time of the Famine until the present, Kelly asks, how do we view, experience and represent the past in the present? To what extent does the viewer insert themselves in this complex process? Is there such a thing as ethical spectatorship? Kelly’s sophisticated yet sympathetic study of the “grievous history” …

I Love You, Go Away (A Novel), John Matthew Steinhafel

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

I Love You, Go Away, a novel set in Milwaukee, tells the story of a twenty-two year-old nobody, Gabriel Driscoll, who meets and befriends a middle-aged, drug addicted, recluse actor, Beau Brooks. But less than six months into their friendship Beau commits suicide. At the funeral Gabriel meets a twenty-nine-year-old corporate executive, Michelle, the daughter of Beau’s long-time girlfriend. Gabriel and Michelle bond over their mutual grief and quickly strike up a romance. At the same time, Gabriel’s semi-estranged mother, Sadie, a recovering heroin addict, reaches out to him in an effort to rebuild their relationship. What follows for Gabriel …

The Barren Springs Songbook, Caroline Grace Sutphin

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The Barren Springs Songbook is a poetry collection exploring Appalachian themes through the lens of three representative characters and my own experience. The poems presented are in blank verse and lean heavily on musicality, as each poem features an epigraph from my own Great Uncle Henry’s song lyrics. The poetry explores themes of poverty, folklore, feminism, and Christianity within the context of Barren Springs, an insular Appalachian community. The characters of Henry, India, and Myrtle provide a glimpse into how things have been in my family history, and the more modern poems representing myself show the cultural shifts that are …

Gut Feeling, Shelby Fleming

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Through curated space and abstracted sculptures that reference the viewer’s body, Gut Feeling, acknowledges the viewer’s experience as the focal point of the exhibition. I designed the whole gallery as an art object using both positive and negative space. The sculptures act as one unified system that guides the viewer through the exhibition in a counterclockwise rotation inward. The viewer follows the forms as they puncture through the walls of the gallery, while considering their own body’s relationship to the forms being seen. The viewer directly engages with the scale of the forms, sculptural placement, and sensory experience; these elements …

Glut And Guzzle, Ashley Kay Gardner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In Glut and Guzzle I explore my relationship with my partner, our sexualities and how to navigate these outside of the LDS faith of my childhood, and their struggles with gender, sexual expression and mental illness. This exploration landed on seductive and repulsive imagery of food and body. I use color, texture and size as a tool similar to visual tools of advertising to seduce my viewer. This is an exploration of how gender norms and the visual language of advertising that infiltrates daily lives and through media and religion can shape identity and gender roles. I utilize advanced 3D …

The Branch On Which The Blossom Hangs, Thomas Sterling Coffey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Branch on Which the Blossom Hangs is a body of paintings which address the relationship between landscape or physical presence and the primary experiences of emotion and perception. Through this examination of phenomenology and the malleability of the perceptual apparatus, the paintings express my feeling of dislocation caused by a cycle between depression, dissociation, and mental well-being. They question how an individual relates to their environment. The paintings seek to elicit the allusive and embodied qualities of poetry, framing and evoking a broader experience without defining it. By using the recognizable visual language of landscape, abstracted to the point …

Walking West: A Dérive Along The “Longest, Wickedest Street In America”, Conor Mcgarrigle Dr.

Conference Papers

Walking West centres on a dérive by the author along Denver’s Colfax Ave, the “longest , wickedest street in America”, with this paper an account of that dérive and its resulting artwork. Walking West comprised walking the length of Colfax in a single continuous movement while drawing a line on the sidewalk, tracing the route with a GPS device, while a satellite photograph captured the entire length of the street in a single image during the performance. The project additionally involved an outdoor screening of a film documenting the performance on prairie lands near Denver, and a gallery exhibition of …

The Persistence Of Hope In The Art Of Donald Keefe, Donald Keefe, Bonnie Dwyer

Faculty Works

Artist Donald Keefe is interviewed about his work and artistic development. His artwork Untitled Construct No. 4 is featured on the front cover of the magazine issue, and through out the interview section, pgs. 70-77. A biography and artist statement is also included in the inside cover of the publication. Other artworks featured are Mythos, Waiting, Consolation, Out-of-Work Horse, Revival, Autumn 2, Alone (Not Alone), and The Inauspicious Present No. 2.

Non Conviene Ma Conviene: Ogni Museo Decide Per Sé, Maria Sancho-Arroyo

Faculty Articles

This article discusses the museum industry in the United States plans to reopen their institution's in the wake of COVID-19.

The Expressive Forms Of Xu Bing’S Neo English Calligraphy, Jinfu Xie

Student Works (2020-2029)

Xu Bing is active in the contemporary art world and a famous calligraphy artist and painter who held many individual art exhibitions in New York New Art Museum, Czech National Museum and other famous international art institutions. In 1999, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his "significant contribution to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy". Xu Bing created a kind of new square character which combined English alphabets with Chinese calligraphy strokes and named it Neo English calligraphy. A series of Neo English calligraphy artwork was produced which theoretically influenced by the Chinese traditional philosophy …

Evermore Park: Audience Takeover And The Role Of The Twenty-First Century Spectator In Immersive Experiences, Elise Raycel Haines

Theses and Dissertations

Supportive fan bases in live events are more than casual viewers. They are the result of an active audience who have shifted the power dichotomy between producers and viewers via their range of participation. Drawing from scholars like Jacques Ranciere, Henry Jenkins, and Adam Alston, this essay uses Evermore Park in Pleasant Grove, UT, as a case study to review levels of engagement within spectatorship, and particularly how fandom can lead to audience takeover of immersive spaces. Evermore Park is a unique site that sits at the intersection of all three performance genres--immersive theater, park studies, and live action role-play. …

Entropy's Child, Brandon Reed Boulton

Theses and Dissertations

Art, process, and materials offer me an escape from the sometimes-crushing realities of my personal struggle with chronic mental illness. Escape is often my primary motivator for making art. However, personal meaning and understanding sometimes come while I'm working in the studio. Sometimes the meanings of the work only become clear years later. Personal experience and experimenting with materials and processes have led me to an appreciation and awareness of entropy--the second law of thermodynamics. My sculptures use spontaneity, abstraction, and process to dialogue with entropy.

A Drawing A Day Keeps The Pandemic Away: Vol 9, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

A Drawing a Day Keeps the Pandemic Away

The project is called A Drawing a Day Keeps the Pandemic Away. We created it on March 17th, which was the day when we realized that we weren’t going to be able to go back into the museum and continue installing the exhibitions we had been planning to open on March 27th. People were asking us what we, as an art museum, were going to do to reach out to the community during the pandemic shutdown and honestly we were wondering that ourselves, so we had an online brainstorming session and came up with the idea of posting a daily …

Yours Always, Always Yours, Emery Kate Tillman

LSU Master's Theses

The body of artwork discussed in this paper deals with the navigational process of the actualization of my own desires and needs in an intimate capacity specifically relating to my own queer identity. In this paper I will address the use of certain forms throughout the work as well as color and material choices. Yours Always, Always Yours is a thesis project produced as the final requirement of Louisiana State University’s Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art program.

Considerations Of Implementing Student-Directed Teacher-Supported Strategies In A Public Middle School Setting, Kaleb Joseph Ostraff

Theses and Dissertations

In an attempt to help middle school art students to be more engaged and have more ownership over their learning experience, the researcher, who is also the classroom teacher, created and implemented student-directed and teacher-supported strategies. Using a design-based research methodology, the author conducted a qualitative study over a twelve-week period investigating the affordances or limitations of implementing more student-directed strategies. The results showed three categories of student responses. The students that were ready and capable to direct their own learning excelled, guiding their own learning, and were able to generate personally relevant and disciplinary connected art. The second category …

Three Strikes: The Evolution Of A Creative Practice Through Discovery, Connection, And Structure Or We Should All Be Artists, Anthropologists, And Feminists, Anne Barnes

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

By identifying the three areas that merge to form my artistic practice: discovery, connection, and structure; this thesis uses my creative process as a way to form the link between my intellectual and material impulses, and to identify the connections I make between what abstract painting means to me, my feminist ideals and how they are informed by the gender inequality persistent in the art world today, as well as thoughts I have around the concept of the “feminine” as viewed through the lens of art history. In this way, I demonstrate how these elements are woven together and the …

Connections: Life, Memories, And Metaphors Through The Window, Cindra Lyn Ross

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

Abstract

Photographic imagery can transport a person mentally and emotionally to another place or another time, and create connections to people, memories, or experiences. A photograph can also conjure emotions or serve as a metaphor for something wholly unrelated to the image but triggered in our minds by our own history and impression of the image. Photographs can capture transitions and expanses of time by showing the movement of light, or via comparison in a series of images taken over periods of time.

My work has evolved to incorporate a series of images that focus on windows. Throughout the history …

Being In The Place Of Possibility, Laura Domencic

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

This paper explores my art practice as a phenomenological search for understanding how to be in the world. It begins with a description of my practice as a way to access the place of possibility that exists between faith and doubt. I examine materiality in art making to encourage consideration of both the physical and temporal nature of experience and to find balance with the increasingly incorporeal experience of the digital world. I discuss the materials and processes of drawing, sewing, and printmaking within their historical contexts. This paper connects my practice with artists who consider the act of perception …

In Through The Outdoors: A Case For Rugged Femininity, Shana Martin

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

Starting from the day we are born, society bombards us with rules, ethics, roles, and stereotypes as socially constructed ideals; however, as children we are not as concerned with these constructs. Children want to feel included and loved, exploring their curiosity about the world through play. Does any of this change as we grow older? A large part of our quest in life revolves around finding comfort and belonging while being part of something bigger than ourselves. Regardless of where we see ourselves within society, our associations and actions create relatable feelings of belonging, connection, and purpose.

In my current …

The International Rise Of Afro-Brazilian Modernism In The Age Of African Decolonization And Black Power, Abigail Lapin Dardashti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two competing artistic representations of Brazilian blackness emerged from 1966 to 1988. The first began in 1966 when the Brazilian government positioned itself as a leading diplomatic partner for newly independent African nations by showcasing black Brazilian art in West Africa. Through exhibitions, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry aimed to highlight the country’s presumed homogeneous identity and absence of racism. The second definition arose through the work of artists inspired by U.S. social rights activism, who founded Brazil’s civil rights movement in 1975. Brazilian artist-activists combined symbolism from U.S. Black Power, African liberation movements, and Afro-Brazilian culture to denounce racism in …