Fine Arts Commons^™

¡Escriba! ¡Write! Volume 9, June 2011, Hostos Community College Library

¡Escriba!

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A Sequence Of Gaps, Oscar Santillan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis unfolds some theories and reflections on specific works I developed during my MFA. It is a map of the past and present of my art practice, and speculates about its future.

Melancholy And The Infant, Wesley Friedrich

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis contains descriptions of works I have made over the last two years. These descriptions have been applied to support themes of melancholia, restraint, and indeterminacy, which serve as prevalent strains connecting recent work. A few stories are also shared in the way pieces come about through thinking and making.

Quick Xlthlx Fish, Andrew Brehm

Theses and Dissertations

A sequence of short stories both fact and fiction leading to, resulting from, or having nothing to do with the three sculptures that comprise The Crescent Club, an installation for the Anderson Gallery.

A Voice From The Dust, Gian Pierotti

Theses and Dissertations

We shall not starve. We shall not lack shelter. We shall have a hearth. Awake self reliance! Our art is for feeding, warmth, protection. Ceramics– our temporal salvation. Clay– our material life-force. Transformed by fire we arise with the skills of the ancients! No longer will we live in obscurity. To the deskilled, your fate is at hand! You have chosen alienation, distraction, banality, and sloth. Embrace your digital false Gods and die or be reborn to the natural physical world. Now, together we complete our reason for being. We create a new world of kinship. A hope for the …

Plex, Jon-Phillip Sheridan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the evolution of my practice as it developed over my two years of graduate school. I entered school interested in the built environment and how structures helped create subjectivity and provided sites for material and phenomenological transformations. Early in graduate school, I developed a photography series that investigated these issues. However, an awareness of a conversation occurring in the larger art world that questioned the efficacy of photography drove me to consider ways to extend my practice into sculpture and installation. Over the next two semesters, I developed my ideas of light, form and structure into video …

An Artless Dream, Lauren Abrams

Theses and Dissertations

The brain begins collecting and categorizing information from the moment we are born. It can identify patterns and direct our choices long before we are consciously aware of it. Even when we become aware of the deliberate choice we often don’t know why we are making it. It is striking how much of what we do is dictated subconsciously by our brains. While I am not a scientist and I don’t aim to research the brain, I think it is interesting to think about how this effects what I do in the studio. I am a product of the world …

I Wanna Rock!, Amanda Briede

Theses and Dissertations

Do you know that feeling? That feeling when the music you are listening to a concert or a new record and it just seems right? When you think, that’s it! That’s what music should sound like! When the music seems to touch your soul or mirror it, or…. something. And when you feel that, nothing else seems to exist and you are purely experiencing the music. My thesis work explores the way in which we try to capture this ephemeral moment of pure experience in order to keep it with us to revisit at our leisure. This, however, is a …

The Absent Artist: Muteness And Fiction In Recent Painting, Costa Michael Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations

For the written component of my thesis, I am attempting to make sense of a current strain in contemporary painting which, generally speaking, tends towards reduction, humble materiality, lack of overt, didactic critique, and a scholarly interest in outmoded or overlooked art historical movements and figures. These are tendencies with which, as a painter, I feel both affinities and differences. Rather than rigidly define a “movement,” I will identify prevalent modes but also highlight individual strategies. I will begin by outlining some of the basic, underlying problems in painting today. I will then examine, as case studies, three young painters—Josephine …

Live Attitude, Keith Jason Varadi

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis serves as an open-ended document of a young artist attempting to sift through his accumulated opinions in order to figure out what it means to accept complicity in the face of auspicious authority, rapid turnover, and paper-thin irony and nihilism, while still striving to stake a claim at something worth making and defending.

Dig, Spencer Neale Iii

Theses and Dissertations

DIG Spencer Kellogg Neale III MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2011 BA, The College of Santa Fe, 2009 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University, 2011 Major Director: Bob Paris Associate Professor, Department of Kinetic Imaging This paper is an outline to various creative pursuits in the Graduate school of arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in leading to my MFA Thesis Exhibition. I have been focused on the works of artists exploring audio/visual textures and overall conceptuality behind a Lo Fidelity sensibility. In my …

Craft Cyborg, Laina Seay

Theses and Dissertations

By merging the ancient associations that clay has with the human form and prosthetic science I question the relevancy and role of the human body in the future. As prosthetics heighten the awareness of the body through absence these additive limbs further this relevancy by presence. With greater advances in genetic engineering and plastic surgery biology will no longer dominate and these ridged clay extensions could become flesh.

Outside Things, Jacob Sorenson

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis is a description of the issues encountered during the process of research and construction of the objects leading to, and consisting of, the work shown in Outside Things. The work is my attempt to gain personal insight into the complicated relationship between nature and culture. Through abstract furniture objects, floral patterns, and robots I explore the relationship between actual landscape and the constructed man-made bio-mimicry that convolutes the definition of Nature.

Every Night At 8pm, Jennifer Lauren Smith

Theses and Dissertations

An experiential thesis, this document begins at dawn, travels through storms and calm air and ends at night in Argentina. It details the circumstances and influences leading to my thesis exhibition at the Anderson Gallery, including an artist’s statement told through a creative reading of Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” and the excitement I found in an out-of-print text on scuba diving.

A Subversive Socialist Craftsperson In The Post-Post Modern World (The Conspiratorial Ranting Of Kristoff Kamrath), Kristoffer Kamrath

Theses and Dissertations

My research in this thesis delves into the corruption of American culture and my personal experience with the academic institution of art school. I delineate my symbolic representation of a social agenda through images and objects that reference the absurdity of institutionalized art and the decay of socialist idealism in the realm of crafts and contemporary culture at large.

Producto Centro Americano : Made In Honduras, Alma Leiva

Theses and Dissertations

PRODUCTO CENTRO AMERICANO: MADE IN HONDURAS By Alma Leiva Master of Fine Arts A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2011. Thesis Director: Robert Paris, Professor Kinetic Imaging / Photography and Film I was born in 1973 in Honduras, a country under military regime. In 1982 after 20 years of military rule, Honduras finally had democratic elections. During that decade, and as a consequence of the cold war, the kidnapping, torturing, murder and disappearance of civilians became common practices among the Honduran military. …

Eulogy., Megan Renee Levacy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses the search for identity which underlies her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Eulogy, hosted by the Carroll Reece Museum on the campus of East Tennessee Sate University, Johnson City, Tennessee, from March 8 to May 6, 2011. This exhibit contains works which explore the artist's relationship with the natural world, ornithology, philosophy, psychology, poetry, and related personal influences.

The artist's thesis work consists of paintings, drawings, and photographs. The artist references her own investigation of poetry, philosophy, psychology, and personal history which have shaped a private sense of awareness. Also reviewed are the influences of artists …

A Matter Of Taste., Charles E. Haskins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper supports the Master of Fine Arts exhibition at the Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, from March 14th through March 18th, 2011. The exhibit is composed of nine oil paintings depicting an invented story about two characters who create a soup for a cooking competition. The show A Matter of Taste chronicles an allegory concerning the evaluation of creative works. Through Gaudie and Baudie's "odd" recipe this work illustrates the ways in artists and art audiences interact and determine artistic value. The work is inspired by techniques in distortion and narrative painting. The following expands on the …

Between Friends., Greg Warren Howser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper correlates with a Master of Fine Arts graduate thesis exhibition held at Slocumb Galleries in Ball Hall at East Tennessee State University March 21 through 25, 2011. The exhibition contains a mixed media body of work including prints, metal point drawings, and quilts. These works are an exploration showing the artist's voyeuristic studies through line, texture, form, pigment, and wax.

This thesis goes into detail about how the artist came to create this group of art by discussing tools, printmaking processes, encaustic, metal point, and his influences.

Feet Touching The Floor, Ashley Lyon

Theses and Dissertations

Realism, the uncanny, the figure, empathy, humanism, sculpture, feet, architecture, photography, oscillation, tin, installation, material, form, Herzog, projection, tactility, subject, haptics, sensibility, wax, portraits, space, embodied perception, rendering, duplication, thing, object, fragment, body, gaze, clay, god, man.