Theory and Criticism Commons^™

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Beside Yingzao: An Index Of Chinese Building Traditions, Tianyi Hang

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Yingzao referred to the Chinese architectural practice prior to the nineteenth-century introduction of the term jianzhu, the translation of “architecture.” The earliest preserved illustrated government-issued building standard was titled Yingzao fashi. Published by the Southern Song government in 1103, Yingzao fashi defined and regulated technical terms used to describe imperial construction as well as specified the labor costs of certain building techniques. These terms inform our understanding of the traditional Chinese way of categorization and knowledge system of architecture and architectural elements.

Titled “Beside Yingzao,” this study takes the technical terms from Yingzao fashi to guide the reader in investigating …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

How To Survive The Apocalypse: Using Film, Television, And Video Games As Gateways To Self-Analysis, Braeden Raymer

Theses - ALL

This thesis serves as an investigation on the use of film, television, and video games as access points for personal analysis in imagined scenarios. When creating a fictional world, characters' motivations and behaviors are often based on real-life experiences. In the apocalypse genre, understanding how a character might behave in such an extreme circumstance can be difficult to predict, considering few have lived through comparable conditions. To supplement personal experiences and observations, a creator might use other stories as gateways to self-examination. The investigation begins in film, exploring how stories provide a viewer with new experiences that they can then …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores painting through the ideas of dust, mist, and haze as specific atmospheric metaphors that could be used to describe ontologies of space, time, memory, and history.

The Portrait And The Pedagogical Object: Art, Advertising, And Commerce In The Works Of Marcel Broodthaers, 1968-1971, D'Arcy Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the opposition of language and object and the roles of art, poetry, advertising, and commodity in Marcel Broodthaers’s van Laack ad (1971). Through a theoretical analysis of Broodthaers’s works from 1968-1971, this study situates the enigmatic van Laack ad as one of the Belgian artist’s most significant, yet overlooked artworks.

Black And Silver Screens: Afropessimism And Filmic Appropriation In Contemporary Video Art, Madeleine A. Seidel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at the video works of artists Ulysses Jenkins, Ina Archer, and Garrett Bradley and their appropriation of images of Black actors in Classic Hollywood films through the theoretical framework of afropessimism.

Antifascism And Wildness. “Partisan Ecologies” Between The Spanish Civil War And The Global Warming Era, Jaime Vindel

Artl@s Bulletin

This short essay uses the concept of “partisan ecologies” in order to analyse certain past and present chapters on the relationship between anti-fascism and nature. According to the Swedish eco- Marxist Andreas Malm, wilderness has not only represented an essentialist idea resulting from the projections of conservationist environmentalism about a supposedly untouched nature, but has also been one of the real spaces of a modern antagonism. Taking this theoretical point of departure, the text describes the Alpine Battalion of the Sierra del Guadarrama during the Spanish Civil War and its resonances in some contemporary events.

Scenes Of Screens, Scenes Of Sodomy: The Role And Impact Of The Folding Screen In Eighteenth-Century French Erotic Novels, Katherine Delony

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project provides an analysis of the folding screen as a literary agent and signifier which reflects the cultural happenings of the eighteenth century with specific emphasis on new ideas about queerness which arise in France during the eighteenth century. I will focus primarily on the Marquis de Sade’s (1740-1814) Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) (as well as La Nouvelle Justine, 1797) and John Cleland’s (1709-1789) Le Fille de Joie (translated 1751) with reference to Jean-Louis Fougeret de Monbron’s (1706-1760) Margot la Ravaudeuse (1753), Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir Jean-François de Bastide’s (1724-1798) La …

A Boy Born On Wednesday, Charles Krampah

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My relocation to America has presented an unprecedented space for self-examination. The components of my identity and personality have been laid bare before me; My blackness in the face of racism and white hegemony, my African heritage in the face of post-colonialism and imperialism, and my faith in the face of an increasingly secular western culture.

Am I who thought I was? Am I more or less? Why do I feel like a different person, and what does this mean for my future?

My research and art practice serve as a form of introspection. I tell an internal story in …

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 …

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. …

Searching For Hades In Archaic Greek Literature, Daniel Stoll

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No single volume of mythological or philological research exists for Hades. In the one moment Hades appears in archaic Greek literature, speaking for only ten lines, Hermes stands nearby. Thus, to understand and journey to Hades is to reckon with Hermes’ close presence. As I synthesize research by writers from several different disciplines, may some light be brought into the depths. May we analyze Hades’ brief appearance in archaic Greek literature, examining how what I define as the “Hermetic” emits from his breath in the one moment he physically appears and speaks.

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes, Andrew Demczuk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes examines the ways we encounter environments as readers/viewers of operas, literature, film, and sound recordings, and how each medium requires different detail-gathering techniques. Respective to the previously mentioned mediums, Sun & Sea (2017), Mount Analogue (1952), El Mar La Mar (2017), and Energy Field (2010) are analyzed by engaging with environmental media studies and invention. Reflecting the nature of each landscape—summits of mountains, aporias of deserts, and mysteries of waterscapes—an elemental approach is taken in investigating how these spaces may be noticed, internalized, recorded, and traversed by both the artist and viewer. …

Asking For Forgiveness: Negotiating The Creation Of Memory Through Public Memorialization, Alyssa Castronuovo

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The practice of spatializing culture, or “examining space through theories of embodiment, discourse translocality, and effect,” localizes the global and separates hegemonic narratives of space from how it is actually utilized by the people who interact with it. Setha Low argues that this perspective is especially useful to the anthropologist committed to challenging the discipline’s historically eurocentric approach to studying culture. She writes that a spatial focus “[draws] on the strengths of studying people in situ, producing rich and nuanced sociospatial understandings.” This project began with an interest in theorists such as Edward Soja, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre, …

Anthropomorphism In Architecture: An Investigation Into Anthropomorphism Through Ancient Greco-Roman Religious Structures, Emily Wilcox

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper will outline and detail an investigation into religious Greco-Roman structures of antiquity through the lens of anthropomorphism. Through defining anthropomorphism, three lenses of thought have presented themselves as means of inquiry: metaphor, scale and proportion, and ergonomics. Previous research into these structures and cultures has shown that there was indeed consideration for the human body in designing in construction; this project hopes to solidify these claims and present new supporting information regarding specific relationships to the body using anthropomorphism. Many contemporary buildings approach the relationship to the human body as a mask or an afterthought, disregarding what reflecting …

Architecture In Anime: Miyazaki's Motifs, Jack Collins

Honors Projects

Internationally known, celebrated, and respected, director Hayao Miyazaki has become a household name by transforming an industry through his films. This research focuses on Miyazaki’s process and the similarities he shares with architects, both in and out of his works. By initially examining his background, the three motifs of architecture, inspiration, and sustainability are explored through works like Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke and more. The results of this research are to inform fans of both architecture and anime about the connection between someone who designs and builds the world, and one who designs and builds …

The Currency (Volume 1, Issue 1), Elsa Akesson, Claudio Castillo, Sophie Delaplaine, Jade Wu, Maria Paula Suarez

The Currency--SIA Student Magazine

Table of Contents

Page 2: Elsa Akesson, "Kids of Morondava," 2020, oil & acrylic on linen, 130 x 97 cm.

Page 4: An Interview with Generative Artist Claudio Castillo by Sophie Delaplaine, SIA-London '22

Page 9: Jade Wu, "Grain Rain," 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 36"

Page 11: Navigating the Artworld: My Personal Journey as an Emerging Artist through the Pandemic by Maria Paula Suarez, SIA-NY '23