Digital Commons Network^™

Three Tries, Getsay

Art and Design Theses

Three Tries is an interdisciplinary exhibition featuring installation, sculpture, and performance that explores the experiences of a Queer nonbinary individual growing up in the Baptist Christian South. The exhibition centers around the reclamation of the body, identity, and space, drawing parallels between the baptist christian holy trinity of father, son, and the holy ghost and Sigmund Freud's Trinity of id, ego, and superego. By returning to the developmental stages of one's life, the exhibition serves as a revolutionary attempt to isolate the id and disentangle the workings of the id, ego, and superego. Three Tries represents a visual framework for …

Animus, Parker Grace Thornton

Art and Design Theses

Animus explores the uneasy intimacy between human bodies and nature through soft sculpture, short stories, photography, video, and a deadpan tone. An image of a frozen chicken defrosting inside of a sauna is countered by trail camera footage of hungry birds feeding on a foot that’s been life-cast in suet and birdseed; latex sheets hang like flayed skin, mimicking the texture of the trees’ surfaces on which the sheets were cast. The work posits that human attempts to command and contain nature can be compared to the shifting tectonics of a sexual relationship--in which there is play between dominance and …

The Feeling Of Being Ok, Benjamin B. Lee

Art and Design Theses

The Feeling of Being OK is an exhibition of appropriated imagery from unknown abandoned collections. Using the tension found in the enigmatic aspects of these materials, I investigate the fragility of the photograph and its capacity to fabricate memory and narrative. Designed to be a meditation on William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, this series focuses on themes including empathy and indifference, instability of identity, and life’s inevitable fate. By incorporating found materials such as vernacular objects and text into the installation, the potential for meaning is broadened. The work is installed in constellations or vignettes, allowing …

A Few Weeks, Maybe Months…, Tyler D. Mann

Art and Design Theses

A few weeks, maybe months… is an exhibition of photographs that contemplates the societal expectations of the gender binary in the context of travel. The work considers the intersection of manhood with my transgender identity and examines definitions of masculinity and gender. The American road trip is historically a masculine rite of passage which in my case will never fully come to pass. Discrepancies in imagery throughout the work interrupt the conventional narrative structure of the road trip. Acknowledging that the acquisition of masculinity is a futile act, the journey then becomes a complex act of reconciliation.

Dysfunctional, Gina R. Thompson

Art and Design Theses

Dysfunctional examines the relationships and experiences that contribute to my art. I grew up in an unsafe environment, with dysfunctional people. This work serves as a peek inside some of those emotions and explores issues of codependence and abusive family systems that suffer but endure. There is no victim in this story only a strong survivor who wants to cultivate awareness through her work. I have revisited this subject as a way to overcome shame. By being vulnerable and sharing my experiences I am able to heal.

Locating The Individual: Theatricality, Realism, And Historical Engagement In The Photographic Work Of Yinka Shonibare Mbe, Anne Weems

Art and Design Theses

This essay is a study of Yinka Shonibare MBE, London-born and Nigerian-raised contemporary artist, and his recent photographic practice that includes three series: Fake Death Pictures, William Morris Family Album, and Medusa. Exploration of the series reveals insight into Shonibare’s unique relationship to photography, in which he employs the hyper-realism and theatricality of the medium to interact with individuals from British history and reveal contemporary social and political injustices.

How To Orient Yourself In The Wilderness, Jack W. Deese

Art and Design Theses

How to Orient Yourself in the Wilderness is an exhibition presented in the style of a survival guide. The “wilderness” is a metaphor for the unknown. Within this category of the unknown are numerous literal and figurative spaces. I use the guide as an attempt to pin down why I gravitate towards the camera and what it means to me as a form of communication. Simultaneously I explore what it means to be “southern” and the manner in which it is traditionally represented in images. Also included in the wilderness tag is the “art world” and the relationship of straight …

Fracture: Failure As A Path To Utopia In Queer Art And Life, Charles D. Snyder Jr

Art and Design Theses

Reproductive Futurism is the pervasive structuring of politics and society around securing of the future through fealty to a figurative Child. The primary means of the Child’s proliferation is the normalizing of hetero-reproduction, which privileges heterosexuality with validity and meaning. Fracture represents a body of work that illustrates my personal break with these normalizing structures, and through embracing my queer sexuality a refusal of the figurative Child and the future it represents. The work articulates the role sex played in my failure to adhere to (liberation from) normative relational structures, and proposes potential new configurations of bodies and filial bonds …

Axis - A Theoretical Approach To Allegorical Pictorialism, Minimalist Ideologies, And Expressionism In Contemporary Photography., David King

Art and Design Theses

This Thesis explores the historical foundations and contemporary context of the photographic series titled Axis. Within Axis are vestiges of traditional Pictorial photography endowed with theories of minimalism and expressionism, which invites the audience to expand its insight from what it can see, to what it can understand, both visually and mentally. I will discuss how these influences have changed traditional pictorialism and will focus this series’ trajectory. In examining the works of Axis, the theory, its active practice, and principle of this series become clear. This practice, vested with craft mastery, allegorical study, and symbolism, calls to question photography’s …

Photography: A Communication Tool, Holly B. Ballenger

Art and Design Theses

There are limited resources available for art teachers wishing to implement a photography curriculum that focus on social justice. Since the camera is a highly effective communicative tool, students should be encouraged to vocalize their understanding of how to better society through visual images. This research highlights the significance of photography and its ability to change the manner in which people view the world. The culminating product of this research is a downloadable PDF that features both contemporary and historical artists and organizations that have used photography to express social justice. The aim of this research is to promote photography …

Shadow, Skin, And Surface; Examining The Work Of Viviane Sassen, Christina P. Washington

Art and Design Theses

Viviane Sassen is a Dutch fashion photographer, whose personal work feature people from African descent. Through the employment of the equatorial light, her models’ personal identities and faces are left in the shadow, their dark skin rendered “just” black, depicting the sitters invisible and without personal recognition.

In this thesis I offer an alternative to reading her work whose praise always stay on the surface; I examine her work in relation to the historical and geographical location, offer an analysis to the ontology of the shadow in photography, and examine the treatment of the surface of Sassen’s models.

You Define Me, Nicole A. Klein

Art and Design Theses

The work I created in conjunction with this paper is a representation of myself and my family, both individually and as a unit. The work was spawned by a search for my identity at my current age of 25. The outcome is an installation of photographs that focus on my heritage and family work ethic and a series of altar-like tables highlighting the personalities of my grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, and sister when they were experiencing life at my stage. I believe that this work culminates in defining me. Every element, every individual, reflects a part of myself in the …

Shirin Neshat: A Contemporary Orientalist, Mojgan Khosravi

Art and Design Theses

This thesis analyzes Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah photographs by exploring key socio-political events that have shaped Iranian history since the reign of Cyrus the Great, ca. 600 B.C. Since Neshat’s photographs have been largely intended for a Western audience, it is important to explore the concept of colonialism that has created East/West polarities and so greatly influenced our modern era. This paper intends to demonstrate that Neshat’s images perpetuate Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, which allocates the Oriental to an inferior position vis-à-vis his Occidental counterpart. For a Western audience, Neshat’s consistent use of the Muslim veil, illegible Persian …

Changing The Traditional High School Photography Curriculum: Integrating Traditional And Digital Technologies, Julie A. Cooper

Art and Design Theses

This thesis presents a photography curriculum for a beginning high school level photography class. It is designed as a teaching guide to structure a photography class that incorporates both film photography and digital photographic technology. One of the biggest challenges for teachers of photography is how to structure a curriculum with a limited number of enlargers and space in the darkroom, while incorporating digital technology with limited computer access for students. The curriculum presented here includes three major parts: a traditional photographic film component, a digital photography component, and a concepts component where students will experiment with different photographic techniques …

The Culinary Browns, Phoebe A. Brown

Art and Design Theses

The Culinary Browns is an experimental documentary that traces four generations of the Brown family beginning with Bob Brown, my great-grandfather, a writer of pulp fiction, modern poetry, cookbooks and social commentary. This documentary is not a linear history or purely factual document, but instead, uses personal experience as a means to generate more universal connections to the inherently dysfunctional dynamics of family, the fragmentary quality of memory, and to ultimately remind the viewer that history is relative.

An Autoethnographic Study Of The Effectiveness Of Teaching Art Appreciation Through Pinhole Photography To Home Schooled Students, Elizabeth Ann Church

Art and Design Theses

This research studies the effectiveness of teaching art appreciation to home schooled children ages 10-17 through a DBAE curriculum in pinhole photography via a weekend workshop. An autoethnographic approach to recording data about the students’ learning and my experience as their teacher was used in the research. Data was recorded as journal notes during and after each workshop from my experiences as their teacher and analyzed according to a grounded theory based on open coding. The workshop was open for registration of up to 25 home schooled students of any race, male or female, from the ages of 10 - …

The Unconventional Photographic Self-Portraits Of John Coplans, Carla Williams, And Laura Aguilar, Alice Di Certo

Art and Design Theses

Laura Aguilar, John Coplans, and Carla Williams explore, through photographic self-portraiture, the representation of unconventional bodies. Even though the images produced by these artists are quite different in style, they all reflect an interest in a representation of the nude human body that challenges the traditional concepts of beauty so prevalent in a Western society obsessed with physical perfection. Even though the three artists produced their photographic self-portraits at roughly the same time, using the traditional gelatin silver process and responding to standards of classical beauty, their divergent life experiences, education, and social backgrounds have led them to question an …