Digital Commons Network^™

Touch The Earth: Integrating Biophilic Design And Nature Rx Therapy Initiatives At Georgia State University, Kennedy L. Burks

Art and Design Theses

Touch the Earth aims to establish a meaningful connection between university students experiencing mental health difficulties and the therapeutic advantages inherent in the natural world. The Touch the Earth program currently concentrates its efforts on an outdoor activity initiative at Georgia State University (GSU) within the Recreational Services Department. This thesis applies the principles of biophilic graphic design and Nature Rx initiatives to revitalize, redefine, and educate GSU students on effective strategies to enhance their mental well-being through a strategic rebranding and the creation of informative and promotional materials. The thesis endeavors to raise awareness, educate, and encourage GSU students …

The New College Of The Arts: Forming A Collaborative Community At The College Of The Arts At Georgia State University In Atlanta, Ga, Peter Huesemann-Odom

Art and Design Theses

The Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design, the School of Music, and the School of Film, Media & Theatre form the College of the Arts at Georgia State University. These schools operate in separate campus areas. This lack of unified presence impedes collaborative and inspiring exchanges between communities. The New College of the Arts investigates forming a community that combines all the College of the Arts disciplines and highlights the College’s impact on the city of Atlanta, Georgia State University, and the arts. The components needed for a successful evolution are discovered through primary and secondary research, including …

The Blue Horizon, Shir Bassa

Art and Design Theses

Unlike American Jews, I don't let religion define me. Unlike Israeli Jews, I don't believe I should do anything for a land. This exhibition explores the viewpoint of an appropriating parasite in search of a welcoming host. This exhibition will lead viewers through the myriad roles an artist can assume for herself. The use of repetitions and instructions are essential to my artistic practice and allows me to challenge and define my own belief systems for both oppression and liberation. The Blue Horizon is an exhibition made of printmaking, video and textile.

Addressing Ecoanxiety Through The Lens Of Children’S Literature In The Elementary Art Classroom, Dara E. Andre

Art and Design Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the how as an art educator I can incorporate environmentalism into my art lessons without furthering ecoanxiety in my elementary classroom. Through looking into the many years of research behind the field of eco-art education I found that there were many teachers already finding ways to make their classrooms environmentally conscious. I chose to further explore this topic through the medium of illustrated children’s literature in an attempt to uncover new ways to address environmentalism in the classroom without causing further harm to student mental health. Through the process of writing and …

Design Thinking Process: Visual Art Curriculum Design Tool For Students With Severe And Multiple Disabilities, Kendall Le Siddiqui

Art and Design Theses

All students enter the art room and deserve the opportunity to participate in learning about and creating art. Planning for students with severe and multiple disabilities can be difficult because there is a lack of training and exposure before becoming an art educator. The design thinking process centers the student in the art educator’s research and planning. The design thinking process as a curriculum tool could be a clear path for art educators to plan for success for this population of students.

Terra Multa, Emily A. Albee

Art and Design Theses

Terra Multa is an exhibition of ceramic sculpture and tile installations inspired by historical folktales. Through the industrialization of agriculture and animal husbandry, humanity has created a system that provides surplus for some, while creating food scarcity and environmental hazards to others. Foreseeing a dystopian conclusion to this current trajectory, Terra Multa abstracts these stories to create a fairytale for a world that is no longer able to support traditional livestock practices.

Relatives, Leeza Negelev

Art and Design Theses

More than ever, our lives take place online—a hyper-privatized network posing as a commons. In exchange for convenience, information, and sociality, our attention is pulled in countless directions by companies harvesting behavioral data and compelling engagement through addictive technology. At best we become disaffected by overstimulation and repetitive, preference-based content. At worst, we become hostile. My current work leverages the aesthetic potential of attention. As a counterpoint to the anesthetizing quality of virtual life, my paintings rely on the sensate. In my exhibition Relatives, I experimented with two types of attention. One decisively developed subject matter through long stretches …

Olfactory Vision: Recollection Of Visual Information Through Smell In Graphic Design, Monica Suarez Argudin

Art and Design Theses

Olfactory Vision is a social study conducted to understand the influence of a scent within graphic design processes, enhancing the recollection of details. Twenty-four random adults were tested. The experiment was divided into three groups, A, B, and C, presenting two sets of cards; the first had symbols, and the second one had typefaces. A summary of the investigation was provided; however, the rose oil fragrance was not revealed, avoiding conditioning the subjects. The participants had an in-person and follow-up questionnaire one week after, testing their short and long-term memory. The results generally showed no significant difference between genders. In …

Homo Ludens, Kengel Maysonet

Art and Design Theses

Play and desire are intrinsically linked for the adult queer individual. Our desire to play and our attraction to each other are aspects of our identities that we are trained to repress. In Homo Ludens, I challenge the normative constraints that restrict us from participating in fun by creating a space where we can be free to play and be sexual beings without having to cordon off parts of our identities. I facilitate play in a queer sexual context by creating games that represent different kinds of sexual and relationship dynamics. Through constructing an alternate reality filled with color …

Interference : Interwoven, Sally C. Garner

Art and Design Theses

Weaving, a symbol of knowledge and technology, is so prevalent throughout time that it simultaneously predates recorded history and propels us into our future – a future that is in danger due to environmental threats. The work in Interference : Interwoven reflects upon human attempts to control nature and contrasts these efforts against nature’s inherent unruliness and chaos. Through geometric and tumultuous woven structures, I examine the idea that humanity’s constant drive toward greater knowledge and better technology relies upon the flawed belief that we have the right to meddle in nature’s processes. The work in Interference : Interwoven examines …

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 …

A Wheel Inside A Wheel, Elizabeth Storm

Art and Design Theses

Getting lost in nature, I can sense the unfixity of its countless forms and processes. Recurring patterns at micro and macro scale arise from creative and destructive forces in space and time; reality appears simultaneously constant and impermanent. My thesis work, a wheel inside a wheel, explores the self in relation to contemporary conceptions of reality. I look at static and dynamic representations of stripped-down patterns modeled from nature, like circular bursts, splintering branches, or the meander of a wave. The action-based works on paper and cloth leverage invisible forces and signal permanency and physical embodiment, deepened through an …

Sky Garden Graduate Student Housing, Maria Paula Saavedra Rios

Art and Design Theses

This thesis presents an on-campus graduate student housing project that aims to revitalize its Downtown Atlanta neighborhood, contribute to Georgia State University’s academic goals and campus development plans, and address aspects of the housing problem that GSU’s graduate students currently face in Atlanta, Georgia. The literature review and data collected from the graduate student survey informed the design process by understanding the urban context history and identifying graduate students’ needs and preferences. The project aims to reposition a vacant office building located on-campus and convert it into student housing serving an age-diverse population offering common areas that contribute to students’ …

Wax And Mortality: A Transhistorical Study On Wax In Artistic Depictions Of Death, Mary Kirkpatrick

Art and Design Theses

This essay is an exploration of the medium of beeswax throughout Western art history from antiquity to the Baroque period that explores how it has consistently been used to illustrate death, decay, and violence. Examples range from funerary effigies to magical poppets to anatomical models, each displaying how the substance of wax is inherently tied to corporeality and mortality. Each example is chosen to demonstrate how either the visual appearance or the tactile properties of wax influence its use in corporeal sculpture, culminating in the work of Gaetano Giulio Zumbo to illustrate a union of the two.

Do You Remember The Sun...?, Travis Dodd

Art and Design Theses

Do you remember the sun…? is an interdisciplinary installation that explores gold’s function as a utilitarian material within technology. Once reserved for the Gods, gold can now be found within the circuitry of cutting-edge space exploration technology or plated against the surface of mundane consumer electronics. Gold’s utilitarian shift away from adornment and capital began in the 1970s when digital technology first entered the home. First-generation personal computers and video game systems, both latent with gold, allowed access to new interactive virtual worlds that would evolve into technologies that currently dominate culture and society. The imagery of Do You Remember …

Representation And Participation In Anime, D. Lasseter

Art and Design Theses

Anime, also known as animation, is a style of Japanese film and television animation, typically aimed at adults, as well as children. One of the popular uses for anime—aside from entertainment—is its potential to create powerful messages and address social issues. Despite its huge popularity among diverse audiences, anime is almost entirely devoid of Black and Hispanic characters, as well as social justice themes. After examining the literature, I attempt to provide a model for how a person of one ethnicity can create an authentic character of a different ethnicity, by presenting my character, Ninurai. As a Black artist, I …

Knowing Together With An Other, Jessica Self

Art and Design Theses

ABSTRACT

All people change as we develop. They embody a variety of roles at different stages of life. Carl Jung refers to these roles as Archetypes. Folklore, mythology, and Chakra Systems explore and illustrate Archetypes making them easily relatable. In Knowing Together With an Other, I represent some of the Archetypes I have embodied during my own life. My sculptures depict stereotyped versions of femininity: the seductress, the lover, the mother, and the martyr, they are influenced by Western visual culture, folklore, and personal experience. To create the figures, I combine a life cast of my body with different …

Nostos, Diane Hiscox

Art and Design Theses

Nostos is an exhibition of paintings and textile works that are manifestations of my experience of this extraordinary past year. The work reflects several themes: documentary of the everyday as a form of resistance, feminist art practice, and art-as-therapy. A feminist perspective reclaims domestic or quotidian subject-matter as socially and culturally significant, and acknowledges the place of traditionally female labor in the pantheon of fine art. In representationally-painted images and stitched “maps,” I process personal realities such as domesticity, comfort, geography, the passage of time, and how I observe the world.

I'M Your Perfect Girl, Melissa Anne Huang

Art and Design Theses

I’m Your Perfect Girl is a thesis exhibition of glitch-inspired painting and video self-portraiture that studies the desires, failures, and dissonance associated with portraying an idealized self for a digital audience. Adopting the perfect girl persona online has never been easier; however, the physical and emotional roles society expects women to fulfill have never been further out of reach. In this exhibition, I consider how those of us coming of age with the internet construct alternative identities online—fantasies, really—that bear little resemblance to the person “IRL.” Internet-era artists have built convincingly realistic perfect girls. I take the perfect girl …

Zoetrope Blues, Andrew Tetz

Art and Design Theses

Zoetrope Blues surveys the zoetrope style of animation from its inception to its contemporary practitioners, discussing both the unique charms of the medium and the technical elements that make it work. This paper delineates the process behind zoetrope creation while also investigating the effects made possible by modern technology.

The zoetrope was the world’s first motion picture format, using the flicker of a handheld carousel to transform a spinning disc into the illusion of a moving image. This Victorian parlor trick changed our understanding of vision and laid the foundation for cinema, but was largely forgotten with the invention of …

So It Seems, Kourtney Stone

Art and Design Theses

Memory is powerful, yet paradoxical. Fragmented and mutable, its pliability causes us to question the truthfulness of personal narratives and family mythologies. The assemblage sculptures in So It Seems are meditations on the nature of memory and how we construct stories about our lived experiences. By intertwining found and sculpted objects, I invite viewers to indulge in the human tendency to seek relationships between disparate elements. Each work includes figurative sculpture, employed for its historical function in constructing social narratives, as well as pre-made items that operate indexically and nostalgically, invoking time periods in twentieth and twenty-first century America. Relationships …

Gathering Galax, Albert Lebron

Art and Design Theses

Gathering Galax is a deliberately harvested collection of writings and images about plants, people and landscape in the form of a book and exhibition. The Cherokee people used the Galax plant for a variety of medicinal purposes, and it was advertised as a headache remedy in newspapers during the early 20^th century. Galax’s most consistent use has been as decorative greenery for the floral industry. Mostly harvested by white Appalachians in the early 20^th century, Latinos pick the majority of galax sold today. North Carolina is the center of the galax industry. The plant ships from this Appalachian …

Foundational Curriculum: Integrating Art, Literacy And Social Emotional Learning, Rosie Tempka

Art and Design Theses

This research examined foundational educational components to create an art curriculum for early learners. The curriculum integrates art education, literacy, social justice, and social-emotional learning. Various studies support that these components enhance confidence, communication, social awareness, and interpersonal skills. International art education models were also explored to select key pieces of information that support the need for such a curriculum. The National Art Education Association standards, Georgia Performance Standards, and social-emotional learning program Second Step® standards influenced the learning objectives. This study cumulates in year-long curriculum map for kindergarten visual arts education, which seeks to integrate multiple facets for comprehensive …

Advenus, Ana M. Coello-Amado

Art and Design Theses

Advenus is a graphic design project that explores the challenges and barriers that international students encounter in the United States while seeking employment. For many international students, the U.S. promises freedom, safety, and equality attained through hard work. Despite the value and knowledge that international students can offer to the U.S. economy, government policies regarding immigration make starting a new life here a challenge. For most individuals, it starts – or ends – with a lottery system. Advenus provides resources in digital and print formats, like a website and posters, to help international students navigate the immigration process, understand the …

Absurd Vessel, Michael Jess Tolley

Art and Design Theses

Absurd Vessel is a series of multimedia paintings using themes of science fiction to explore the cognitive estrangement of mind and body through devotional imagery. These paintings provide a playful space in which earnest existential topics are expressed through so-called gay filth and deviancy and reoriented as rites of personal salvation. In this body of work, I research the various ways queer artists and writers come to terms with their spirituality while existing on the theological fringes. I extend this endeavor to cosmic cycles of death and rebirth in order to express a type of extro-science fiction, where full comprehension …

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 Manual For Neocadia, Jack Michael

Art and Design Theses

The Manual for Neocadia is an ongoing body of work that explores utopian yearning through an emergent fictional republic’s citizen’s handbook. This work mines my experience as a former political extremist and calls on my fascination with literary fiction, history, and intentional communities to explore utopian notions and dynamics of personal and cultural power. Works in The Manual for Neocadia are organized around the eponymous semi-fictional handbook for citizens of the Associated States of Neocadia (ASN). The work takes three forms: a suite of taxonomic copperplate prints; typewritten book pages; and flags. Across the work, flags are studied from three …

Abroad, Constanza Loustalet Lopez Aranguren

Art and Design Theses

International students study abroad for many different reasons, which may include personal and professional growth, sometimes prompted by unfortunate political, social, or economic circumstances. A common struggle for international students is adapting to the new environment of their host country offers. To address this, my thesis project entitled Abroad provides a structured campus space as an accessible entry point where international students can find needed emotional relief in the search for long-term solutions. The space will be designed to contribute to emotional well-being, with graphic content to create a sense of belonging, and printed information to encourage students to embrace …

Heads Up/Heads Down: A Pattern Language For Fostering Thinking In The Workplace, Jill Blass

Art and Design Theses

Heads Up/Heads Down: A Pattern Language for Fostering Thinking in the Workplace is a handbook presenting architectural design strategies for how to best support thinking in the workplace. It follows the concept of a pattern language, a theory originated by architect Christopher Alexander in his 1977 book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, where each pattern describes a problem and offers a generic solution that can be customized to suit the reader’s project. While Alexander uses experience to inform his patterns, my work is generated from current scientific and social science research. Alexander’s work spans scales, from the organization …

Inclusive Art Education As A Tool For Art Museum Experiences, Sonja Fasen

Art and Design Theses

This Thesis looks at art education as a tool for meaningful art museum experiences. The study follows students on field trips at the High Art Museum as a process to develop a fully inclusive art educational program. The focus of the process of inclusivity evaluates the personal, socio-cultural, and physical aspects of the learning environment within the museum. The research questions that guide the study are 1) how the inclusive strategies I have found in my art classroom can be utilized to create an inclusive art museum setting, 2) how we can approach inclusive student learning an art museum environment, …