Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Land Of Reverie, Sarah Moon

MFA in Visual Art

As children we are fascinated by the mythical. Imagining the attractive or even the disturbing serves as an escape from reality. By painting unicorns, vast surreal landscapes, and imaginative playscapes my work expands the white cube gallery into an immersive extension of my imagination. By viewing the canvas as a portal into a world where limitations dissolve, I paint acidic colors, fluid boundaries, and a malleable reality.

My studio practice is inspired by artists who experiment with color and scale like Kenny Scharf, Katharina Grosse, and Pipilotti Rist. In my colorful, large-scale works I explore the transformative power of play …

Good Enough, Haley Levin

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The seven-foot-tall sculptural painting Good Enough explores the cultural significance of trophies in contemporary American society. As an ancient object representing achievement and reward, the irony of trophies’ current junk-status pokes at absurd contradictions embedded in American culture. I offer context on the evolution of “the readymade” from Dada to Pop Art to 90s assemblage, and position Good Enough’s handmade, tender approach as a celebratory twist to that lineage of cultural critique.

Omnipresence And An Outlier, Cheyenne Monk

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In this thesis, I explore the possibility of existence outside the confines of labeled identity through the lens of art, drawing inspiration from personal experiences of racial alienation and the desire to transcend societal labels. Through figurations and world-building, I challenge the notion that one's identity must be defined by categories such as race and gender. By removing categorical physicalities and portraying violence as a means to confront bias-motivated aggression, I aim to provoke dialogue on prejudice without further alienation. Through a blend of surrealism, abstraction, and neo-expressionism, I create tense yet playful presentations of bodies to communicate themes of …

On The Six-Cornered Snowflake, Jackson Hescock

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, named after Johannes Kepler’s 1611 essay on geometrically covering surfaces, is both the title of both my final thesis work and essay. Beginning with an inquiry into the nature of hand-made object as intrinsically valuable, my earlier sculptural work surrounding quilting is broken down and considered as a form of reverence for the American object. This is partly achieved through a comparison to traditional Japanese packing techniques and how my own assembly mirrors and converses with the graceful and sensitive packing of Japanese hand-made goods. Early 20^th-century flight experiments are also hand-made objects of …

This Is A Present From A Small, Distant World, Samantha Slone

MFA in Visual Art

I make toxic pastoral paintings in the style of the Dutch and Old Masters, and media installations which depict natural landscapes as distanced, deconstructed forms. What I explore most in my practice is our damaged relationship with land and nature, and our capitalist and media ecologies as artificial landscapes which suspend us from the natural. In a dissection of the dualisms of man and nature, and progress and sustainability, I create microcosms of our detached condition.

Dear Sycamore, Anna Schenker

MFA in Visual Art

I create paintings, sculptures, and rubbings to pay tribute to the earthly beings found within my immediate surroundings. I use indexical processes that stain, trace, and record to preserve a moment in time. The process of rubbing is a tactile and meticulous activity of excavation. It is an imprint of what was once there, a mapping of attentive contact. The works are dependent upon the physicality of the host as I engage directly with the plants, seeds, weather, and trees that surround me. The rubbing’s flatness actively constructs a new reality; a liminal space hovers between the impression and the …

The Hidden Power Of Images: An Allegory Of Chaos And Performance In The Digital Age, Livia Xandersmith

MFA in Visual Art

Within this text, I explore the hidden power of images in American visual culture through painting-based installations. I investigate images of the past and present juxtaposed in a surrealist landscape. Through the use of images in the news, entertainment, advertising, and images within the home, I depict how the problems of the past bleed into our perceptions of the present. I find that this cycle of problem inheritance connects us as humans regardless of time, generation, and place. In my work, I explore the complexity of image culture and its shifting presence within the digital age. Using surrealist collage, I …

Necessary Myths, Jessica Ramsey

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

My thesis essay was inspired by my search for a belief system that could transform despair over what will be lost through climate change into valuing what we still have. In researching the earliest iterations of belief structures, I came across the Maros-Pangkep cave paintings. These paintings are the oldest known works of art, and by my interpretation the first evidence of religious life. They are a series of representational paintings which tell a story, and I was inspired to emulate this methodology in my own exploration of belief.

My essay investigates the relationship between images and religion. Through W.J.T …

Chinese-American Landscape, Jessica Wen

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Cultural hybridity is an unwillingness to succumb to the notion of choosing sides when it comes to mixed heritage and culture. The approach taken to identity has a place in the artistic sphere as well. Through an investigation of my art practice in painting alongside a contemporary and historical context, the hybrid space between Chinese and Western landscape painting is explored and determined. The goals of nature depicted through distorted perspective, abstraction and simplification of objects, and emphasis on texture are techniques employed by both artistic spheres. By utilizing these goals and mixing materials of both Chinese and Western painting, …

Invisible Territories, Lydia Seaman

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Layering geography, space and time, my work urges viewers to embrace the equivocal and create a desire for the impossible. To explore this notion, Invisible Territories is an analysis of my practice, examining how I mediate specific references into abstract and universal interpretations. My work employs subjects that document the world by analyzing the layers and simulacra that form our visual information; focusing on the intervals between “things” as the subject matter themselves. Looking to the words of Italo Calvino as a conceptual guide, this paper discusses the practice of mapping through drawing, etching and painting.

Artificiality And The New Image: The Image Body, Liza H. Butts

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This paper sets up a historical argument for how images exist in the world and how artists relate to these images. The questions of the paper are concerned with defining the “Contemporary Image” and looking at how the digitization of all the images in our world affect the art object and the experience of art in the physical world. The conclusion and answer to these questions is found in a resistance to images that oversaturate our culture. This resistance occurs by looking to the painted image to function as a body in the world; aware of its existence, responsive to …

Rewriting History: The Press As A Tool For Destruction And Preservation, Emily L. Mogavero

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This statement describes my two bodies of work, Aufheben and Artist-Hero/Squish, in which I use printmaking processes to rewrite history. In Artist-Hero/Squish I mimic canonical paintings of women by modernist male painters and run my quotations of these paintings through the press while the paint is still wet on the canvas. Through this process, I examine, confront, and change the male-dominated history of art. Aufheben currently includes one hundred drypoint prints that catalogue the personal history of my mark. This series represents a process of constant change, with individual prints suggesting stages of my process including moments of growth …

Landmarks For Sleepwalkers, Isaac S. Howell

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Abstract:

In my recent work I have been interested in thinking about notions of instability. In order explore these notions, in this paper I will like to explore the relevance of postmodern literary theory and the color black in my work, as well as think about the importance of the grid as a tool for organization and ontological delineation.

I will be examining writing by Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as art work by Mark Manders, Giorgio de Chirico, Kay Sage, and Ad Reinhardt.

Pressing: Where The Objective Meets The Subjective, Mariana Parisca

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Through this essay I describe the theoretical and anthropological ideas that led to the creation of the Cushing Series. An interest in the obsession with photography in popular culture leads to an understanding of the permeation of structured reasoning beyond scientific research and into everyday life. Taking evidence from photography, and philosophy of science I establish the limitations of structured reasoning, both as a way of perceiving the world and as an understanding of identity, and define surface and frame as its physical representation. Using Sartre’s existential theory and phenomenological anthropology I then describe the infinite subjective existence of …

Paiting, Lucas Page

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My work is motivated by the painting “as such” – as an inquiry into and intervention upon what constitutes a painting, how they are constructed, how they function, etc. Through an investigation of painting as a genre, both in its historical canon and contemporary forms, I deconstruct the formal and cultural elements surrounding the field. Four major axes serve as the basis for my inquiry and intervention of painting: Painting, Abstraction, Representation, Control. Taking as a point of departure the comment, “Your work is a representation of abstraction,” I aim to figure out how “the painting” (in all of its …