Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Appeal Of Pornography, Karen Bleitz, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Artists' Books

drum leaf binding, hard cover, pop-up, movable parts; accordion; cover; page spread, title page; page spreads; colophon. Pop-up book featuring the vast array of pornographic materials available in today's culture and the resulting objectification of women. Designed by Karen Bleitz, hand cut and bound by Amelia Drinkwater. Originally produced in 1996, re-issued in 2007.

The Twin Survey: A Study, Amber Gayle, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Artists' Books

pamphlet stitch; stab bound; cover; page spreads, interior page. A study on the psychology of twins and their relationships to each other and other people.

A Conversation With Michael Joaquin Grey, Thomas Asmuth

SWITCH

In this interview, Michael Joaquin Grey discusses his work at the intersection of art, science, and pedagogy, including the art/science movement of the 1970’s and its counterpart around the year 2000. With a background in both genetics and sculpture, he’s interested in how complex systems like biology, computers, or culture grow and connect. Grey also talks about inventing ZOOB, a building toy that helps kids understand how living systems work. Throughout the conversation, he reflects on why artists don’t always need big institutions to do meaningful research and how early learning and play can shape how we think about the …

Cadre Salon Series, Switch Editorial Staff

SWITCH

This article describes the CADRE Salon Series, launched by Joel Slayton of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media. The series created a space for dialogue between artists, researchers, designers, and curators. With a small audience of no more than 25 people, it encouraged conversation and exchange between the speakers and audience. The sessions were also simulcast in Second Life, expanding the discussion to virtual participants.

2007 Yearbook, Risd Archives, Center For Student Involvement (Csi)

RISD Yearbooks

No abstract provided.

Simple Complexity, Eric T. Anderson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

I enjoy a combination of different things. Growing up full of humor and self-awareness, I always knew I would do something artistic. Art gave me creative freedom. Most of my time was used dreaming and imagining, about places, people, and things. Therefore, my roots in the northern Midwest culture and countryside are great inspiration for me. It is in this area of the country where the idea of art and craft are blurred, a place where nostalgic wildlife art shares the same wall with a Monet print and family photos. Unusual artistic conversation happens within that kind of environment, which …

Density, Jesse Ross

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This work is porcelain tableware and architectural ornament. I choose the context of function because the things we use contain purpose both actual and metaphorical. They are concrete, connected to our lives by necessity, regardless of meaning or aesthetics. Form and surface are more than the residue of concept, they must be specifically engineered for right application. This work, be it shelter, ligbt, containment, etc. is the foundation for the intimacy we feel toward our belongings. That said, utility is only one facet of the objects I make. A Styrofoam cup works well enough, but its expressive potential is limited. …

Inside Out, Caitlin Rose Applegate

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The intersection, or in some cases, collision between public and private lives, provides a place to peer through the cracks in the mask we put on for one another each day. A glimpse of this fleeting relaxation of boundaries helps us see one another for what we really are. Alone or in intimate groups, my sculptures describe the vulnerability and insecurity most of us feel beneath our perceived exteriors. I look at the ways in which we define ourselves for others, at the awkwardness found there, and at what happens when that pretense is stripped away. Despite attempts to clothe …

The Artist's Hand In The Digital Age, Jamie B. Mahoney

Theses and Dissertations

For the first ten years of my career I practiced my craft — advertising art direction — exclusively by hand. To help me in the design process itself, I hired specialists. For typography, for instance, I chose a firm I admired in Minneapolis where the typographers would hand cut the film negatives letter by letter.

In those days — the 1980s — each area of design had master craftsmen. I can remember one day walking into a warehouse with thirty-foot ceilings. On the back wall I saw a large horizontal canvas. The artist was suspended from scaffolding and covered in …

Lets Make It Outback Tonight, Michael Douglas Erickson

Theses and Dissertations

When I was younger, shortly after my father died, my mother bought me a t-shirt that I loved and wore till it was worn out. On the shirt there was an image of a man, strapped into an electric chair, holding pieces of bread in each hand. A sign above him read, "Making the best of a bad situation." That statement became a mantra I held onto in the early years after my father's death. It still guides my personal philosophy---humor is key to survival. Particularly a type of humor that celebrates the fact that "shit happens", while highlighting and …

One Million Paintings 2005-2007: A Thesis, Jared Lindsay Clark

Theses and Dissertations

I assist discarded collectives of objects to volunteer themselves for inclusion into the privileged legacy of flatness – assuring them they can be transformed into Painting. Reducing my interventions - often to mere arrangement - respects the possibility of this transformation while frankly retaining the objects' original functional identities. Every surface of any object is a readymade painting – especially flat ones. By stacking objects and aligning their surfaces on one privileged side into a flat mega-surface, I am composing and collaging – even building – a painting. With my amateur interest in German I latch upon the double meaning …

Would You Believe Me If I Said I Didn't Need You, Andrew Kozlowski

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an attempt to expand upon the ideas that permeate the practice of art making that has developed over the past two years. Art criticism, theory, history, and practice are used to give definition to the boundaries of my ever-shifting body of work. Focusing on the elusive nature of communication in both public and private spheres, these projects range from installation and sculptural work, to web projects, photography, and drawing.

Portable Space And Interior Design For Dentists, Yu-Ping Liu

Theses and Dissertations

In the United State today, many people do not have access to adequate dental treatment, while tooth decay is the single most common chronic childhood disease-five times more common than asthma and seven times more common than hay fever. At the same time, studies show that 80% of dental illness takes place in 25% of the population, which is comprised mostly of lower socioeconomic groups. A study undertaken by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2000, concludes that poor children suffer five times as much tooth decay as their more affluent peers. Furthermore, in poor children with tooth …

Confrontation: Endeavors In Futility, Gabriel Lashley Barlow

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is intended to compliment and describe the body of work that has been produced within the time I have been enrolled as a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University's Photography and Film department. The paper will include information on both my MFA candidacy presentation as well as a description of the evolution of my artistic endeavors. The main focus of this document is to discuss my formal examination of performance based video works pertaining to the absurd as described by Camus, and later expressed by Samuel Beckett, also the role of the masculine body's physicality within ritualized actions.

In Search Of The Ooey Gooey Good, Lauren Ashley Clay

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores ideas of everydayness, the mundane, and the repetitive emptiness of consumer culture. It looks at the malaise that plagues everyday life and examines several attempts throughout history to break from its grips which revolve around a search for a more ideal state. This research includes utopias of modernism, the transcendental, the communal living of Shakers and Early Christians, ascetic monks and The Desert Fathers. These ideas have shaped my studio practice as I construct installations based on worlds which allude to the eternal, the otherworldly, and the fragility of our physical world when compared to more eternal …

Within And Without, Shane Robert Rocheleau

Theses and Dissertations

Within and Without is a document which illustrates my personal and artistic research into the nature of the postmodern conception of the self: that self is unfixed, multiple, and reactive. It explicates my myriad and explorative approaches to photographic portraiture. Furthermore, it indicates many of my theoretical and artistic references and how I have applied my lessons both as an artist and a researcher to maximize the effect of my concepts within the formal and aesthetic confines of my photographs. Finally, this document explains my own beliefs concerning the nature of self and how a synthesis of my influences has …

Renewing Manchester: A Supportive Life Skills Center For Manchester's Most Underprivileged Residents, Jennifer Lynne Hamilton

Theses and Dissertations

In America today, many people have fallen into sub-standard housing situations. Domestic violence, drug abuse, and lack of educational and employment opportunities are a few of the myriad reasons for this. On average the number of homeless people in the greater Richmond area is 5,200 individuals.1 These are people specifically in need of a re-integration into society.This thesis examines the role that the built environment can play in this process, by providing a sustainable, affordable and flexible site for a program that encourages people to rise above their current state by "recycling" them into better more productive citizens. The intent …

A Fugitive Sea, Marian Brunn Smith

Theses and Dissertations

I make images that are fragmented like ominous dreams. Described with sensuous marks of paint, they demand intimacy but reveal vulnerability as they threaten to break apart before the eyes. This thesis examines my journey over the past two years at VCU and describes my artistic beliefs and visions.

Ws 1207 Community Workshops, Katherine M. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

For my thesis, I have chosen to adapt the abandoned office/warehouse at 1207 North Boulevard for use as a community workshop for all of Richmond's urban neighborhoods. The community workshop's focus will be to provide open workshops, classes, a resource library and design consultation to low and middle income homeowners, affordable housing properties, and community parks. In addition, the center welcomes all of Richmond city residents to join and partake in 1207's resources in order to grow a multi-faceted community focused on improving the lives of all of Richmond City's residents. The center will function as a gathering space for …

Invisible Green, Amanda Sauer

Theses and Dissertations

How is nature conceived today, a generation into the environmental movement? Many contemporary artists grapple with how to reconcile our inheritance of both a precarious natural world and the culture that created it. My work investigates the subtle intricacies of our relationship with nature. I use photography to develop a way of seeing that points to the often-unnoticed nature in front of us. In particular, my work recognizes and re-imagines nature's deep connections in the context of our ecologically changed world.

Cradle To Cage: Confronting The Premature Institutionalization Of The Children Of The Incarcerated, Jen Fell

Theses and Dissertations

American prisons are swollen and distended. Over 2 million Americans sit in jail or prison today. About 2/3 of the incarcerated are parents. They parent approximately 2 million children in America today who are separated from mom or dad because of incarceration. Their children suffer from poverty, inconsistency in caregivers, separation from siblings, reduced opportunity to health and education and increased risk for substance abuse, alcoholism and incarceration themselves. Children of the incarcerated are seven times more likely than their peers to become incarcerated as adults.Many of these children are unable to visit their parents. Over half the mothers in …

Walk 14 Blocks, Bryant Mark Dameron

Theses and Dissertations

Walk 14 Blocks is a document that describes my two-year investigation of simulation in everyday life. It describes how I examine both simulated places and the tools of simulation. I explain the key elements relating my work to simulation; experience, language, and the video monitor. I trace how I have utilized these elements in several works that led to my thesis exhibition titled Evidence.

Seeing It Straight, Heather Harvey

Theses and Dissertations

This Master of Fine Arts thesis is divided into four main sections:FAITH and DISBELIEF: In which I reckon with the implications of faith versus rationality as a secular nontheistic artist. IDEAS: The central locus of my work is a place of indeterminacy between what is known/familiar and what is just one step outside of that. This has nothing to do with mysticism, science fiction, or anything else unmoored from established fact. Section also touches on the particular vantage of a female artist with working class roots.THE WORK: Selection of work made during graduate school, and the the guiding thoughts behind …

Breadfruit Fantasies, Matthew Steven Spahr

Theses and Dissertations

Breadfuit is a strange thing. It's a starchy potato-like sustenance not particularly noteworthy by most accounts. But it's history is amazing, an epic journey. Relocated from the Samoan island of Upalu to Oahu, Hawaii in the 12th Century as well as transplanted from Tahiti, as an economical food source for slaves in the West Indies in 1780 the lowly breadfruit has been held in the hands of Fletcher Christian, Captain Bligh, James Cook, King Kamehameha and innumerous other nameless individuals including Matt Spahr. This fruit contains the weight of colonialism, capitalism, exploration and tropical fantasy under its skin. The collision …

Unfinished Business, Marilyn S. Springer

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Skeleton, Luis Alberto Ruiz Quintero

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Makenzie Seiple, Makenzie M. Seiple

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Bermuda Sunset, Sarah B. Fagan

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Jazz Club, Jennifer M. Kuzmik

The Mercury

No abstract provided.

Molly, Terry Ann Hayes

The Mercury

No abstract provided.