Arts and Humanities Commons^™

How To Forget, Jesse D. Hoyle

Theses and Dissertations

How To Forget was born from a need to give tangible form to the psychic residue left behind by a life lived. Through the use of silk-screening of red clay mud onto ink-jet photographs, archival textiles, and site-specific installations, I attempt to tie and/or divorce myself from my own and my family's extended history and examine the function of memory within the dynamics of the archive. How To Forget takes a non-linear, non-chronological approach to this examination, compressing decades of time and space through the manipulation of the archive and my own self-portraiture, designed specifically to deny myself from its …

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

Heavy Hold: A Physical Score, Alexandra Velozo

Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of essays, stories, and fictional interviews that are in conversation with my performance, teaching, and sculpture practice. My research and work considers chronic illness, disability, the historic cultural connection between swamplands and illness, the medical industrial complex, medical theater, the medical gaze, disabled performers, metatactile space, sensory learning, and access.

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Onlone 00:00, Junyun Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Being alone is not the only definition of loneliness. Loneliness can be felt even when surrounded by a lot of people, especially in the virtual online world. Our digital devices play an important role in connecting everyone together without the restriction of time and space. Communication became more and more convenient in this era. Mostly we are digitally connected, but sometimes, we are mentally disconnected. We are online and together in this virtual world, but loneliness is always a never ended situation that we are suffering from. As a visual communicator, My works focus on using performance as an approach …

The Break, Ian Gerson

Theses and Dissertations

The Break is a personal investigation into problems and possibilities of representing my specific transgender identity.

Trans as a tactic to speak about a state of forever becoming, forever in between, outside of and in opposition to dominant social norms of being.

Trans as a model for a different way of viewing and being in the world.

Can we form a different kind of horizontal shared power though a collective refusal to play into existing structures from which we have been excluded? What are the potentials for modeling other ways of being, other ways of (dis)engaging, other ways to be …

Converging Objects Of The Universe, Everett Hoffman

Theses and Dissertations

Reconfigured found objects shape scenes of everyday life, questioning the structural histories that go into defining an identity. Engaging in a multidisciplinary approach of making, my work reimagines the function of ornamentation and its relationship to the body. I approach new materials and found objects with the eye of a jeweler, highlighting and exploiting the subtle, and often invisible, links between material histories and their connection to identity. Material debris patinated with age like skillets, baseballs, and furniture are used to penetrate normative structures around identity, gender, and sexual desire. Using adornment as a support in my installations I propose …

Hissār, Sohail Abdullah

Theses and Dissertations

Hissaar is a noun and a verb, it is the periphery and the extremities, and the walls and the fortress. And it is to encircle, to wrap and to contain. This paper is an inexhaustive account of thoughts, experiences and lessons learned, of varying forms that influence my aesthetic sensibilities, my art-value system, and my art- ethical concerns. They provide for my art the impetus for its perpetual (and perhaps circular) journey. It is about finding connections between the fraying ends of free floating ideas. The following fragments explores how words make ideas, ideas make images, images make memory; memory …

An Indecent Obsession, Aaron Mcintosh

Theses and Dissertations

The title of my thesis is appropriately borrowed from a romance novel title, as my work proposes to mine the content, design and culture of romance novels and other erotic texts in order to excavate my own queer romance narrative. The body of work includes large-scale drawings of “stand-in boyfriends” stolen from romance novel covers, pieced fabric text works based on the titles of erotic texts, and a couch covered in erotic reading material. Drawing attention to the ubiquity of heterosexualized images and texts by deconstructing them, my work critically questions larger social constructions of normality and deviance, pleasure and …