Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mo, Xinyao Li

Student Projects

Emotions are attitudes or experiences response to objective things, it constantly influences everyone and decides what kind of person we became. Xinyao Li, a young photographer who was obsessed with abstract photography, was once troubled by peculiar emotions, He is a person of few words. Since childhood, his quiet nature has created a gap in communication with others. People assume him dull and aloof, like his doors are shut to all people, some people advise him to change, yet he sees no “sickness” in himself, his aloof doesn't make him indifferent, and his silence and patience are not symbol of …

Generations, Jayla Watkins

Student Projects

Understanding your family can be the starting point of understanding your personal identity. Coming of age, you begin to view your family members as individuals as opposed to their titles of “Mother” or “Grandmother” names that once seemed to elude that she possessed some sort of supernatural power. As Jayla Watkins looks across 3 generations of her family, she sees different versions of the same person affected by life experiences, environments, and choices. Some oddly similar and some worlds apart. Understanding the generations of woman before her helps inform the woman she is becoming.

With influences such as Deana Lawson …

False Eidetic, Zach Sockol

Student Projects

Do memories still exist if they are forgotten?

Memories define the soul. They are created to outlast the experience, but what is left behind? A moment in time captured with the lens of the mind, it is intangible. These memories shape our worldview, our thoughts, our reality. It is the culmination of these experiences that makes us who we are, yet through reminiscence, those moments are viewed so clearly in your mind that to you it is the truth, only to hear someone else remember it completely differently. Does this mean our memories aren’t real? Will we ever be able …

Reclamation: The Towns Of The Virginia Coalfields, Craig Owens

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses his work in Reclamation: The Towns of the Virginia Coalfields, a Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibit held at the Tipton Gallery from February 12th through February 23, 2024. The exhibition focuses on coal towns located in the southwestern part of Virginia. The exhibition consists of 20 framed, archival inkjet prints. Each framed work is 36” x 24” and is representative of the artist’s exploration of the towns. A catalog of the exhibit is included at the end of this thesis.

Owens examines formal and conceptual artistic influences, both historical and contemporary. Historic and contemporary photographic …

Double Exposed Perspectives, Michael J. Leeson

Student Projects

Humans have always stumbled through time, whether each person lived or not is another question. Connecting, experiencing, and feeling dissolve existence into living. Inspired by artists Richard Mosse and Cara Romero who use alternative methods to present perspectives, Michael Leeson uses 35mm film in collaboration with friends from around the United States to do the same.

Leeson ships a variety of black and white film types and a film camera if they do not have one to his collaborators (some who have never shot film before) giving them a wide direction of “shoot your everyday life and vulnerability”. Leeson refuses …

Makeher, Maeve R. Wallace

Student Projects

Makeher is a multi-media work that grapples with the existential dilemma of creation within the context of our increasingly unreliable world. Anchored by a concern for the implications of childbirth, my art studies themes of life's genesis and the world we leave behind.

My subject matter, an amalgamation of mirrors, planets, silver, body parts, hair, and tights, are tools with which I explore these themes. Using silver fabric, I abstract the human form. By integrating disassembled body parts with mirrors, I reflect on the fragmented and multifaceted nature of the human existence. This process is not just about the creation …

Writing With Light: Analyzing The Technical And Creative Significance Of Light In Photography, Sarah Dean

Honors Theses

Light is an essential part of photography. It's technical and creative use contribute to the creation of images as well as their mood, narrative, and aesthetic. This thesis dives into the importance of light and how I have used it in my personal work.

"This Other Way": Photography At Black Mountain College, Kyle Canter

Theses and Dissertations

Relying on the photographic collections of the Western Regional Archives in Asheville, NC, as well as oral histories, personal correspondence, course notes, official college records, and other archival material, this thesis examines the history and pedagogy of photography at Black Mountain College.

The Development And Impact Of Jingdezhen’S Ceramic Live Streaming, Yiyi Wang

MA Theses

Jingdezhen is a renowned ceramic capital in China and abroad. Its porcelain
production dates back to the Tang Dynasty, reached its peak in the Song Dynasty, and continued to thrive during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, solidifying its status as one of the primary production areas for Chinese porcelain. Over time, Jingdezhen underwent social upheavals during the Republic of China period. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the porcelain industry underwent nationalization and modernization reforms, ensuring its sustained maintenance and development. Since the reform and opening-up, the porcelain industry in Jingdezhen has progressively embraced market mechanisms, incorporating …

Encapsulating Scars, Ashley Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My work explores scars through encapsulation, a desire to enclose and express the emotional scars of memories or physical scars of the body. Life’s experiences impact the living, leaving behind scars that we feel the need to understand. Through the mediums of metal and mixed-media photography, I utilize found and created imagery, as well as a triality of text in order to preserve and remember these scars.

Three Stories On Urban Wildlife, Kevin J. Moriarty

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Nothing To See Hear, Adam Kuykendall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nothing to See/Hear is a research experiment into minimalist visual narrative via the short film Not the Boss of Me, in which the criteria for production mandated only the bare essential elements required to construct and convey a plot and its characters be used while filming within a nondescript space - in this case, a mostly empty soundstage. How does one tell a story and define its characters without direct expository dialogue? What is needed to establish and define locations and/or environments when limited to only one or two items? Can an audience engage their imagination to fill in the …

Older Women’S Stories Of Covid-19 Loss: Communicated Narrative Sense-Making Through Photography, Anne Walker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The diverse array of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic make it difficult to assess the full impact of this global health crisis. More than 300,000 older Americans died, leaving a nation of grieving survivors in their absence. This profound loss of life will undoubtedly inform the field’s understanding of grief and grieving for many years to come. Pre-pandemic, older women in the United States understood grief to be part of their life stage; COVID-19 amplified the grief experience through both cumulative losses and the isolation particular to the novel coronavirus response. However, few qualitative studies explore older women’s grief, …

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …

New Mapping, Dowon Yoo

Masters Theses

Tools determine the shape of most of the worlds that are manufactured or measured. Taking the Earth as an example, territory is shaped and transformed by the tools of the earth's plate movement, the sea, and humans. A map, a recognized territory, is represented through numerical instruments, mathematical formulas, and visual devices such as lenses.

The instrumental perspective is one of the powerful lenses that will work effectively into the past, present, and future. So I started to apply an instrumental perspective to digital space. Digital space which is Non-physical has become one of the most important worlds for contemporary …

Landscape De/Re-Construction Through Art, Manuel Gonzalez

Masters Theses

Contemporary landscape architecture practice and education primarily focus on ecological and technical interventions. The climate crisis we find ourselves in demands scientifically informed decisions and well-engineered execution of projects, but, more importantly, creativity and innovation.

The fine arts, which were once integral and foundational to design, are today largely unappreciated and appropriated. The spiritual power of Art, Aesthetics, and Beauty, explored at length through art history and theory, are often viewed as indulgent or secondary to execution. The gap between Art & Design has widened. As a result, designers face challenges in fostering in individuals the kind of care and …

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

Moretheless, Abdelghani Alnahawi

Masters Theses

material investigations becoming questions with interjections

Mistranslated, Hee Young Cha

Masters Theses

Mistranslated is an essay based on my research on the patriarchal structure that is inherent in the translation, and an attempt to challenge them through the perspective of a colored woman with a transnational background. I focus on the cognition of cultural identity that is otherwise a subject of oblivion when living in a homogenous nation. Moving between countries that predominantly share the same racial ethnicity and languages, I began to be categorized with the modifier only after I stepped into dynamics of the diasporic community – America. As my presence of cultural identity becomes increasingly apparent after being positioned …

You're Making Me Sentimental, Chris Geng

Masters Theses

My project is a personal search for a different way to see the footprint we have left on the landscape. A way of seeing that finds potential in existing buildings without placing the building in the background, that instead engages sentiments in order to approach reuse as an act of layering that retains the memories of before. I went about uncovering the memories of a site through film photography, a process equally rooted in nostalgia and sentimentality. These images attempt to capture the beauty of melancholy and in turn, ask the architect and audience to slow down and contemplate as …

Soul Furnace / فرن الأرواح, Isa Ghanayem

Masters Theses

“This is the good washing, this is (the washing) which separates the dirty body from the pure body. This is like silver mixed with lead, it is separated from it by this (process): one makes for it a cupel of bones, which is what is called the “head of the dog” and of which the common name is kūja-which is the crucible—and this must be made of burnt bones. One melts the silver in it, one gives it a strong fire: the cupel will absorb and receive the lead, the fire will make its subtle (part) fly away and extirpate …

Garden Etiquette, Kai Wasikowski

Masters Theses

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.

With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, born and raised on …

Entrelazados, Agustina Markez

Masters Theses

Entrelazados is composed of a series of photographs from my trip to Argentina summer of 2022. I explore my immigrant Argentine identity and displacement in relation to turmoil, thinking about political disruption of everyday life, within the passage of time This work aims to give an inside look on the mundane daily life of my family, capturing the quiet moments in our everyday life. I used film and collage to have a closer connection to the medium I was using to capture these moments. Through sewing, inks, and physical collage of materials, I got to form an intimate relationship with …

Rebranding Lauren Hope Photography, Lauren H. Toomey

Graphic Communication

Lauren Toomey has been building her business, Lauren Hope Photography, for the past six years. During this time, she has developed a website as well as a social media presence, but has yet to establish a clear brand identity. This project served as motivation for Lauren to define her brand identity, which allowed her to create branding guidelines that could then be implemented across print and digital media.

Step 10, Jinhong Cai

Masters Theses

Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through

abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am

proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning

on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:

narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.

While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or

personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them

because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in

learning more about the motive behind this creation.

The questions I bought into the thought and creation

process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring

out …

Eco-Interoception: What Plants, Fungi And Protista Have Taught My Body, Sara Riley Dotterer

Art Theses and Dissertations

To me, ecology is the relational, full-body awareness that I am made up of and deeply connected to everything around me; and for better or worse, this is reciprocal. I form ecotones, an ecological transitional zone between two ecosystems, with the world around me. I use this ecotonal lens to blur binaries and dissolve boundaries between me and the world “outside my body.” During my Masters of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University, I have continuously explored and represented the lives of various more-than-human species outside of my body, including plants, fungi and protista through an ecotonal lens. Although these …

The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness, Megan Kenyon

MFA in Visual Art

I am a Midwestern, Christian, and feminist artist. I make work about the beautiful, broken, and absurd ways in which American evangelical culture influences lives, especially women’s lives. I’m dragging everything into the light by deconstructing and critiquing the world in which I live, move, and have my being. I do this by harnessing prophetic imagination and incarnational space to shine a light on how patriarchy infects evangelical Christian theology and practice. Using prophetic imagination through photographic self-portraiture and text (my own and found texts using the Bible), I seek to make plain the effects of white, Christian patriarchy on …

Contact Sheet, Jiwoong Jang

Theses and Dissertations

Jiwoong’s thesis paper is a field guide to how he navigates his curiosity with photography, sound, sculpture, ceramic, and installation. Connecting fragments through narrative vignettes, he underscores how chance, walking, light, time, and uncertainty inform his art.

Transition From Sport To Career, Brookelyn Sears

Student Projects

This series is about the transition from sport to career. This idea is pretty universal for anyone in sports but can also be understood by anyone who has had to make transitions throughout their lives. The inspiration for this series was my class, which is the Northern Illinois University Gymnastics Class of 2023 and my own journey. This is important because of everything we have gone through together and the lessons we learned from overcoming these hardships. We have gone through major injuries, COVID, and many sacrifices we have all had to make. A big sacrifice for any student athlete …

Fragmented Relationships, Drew M. Dzurko

Student Projects

Relationships are often viewed through a binary lens. This greatly oversimplifies their intricacy, yet they can be one of the most challenging human experiences to navigate. Drawing on the symbolisms of memories Drew created digital images that embody these memories related to lost relationships. Using a binary image converter Drew created a visually simple image made up of only two colors down to each pixel. He then brought these images into a text editor on a computer which would display the raw code of an image. This revealed long strings of machine learning code that are indecipherable to the human …