Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Winding Down River Road, Gillian Harper

LSU Master's Theses

As a mechanism to explore my temporary home in Louisiana, Winding Down River Road is a collection of artworks that integrates natural materials collected from landscapes in southern Louisiana with steel and petroleum-based products. My interest in researching environmental issues, ecology, and industry has shaped my vehicles for observation and how I generate data. Through a variety of methodologies, I am considering how climate change is forcing many of us to re-contextualize how our home can be affected by the very industries we rely on. Personal engagement with residents living in the dystopian atmosphere of southern Louisiana’s industrial corridor and …

Body/Mind:Matter, Mary Ellen Ratcliff

LSU Master's Theses

Body/Mind:Matter presents the unfiltered experiences of living in a period of momentous instability. Three life-sized figurative sculptures stage my emotional journey towards mindfulness as a direct response to the pandemic and my growing concern for our collective future. A winding network of crocheted yarns and growing vines interweave the troubled figures to signify our complex dependencies upon one another and our environment.

The condition of the encumbered bodies is a result of the worried mind. Revitalized matter proposes reconciliation by introducing a sense of hope; decaying surfaces reveal new life; fused wires hold up under immense pressure; and soft woven …

So Long, Sinkhole City!, Heather Molecke

LSU Master's Theses

Abstract

A sinkhole is land that appears structurally sound, but underneath its surface lacks foundation. If there is not enough support for the land above, a sudden collapse of the surface happens. Sinkhole City is a conceptual three-part installation that metaphorically conveys experiences of childhood sexual abuse, incarceration in adolescent psychiatric hospitals, and young adult drug addiction. This work illuminates and explores the relationship between childhood trauma and drug addiction.

Sinkhole City takes the viewer on a journey through semi-autobiographical life passages. In this three-part installation assemblage I am confronting my own sense of past shame, the emotional roller coaster …

Dig, Spin, Repeat, Brittany Anne Sievers

LSU Master's Theses

Dig, Spin, Repeat, is a body of process based installation objects that uses minimalistic aesthetics placed strategically in the gallery to highlight the architecture of the room. By connecting these unique architectural elements, the work aims to achieve mindfulness similar to the research of Ellen Langer: encouraging active observation. Drawing from my background in sports and factory work, I create multiple repetitive forms out of hand-spun yarn and sourced clay. The room-sized installation objects produced from these raw materials explore the value of staying in the present moment for both the viewer and myself.

The Truth About Your Monsters, Cassidy Creek

LSU Master's Theses

The Truth About Your Monsters is an immersive and dialogical exhibition formatted as a walk-through storybook environment. Viewers are transported into a child’s make believe world through hands-on stations. By building on the skeleton of an archetypal narrative, audience members are encouraged to tap into their own experience as they contribute imagery and action to the narrative. I call on audience members to discuss personal or universal fears by prompting them to draw images of monsters that represent their fear.

The Veil, Eric Richard Euler

LSU Master's Theses

The Veil is a print media exhibition exploring the politics surrounding internet and internet related technologies and how they shape our identity. All of the works shift within a satirical and enigmatic visual language which accumulates to form a critique of our online habits and rituals. My work is driven by questions surrounding digital identity, privacy, data mining, narcissism, and commodity fetishism. How is the internet changing us as people and consumers? What are the repercussions of frivolously sharing private information online? And how are new government bills affecting our freedom online? Gallery visitors will encounter the hand-pulled print in …

Drugged Paranoia And Warlust, Nathan Pietrykowski

LSU Master's Theses

Drugged Paranoia and Warlust are stories of human depravity and violence that happened on an abandoned U.S. military base in the rural world of Indiana. These tales are told through a series of prints, drawings, animation and a comic. Scenes of bombings, mass graves, and drug overdoses are presented as humorous cartoons in playful colors to subvert the viewer into exploring imagery that discusses serious and somewhat bleak issues. The work in this exhibition is both satire of absurd events and trying to find meaning amongst madness.

Echoes And Artifacts, Molly Elizabeth Miller

LSU Master's Theses

Architecture has many different contexts and meanings, but regardless of time and place, buildings act as a physical container of memory. This body of work explores the use of large facades as residue of a personal memory and uses physical deterioration to parallel the distortion of memory as a result of time and emotion. The work makes use of warping and tearing of materials and is created through the combination of large-scale relief prints, drawing, sewing, and the cutting away of materials. The exhibition includes an installation of fabric-based prints, a series of wall-based altered paper prints, and several artist …

Your Loss, Lauren Jean Hegge

LSU Master's Theses

Your Loss is an exhibition of drawings, photographs, intaglio prints, found objects and prose. Drawn from personal and anonymous archives, the works in the exhibition acknowledge various forms of breakdown, exploring individual reactions and attempts to rebuild from the fragments of loss. Inherent in the work are discussions of remembering and forgetting, finding and losing, building and destroying, growth and decay. This work is both recognition of the desire to hold on too tightly and an effort to learn to let go.

Placed Residue, Thomas Lapann

LSU Master's Theses

“Placed Residue” is a series of eight works that highlight nature and its transformative quality. The video, photos, and sculptural objects, contained in the show, call attention to different materials and how they undergo growth and decay. Using various resources ranging from Kinect to video projection I incorporate the unnatural in order to depict a natural narrative involving the viewer. In order to emulate these natural processes, a cause and effect system had been developed where nature completes the final object. These systems activate the material providing for behaviors to be visible through their tactile qualities and allowing for their …

The Collaged Practice : (Un)Familiar, Raina Beth Wirta

LSU Master's Theses

My thesis exhibition is an installation of works including sculpture, video, paintings, a hand made book, sound, and drawings that emanated from a series of two-dimensional collages: self-contained forms that evoke the surreal, (un)familiar, and/or grotesque. Infused with a sort of mysterious being-hood and intended to inspire curiosity (at the least), they are unfamiliar in relation to a particular biological thing, but (mostly) recognizable in the autonomous bits and pieces. I seek to question where our physicality ends and the next form of biological life begins, and our responses to that physicality. With childlike inquisitiveness and wonder, and a healthy …

I Saw Life, David Clayton Williams

LSU Master's Theses

My thesis embodies the uncertainties and reservations that surround one’s mortality. Dealing with the loss of my father who suddenly passed away two and a half years ago has sparked an emotionally driven artistic process. The abruptness of my Dad being alive one second and with little or no warning deceased the next has impacted my work tremendously. My goal has been to evoke and share the very human emotions that occur during the erratic stages of grief. This research acknowledges the ‘black and white’ absolutes of living and dying, yet those ideas are juxtaposed with the many gray areas …

A Matter Of Time, Rebecca Kreisler

LSU Master's Theses

We frame our experiences as narratives, and associate the narrative with the book. My work takes the form of an immersive installation of printed, paper polyhedrons that act for me as non-traditional book structures. The planes of the polyhedrons function as pages without prescribing a certain order of events. The focus has been to blur the linear narrative into a body of visual work that represents my particular human experience, one full of memories and dreams, contradictions and juxtapositions, chaos and calm. What began as an objective examination of concepts of time in physics, philosophy, and psychology has developed into …

Site Unseen, David Christopher Carpenter

LSU Master's Theses

Site Unseen is a large-scale installation of seventy-three brightly screen-printed and painted house forms. The houses stack and interlock with one another, creating clusters of towers and archways. The forms appear to grow into one another, physically connecting the homes. Each house is printed with images of materials in various states: raw, processed and waste. These materials represent the cycle of community’s rise and fall. Beyond examining the construction of community, Site Unseen explores a moment when trust or foundation is lost in a community. In the center of the community is a gaping, spherical void. This void represents the …

Yours, Mine, & Ours, Mallory Lynn Feltz

LSU Master's Theses

Yours, Mine, & Ours utilizes found object assemblage, textiles, art multiples, and installation to present the theme of discovering personal identity through collecting, ownership, affiliations, cultural context, and transformation. This work presents to viewers a tactile experience to be investigated, touched, and transferred to their own lives. Centered on domesticity, the familiar and ordinary becomes transformed through labor-intensive processes into unique and personal works of art. Viewer participation, in all aspects of the making process, emphasizes the universal human experience of searching for comprehension of our culture. Each artwork is a metaphor for this search and how we are constantly …

In The Wake: A Louisiana Memoir, Ryan Lindburg

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis project was an exploration of narrative artwork through installation. Throughout the exhibit, I used multi-panel wall pieces, traditionally bound books, and fake walls to create an unbound book for the viewers to walk through. The pathway through the gallery provided my plotline; the works manipulated the pacing of this plot through their size and placement on the wall, with careful attention given to changing perspectives through the height of the hanging, as well as adjusting time by varying the space between the panels. Multiple print mediums were used in an effort to change the tone between pieces. This …

Drift, Emily Jane Cook

LSU Master's Theses

Drift is a movement by, or as if by, a current of air or water . It can mean the depositing of debris by such a current. It can also connote a veering off from a projected path. What interests me about the word is that it suggests a slight loss of control, but not a devastating one. Most importantly, for this body of work, it implies a passive movement, a transition in which one is not able to control every part. We can perhaps choose the river we get into but not the direction of its flow. Using properties …

Culturally-Constructed Barriers, Hae-Jung Lee

LSU Master's Theses

I have traveled to and lived in many different countries outside my native country of Korea. These opportunities have allowed me to meet diverse people and learn about their unique cultures. While living in the United States, I have experienced culture shock in such everyday activities as observing students eating food during class, wearing pajamas at school, and other similar displays of informal behavior. I was taught to follow Confucian ideas; the basic principles being to respect one¡¯s elders and to be considerate of other people. Compared to Korean culture, Western culture seems very open-minded and individualistic. Adjusting to the …

Discerning Lines Of Demarcation, Jennifer Dawn Poueymirou

LSU Master's Theses

Discerning Lines of Demarcation is an investigation into the accumulated landscape of distressing times. Situations of mass destruction, loss of family, substance abuse, domestic violence, loss of friendship, and uncertain health have all been encountered within a steady progression in the last five to six years of my life. The digestion of these situations has been slow as the events overlap and intertwine each other. I have tweezed and distilled these circumstances. This is described through different types of terrains that create physical boundaries to represent psychological fears or events. Tied to Your Hate; How Much More Will Fall, Untitled, …

Too Fast, Too Tight, Too Loud, Too Bright, David Martin Storlie

LSU Master's Theses

It is difficult to imagine that others do not perceive and react to the cultural stimuli as I do when dealing with everyday sensory situations. Unlike most, I have struggled with many different responses to commonplace sensory events during my life. A recent diagnosis of certain symptoms has helped to explain not only my lifelong reactions to sensory stimuli, but also the resulting environments I have created for myself in which I live and work. The four terms I use that most fully describe the affects of this condition are; too fast, too tight, too loud and too bright. Although …

Thick Skinned, Alair Dyan Wells

LSU Master's Theses

“Thick Skinned” is a series of sculptures using the domestic structure as a metaphor for the body. Issues of sexuality, gender roles, and domesticity are explored in this mixed-media installation. Viewer interaction with the work is encouraged for a complete sensual experience. The body and home are protective, yet fragile and delicately vulnerable. My work confronts notions of beauty and cruelty, bodily function and presence, with a focus on gender-biased social conventions in our culture. Conceptually, the work is autobiographical in nature, as it pertains to my experiences as a woman. Universally, it deals with the merging of sexuality and …

Elemental: Promise Of Plenty, Bill Wolff

LSU Master's Theses

This body of work is about human nature, and centers on issues of aggression, consumption and collapse. Five materials make up the exhibition, and each carries a specific metaphor: wood is flesh, brick represents collective history, rope is a metaphor for human activity, metal is control and salt is a quintessential commodity. Craft is used as a means to explore the boundary between natural and synthetic phenomena, as well as elevating the status of the base materials. The work is arranged to provide an environment and context for the viewer to respond.

True Image, Janet K. Link

LSU Master's Theses

A still-life is often the painted record of a complex arrangement of objects. My aim in making the visual portion of TRUE IMAGE is to turn this sort of still-life inside out. Rather than arranging a collection of objects and making a painted or drawn image of the set up, I made simple images of things and arranged them with actual objects into three larger tableaux. The subjects of the paintings and drawings are these: checkerboards, objects, portraits, and shadows. The subjects of the tableaux are work (LABOR), home (DOMUS), and church (ECCLESIA). Viewed as a whole the exhibition asks …

Accelerate Into The Accident, Jeffey D. Hill

LSU Master's Theses

The installation uses purely steel to describe the organic and chaotic nature of thought processes. It looks for a way to confront grief and anxiety. The procedure's purpose is to understand abstract, emotional thinking in immediate, familiar physical terms. By examining each fine strand, either steel rod or line of thought, I attempt to revel in the overwhelming complexity and irrefutable beauty of the mind. It is not a strategy to control mental imbalance. It is rather a humble acceptance of the organic chaos of thought.

Full, Leanne Rose Mcclurg

LSU Master's Theses

As an artist I want to make my human experience sharable. I am interested in the connection between the act of consumption, the desire that leads to that act and the repercussions of fulfilling that desire on the body both social and intimate.I have chosen the hand made pot to express my thoughts of filling the vessel. It is in the arena of eating that I begin to understand larger philosophical issues about sentience. Using dishes I made, I have chosen to illustrate the experience of consumption by leaving remnants of a dinner on display during gallery hours. How much …

Chronophobia: Doing Time, Rosemary Stoltz Hill

LSU Master's Theses

Chronophobia is the fear of time—characterized by panic, anxiety, and claustrophobia. Also known as prison neurosis, it may be the most common anxiety disorder in prison inmates. Sooner or later, almost all prisoners suffer chronophobia to some degree and become terrified by the duration and immensity of time. This is often called going “stir crazy.” The work in this installation subjectively explores interpretations of the passage of time through various multimedia experiences. Interactivity is a key feature of several installation components. There is also limited use of traditional print media graphics. References to time in music, literature and film are …