Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Little Poems Of Barbara Erskine, Jan Baker, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Artists' Books

Altered book created by Jan Baker (1950-2018). Jan Baker was an accomplished artist and RISD Professor of Graphic Design (1981-2017) guiding students through book arts, letterpress, papermaking, bookbinding, and visual poetry in the Graphic Design department. For 37 years, she infused her classes and the campus community with the magic and meaning that comes from the handmade. Lettering, cutting, folding, binding, inventing, collecting - these were some of Jan's favorite things. Read more">. Curated title for Fleet Library Special Collections exhibition Stacked & Altered, summer 2022.

The Inner Shrine, Jan Baker, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Artists' Books

Altered book created by Jan Baker (1950-2018). Jan Baker was an accomplished artist and RISD Professor of Graphic Design (1981-2017) guiding students through book arts, letterpress, papermaking, bookbinding, and visual poetry in the Graphic Design department. For 37 years, she infused her classes and the campus community with the magic and meaning that comes from the handmade. Lettering, cutting, folding, binding, inventing, collecting - these were some of Jan's favorite things. Read more. Curated title for Fleet Library Special Collections exhibition Stacked & Altered, summer 2022.

Post-Postmodernism And The Emergence Of Heterolinational Literatures, Mehdi Ghasemi

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Following the challenge by Linda Hutcheon inviting readers to name the era after postmodernism, several scholars have attempted to conceptualize the aftermath of postmodernism through introducing some successors. To join the challenge, I also introduce “heterolinationalism” as another successor to postmodernism and draw upon some paradigms of heterolinational literatures, including postacademia, postnationalism and polyliterature, polyvocalism and plurilingualism, self-publishing, social media and multimediality as well as transtextuality and fanfiction.

That Mirror Again, Kyros Barton

Masters Theses

That Mirror Again is a summary of experiences, used to pose questions about self-hood through technological metaphor and theory. Its memories are disjointed, separate, and removed from time, and are an honest attempt to recenter an identity before the end of formal education. The themes of each section, Aground, Tilt, and Threshold, are presented as isolated definitions that set the mood for the writing before it is introduced. Referencing information age technology, invoking ancient deities in prose, and brushing against the fur of monster-hood, the text holds the memory it carries softly and offers it to the reader.

What The Water Says As It Runs, Jeanette Cosentini

Masters Theses

During the last two years, I have been examining the importance of vulnerability, memory and empowerment within my work as it relates to archival silence. The archive is presumed to be an objective record but what is chosen and discarded is an inherently political act. When there is archival silence, what then becomes missing from our collective histories? My exploration has spread across many forms of media, including sound, video, textiles, sculpture and writing . I have sought to understand the ways that these different mediums embody sentiment and concept, while establishing an open-ended record within which others can explore …

Treeing: What Remains Of A Pilgrim, Sichen Liu

Masters Theses

Myths and legends have existed since the start of human civilization, but now we can only imagine a world full of wonders from our ancestor’s scripts. What if we could go back to the age of myths and magic? Would we see things differently?

In Treeing: What Remains of a Pilgrim, I propose a fictional book with 15 short myths of humans transformed into trees. The stories combine my own imagination with inspiration from real mythologies. In the annotations of each story, an unnamed person is following the myths as guidance and manuals, one by one, trying to bring them …

Everything Comes Full Circle, Lilan Yang

Masters Theses

Following Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) filming locations from Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, California, I use a 16mm Bolex camera to capture the vastness of the American West. The footage draws me to reminisce about snippets of my everyday life. I contemplate how we perceive the world through analog optical apparatuses and how memories are multidimensional yet fragile. Our recollections of people and places can be distorted, unrecognizable, and fictitious. These memories would eventually diminish with the passing of time. By converting the filmmaking back and forth between analog and digital filmmaking, with the loss of information during the …

Generative Image Systems And Emergent Play, Travess Smalley

Masters Theses

Generative Image Systems and Emergent Play is a collection of writings around generative creative processes and the emergent outcomes that can develop from simple systems. The generative systems I utilize in my practice are explored in this writing through the lenses of Instructional Art, Generative Art, Chance and Randomness, the Xerox, Computer Programming, and Emergent Play in games. These texts are a statement about my computational art practice and research, and they explore what it means to create with generative systems inside of other designer’s programs.

Embedded Are The Embers Of Echoes, Sarah Jane Cribbs

Masters Theses

What is a haunted house? What makes it haunted? What makes it a house?

I grew up in northern Appalachia. I sat in the back seat of my father’s car for trips from the Eastern foothills to the Western foothills of Pennsylvania mountains to visit my grandmother.

When my perception of the world grew larger as I did too, I began to hide my Appalachian identity. This ended as I began my practice, beginning with a realtime performance on artificial intelligence and queerness. Art practice opened up the possibility of critical play, a method of criticism that focuses on a …

Wall, Jazzmynn Chang Hong

Masters Theses

The WALL is a mosaic-style book with a collection of personal anecdotes and reflections. Traceback from the earliest memory of mine, the instinctive exploration of a sheltered structure, to my recent art practices exploring the spatial perception when the boundary breaks. Each chapter, as I grow older, unfolds my progressive encounter and interpretation of the spatial boundaries.

As the book titled the WALL, its form references a traditional Chinese partition structure - the folding screen. It is not only an aesthetic manifestation, the screens are usually decorated with calligraphies or paintings, it also has a practical purpose as a spatial …

Abyss Without Vertigo, Jack Madden

Masters Theses

Science has difficulty changing the way we think because it takes us beyond our natural perception. To scales and phenomena that we are unaccustomed to, that are instinctively inhuman.

To fundamentally change the philosophy of our species there needs to be a bridge or, more presciently, an emergency ladder for the human mind to science.

As we are inclined to logic yet inherently emotional, the importance of the scientific cannot be understood using science alone.

Significance must be felt, feelings are the foundation of art, and validation the consequence of the artifact.

Wanderer, Yuhan Ma

Masters Theses

My thesis writings include four chapters. It begins by my self-reflection, an introduction to my liminal space and how it has become a spiritual endeavor. Building on that, the second chapter Encounters elaborates on my childhood memory; and the following two, the Non-resident alien, A Sanctuary, respectively expresses my recent concerns or situations that have greatly affected my perceptions, and a mythological idea of sanctuary that can keep me away from the chaos. These chapters have been influenced by the eastern ideology icons, such as Buddhism and the culture of reclusion. They have examined a process of me dissecting …

I Don't Quite Remember It That Way, Margaret Lindon

Masters Theses

In the fall of 2020, during the first week of graduate school, I crashed on my road bike and suffered a big-time concussion. Like, lost-consciousness-and-forgot-the-whole-day kinda big. I became obsessed with this permanent memory deletion. Trying to remember the event was like trying to remember the first time I saw the color blue. Impossible without supplementary data or second-person observation.

Memory recall can operate like a game of telephone. When we remember something, we’re really just remembering the last time we remembered it. We accrue subtle adjustments to our memories that result in gradual omissions and distillations.

This process lost …

Extended Reality Interface, Neil Nelson

Masters Theses

My thesis project at Rhode Island School of Design looks at how we interact with technology, specifically augmented and virtual reality. I explore these ideas through the development of novel hardware. I am interested in human centered design and specialize in ideation and rapid prototyping.

Vulva Gazing: Power And The Gendered Body, Aaliya Jamal Zaidi

Masters Theses

How does a gendered gaze determine what we feel shame about?

In patriarchal society, the male gaze is normal. Within its sights, the vulva, the external female sexual and reproductive organs, is viewed negatively — censored and ignored, or labeled with euphemisms and slurs across cultures. The modern western medical canon upholds and reinforces this view of the vulva, through a combination of disinterest and omission. This cultural aversion leads to a personal aversion. For people with vulvas this manifests in a lack of information about their own bodies which leads to shame, pain and even death.

Vulva Gazing is …

In This Form, Together, Elana Shvalbe

Masters Theses

Most of my memories consist of lively dinner parties. Hands moving in every direction when the food is brought out. The piano bench for the kids to sit on, the fold out table necessary to fit everyone around the meal, and always endless stacks of plates. These experiences and traditions were curated by my heritage and have a strong presence in the work I design. I intend to understand and create interlocking relationships of care, where ritual and romance lead the way to form a community; designing and making furniture and objects that reassert hospitality within the home.

Hospitality is …

To Be Seen To Be Heard: Embracing Social Anxiety In The Workplace, Jingxuan Chen

Masters Theses

Social anxiety has become the third most common mental illness in the U.S, but there still is a lack of public understanding of this issue as it often goes unspoken. Through my research, I found that social anxiety is deeply entangled with environments, situations, and interpersonal interactions; especially within unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and unsafe situations.

Workplace exacerbates social anxiety as people are constantly being evaluated by others, exposed to new situations, and required to perform well, which leaves no room for people to share the unspoken and seek support. Guided by the questions of what social anxiety is and how it …

Mood Follows Matter, Maxwell Taylor-Milner

Masters Theses

Function is an invisible thing - what disappears when an object is used? Ornament has long been considered an obstacle, a roadblock to forgetting. Capitalist logics of speed, efficiency, and distraction militate against a material culture that might require patient observation, against acquiring the skill to make thoughtful objects or the knowledge to read and appreciate them. The result is the impenetrable trash mishmash spectacle of virtual flea markets like Amazon and Alibaba, of trackable yet traceless objects whose visual identity is algorithmically generated - commodity mystification as pure capitalist abstraction.

While I bow to the quixotic nature of yearning …

The Aesthetics Of The Mexican Public Garden And Its Photographic Compositions (1912-1982), Victor Hugo Rivera-Diaz

Masters Theses

In Mexico, there are currently several collections of photographs which depict the history and development of public gardens and ecological corridors under the management of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. By focusing on two exemplary collections—the Nacho López Collection and Vicente Luengas Collection—I apply a visual studies approach to the photographic archive in order to formulate the Mexican public garden as a branching set of aesthetic (sub-)categories, all of which take into account the creation of garden landscapes vis-à-vis land use policies and historical accounts during the rise of Mexican modernity. In so doing, the primary sub-categories of …

Just Enough, Amelia Greteman

Masters Theses

As a child, I never answered the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “a furniture designer.” Even though both of my parents are artists, making things never seemed like a job; it just seemed like something we all loved to do. Some of my best memories are of working in the studio alongside them - painting, smearing, building, and destroying, but always vigilantly coloring within the lines.

This thesis investigates my past and current relationship to making and the urge I have to simplify and reduce. It takes place in the form of furniture …

Slow Puzzle, Tzyy Yi Young

Masters Theses

One may argue that we all observe. It is this finely tuned capacity that allows designers to read context and to identify patterns. Since I was a child, I’ve been a carefully tuned explorer of the world, observing the world around me. Yet as a designer, I take this observational impulse to another level by recording my observations and then translating these impressions into form. What is seen, felt, and gathered is then edited, nuanced, and reformed. This act of translation becomes a slow puzzle as I look for cues, acknowledge every facet, and conceive of forms in such a …

Military, Art & The Inbetween, Andrew Storck

Masters Theses

I find myself navigating life from the perspective of both a civilian and military service member. Everyday, I am between domestic, civilian spaces and military memories as my military service has impacted every aspect of my adult life. Serving in the United States Air Force allowed me to travel the globe while working alongside people from every class and race, on missions focused on tasks greater than ourselves.

My artistic practice explores how my time in the military has affected my transition back into civilian life by using sculpture and installation to express a variety of emotions. I hope my …

Retelling A Landscape Through The Alchemy Of Recasting, Amanda Lee

Masters Theses

This project is an acknowledgment of reshaped landscapes while also understanding that this moment of time is only relevant to my own human lifespan and perspective. The work embodies unmet expectations when one confronts a memory landscape of their, or my, childhood. Specifically, I am discussing the chasm between reality and memory through a recent return to my childhood home in Colorado, and was met by two of the largest wildfires in the state’s history. This project takes a moment to digest that loss, of what was known, what was not, and can no longer be known: forests, trees, and …

The Sky Is Falling, Alexis Tingey

Masters Theses

The ceiling would fall apart in my childhood home, it was an old house. Occasionally a piece of ceiling would clomp down on my head. In these moments, I would pause, and close my eyes until an image of some fabulous, beautiful interior came into my mind, and then I would open my eyes and continue. Sometimes to escape a falling ceiling, I would find respite in my first ideal sitting spot, a post on our back fence; I would sit with the sky and think. Looking back, I believe these are the moments where I caught glimpses of the …

Matingkad - Flamboyant, Bhen Alan

Masters Theses

In the Tagalog language, matingkad is used when describing colors or light. Its English translation, flamboyant, usually describes a character of a person - a queer, performer, drag?

People have called me flamboyant due to the way I dress, my gestures, and how I approach my work. Because of this, I have experience discrimination and abuse towards my race and gender, as well as my citizenship status. Therefore I have learned to begin employing flamboyance to be opaque (matingkad na kulay).

With this experience, I had to adjust the opacity of my body as a way of survival …

Breaking | Grounding | Growing: Expanding The Rhode Island Gardening Reentry Programs As A Pathway Towards Stability, Juliana Soltys

Masters Theses

What happens to the over two million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails?

Changing in sentencing laws and policies have created a cycle of imprisonment, racially isolating and oppressing BIPOC communities. Reintegration and reentry programs are an avenue to break the cycle of recidivism. Through my work, I have developed hands-on, structured opportunities for justice-involved adults to rebuild a life for themselves by increasing the accessibility of gardening reentry programs. This project creates a space for mentorship and support for Rhode Island’s formerly incarcerated people with the goal of helping them to develop vital life skills through growing and …

The Color Of Stress, Jiemin Park

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the physical and emotional process by which stress in glass can be visualized through color by using a polarization effect.

A conceptual account of three different projects using this process of discovering and revealing the colors of stress hidden within clear glass will be addressed. The mainstays that catalyze the visual metaphor of extreme stress and beauty are; the making process, evidence of the making process and the polarization effect. These two contradictory concepts of beauty and stress are central to this thesis.

Re-Order The Order Of Thing, Yingxi Sabrina Ji

Masters Theses

Humanocentrism positions humans as the measure of all things; what we know as the ‘real’ or ‘true’ is perceived through this limited perspective. As a designer, I challenge the hierarchy, actively moving away from the notion that inanimate objects are subjugated matter.

In this body of work, I turn to actions of world-building to create immersive experiences where ‘objects’ become ‘subjects.’ They are rescaled and re-centered — called into prominence to become protagonists on the cultural and environmental stage. Through generating, collaging, and juxtaposing recycled facts, imagery and organic materials using digital filters, I insert absurdity as a breakpoint to …

Slow Ruptures; Slow Formations, Asta Thrastardottir

Masters Theses

Language shapes our understanding of identity, place, and self. As a graphic designer, I question the existing structures of language, while using it as a material to build new formations. Nudging against certainties, I challenge how the stories we are told can dispossess us, even flatten us.

My method is a constant attempt to peel back the layers and study what lingers below. When questions arise, I look to the ways in which visual artists and writers have seen through this surface. I observe, listen, and hold stories closely, passing them back and forth between my hands. Using annotation and …

Notes To Myself, Anna Dawson

Masters Theses

Immersed in the sun’s light, my body feels saturated, during a long day at the beach. When it begins to cool down and the day inverts into night, I watch the sun set on the ocean horizon. Bart Lootsma, the Dutch architectural theorist describes this experience of light as an immersion and inversion. Intangible, yet something to look at and something to submerge in.

This thesis is a personal journey, and an open exploration of the aesthetic and experience of furniture objects in everyday living. It is a collection of thought processes, observations, and speculations. Sometimes it’s just a note …