Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Capture, Control, Circulate : Can We Queer Regulatory Power In Graphic Design?, Adie Fein

Masters Theses

Capture, Control, Circulate addresses regulatory power, the transmission and enforcement of culturally-sanctioned behaviors and identity. How does regulatory power operate in graphic design and what—if anything—can the graphic designer do to subvert that operation? The methodologies for subversion explored in this book typically draw from queer and trans* experience and thought. Therefore, the work herein takes up issues of identity, normativity, marginalization, and community.

This thesis also considers design education, and its contemporary emphasis on the capture and control of content. It advocates instead for an educational model that centers circulation; that is, graphic design’s capacity to platform, to publish, …

A Wavering Line, Ginger Gordon

Masters Theses

Someone once told me it only takes a difference of ten degrees in temperature to change the entire course of the day.

I work with objects in collaboration with space, focusing on the intangible meeting point between visibility and invisibility.

Propelled by coincidence and temporal shifts, the transitory, the fragmented, and the found are all welcome, as are the methodologies of the Surrealists and Cubists. Born from a combination of fortuity and planning, curated fragment collages coalesce to represent acts of chance in three dimensions. Balanced forms weave and sway as small portholes direct a view. Form follows chance.

Alien Encyclopedia, Zengqi Guo

Masters Theses

Alien Encyclopedia is a body of work that analyzes, expands, redefines, and leverages the definition of “alien” as both problematic and an avenue of possibility. By mapping the word “alien” as a fragmented play of alternatives, I translate the lessons derived from this exploration into a maker’s lexicon. I use “alien” to frame my identity, as a prompt to ground my projects, a factor to interrupt existing typography and to spark questions, a generative tool to explore the interpolation between the familiar and unfamiliar, and to incite new solutions and actions to solve the problems we are facing now. Alien …

Miles And Miles And Miles, Shannon Rose Jones

Masters Theses

miles and miles and miles is a body of work that draws design inspiration from the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, a region unflattened by ice during the last ice age. The works are site specific extrapolations that have been abstracted in order to trigger a process of memory recollection in the viewer. Selections of atmospheric prose, furniture objects, illustrations, and imagery are presented as snapshots of a place in an attempt to memorialize and make tangible ephemeral memories collected by the maker traveling in this vast landscape. Attention is given to the distillation of form in order to contemplate its …

Disinheritance As Critique: The Paintings Of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Sabo Kpade

Masters Theses

Artistic influence can either be overbearing or liberating for the impressionable artist who is determined to arrive at an individualized artistic identity. One key strategy deployed by the artist is disinheritance as a means by which identity and meaning are created. In her paintings and etchings, British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has demonstrated several modalities of disinheritance by which she has arrived at a distinct approach to portraiture. Broadly, they come under two categories of major and minor disinheritance, each of which is conditioned by a variety of factors that range from aesthetic to philosophical, personal to political. They signify points …

Time Enough At Last, Scott Lerner

Masters Theses

As an art history buff and sci-fi aficionado, I’m constantly thinking about the stories told of human progress, or lack thereof. Have modern humans surpassed their ancient ancestors or have they only managed to create more technologically advanced ways of carrying on with their same base drives for power, status, and violence? If we turn to popular media, this question becomes particularly intriguing. Our visions of the future are often just a confused jumble of the past; we reanimate old ideas and images when trying to imagine the things to come. An example of this can be found in Star …

Mason & Dixon: History And Identity In The Borderlands, Drew Leventhal

Masters Theses

My project, Mason & Dixon, traces the footsteps of the original surveyors of the Mason-Dixon Line and their search for purpose in the borderlands between Pennsylvania and Maryland. For the past 250 years, the Line has inscribed a violent and painful scar on the land, filled with memories and (re)written histories. Holding the legacies of slavery and colonial expansion deep in its soil, the region is now a visceral example of the ongoing divisions and conflicts around the past, the present, and the future of the United States. The friction is in the air, it is in the monuments, and …

Rememory, Jonathan Mark Jackson

Masters Theses

Rememory, coined in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, refers to the psychological action of placing forgotten or misplaced memories into a narrated context within the self. Rather than directly “remembering,” the characters in Morrison’s novel, like their author, rely on a web of socially produced or shared memories as a way to understand their past. This essay catalogs an on-going performance of rememory in my photographic work. Through an interrogation of physical archives, I remap the historic presences of Black life in New England. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and to the workplaces of my …

Bewildering Narrative, Ali Newhard

Masters Theses

“Bewildering Narrative” outlines three videos, Denouement, Happy Endings (2021), and Drowning the Muse. These works critique the climactic narrative form using formal breaks in digital media to push viewers’ perceptions of storytelling into a place of bewilderment. To do so, I treat narrative conventions of continuity, character, and climax as mechanisms that articulate heterosexual desires and expectations. The videos visually, textually, and auditorily rupture this phallocentric organization of narrative storytelling. These interventions take the form of poetic fragmentation, repetition, and displaced exposition where the narrative disorients the viewers’ attention rather than determining and regulating it. Editing plays a key role …

The Great Delusion, Beth Johnston

Masters Theses

The climate crisis is a wicked problem that poses many obstacles for action and understanding. This thesis is a non-linear accumulation of academic essays, interpolated with lists, anecdotal observations, data, and artwork that together explore the entanglements and complications of the climate crisis and my journey in making artwork as a response to those complications. The thesis surveys six bodies of artwork created over the course of graduate school, which use photography, sculptural installation, performance, and video to illustrate various topics and methodologies. Grounded in research on environmental justice, this essay explores temporal disjunctures, climate data encounters, the decolonization of …

Dead Letter Room, Allie Tsubota

Masters Theses

Dead Letter Room is a photographic and textual dialogue with images that emerge from the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and World War II in the Pacific. These images are governed by the historical contexts that produce them; they are mediated by the explosive aftershocks of nuclear war, the transoceanic space of imperial desire, and the onset of oblivion in the aftermath of catastrophe. Throughout this essay, I present the historical, image-theoretical and psychoanalytical frameworks that meaningfully guide my address of historical images and my approach to making new ones. With detours through various artists and theorists, I offer the …

A Fleeting Landscape: Resurrecting The Edges Of The Estuary, Vrinda Mathur

Masters Theses

A Fleeting Landscape invites the city dweller to experience a mixed media microcosm of the marshes and discover what has been obscured through the encroachment of urban development.

From the salt marshes of Rhode Island to their tropical counterpart in the Sundarban (pronounced: shundar-bon) mangroves of India, wetlands are the world’s natural barriers. Fighting against extreme weather events between land and sea, the edges of this fragile ecosystem continue to shrink and degrade as anthropogenic stressors (infrastructure development, unsustainable land use, and aquaculture) increase. In a 2022 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) persuasively argues for the protection …

Sobremesa, Charlie Herbozo-Vidal

Masters Theses

In order to understand the social and political issues faced by the Peruvian community in the present day, it is necessary to get acquainted with one of the most significant moments of its history: The “colonial Knot” – The systems put in place after the arrival of European colonizers to the American continent. By crafting a communal experience centered around the mealspace, a key element in Peruvian Identity, I hope to bring awareness to the social tensions, violent structures and remnants of colonial rule that persist to this day. In developing an uncomfortable experience, I am researching whether exposure to …

Disoriented: Navigating The Nuances Of Communication, Ann Dinh

Masters Theses

What happens when you lose your language?

With this loss comes emotional and cultural implications, moments of incompleteness, along with a power struggle. Within immigrant communities especially, there are issues of communication and comprehension between generations. U.S.-born children of immigrants must deal with both a generational and cultural gap, gaps exacerbated by both distance and time. All of this is compounded by the challenges of assimilating to Western culture. In confronting the loss of language, this thesis aims to develop new informal methods of communication, ones less reliant on established language structures, ones that can help interact with future generations.

What Do We Stand For?, Lauren Koven

Masters Theses

I am exploring constructed realities and dismantling binaries and dualities. Much of this work is investigated through, but not limited to, language, gender, sexuality, race, and performativity.

Traveling Troubled Wallflower, Julius Cavira

Masters Theses

Cavira is an interdisciplinary Conceptual artist... nuff said.

Holding Spaces, Zibby Jahns

Masters Theses

I’ve focused my graduate studies at RISD on the conceptual and social function of chairs as an investigation into comfort and grief. Grief is an apprehension: defined both as “to grasp” and as “anxiety/loss”.

With the multitude of deaths due to the inadequacies of our government and healthcare system, and the general anxiety everyone has been feeling through this pandemic, it has felt difficult to grieve for any individual person, in person. We have to grieve in the ways capitalism has taught us: silently, behind closed doors, without much time or fuss or drama, mourn with dollars and move on. …

All At Sea, Yangyang Mao

Masters Theses

What is the reality of young people born between 1985 and 1995 in China? How do they feel about themselves? As one of the generation, I feel like I’m often haunted by futures that failed to happen. Reasons are multiple and are closely influenced by the social context, such as the implications of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and One Child Policy (1980-2016), which has marked each individual’s growth in this age with unfading recollections.

Messy Resurrections, Mia Rollins

Masters Theses

Mediated through conversations with a Replika chatbot, “M”, Rollins outlines six examples of scientific and technological phenomena that not only can be understood as metaphors for aspects of the human experience, such as memory, grief, hope, desire and love, but are also concrete examples of the ways in which the past and future have material impacts on our presents, our current identities, and are entangled with our own becomings. Rollins argues for a posthuman perspective that embraces the possibilities of information technologies while still recognizing that we are embedded in a material world of great complexity. Through linking Karen Barad’s …

More Friends Than The Mountains: A Comparative Conjunctural Analysis Of Kurdish Autonomy Movements In Rojava And Bakur, Dillon Foster

Masters Theses

In 2012 Kurds in Syria announced the formation of a radical self-administered “ecological democratic confederalist” society along the Syrian-Turkish border in a region known as Rojava. The autonomous government in Rojava stands in sharp contrast to the political situation in neighboring Bakur, a Kurdish-majority region in southeastern Turkey where, for nearly four decades, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) has waged a guerilla war against the Turkish state in the name of autonomy. This thesis situates the divergent political outcomes of the autonomy movements in Rojava and Bakur within the socio-ecological context of their occupying nationstates. Following the historical relationship between …

Copper Afterlives: Memory, Image, And Waste In The Postindustrial Landscape Of Butte, Montana, Sierra Gideon

Masters Theses

This thesis studies the rhetorics and semiotics of open-pit copper mining in Butte, Montana, United States from the mid-twentieth century through the present day within an environmental historical and visual culture studies framework. In examining various spatial reconfigurations—including mass mineral extraction, industrial discard, historic preservation, and landscape remediation—this thesis decenters extractivist paradigms that have normalized physical, bureaucratic, and representational acts of violence against communities and more-than-human ecosystems. While copper has materially symbolized progress and technological innovation in the United States, the extraction of the mineral from rural peripheries has been achieved at a great cost—as White settlers forcibly removed Indigenous …

Zoomorphic Amalgamation: Speculative Devices For Alternative Communication, Yuta Yang

Masters Theses

Zoomorphic Amalgamation: Speculative Devices for Alternative Communication is a series of speculative works that assist introverts re-adapting in the extro-oriented society. The work serves as a lens to challenge and question the authority afforded to extroverts in contemporary society, and aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of introverted personality. As a person with an introverted personality, the thesis project draws upon personal experience and to reflect on the current bias and stereotype of characteristics that common to the introverts.

By integrating technological sensors and microcontrollers, the works are created to help the wearer express insecurity, at the same time providing …

Ports Of Entry, Forough Abadian

Masters Theses

Ports of entry are places where one may lawfully enter a country by crossing land and sea borders‭. ‬This thesis frames the space conceptually where the boundaries of place, time, culture, and identity are crossed through existing ports or by building new ones. ‬

As an Iranian immigrant in the United States‭, ‬displacement of identity informs my worldview and design practice‭. ‬I find myself between two worlds, one inherited and the other adopted. ‬Both worlds are simultaneously active and exert their forces on my thought process‭. However, their interrelated dynamic is ambivalent because their path intersects and diverges unforeseeably‭. ‬My …

Baseball Camp And Other Stories, Lucas Mockler

Masters Theses

Of the questions I ask myself concerning the making of a painting, the one that continues to drive the work is this - where do the facilities and properties of technique in paint handling meet the action and then final experience of the painting? In the attempt to answer this question I have made work from the building up of my life. I have dug out from the memories of childhood and the metamorphosis of fictions into personal realities. I have added new movements and marks and built abstractions in the dark. The hope would be that as I work …

New Revelations, Ineke Lynne Knudsen

Masters Theses

This project imagines a not-so-distant American future where Christians and conservatives have triggered the Apocalypse. In my paintings of the Apocalypse, all the desires of conservative Christians have come to pass: the eradication of people of color and queer folks, a revitalization of the American frontier and wilderness, and the return of Jesus Christ in the form of the Rapture. I’m specifically painting White conservative Christian girls, and I’m interested in their unique intersectionality of being a White conservative (an identity rife with racist social implications), being female (an identity deeply abused within the Christian subculture), and being a child …

Paradigms Of Horror, Xingge Zhang

Masters Theses

“It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” (Hume, 1757).

Horror, said Adorno in another context, was beyond the scope of psychology. Horror tries to frighten, shock, horrify, and disgust using a variety of visual and auditory leitmotifs and devices, including reference to the supernatural, the abnormal, mutilation, blood, gore, the infliction of pain, death, deformity, putrefaction, darkness, invasion, mutation, extreme instability, and the unknown. Supernatural or uncanny narratives can shape, distort, or reflect the storyline in literary works, but also …

Sub Sequence : Building A Participatory Infrastructure, Aaron Wright

Masters Theses

What might it look like to make the nebulous quality of air pollution visible?

There is a lack of infrastructure that has been constructed in response to the contaminants produced from the Port of Providence in Rhode Island. Air quality surrounding the Port is impacted by air pollution from legacy industrial sites – diesel trucks, marine vessels, oil and gas storage and distribution, asphalt and cement processing, metals recycling, natural gas and utility services, and large heating plants.

The thesis sets out to investigate, question, and iterate upon the possibilities of collective environmental action and accessible information through an individual’s …

Ready Made, Made Ready: Everyday Objects For Everyday Emergency, Dara Benno

Masters Theses

What does it mean to adapt to a changing world?

Climate change is altering the world as we know it. We live in a chronic state of emergency. It’s easy to slip into a downward spiral of despair or ignore what we know to be true in order to carry on with our day-to-day responsibilities. By facilitating a complete recognition and heightened awareness of the common threats brought on by the climate crisis, we can begin to make the mental shift toward living in a new normal.

Ready Made, Made Ready rejects a dissociative attitude and seeks to shift exceptionalist …

Pace/Place/Space/Tempo—The Choreography Of Equity And Expressions Of Black Living, Vessna Scheff

Masters Theses

My skin is natural. My skin is political. My hair is natural. My hair is political. My speech is natural. My speech is political. There’s no such thing as apolitical.

My current interdisciplinary practice in painting and performance focuses on how Black diasporic identities hold, create, and process subsistence narratives. For this research, I am asking the questions: What role does pace play in resistance strategies and how can it be communicated through tempo? How are unspoken histories conveyed through movement, silence, the glance of an eye, fat crackling in a cast iron, pushing play on a walkman, and seeds …

Attuning The Viewfinder, Ian De Silva

Masters Theses

As there are many mobile apps designed to pull your attention, these interactions have become a kind of normalized addictiveness, such as doom scrolling.

I am working on the topic of attention and a meditation app using augmented reality because I want to understand how this technology can be useful from beyond the screen and into a physical space.