Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Remains To Be Seen: Recollecting Memory, Nathanael Kooperkamp

Masters Theses

Abstract

Remains to be Seen, a multi-media installation, provides the opportunity for reconfiguration, re-contextualization and re-remembering of visual memory. Geoffry Cubit, a historian of memory, has noted that “memory has no fixed, stable, unitary meaning to which we can invariably recur: it has always been, and legitimately, a concept in flux and under review”.[1]My work in this exhibition (and as discussed throughout this paper) addresses the unstable and revisionist nature of memory—both culturally and individually. Additionally, I attempt to address how memory (collective, visual, familial and individual) is implicated in the creation of selfhood, of personal narrative, …

Conformity And Digression: Change Of Narrative In A Chinese Peasant's Personal Writing, Danping Wang

Masters Theses

Rural China has gone through dramatic transformation from the Mao era to the post-Mao era. China scholars have been studying the institutional changes closely in the past few decades. However, Chinese peasants’ living experience and their memory and understanding of the past have not yet received enough attention and discussion. By examining personal writings of a peasant named Luo Xuechang in Jiande, Zhejiang province, this paper discusses the complex interactions between the state and the individual. This paper attempts to unfold the juxtaposition of state narratives and personal narratives embedded in Luo’s unpublished memoir, almanacs from 1972 to 1980, notebooks …

The Unaccustomed Vanishing Point, Procheta Olson

Masters Theses

The Unaccustomed Vanishing Point is an exhibition of miniature paintings and installations that explore the irregular and fluid terrains of multicultural exchanges in India. Although drawing heavily from Mughal and Persian painting traditions, the paintings are rife with allegories of the postcolonial history, politics, and visual and material culture of contemporary India in the age of globalization. The installations, on the other hand, navigate the intersection of sensory experience and memory while simultaneously examining the dynamics of transnational experiences. Together they map the overlapping boundaries of the personal and social to probe into the complex interplay of cultural hybridity, class, …

"The Fate Which Takes Us:" Benjamin F. Beall And Jefferson County, (West) Virginia In The Civil War Era, Matthew Coletti

Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes the editorial content of a popular regional newspaper from the Shenandoah Valley, the Spirit of Jefferson, during the height of the Civil-War Era (1848-1870). The newspaper’s editor during most of the period, Benjamin F. Beall, was a white, southern slaveholder of humble origins, who spent time serving in the Confederate military. Beall, however, had also quickly established himself as one of the preeminent Democrats in his home county of Jefferson, as well as both the Shenandoah Valley and the new state of West Virginia. Beall firmly believed in the institution of racial slavery and fought to …

A Step Of Two Or The Pas De Deux, Molly A. Hoisington

Masters Theses

The second part of a two-part MFA Thesis presentation, this paper distills the content from the preceding exhibition A Step of Two or The Pas de Deux: an installation of paintings, drawings and projected video. It touches on various themes that surround [well researched] ideas about perception, dissociation, the gaze, and relationships. Most of all, this paper and the body of work it describes is about the visual representation of a sensual understanding of the world.