Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mixed Messages, Hannah Duggan

Masters Theses

The bodies of work that I have created during graduate school stem from my interest in mass media, culture studies and spectatorship in the digital era. My research engages digital technology and media studies to consider the ethics and ambivalence associated with spectatorship. Using traditional art mediums, I explore social and digital media, revealing tensions through representation and materiality. This translation from digital to analogue media is pivotal in all my work. Handmade objects introduce slippage and meaning as they break from the limiting format of the screen. This thesis will explore the research and content that inspired the creation …

Disintegrating Loops Of Uprooted Plastic, Jacin Giordano

Masters Theses

I’m interested in paint’s malleability. In my work, I transform the physical possibilities of paint in a literal way, using it as a tactile material to be cut apart, reassembled, or simply exposed for what it is. My paintings are labor-intensive. They are not predetermined, they meticulously evolve; crafted rather than executed. Remnant material from one painting, the result of a working process of cutting, gouging, or sanding, leads directly to the production of a new piece. In my work there is no illusion, material is meant to reiterate itself. Unlike abstract painters of the early 20th century, who hoped …

Hovering, Benjamin J. Blatt

Masters Theses

Hovering is an attempt to navigate the contemporary digital environment through traditional means. The imagery created function as paintings, photographs, prints, and drawings. They explore and raise questions about visual perception and sensory awareness, as well as highlighting the modular limitations of the pixelated image and the illusion of reality in the digital landscape.

Summoning The Body That Acts, Brendan M. Mccauley

Masters Theses

Seven series of artworks; painted, drawn and performed. These works are presented as affective incorporation exercises, that test modes of aesthetic communication in response to varying political contingencies. The constitutive processes used to develop the work also function as a methodology for my own political radicalization. As an artist I am wagering how to talk, as an activist I am preparing to act. The artworks discussed occur at the crossroads of these desires as enactions of futurity within the subjunctive mood.

Blundered By The Borrower, Eben A. Kling

Masters Theses

Blundered by the Borrower attempts to illustrate the potential loneliness and anxiety that is experienced by the individual, amidst the contemporary and panicked social climate, domestically and globally--using the mediated jetsam of everyday life, violent entertainment and the disarming characteristics of cartoons to better understand and possibly illuminate a chronic lack of empathy in American society and popular culture.

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.

Heard Or Dreamed About, Priya Nadkarni

Masters Theses

ABSTRACT

HEARD OR DREAMED ABOUT

MAY 2014

PRIYA NADKARNI, B.F.A. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

M.F.A. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Directed by: Professor Shona Macdonald

Firing The Canon, John M. Byrd

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Firing the Canon is written in conjunction with is namesake exhibition, prepared as a culmination of work leading to the master of fine arts degree. In an attempt to help viewers better understand my body of work, I discuss herein: events contributing to my personal narrative, major themes and their origins and pertinent sources of artistic and non-artistic inspiration.

Walks To Nowhere, Lauren Pleveich

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This essay is an academic justification for a means of producing images explained mainly through ideas of experiential memory.

The Artist As Creator: The Theory Of Art In Du Fu's Poems About Paintings, James H. Edwards

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Du Fu is one of China's most celebrated and influential poets. His poems about paintings are a highly innovative subset of poems rich with imagery and emotion. Received ideas about these poems fail to account for any role played in them by Du's aesthetic ideas. This study analyses Du's poems about paintings in order to bring to light Du's theory of art. Du's theory of art combines ancient Chinese ideas about aesthetics, literature and the nature of humanity's relationship to the universe. These traditional ideas serve as the foundation for a unique theory. Du's theory of art posits the painter …

The End Of Histories, Joshua Field

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This M.F.A. thesis paper and exhibition explore the ephemerality of relationships as they are redefined by contiguity and recontextualization. My work derives from an investigation of alternative interpretive structures while retaining an overarching sense of narrative. This approach to painting relies on the human propensity to create organization in order to contend with chaos or overwhelming amounts of information. Traced back to curiosity cabinets or wunderkammers and forward through museums and encyclopedias, the organization of knowledge in both its diachronic and synchronic forms serves to collapse time and space. Geography and chronology become obsolete as relationships between images and objects …

Into Another, Sarah N. Purnell

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Through a series of paintings, drawings, videos, and large-scale sculptures/installation, I intend to create an environment that explores relationships between the safe and the unsafe place, the sweet and the grotesque, the dream and the reality, and the remembered and the forgotten. I am investigating landscape and how it relates to the body, human relationships, memory, and status of being.

Vision And Contemplation: An Exploration Within The Medium, Mica Y. Pillemer

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This thesis is an exploration of various issues concerning composition in painting. In it I take a step by step approach to advancing the compositional thought process. Within that exploration the central issues of painting are confronted and expanded upon.

Bang!, Kimberly C. Hennessy

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

BANG! is a thesis paper presented in conjunction with a visual art show that is made up of paintings, sculptures, and site specific installations. Primary ideas explored with the body of work are those of growth and expansion, energy, contradiction, excess, collection, play, drama, and nostalgia, specifically relating to color relationships and physical material.