Art and Design Commons^™

Once-Removed (And Other Familiar Relations), Emily Newman

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Conventional perceptions of space rouse my investigation of images as stand-ins for an objects reference. Removing the context of an object changes the once tangible form. No longer able to be touched, used or relate to its original environment, an object transformed into an image exists solely for our visual and psychological perceptions.

In substituting one for the other, image for object and vise versa, a hierarchy occurs. Its previous existence now establishes a mental presence, shifting the future recollection of such an image to precede or replace the actual object in memory. Proxy of image for object and object …

Maelstrom, Gertrude L. Teijink

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

My work is a confrontation with the conflict between our everyday activities, and the fleetingness of our existence. We are dragged through time and through space, but ultimately we are unavoidably lost in a swirl of oblivion. Given this dissonance, I question the meaning of our everyday activities. Can we find satisfaction with what we do? And why are we compelled to do it? The case I try to make for the meaning of life’s repetitive or renewal actions is made largely in reference to myself, which gives my work an undeniable autobiographical component.

For my thesis work, I photograph …

From Baa To Eye: Language As Images, Yinghua Zhu

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

From Baa to Eye: Language as Images

Languages, as I understood, are the most direct confrontation of cultures because of their inherent culture iconicity. My approach to employ the English language as a subject matter is to interpret the culture it represents. I use language as a metaphor to address the boundary, the inadequacy, the longing, the contradiction, the adaptation, the curiosity, and the frustration that one encounters when different cultures clash. These clashes are valuable because they help me recognize and appreciate the differences, or in other words, the otherness. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. It …

Breathe... Keep Breathing., Shaun C. Kiel

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

I work with short-duration seamless video loops. My work simultaneously depicts and emulates the material composition of time, specifically how action composes time and how time can compose or construct objects.

My work is self-reflexive. Self-reflexive means that a product actively considers or examines its own production. In video this means breaking either the illusion of depicted time as real time or the illusion of the depicted image as real space. Video loops are self-reflexive by function. Their periodic recurrence points out the artifact of the medium.

The periodic recurrence of video loops also changes the narrative quality of the …

Cut, Bryan Drew

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The act of cutting is to sever, to divide an object or even an idea into separate parts of its original state. Non-tangibles can also in a sense be ‘cut’, like gaps in memories or modifications of beliefs or ideas. My work encompasses these definitions of cutting. Working mostly from photos, I use imagery from personal experience, such as meat from my hunting experience, patterns from nostalgic blankets, or photos of people in my life. Other times, I choose imagery simply because I feel compelled to paint it, or it feels somehow needed within the composition. My process begins by …

Black, White, Brown, Aisha S. Harrison

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

BLACK, WHITE, BROWN Aisha Shani Harrison, M.F.A University of Nebraska, 2010

Adviser: Gail Kendall

I address emotions and perceptions that are complex and multifaceted. My goal is for the work to communicate these emotions in a way that makes them accessible to others. Most people have felt disconnected, longing, anticipation, relief, anger, frustration and have experienced internal conflict. While this work touches on these emotions, there is, because of who I am, a set of questions I am asking regarding racial identity.

This autobiographical work is a series of ceramic figures that are engaged with symbolic objects which together form …

I'Ve Fallen In Love With Every One Of You..., Kayleigh L. Speck

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Photographs best show and describe the world, capturing a split second in time without necessarily providing the viewer with any sort of explanation or answer as to why something looks the way it does. Although the camera captures images of the “real,” it has the ability to tell lies. It changes our perception of space, the color of light, and the way things look overall. This is the reason I have chosen this medium; I want to see what my world looks like in a photograph.

Through these photographs of the every day lives of my subjects and myself, I …