Art and Design Commons^™

Ripe Spoils, Yan Cynthia Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Chen’s practice primarily focus on sculptures and installation. She explores the interplay between the idea of nature and the constructed environment, by examining how language informs what we know. The central thesis, "Ripe Spoils", employs citrus fruits as symbols for bodily experiences and personal identity, investigating their cultural and historical significance. Her sculptures summon the qualities and embedded meanings in materials like paper pulp and clay, wax and citrus fruits, often resulting in abstracted forms evocative of the human body. This thesis paper and exhibition reflect on themes like mortality and the essence of self.

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Place-Conscious Vs. Place-Bound, Julie Avetisyan

Theses and Dissertations

Julie Avetisyan’s installation of sculptures, paintings and printmaking works are driven by an exploration of constructed identity that is not place-bound, but place-conscious. In this paper, she explores how her art practice generates world building under the context of the Armenian Diaspora – considering histories of indigeneity, migration, and assimilation.

Vanitas, Sae Jung Oh

Masters Theses

Vanitas is a tribute to the missing pieces within the reconstruction of human memory, places, and data. It is a cartography of words, including home, apartment complex, reconstruction, mourning, archive, memory, memorialization, a god within, collective memory, photogrammetry, cyberspace, omnipresence, meandering, heterotopia, alleyway, construction site, and mirror. I invite readers to meander in the map of relations and be lost in the topography. What can you discover when you meander? What happens when you renounce being a subject and become an object seamlessly blended into the topography?

Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang

Masters Theses

Disillusioned by my transnational identity, I have come to realize that my sense of belonging is no longer attached to any physical location, but instead to a state of mind, to an intimacy with the world. My notion of home is an obscure and unsettled—at times utopian—idea, which can be infinitely decoded, re-positioned and re-established psychologically. This thesis is an investigation of that liminal state, questioning the paradoxical place at the intersection of longing and belonging, interior and exterior, rootedness and uprootedness. Through a collection of short essays that accompany projects, I seek to unpack the precarious emotional complexities that …

Personal Details, Ben Nathan

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In 2022 I lost my Paternal Grandmother. I found that in addition to the loss of a dear matriarch I mourned everyday things lost to the past. From furniture to childhood relationships, I was made keenly aware of their absence. As I longed to spend more time in the past, I created a studio practice of printing and drawing, whereby I enable myself to spend hours a day in quiet introspection, just drawing and reflecting on my life as expressed by personal details.

My work melds renderings of everyday spaces and objects from memories of childhood and my present experience …

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 …

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 …

The Silent Rage Of Being Loved, Michelle R. Albertson

Theses and Dissertations

The Silent Rage of Being Loved is a multimedia installation working primarily with photography, video, and sculpture. It explores the nuanced ways in which memory, grief, and veneration manifest physically in my life through objects and my body. My proposed thesis installation is intended as a place of refuge for my audience amongst a shrine-like space and for us, collectively, to reexamine and widen the ways in which we experience mourning and grief.

Ambedo: Immersive Storytelling Through Augmented Reality, Dr. Diane Derr, Law Alsobrook, Sadia Mir

Frameless

The territory of locative media, coupled with augmented reality, offers unique opportunities to excavate and unpack rich historic events, in immersive storytelling. In September of 1943, during World War II, approximately 5,200 Italian soldiers were massacred on the Greek island of Kefalonia by Nazi troops. This massacre is credited as one of the largest ever prisoner-of-war massacres in recent history (Lamb, 1996) and left an indelible mark on the island of Kefalonia. In 2019, Configuring Kommos: Narrative, Event, Place and Memory, an interdisciplinary research project, began an investigation into the triangulation of narrative within the complexity of this tragic …

Coping With Burdens, Jennifer Rose Wolken

MSU Graduate Theses

How to carry and cope with burdensome circumstances beyond my control is the main theme I am currently exploring in my artistic practice. I create art objects and experiences that can elicit an empathetic connection to the realities of living with burdens like grief and chronic illness, or help you to process your own relationship to a wide variety of burdens. Individual pieces explore aspects of how I or close family members cope. My practice is multi-disciplinary and the forms focus on reinterpretation of the book as a sculptural art object or artists’ book. The processes I use are overwhelmingly …

Fatal Softness, Mariah B. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

my work is about my teeth falling out, the fatal softness in the earth, a monster tattoo on leathered skin, the bliss of not-knowing, revelation, reveling, the ship and the shipwreck, a fire that knows the naming of you, its dark flame acquiring every part of you, smelling a bad candle at tj maxx, handing it to your mom to smell too, a darkness of that which is golden, a god-shaped hole, the petals of a monstrous flower,1 and frog spawn and at the middle of each jelly pearl is a little secret i don’t have to tell you.

Lost & Found Memories: An Examination And Critique Of My Past Through Art, Alice Chi

Scripps Senior Theses

Ever since I was young I depended on triggers to retrieve my deeper memories. It is because of this quality that I think I have developed a tendency to collect and assign sentimental value to various items that I associate with certain people and moments. Over the course of my life, I have kept many objects, trinkets, and documents because of this. To catalog these memories and confront my lost relationships, I have collected these found sentimental items around my home and compiled them into a documented history of the lingering relationships throughout my life. The resulting product is a …

Still, Unfolding, Ramolen Mencero Laruan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Together with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, still, unfolding, at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, Ontario), this dossier constitutes the following accompanying components: a comprehensive artist statement, documented artwork, an interview with artist Erika DeFreitas, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize my subject-position, and outline theoretical research, motivations, and reflections that drive my work. I expand on the diasporic experience, politics of knowledge, and the autobiographical genre as they are linked methodologies in the retrieval of immigrant histories. The fusion of autobiography and fiction becomes a hopeful approach in challenging forgotten or omitted history and confronts the expectations …

Finding Identity In Memories, Hyejun Youn

Masters Theses

What are the ways in which we form and build our identities and habits in both physical and digital spaces? How can our different uses of the digital expression which evolved from analog forms reveal traits and memories that we have forgotten or overlooked?

The way I define my identity through the analog media I collect correlates with the quality of the memories within my current schema, knowledge structures that represent typical instances of categories.

We interact with an infinity of objects from birth to death. Our collection of objects resonates more and more with memory and nostalgia as the …

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

In The Shadows And Folds, Julia Mueller

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In the shadows and folds is the result of a mental scavenger hunt that I began this past year, to uncover myself and find what is hidden in my crevices. It was spurred by my fear of memory loss which had grown to such a size that it sat visible in the back of my mind unaddressed for some time. The reason for this fear is not large but it feels monumental. I have been existing in various states of sadness and disconnect, which have acted like a thick blanket over my mind. This blanket is simultaneously protective and damaging, …

Out Of The Box: Hiraeth: The Nostalgia Within Abandoned Homes, Jessica Mcdaniel

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

Student researcher Jessica McDaniel explains why abandoned houses obtained a reputation for horror, as well as how this fear is not all that remains in what were once homes.

Deconstructing The Present || (Re)Constructing The Past, Hugh Hoagland

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Though we live only in the present, our every experience will eventually fade into the depths of memory. Deconstructing the Present || (Re)constructing the Past introduces my artist practice on a broad level, one that is preoccupied by the difference between present experience and its memory, as well as the ways we weave memory into the physical environments of architecture and material objects. This thesisestablishes a specific signal memory for the body of work, the memory of a structure that, for a brief time, was a sanctuary for myself and many others. The paper then follows the arc of …

Liable To Change, Jody Travis Thompson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Liable to Change is a body of paintings in which I explore diverse approaches to the representation of visual space. Depictions of space and movement change throughout the pictures by combining various artistic conventions, such as trompe l’oeil realism and non-objective, geometric abstraction. Oil paint, resin, beeswax, and other materials create built-up surfaces which contain the history of their making. Interaction between various finishes and light on these surfaces changes based on the viewers' proximity to the painting. Images of monkey bars, lattice, golden ratio and flower of life patterns provide a structure through which line, form, and space are …

Getting Dressed And Being Dressed: A Constructed Autobiography Of Identity, Jana Jarosz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This written and visual capstone project examines how feminist theories surrounding the construction of a gendered subject are related and situational to the narrative of a lived body experience within a layered context of clothing. It opens up a discussion concerning the negotiated space between an individually-empowered, subject-in-process and the boundaries of social expectations outlining gender and cultural identities. The thesis introduces the concept of using an automediality framework to connect the material culture of clothing to still and motion imagery with text as a way to encapsulate and illustrate the fluid nature of becoming. It concludes by suggesting that …

Living Tangent, Cornelius Alexander Hugo

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

A living tangent is how I am known by many and how I have lived my life for some time. I think in tangents and my life and art seem to evolve through them. Everything I make is connected by multiple thoughts or tangent lines that run from something as simple as the color red, to the idea that I believe communism has invaded my family’s homeland. This then leads to the recollection of childhood games, taught to me by my family in Venezuela and the importance these games played in my psychological development and in my presence as an …

Nirmal Raja Interview, Dalton Campbell

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Nirmal Raja is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Milwaukee, WI. Born in India, she has lived and traveled in several countries. Raja received a Bachelor’s of Arts in English Literature in India, a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Painting at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and a Master’s of Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her work deals with concepts of displacement, cultural negotiation and memory. http://nirmalraja.com

“Lately, I’Ve Been Feeling Distraught” Self And Fear, Jelena Prljevic

MFA Statements

No abstract provided.

Passing, Paul Kelley

The STEAM Journal

Passing is a Site-specific public installation assembled with plastic and an iPad. At its center, the iPad displays a video loop of a human image repeatedly walking in and out of the frame. The work maintains my foundational interest in having the viewer slow down to have a more thoughtful and absorptive experience with the work and surrounding space – continuing my practice of challenging viewer’s expectations and putting them in a position to stop and question.

A Fly Has Died A Splendid Death In A Pool Of Strawberry Ice Cream., Miranda L. Becht

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Humans have evolved an overwhelming awareness of self, other, life, and death. We have learned to selectively process information and to replace dissociated memories with less disturbing ones. We have evolved this ability to deceive ourselves, thus producing a personal reality that is innately false. As a society we tend to idealize our vision of the past, particularly our vision of home. Our idealized notion of home presents itself as a supposedly traditional form of domestic life, but bears little relation to the way people actually lived. This concept of a cozy home full of family love is an invented …

"Perhaps," She Said, "Looking Itself Could Be An Antidote.", Sarah Moore

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Fear And Nostalgia In Immigration, Daniel A. Matthews

Theses and Dissertations

Fear and Nostalgia in Immigration is a project that uses re-occuring memory and experiential memory to help us understand our common histories. The projects asks individuals to first share a re-occuring memory by writing it on a chalkboard. The next step is to then write an experiential memory about immigration, this can be a story you might have heard or it could be something from your own family history. These two tasks are done on a communal table where several individuals are engage in the same task at the same time. This aim of this exercise is to have something …

Remembrance: Drink While The Water Is Clean, Marissa Angel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper supports the Artist’s Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at the Tipton Gallery, located in downtown Johnson City TN from November 30, 2015 through January 22, 2016. The works Included in the exhibition consists of a series of mixed media collage paintings, a large scale etching combined with clay and a site specific installation.

The Exhibit features work that delves into the concept of nature as a subject of beauty, as well as a symbol of the resiliency of life. The work in this exhibit exposes the separation that exists between humanity and the natural world. Through …

The Effects Of Affective Arousal On Color Perception And Memory, Nicole Elizabeth Lang

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The link between affective arousal, color perception, and color memory was explored by inducing fear, sadness, or embarrassment in 158 participants who them completed a color perception and memory task. It was predicted that participants experiencing fear or embarrassment would more often correctly identify and remember red and green than a neutral condition whereas experiencing sadness would lead to less correct identification and memory for blue and yellow than neutral. There was only a marginally significant effect of fear on color memory for red. In the low arousal condition, there was an effect of fear on color memory for green …

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.