Art and Design Commons^™

Driven By Personality: Exploring The Relationship Between Custom Cars And Self-Expression, Tharwa Dalansi

Theses and Dissertations

Custom Car Culture (CCC) is a form of creativity that emerges from personal identities and passions. It involves the restoration, modification and personal adornment of commercially manufactured cars. This process creates a journey, where the enthusiast goes through multiple phases of self-reflection. But due to a lack of local resources, Qatar-based CCC enthusiasts often have to send their cars abroad to Dubai or Japan in order to customize them, relinquishing creative control in the process.

In response to these challenges, based on observations and interviews conducted among actual CCC enthusiasts, I develop a platform for engagement between these enthusiasts and …

Nuff Love: From Me To You, Katherine S. Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis exhibition, Nuff Love: From Me to You, explores the profound impact of diasporic memory on identity within the family structure, particularly for those who were born after immigration. This unpacking of memories is achieved through photographs, collages, and installations that reveal the distant and absent attributes that reside within the home. As a second-generation American of Afro-Jamaican descent, this thesis navigates how the dual identity becomes too complex and is never allowed to exist in a binary state. The constant state of in-betweenness between both cultures led to further questioning of selfhood beyond the Caribbean identity maintained by …

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.

An Escapist Utopia, Sara Eh Denney

Theses and Dissertations

As an active pursuit of avoiding excellence, my work acts as a space for failure, play, experimentation and imperfection. This document and final installation acts as a pause along a lifelong journey of object-making, creation, and spirituality. My work, specifically my working practice, rather than any one object or moment, is an escapist utopia for myself. My work is the process, the journey, not the ending or the completion of any one thing. The repetition, distortion, and production that I engage throughout my working practice acts as a spiritual exercise of meaning—making through creation. I fall deeply in love with …

Form Follows Culture, Nada Raafat Elkharashi

Theses and Dissertations

We all use everyday objects as part of our daily routines, but the way we use them varies from one culture to another. Using George Herbert Mead’s study of human conduct and Louis H. Sullivan’s credo, “Form follows function,” this thesis examines the cultural meanings and implications surrounding the fundamental act of drinking water. Using a methodology of iterative, exploratory making, a collection of glass vessels explores philosophical and physical manifestations of Islamic cultural principles derived from the Sunnah of Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم. With the goal of restoring cultural integrity to our daily activities, the work highlights …

The What If Collection, Aisha J. Daniels

Theses and Dissertations

The What If Collection is a visual narrative that confronts white supremacy, the social, economic, and political ideology used to subjugate black civilization via colonial rule and enslavement in history and via structural racism today. Many white people have been socialized into a racial illiteracy that fosters white supremacy. This racial illiteracy fails to realize and understand the destructive effects of Western dominance on the rest of the world, particularly on past and present Africa and her diaspora. In response, utilizing discursive design, the collection constructs a counter-story that depicts a shift in the power structure in which the white …

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

Abjection And Vision, Brianna Perry

Auctus: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

I am currently researching medieval Christian mysticism and Black Hoodoo. Both traditions are founded upon a more involved relationship with the body and spirit. The herbalism, magic and superstition involved in the Black Hoodoo tradition have served as means of resistance among Black Americans. In light of the Tuskegee Airman incident, Black Americans’ doubt of the white medical establishment has increased. In a world dominated by reason and logic, magic makes less and less sense. The role of mystics provided new opportunities and fulfillment for medieval women, who found their voices through articulating and illustrating their visions. Visions primarily served …

Enact In Disappearance, Stephanie Demer

Theses and Dissertations

Enact in Disappearance excavates the unseen through the medium of photography in order to chart a new strategy for knowing and communing with a complicated world.

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

So Much Apparent Nothing, Emily Mcbride

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on motivations behind selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition so much apparent nothing. Through journal excerpts and analysis of my own psychology, I attempt to put into words my thoughts concurrent to my making, indirect as they may be. The following text shares my personal conflicts and ideologies surrounding art-making, the permanence of objects, and the acceptance of an identity in flux.

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …

Land Of The Ley, Grace Huddleston

Auctus: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

The line separating phenomenon and science has become blurred in the investigation of ley lines. Ley lines can be described as “invisible” lines that link different places of interest and significance, either historical or geographical. This is a very loose definition, but it must remain vague, as it has to account for the various understandings of the lines. These individual interpretations are noted by Atkins Webster in his introduction to “Do Quasar Ley Lines Really Exist,” in which he states that “one supposition is that these ley lines were intended for some practical purpose, perhaps to mark a track or …