Art and Design Commons^™

Beyond Narrative, Jacob Adam Joseph Dodd

Theses and Dissertations

My graduate film at Virginia Commonwealth University, "Nunna Mia e la Barca," explores the traditions behind narrative and documentary film construction. With this project, my goal was to blend narrative story telling techniques - for example continuity editing - with that of documentary approaches in order to communicate the story of my Italian grandmother, Nunna, and her journey on the Andrea Doria in 1956. These documentary approaches focus more on the specific details of Nunna's American home as I have experienced them growing up. Everything in the motion picture frame has been lit, composed, rehearsed, and edited as in any …

Toward A New Kinship Constellation, Nellie Helen Frances Appleby

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to elaborate on my artwork during my graduate studies, while contextualizing it within the framework of the art world and the works of other artists. A main project during this time was to minimize the singular interpretation and framing of a fine art photographic print, while expanding its possibilities of meaning through the addition of important ephemera and objects such as plants, drawings, moving imagery, conversation and the unknown.

Building As An Instrument, Catherine Irene Grottenthaler

Theses and Dissertations

The proposal of this thesis project is an exploration of the relationship between music and the built space. The space chosen for design is the first two floors of the Lady Byrd Hat factory located at 140 Virginia St. in the Shockoe Slip area of Richmond, VA. This project proposes the design of the building for the purposes of a music center that will benefit the community by providing music therapy, music and vocal classes, a performance space, and a café. It is to be used as an instrument for communication, health, and education. The main users of the space …

Times New Roman, Jason Mckrindey Coates

Theses and Dissertations

It is difficult to say that anything will be proven in this thesis of mine. I think of it more as an account of some things that happened in my artwork over the course of graduate school and my earlier development as an artist. Some influences are listed, but certainly not all of them. Likewise, the work that is mentioned in this paper represents a sampling rather than an in-depth survey. I don't have any tables or charts.

The Artist's Hand In The Digital Age, Jamie B. Mahoney

Theses and Dissertations

For the first ten years of my career I practiced my craft — advertising art direction — exclusively by hand. To help me in the design process itself, I hired specialists. For typography, for instance, I chose a firm I admired in Minneapolis where the typographers would hand cut the film negatives letter by letter.

In those days — the 1980s — each area of design had master craftsmen. I can remember one day walking into a warehouse with thirty-foot ceilings. On the back wall I saw a large horizontal canvas. The artist was suspended from scaffolding and covered in …

Lets Make It Outback Tonight, Michael Douglas Erickson

Theses and Dissertations

When I was younger, shortly after my father died, my mother bought me a t-shirt that I loved and wore till it was worn out. On the shirt there was an image of a man, strapped into an electric chair, holding pieces of bread in each hand. A sign above him read, "Making the best of a bad situation." That statement became a mantra I held onto in the early years after my father's death. It still guides my personal philosophy---humor is key to survival. Particularly a type of humor that celebrates the fact that "shit happens", while highlighting and …

One Million Paintings 2005-2007: A Thesis, Jared Lindsay Clark

Theses and Dissertations

I assist discarded collectives of objects to volunteer themselves for inclusion into the privileged legacy of flatness – assuring them they can be transformed into Painting. Reducing my interventions - often to mere arrangement - respects the possibility of this transformation while frankly retaining the objects' original functional identities. Every surface of any object is a readymade painting – especially flat ones. By stacking objects and aligning their surfaces on one privileged side into a flat mega-surface, I am composing and collaging – even building – a painting. With my amateur interest in German I latch upon the double meaning …

Would You Believe Me If I Said I Didn't Need You, Andrew Kozlowski

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an attempt to expand upon the ideas that permeate the practice of art making that has developed over the past two years. Art criticism, theory, history, and practice are used to give definition to the boundaries of my ever-shifting body of work. Focusing on the elusive nature of communication in both public and private spheres, these projects range from installation and sculptural work, to web projects, photography, and drawing.

Portable Space And Interior Design For Dentists, Yu-Ping Liu

Theses and Dissertations

In the United State today, many people do not have access to adequate dental treatment, while tooth decay is the single most common chronic childhood disease-five times more common than asthma and seven times more common than hay fever. At the same time, studies show that 80% of dental illness takes place in 25% of the population, which is comprised mostly of lower socioeconomic groups. A study undertaken by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2000, concludes that poor children suffer five times as much tooth decay as their more affluent peers. Furthermore, in poor children with tooth …

Confrontation: Endeavors In Futility, Gabriel Lashley Barlow

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is intended to compliment and describe the body of work that has been produced within the time I have been enrolled as a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University's Photography and Film department. The paper will include information on both my MFA candidacy presentation as well as a description of the evolution of my artistic endeavors. The main focus of this document is to discuss my formal examination of performance based video works pertaining to the absurd as described by Camus, and later expressed by Samuel Beckett, also the role of the masculine body's physicality within ritualized actions.

In Search Of The Ooey Gooey Good, Lauren Ashley Clay

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores ideas of everydayness, the mundane, and the repetitive emptiness of consumer culture. It looks at the malaise that plagues everyday life and examines several attempts throughout history to break from its grips which revolve around a search for a more ideal state. This research includes utopias of modernism, the transcendental, the communal living of Shakers and Early Christians, ascetic monks and The Desert Fathers. These ideas have shaped my studio practice as I construct installations based on worlds which allude to the eternal, the otherworldly, and the fragility of our physical world when compared to more eternal …

Within And Without, Shane Robert Rocheleau

Theses and Dissertations

Within and Without is a document which illustrates my personal and artistic research into the nature of the postmodern conception of the self: that self is unfixed, multiple, and reactive. It explicates my myriad and explorative approaches to photographic portraiture. Furthermore, it indicates many of my theoretical and artistic references and how I have applied my lessons both as an artist and a researcher to maximize the effect of my concepts within the formal and aesthetic confines of my photographs. Finally, this document explains my own beliefs concerning the nature of self and how a synthesis of my influences has …

Renewing Manchester: A Supportive Life Skills Center For Manchester's Most Underprivileged Residents, Jennifer Lynne Hamilton

Theses and Dissertations

In America today, many people have fallen into sub-standard housing situations. Domestic violence, drug abuse, and lack of educational and employment opportunities are a few of the myriad reasons for this. On average the number of homeless people in the greater Richmond area is 5,200 individuals.1 These are people specifically in need of a re-integration into society.This thesis examines the role that the built environment can play in this process, by providing a sustainable, affordable and flexible site for a program that encourages people to rise above their current state by "recycling" them into better more productive citizens. The intent …

A Fugitive Sea, Marian Brunn Smith

Theses and Dissertations

I make images that are fragmented like ominous dreams. Described with sensuous marks of paint, they demand intimacy but reveal vulnerability as they threaten to break apart before the eyes. This thesis examines my journey over the past two years at VCU and describes my artistic beliefs and visions.

Ws 1207 Community Workshops, Katherine M. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

For my thesis, I have chosen to adapt the abandoned office/warehouse at 1207 North Boulevard for use as a community workshop for all of Richmond's urban neighborhoods. The community workshop's focus will be to provide open workshops, classes, a resource library and design consultation to low and middle income homeowners, affordable housing properties, and community parks. In addition, the center welcomes all of Richmond city residents to join and partake in 1207's resources in order to grow a multi-faceted community focused on improving the lives of all of Richmond City's residents. The center will function as a gathering space for …

Invisible Green, Amanda Sauer

Theses and Dissertations

How is nature conceived today, a generation into the environmental movement? Many contemporary artists grapple with how to reconcile our inheritance of both a precarious natural world and the culture that created it. My work investigates the subtle intricacies of our relationship with nature. I use photography to develop a way of seeing that points to the often-unnoticed nature in front of us. In particular, my work recognizes and re-imagines nature's deep connections in the context of our ecologically changed world.

Cradle To Cage: Confronting The Premature Institutionalization Of The Children Of The Incarcerated, Jen Fell

Theses and Dissertations

American prisons are swollen and distended. Over 2 million Americans sit in jail or prison today. About 2/3 of the incarcerated are parents. They parent approximately 2 million children in America today who are separated from mom or dad because of incarceration. Their children suffer from poverty, inconsistency in caregivers, separation from siblings, reduced opportunity to health and education and increased risk for substance abuse, alcoholism and incarceration themselves. Children of the incarcerated are seven times more likely than their peers to become incarcerated as adults.Many of these children are unable to visit their parents. Over half the mothers in …

Walk 14 Blocks, Bryant Mark Dameron

Theses and Dissertations

Walk 14 Blocks is a document that describes my two-year investigation of simulation in everyday life. It describes how I examine both simulated places and the tools of simulation. I explain the key elements relating my work to simulation; experience, language, and the video monitor. I trace how I have utilized these elements in several works that led to my thesis exhibition titled Evidence.

Seeing It Straight, Heather Harvey

Theses and Dissertations

This Master of Fine Arts thesis is divided into four main sections:FAITH and DISBELIEF: In which I reckon with the implications of faith versus rationality as a secular nontheistic artist. IDEAS: The central locus of my work is a place of indeterminacy between what is known/familiar and what is just one step outside of that. This has nothing to do with mysticism, science fiction, or anything else unmoored from established fact. Section also touches on the particular vantage of a female artist with working class roots.THE WORK: Selection of work made during graduate school, and the the guiding thoughts behind …

Breadfruit Fantasies, Matthew Steven Spahr

Theses and Dissertations

Breadfuit is a strange thing. It's a starchy potato-like sustenance not particularly noteworthy by most accounts. But it's history is amazing, an epic journey. Relocated from the Samoan island of Upalu to Oahu, Hawaii in the 12th Century as well as transplanted from Tahiti, as an economical food source for slaves in the West Indies in 1780 the lowly breadfruit has been held in the hands of Fletcher Christian, Captain Bligh, James Cook, King Kamehameha and innumerous other nameless individuals including Matt Spahr. This fruit contains the weight of colonialism, capitalism, exploration and tropical fantasy under its skin. The collision …

Persistence Of Vision: The Value Of Invention In Independent Art Animation, Pamela Turner

Kinetic Imaging Publications and Presentations

The focus of this investigation is in the realm of animation that straddles the ever-shrinking gulf between a screening and an exhibition, the theater and the art gallery. There is a subtle maturity and movement in the animation art world that not only continues but also extends the often-overlooked legacy of independent animation while engaging the conceptual dialogue of contemporary art. This tradition of an art aesthetic is passed from the early inventors who fashioned the necessary tools and images. The myriads of techniques and concepts evidenced throughout this history inform the current practitioner, just as digital technology and the …

Kick Me, Jennifer Stackpole

Theses and Dissertations

Human experience, particularly the trials and tribulations of growing up, is the foundation on which I build. In this body of work, I represent these somewhat unsettling times. I use flattened space, strong diagonals, and vibrant color to add energy to the compositions. An underlying structure of fragmented shapes suggests the incomplete nature of adolescence.

Out Of Body, Alessandra Lee Michelle Torres

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the evolution of Alessandra Torres's work, from her early performances and installations, to her latest work with surrogate bodies, as she challenges the relationship between artist and their creation, body and object, and audience and art. Examining the work of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Rebecca Horn and Marina Abramovic, Torres explores the transformative capabilities of interactive sculpture and live performance. Join Ms. Torres as she transforms herself into everything from a paintbrush to a serpent, in her ongoing exploration of the body's ability to adapt and evolve.

Investigations Into Social Game Theory, Stephen Bryce Harper

Theses and Dissertations

Investigations into Social Game Theory is a document that describes my two-year exploration of the ritual encapsulated in our societal framework. It discusses the thoughts and processes that accompanied the three bodies of work that led to the creation of my final thesis exhibition.

The Enduring Image, Michelle Lieb

Theses and Dissertations

In my work, I have chosen to pursue the antiquated, experimental, and alternative processes of photography. A digital image, a web page, an e-book all point to the current pace of a society concerned with the beauty it can access in a moment of instant gratification. It often has no regard for a process that requires personal discipline to capture a moment, a place, or an idea. I find little enjoyment in the immediate, when I can instead experience what happens when the combination of chemicals, glass, wood, and the environment turn a potential photograph into an inimitable encounter. It …

The Other Side Of The Fence, Benjamin S. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

I pull from what I see in my urban surroundings. There is always a sense of dread fused with optimism that prevails. Is it beautiful? Fragments of low-riders and tricked-out cars become symbols of desire and the glowing red lens of a stop light becomes a Cyclops poised to defend his garden. Candy-coated, blooming, dripping and seductively slick confronts you with the obvious warning: STOP! You could be next… …The grass really is greener on The Other Side of the Fence. At least until winter comes.

Natural Selection, Jeffrey A. Vick

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis work is about imagination. I use the collaborative efforts of the viewer's mind and my sculptures, or specimens, to make associations of real life animals. I feel this engages the viewer and in turn invites them to inspect the work on closer level. This is my ultimate goal in the work, to take hold of the viewer's curiosity and have them examine the work on a closer level.

Through My Eyes, Candace B. Conklin

Theses and Dissertations

I am the one my friends call the creepy one. My art is not pretty or happy. It is an expression of my inner feelings and thoughts. I don't make pretty pictures because I find them void of true emotional substance. I developed my point of view when I photographed my eyes, which have become a consistent theme in my work. Eyes are the window to the soul and the key to my inner emotions. I have since expanded my work to include other images. I continue to seek ways to help my viewers experience my work both emotionally and …

Dirty Laundry, Mona Mullins Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Making art is cathartic for me. Working in a visual medium allows me to communicate ideas and feelings that I would find difficult to express in words. I use a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional materials as symbolic elements in my work. While the pieces are not always pretty, my goal is that they contain an element of irony and humor which helps us laugh at ourselves.

Raubeaux Scientician, Joe W. Grant Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The works contained in "Raubeaux Scientician" are about a triadic relationship between people, science, and art. The obsessions, of individuals and the apparent change brought about by their physical presence guide my artistic research. I am awestruck at the capabilities of the individual to overcome conventional thought and through creative action yield a new vision. Some of the people I am fascinated by put forth theories and inventions that continue to affect myriad aspects of our world today. Among those at the forefront are, Robert Oppenheimer, and Edward Teller. Their contributions to science and mathematics remain almost unmatched. These and …