Art and Design Commons^™

Homeland Insecurity, Amy Chen

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Homeland Insecurity is a project born out of a life’s worth of marginalization, internalized racism, and forced assimilation. It presents common experiences and emotions that are located between cultures, questioning what it means to inhabit a homeland that exists as a hybrid mental space. As I progress through life, my parents’ culture—my heritage—becomes more and more distant, yet like many non-white children of immigrants, I will continue to carry it in my face as a physical reminder of a life I do not know. Influenced by acculturation theory, my work explores this culture that never quite belonged to me to …

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, Sarah Adcock

Graduate School of Art Theses

I view my creative process as alchemy, the transformation of materials through experimentation. I use wax as a material that transcends its historical use as a sculptural process for casting and instead, use it for its transmutable qualities to inform content. Because of its plasticity and duality as fragile and resilient, wax is symbolically submissive and assertive. By applying heat, wax can be molded and formed into new shapes. Once it cools, wax reverts back to its natural state; solid and impermeable. I use objects to explore desires of origin and life. Transitional objects, the first “me not me” possession …

Material Memory, Merry Sun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Memory may be implicitly embedded into an artwork through explicit material triggers. Materials can evoke memory through material past life and through physical denotations of the past. The former carries with it the weight of existence; the latter demonstrates tangibly what cannot be captured by words. The material triggers act as semantic memories that can be used to construct an experiential, episodic memory in the mental faculties of the viewer. The memory that is contained within the work must be implicit in nature to carry experience, for explicit memory can only be read semantically. As the viewer strives to reach …

Black Stereotype, Rashonda Daniels, Blaize'b Daniels

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my work, I create my own narrative regarding the stereotyping of Black people. The body of work that is discussed focuses in on the history of the Black stereotypes that dates as far back as the slavery era. Through my art practice, I address how the contemporary mistreatment of Black people stems from the historical foundation of negative Black stereotypes that were imposed upon us by Europeans. My hope is that by confrontingour history we can eliminate so called “Black behavior” or bad behavior and accept it as simply normal human behavior.

The Psychos, Paula N. Stevenson

Graduate School of Art Theses

My current body of work is a series of drawings that juxtapose characters of fiction and reality in an attempt to explore the relationship between horror film and contemporary social issues. I strive to render an accurate portrayal of the face to draw the viewer into questioning the troubling narrative these characters illuminate. I focus on retelling stories of fear and horror, and crime and infamy. I want my work to convey ethical dilemmas as they are present within the relationship between horror movie antagonists and the audience (all of us). It is these concerns I attempt to visualize in, …

Dialogical Practice, Meenakshi Jha

Graduate School of Art Theses

Within an interdisciplinary and dialogical practice where process is as significant as final form/s, I delve in matters not to resolve but to explore them. Digging deep in my studio practice over my philosophical yearnings to talking loud and clear about my life in performances, I venture out in the geographical expanse to connect with self and others. In fact, the more I practice my craft, I feel a lesser and lesser gap between my ‘self’ and others. The walk outwards brings me closer to my internal realizations as a human being. In short, my practice is based on the …

Breaking The Fourth Wall: Avenues For Empathy Through Participation And Interaction, Grace Zajdel

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abstract:

Theater is used as a lens through which I view the act of role play in participatory and interaction based artworks. I examine the elements of Action – in participatory or performance works—and Set—in immersive installation works – for their effectiveness in creating avenues for empathetic relations in my own work and that of contemporary artists. I distinguish between the overblown spectacle of Peter Brook’s Deadly Theater and connect the mission of the Holy Theater to that of my own art practice. Performance, immersive installation, participation and interaction thereby serve to allow the artwork’s participants to engage in role-taking …

A Vestige Of The Ultimate Force Of Time And Space, Jiyoung Megan Lee

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This art statement is rooted in an idea that the existential quality is independent of absence and presence (synonymous to appearing and disappearing, and real and recognition) and distilled physicality of human body creates a parallel relationship between the two. In search of a proof and logic for articulating the central idea, –that the absence does not define evanescence of existence— the application of physical interactivity in my art, also known as relational aesthetic, enables the work to invite viewers in a way that the interactors leave their traces by physically interacting with the work. These individual traces are eventually …

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

Skin, Bones + Bags: Investigating The Death Of Marine Ecosystems, Rylie Walter

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Plastic has become ubiquitous in the oceans. Although a convenient and cheap way to distribute goods around the world, plastic is also a leading cause for the death of many marine ecosystems. Walter explores her personal connection to the ocean, researches the relationship between plastic pollution and the ocean, and examines art as a means for inciting social change to protect and restore ocean environments. By using plastic as her main material for making art, Walter transforms the material from one that harms into one that can be calming and peaceful, while still representing the destruction it causes.

For Cheryl: The Long And The Short Of It, Rachel Lebo

Graduate School of Art Theses

Short stories are an indirect way of creating a truth by showing instead of telling. They are a way to observe and communicate a single idea. A short story for me is a vehicle for hiding my truth behind a character, exploring myself in the safety of an identity that is not my own. When I read Chunky in Heat, author A.M. Homes and I hide together behind her character, Cheryl, and find solidarity.

The following writings, paintings, and sculptures are collaborations between myself and the women of short story fiction. Those women being the authors, the subjects, and …

Feeling Blue, Katherine Ewald

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

“Feeling Blue” discusses the intersection between art and science as it relates to my thesis body of work entitled Bed/Room. I delve into the sensory world of art, diving into how our environment can have an effect on our neurological and emotional state of being. This is explored through different pathways, namely the color blue, seasonal affective disorder, and the senses. The artwork reflects these ideas, providing a multi sensory environment with the goal of promoting tranquility. Through my process of creating the piece, my intentions shifted to removing Bed/Room from the fine arts context and transferring it into the …

Its Skin Is My Skin, Bryan Page

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text examines the complexity of attempting to empathize with bodies that are vastly othered from my own. This broad yet nuanced subject crosses epistemological boundaries and complicates the dualities between both the mind and body, and between the corporeal and the virtual. My desire to better understand the conditions of another’s experience originates from a painful traumatic loss which caused me to feel isolated and incomplete. In response to this suffering, I long to emotionally connect with other beings and create artwork that attempts to bridge the qualia of individual experience.

I am interested in the capacity (or lack …

Books / Vessels / Hours, Lara Head

Graduate School of Art Theses

My thesis works two vessels, book : 300 hours and book : terrain explore and enact states of meditation, focusing on the process of making and the specificity of materials used. The meditative aspects of my process of making correlate to an anticipated meditation in the observer's time spent viewing. I hope to spark in the viewer the same response and state that I myself was in while making. In this text I explore my artistic process and what I hope for the viewer to experience while they are spending time with my works. I discuss how spending time making …

One Country, Two Systems, Faith S. Pang

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

As Hong Kong approaches 2047—the year that China will formally commandeer the government—fear looms over our city. Since 2014—the emergence of the Umbrella Revolution—thousands of protests occur every year, as citizens continue to fight against the policy changes that China has imposed upon the city. Our freedom and our future hangs in a delicate balance; no one know what China will do next as the Communist government is too unpredictable. I left Hong Kong eight years ago but since these riots began, I have felt an urgency to understand the exact nature of Hong Kong’s identity, to tell our story …

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 …

Time, Space, And Reality, Hugo Patao

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am a mixed media artist working primarily within painting. I make layered, photo-based works that come from dreams and my own photographic archives. At the moment I am making oil paintings on board. What interests me the most is the nature of reality, including perception, memory, time, and dreams. I create environments that I like to call my own mindscapes; imagined places that have the potential to become real. I am engaged in creating worlds that are “in-between” reality and the imagined, dreams and waking life, conscious and unconscious.

My work engages and expands within the tradition of Western …

The Impossible Tasks, Rachel Kalman

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis I unpack the still life genre and its relation to my painting practice, examining the ways in which banal objects project influence and disrupt the notion of a linear, narrative history. Through the contextual lenses of close observation, propagandistic agendas, and the transgressive history of pattern, I explore the inherent contradiction contained within still life painting; working to balance an empathic respect for objects, as such, with my deeply seated desire to metaphorically interpret and empower visual imagery. I am fascinated by the impossible tasks we ask of weak, inanimate, decorative objects and work to generate still …

The Rupture Repeats, Jennifer Everett

Graduate School of Art Theses

Rupture repeats without regard. Occurring on macro and micro scales, these historical, financial, and social upheavals continue throughout our lives, remaking our worlds and leaving us to respond as best we can. Rupture is a condition of human existence. For marginalized communities and Black Americans specifically, rupture is familiar and precarious. Historically, Black people respond to the space that rupture makes through a rigorous, interdisciplinary, creative tradition which serves as a strategy for survival and a way to produce and transmit knowledge. These methods of knowledge production exist in excess of formal training and are evident of quiet and expansive …

Bodies Of Empathy, Eunyoung Rosa Jang

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Trauma is defined as the emotional and or psychological response to a deeply disturbing event. When looking at domestic, familial and generational trauma, however, it is not a singular event but a thread through a lifetime or even generations. When it accumulates and goes beyond one person or body, that trauma can embed itself deeply and go neglected and unaddressed. Despite this, trauma is not invisible, and it is not silent. It festers in the mind and surfaces on the body. In Bodies of Empathy, I discuss my body of work which attempts to come to terms with my …