Art and Design Commons^™

Queering Up For Battle, Alex Davis

MFA in Visual Art

In this text, I explore the potential for interwar European art to serve as a catalyst for the contemporary Queer rights movement. Drawing on the works of Remy Jungerman, LJ Roberts, michá cardenas, and Joar Nango, alongside the insights of Queer theorists Lisa Duggan and José Esteban Muñoz, I analyze my own artwork and the way I remix elements of both Russian Constructivism and Queer culture.

Amidst the current proliferation of anti-Queer violence and legislation, I highlight the importance of safeguarding Queer spaces and communities. To this end, I collect Queer objects and organize them into an arsenal of triangular …

The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness, Megan Kenyon

MFA in Visual Art

I am a Midwestern, Christian, and feminist artist. I make work about the beautiful, broken, and absurd ways in which American evangelical culture influences lives, especially women’s lives. I’m dragging everything into the light by deconstructing and critiquing the world in which I live, move, and have my being. I do this by harnessing prophetic imagination and incarnational space to shine a light on how patriarchy infects evangelical Christian theology and practice. Using prophetic imagination through photographic self-portraiture and text (my own and found texts using the Bible), I seek to make plain the effects of white, Christian patriarchy on …

Elsewhere: In Defense Of Daydreaming, Alex Braden

MFA in Visual Art

Much like music, organic life is an absurd, improbable, and serendipitous instance. I set circular, electric, acoustic, and magnetic forces in motion and allow them to coalesce freely in the hopes of synthesizing unexpected moments of beauty, connection, and harmony.

Dear Sycamore, Anna Schenker

MFA in Visual Art

I create paintings, sculptures, and rubbings to pay tribute to the earthly beings found within my immediate surroundings. I use indexical processes that stain, trace, and record to preserve a moment in time. The process of rubbing is a tactile and meticulous activity of excavation. It is an imprint of what was once there, a mapping of attentive contact. The works are dependent upon the physicality of the host as I engage directly with the plants, seeds, weather, and trees that surround me. The rubbing’s flatness actively constructs a new reality; a liminal space hovers between the impression and the …

Forget Us Not, Jamie Harris

MFA in Visual Art

I create because I mourn, to seek comfort in the knowing and sharing of Suppressed Histories, and to find joy in the rediscovering of lost stories. I create the vessel, which for me is akin to the human body. A form containing memories, wisdom, a soul, and a space for transportation between plains. I paint to capture moments in times of joy and sorrow. To make memoriam, I pay homage to past, present, and future.

This Is A Present From A Small, Distant World, Samantha Slone

MFA in Visual Art

I make toxic pastoral paintings in the style of the Dutch and Old Masters, and media installations which depict natural landscapes as distanced, deconstructed forms. What I explore most in my practice is our damaged relationship with land and nature, and our capitalist and media ecologies as artificial landscapes which suspend us from the natural. In a dissection of the dualisms of man and nature, and progress and sustainability, I create microcosms of our detached condition.

Land | Lineage, Allena Marie Brazier

MFA in Visual Art

Land | Lineage is an in-depth text of my thoughts and tha artistic choices I make within my work. In my thesis I use tha concept of Black Ecology to understand art rooted in tha relationship between race and geography. Black culture and city spaces in proximity to natural landscapes, or edgelands, reveal tha social and physical conditions of a place where these two worlds collide and form distinct characteristics of site, sound, and human interaction.

My research also focuses on tha theory of place-based works to reconceptualize the lost stories and complexities of city trauma and joy within my …

Every Rock Has A Soul, Karen Yung

MFA in Visual Art

My studio practice focuses on the Asian American diaspora and the feelings of displacement that arise from being away from one’s homeland. This paper traces the beginning of my journey to find a way to make art that observes and applies Buddhist philosophies, practices and acknowledges the intrinsic energy found in all things. I create sculptures inspired by the qi of rocks to explore my ongoing struggles with my bicultural identity. Through the continuous pouring of wax and plaster that create stalagmites on to domestic objects, I imbue positive qi into my artworks to pass on to whoever seeks it. …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

Azul, Amarillo, Rojo, Jorge Rios Morales

MFA in Visual Art

My most recent body of work was produced out of the pleasure of exploring pure formal and processual painting. In this text—divided by sections titled like a traditional opera to highlight the mise-en-scene quality of my artwork—the reader will find clues about the context, inspirations, and desires that led to my current practice, such as my ambivalent condition as an immigrant, my exposure to post-conceptual abstraction embodied in Christopher Wool’s provocative oeuvre, and my interest in offering the viewer the experience of what I call “an aesthetic interrogation.” l have privileged in this thesis my own voice and character with …

La Cultura Que No Cambia, Karina Arreola-Gutierrez

MFA in Visual Art

In the text of La Cultura Que No Cambia, I mention how my work has been influenced by becoming more aware of generations of altar making that occur in my family. By collecting stories and photographs of altars, I can observe and create work based on how the legacies can change through generations or stay the same. The memory of my ancestors and family traditions is strengthened. Growing up seeing discrimination towards others has influenced me to highlight my Mexican heritage of traditions, culture, and language through several different methods. Using these elements, I can create work informing audiences about …

The Ephemerality Of The Living And The Persistence Of The Inanimate, Erin Johnston

MFA in Visual Art

I create fragile, sculptural works with paper. Either cast from pre-existing objects or constructed forms, my three-dimensional works ultimately become pure paper objects. I use the visual language of absence, memory, ruin and ephemerality to present modern artifacts and address the now. I am interested in how the manufactured crumbs we leave behind as a species reveal our collective desires, and our relationship to the body and mortality. I am fascinated with, and even enchanted by, the proliferation of material objects and their tendency to surpass the lifespan of any single human. Perhaps this behavior of producing lasting creations is …

The Hidden Power Of Images: An Allegory Of Chaos And Performance In The Digital Age, Livia Xandersmith

MFA in Visual Art

Within this text, I explore the hidden power of images in American visual culture through painting-based installations. I investigate images of the past and present juxtaposed in a surrealist landscape. Through the use of images in the news, entertainment, advertising, and images within the home, I depict how the problems of the past bleed into our perceptions of the present. I find that this cycle of problem inheritance connects us as humans regardless of time, generation, and place. In my work, I explore the complexity of image culture and its shifting presence within the digital age. Using surrealist collage, I …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Echoed Sites And The Unknowable Object, Joseph Canizales

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis will discuss the expanded field of sculpture, simulacra, digital technology, and two terms I’ve devised: the unknowable object, and echoed sites. Within these two terms, I’m concerned with the complicated relationship between humans and geology and how we extract material from the ground without reflecting on the geologic history of the site. In echoed sites I create sculptures with and without a geologic site or object, by way of digital technology. These forms display two states paradoxically in balance, where what’s presented leaves more questions than answers. Thus, as part of echoed sites, exists the unknowable object. …

Constants, Martin Lammert

MFA in Visual Art

A constant is something that I consider to be present in everything I make. Each overarching constant is a clue which may help the reader come to a conclusion about why I make sculpture. I will address repetitive motion in regard to failure and how this parallels the ongoing endeavors of the alchemist. I will discuss the idea of meaning as it exists in the conflict between cleanliness and the mess. I will explain how Hollywood movie tropes can be used to create sculpture. Lastly, I will frame the theatrical vessel as a vehicle to make a story more significant …

Un Guisado: Allí, Allá And The Space In Between, Quinn A. Briceño

MFA in Visual Art

I am a Guisado: a savory stew. A blend of two worlds: one of Nicaragua, and the other of the United States. I am both Nicaragaüense y Estadounidense. As an artist, I work with painting and collage as a form of image making that carefully takes inspiration from those traditions to create a new narrative. In my work, I examine both my struggle with identity and how I came to be the person I am today. As I am both Nicaragüense and Estadounidense it is important that my paintings reflect those two worlds.

The ingredients making up my …

Source Of All Hair, Wearer Of All Socks, Samantha Modder

MFA in Visual Art

I work figuratively in pen, collage, and digital media to portray larger-than-life Black, female characters taking up space in real and imagined worlds. In a series of mural installations, I present a subjective Black woman’s fairytale to process interlocking structures of oppression. Centered in the speculative practice of the Black imaginary that creates spaces of both comfort and confrontation, I tell the story of a Black woman who escapes into an alternate reality made up of only herself, her hair, and the clothes she wears. This text is centered on a chapter of this ongoing narrative, Source of All Hair, …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …