Art and Design Commons^™

Pero...Maybe, Adrian Gonzalez

Graduate School of Art Theses

Through collage, assemblage, and object making, I fit unlikely fragments that I call manchitas—stains—together. In my paintings and mixed media assemblages I incorporate references to Spanglish as un acto of making. To me, it’s like the visual work that I make: thinking in one language and speaking another, words start with English but end in Spanish. They sound like English but are Spanish or vice versa. The words look misspelled but are used in everyday conversation. Spanglish is idiosyncratic and is what I build my practice on. I collect materials around me, some I find and some I make. …

The Garden Of Extraterrestrial Deee-Lites, Jessica Bremehr

Graduate School of Art Theses

I present a delusion where you, the reader, are a hitchhiker on a journey toward an alternate realm guided by a god-like buffoon. While I take you on a journey through my daydreams and my musings on an alternate existence, a tour guide will lead the way to an otherworldly realm called The Garden of Extraterrestrial Deee-Lites, reflective of a tourist experience to a faraway destination. The tour will culminate in an uncanny space where curious life forms converge with familiar objects to encourage a sense of wonder while promoting ideas of interconnectedness within the world around us.

The Feeling Of Foam & Other Essays, Ryan Erickson

Graduate School of Art Theses

I create conceptual drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations to humorously destabilize and ultimately question how human language, formal methodologies, and social institutions function. While seemingly embracing an aesthetic of rationality, I undermine it with absurdity. In my work, I take a fundamentally dialectical position by skewering the rational to the illogical as neither can exist without the other.

Suture...Harm And Remedy, Amanda Casarez

Graduate School of Art Theses

My artwork centers its attention on treating the body as a sacred and vulnerable vessel that needs protection, healing, and repair. It is informed by my technical training (in garment construction) and my personal traumatic memories. It responds to the embodiment and transfer of traumatic memories through textiles.

Through my haptic process of destructive transformation, I seek to replicate the embodiment and transfer of trauma. The textiles are imprinted, inhabited, and transformed by traumatic memories in a continuous process that is followed by a harming form of repair, the suture. It is my hope that by exposing the wounds of …

The Digital Grimoire, Benji Snyder

Graduate School of Art Theses

Adigital website that houses written narratives & visual works. Its contents cover Occult topics and narratives in a diaristic fashion and visual storytelling. The website acts as a Digital Grimoire of the creator Benji Snyder.

Hunkidoree Resort, Stephanie Gobby

Graduate School of Art Theses

Hunkidoree Resort opened in the summer of 1960 as a middle-class leisure resort for an often-marginalized community: monsters. Monsters including the likes of vampires, lagoon creatures, mummies and other figures appearing in Cold War era films, which served as personifications of American anxiety over nuclear annihilation, this project seeks to reimagine mid-century illustrated posters with unexpected monstrous figures in leisure settings.

The Freakiest Dungeon In The Castle: The Interiority Of Confinement, Madeline Valentine

Graduate School of Art Theses

Series explores toxic fertility and the interiority of psychic trauma.

Songs In The Gutter: Writing And Authorship In American Comics, Jonathan Marshall Smith

Graduate School of Art Theses

An exploration of authorship and writing for comics understood through the divergent history and conventions of mainstream and alternative American comics paralleling the writing and development of a graphic novel.

Excorio: Cursed Films, Haunted Props, And Fictional Reality, Racheal Bruce

Graduate School of Art Theses

The project Excorio is a series of visuals which act as a container for a fictional horror film from 1979, also titled Excorio. Films are often adorned with a curse in conjunction with tragedy, making its surplus value fetishistic in nature. When subject matter is supernatural, as it often is with horror, it is simple to explain the gruesome actions of people, on and off set, as ghostly intervention. This phenomenon is explored through films such as Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby and Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist. A film’s props and supplemental materials can act as a catalyst for …

Blessing, Liu Weike

Graduate School of Art Theses

Blessing is a black-and-white graphic novel which explores fate and bravery through a love story. The story is divided into five chapters, beginning with a bank robbery and ending with an escape facing failure. After a note from the artist, the "post-credits scene” shows another ending.

Demystifying The Penny Valley Files, Austin Ickes

Graduate School of Art Theses

This article focuses on the historical antecendents and development processes of the independent comic, The Penny Valley Files.

Bad Baby Lich Lords: Narrative & Cartooning In Card Games, Taylor Dow

Graduate School of Art Theses

Overview of thesis project Bad Baby Lich Lords and its historical place in card gaming.

Fantastical Creatures: Folklore, Fact, And Fantasy, Leah Kurth

Graduate School of Art Theses

Notes on the Existence of Illusive Critters is a collection of creatures that blend into contemporary urban life, framed as a set of notes produced by a young woman seeking acceptance into the local naturalist society. This project is comprised of notes and drawings from a nature journal presenting these fantasy creatures as real, and is rooted in bestiaries, folklore, creature design, and the concept of secondary worlds. Fantasy is at the core of this project, wrapped inside mock naturalism.

Fine/Not Fine: A Cancer Intervention, Erin Lewis

Graduate School of Art Theses

Fine/Not Fine: A Cancer Intervention offers a new way to think about and interact with cancer patients. The projectconsists of an illustrated memoir, poster, birthday cards and a zine, offering an autobiographical perspective of a cancer survivor. Fine/Not Fine helps cancer patients by educating the people in their lives. Readers learn about healthy interactions with cancer patients. They are discouraged from using toxic language,and from citing conspiracy theories and alleged magical cures not rooted in science when interacting with cancer patients.

From Disconnect To Connect: How To Critique The Objectification Of Animals Through My Photography, Gaoyuan Pan

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis, my photography deals with the long history of objectification of animals in Western culture and philosophy. Aristotle started this objectification because he considered animals were born for human consumption. Later, Descartes finalized this objectification by separating humans from animals. This objectification is still central to the global capitalist system, which consumes animals as an industrial product. Through presenting a documentary of dead or dying animal bodies with black and white photography, I challenge the legitimacy of using animals as products and present the injustice treatment of animal bodies under this objectification. Furthermore, this objectification allows humans to …

Art And Empathy: Self Discovery In A Dark Forest, Younser Lee

Graduate School of Art Theses

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 40 million people report feelings of depression, anxiety, and stress as the world moves at an increasingly rapid pace and faces unprecedented challenges. However, many ignore these negative thoughts and fail to acknowledge them as a serious issue. My art, which shares my own experiences, creates safe, cathartic places for viewers to think about their own emotional experiences. Crucial to this process is my use of daily objects and the creation of individualized, participatory, and multisensory experiences.

My art relates to daily life and the negative emotions that we experience daily. I …

Earth Our Body: Expanding Ecofeminism With The Divine, Isolde Finney

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

If the Earth is Divine, then is harming Her not sacrosanct? If She is a god, or rather goddess, then is pollution, deforestation, climate change, and environmental degradation not blasphemy? Divinity and sacredness can be used to define societal values and ethics. In this body of work, I bring my experiences and beliefs as a practicing Pagan to the concepts of ecofeminism, a social and academic movement started in the 1970’s that sees a connection between environmental degradation and the oppression of women. I call my work Divine Ecofeminist Art. It attempts to utilize goddess imagery and nature worship as …

Sculpture As Memoir, Tirzah Reed

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Questions guide my art practice, so they naturally guide the structure of this thesis.

Remember?

If I remember, what then?

What makes a memoir?

What is the work made of?

Nouns and adjectives—why have both?

What’s the role of sound?

How does the form of installation relate to memoir?

How do we take an installation from situation to story?

What happens in the studio?

What gets me to the studio in the first place?

What matters?

Objects have power. They hold the histories of their owners—or if they have not had previous owners, they at least carry the connotations of …

Translating Between Paintings And Sweaters, Eliza Caperton

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My art is the process of translating non-visual phenomena such as emotions and memories into a visual language built from shape, form, and, especially, color. The visuals draw from places rich with personal history. I first explored this through painting and drawing, but in January my material understanding, and the works’ broader implications were reconstructed after tearing my ACL. I discovered knitting first as a form of therapy, then soon after as a material that brought new meaning to my artistic endeavors. Knitting taught me lessons about gesture, gender, color, and craft, that then led me back to painting.

My …

Restoring Connection, Alexa Velez

Graduate School of Art Theses

As a multidisciplinary artist, I draw attention to our disconnect from the natural world. My work seeks to restore that connection through movement and sound. In this thesis, I discuss how I use movement and sound to create affective experiences that sensitize viewers to the world around them. The camera is my primary artistic tool. I take on the role of director, cinematographer, editor, choreographer, performer, and soundtrack composer to create my video art. Through my work, I transform the ordinary spaces we inhabit into theatrical settings for storytelling, intertwining the familiar with the uncanny.

Nature is one of my …

Unmentionables, Madeleine F. Grotewiel

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text explores the capacity for shamed bodily materiality to narrate the complexity of healing from sexual trauma while rape culture persists. Because rape is discussed so little in public, sexual healing often takes place under a meaty layer of shame, placed on the survivor’s body. Their truth is frequently interpreted as too much/gross/ugly/unspeakable for the public, and it is simultaneously not enough to be discussed/accepted/pursued as an actual issue. This uncomfortable teeter-totter comes from the patriarchal boundaries drawn between what is privately or publicly acceptable. There are plenty of depictions of sexual violence in popular culture and the canon …

It's The Funerals I Missed Which Haunt Me The Most, Arno Goetz

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

What makes a photograph great? This is the central question which guides my research, and I answer this question in two parts. The first element is the structure of the photograph, which Robert Adams addresses in his collection of essays, Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values. With the guiding principle that structure can provide harmony in an image, I develop a collection of guidelines for composing images and name them the “Rules of Clarity.” The purpose of these rules is to help photographers create harmonious compositions, free from distractions. When a photograph has few distractions, it …

Twisted Truths In Memories, Jiyoon Kang

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Memory— fragments of minds that are stored to remember the past and information— plays a huge role in human development. Humans interact with each other based on past experiences. These memories are part of our personalities. Flashbulb memory, a highly detailed snapshot of a moment, can even be life changing, because that memory becomes an essential part of “you.” In Twisted Truths in Memories, my body of work aspires to explore the question: what happens to memory when strong emotions are involved? How does that relate to a photograph, especially when photographs are intended to demonstrate the truth? The body …

Unraveling Memory Through Childhood Relics, Franchesca Rousseas

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The formation of memory is a universal experience that occurs at an individual level. Memory is intangible and abstract, but it can be tied to physical objects such as photographs. These objects may remain the same throughout the course of our lives, but our memories are subject to change. Information is inevitably lost or altered over time, as our minds are more pliable than they are rigid. These alterations result in the desire to reconstruct and reinterpret past events given the information that is still accessible. Focusing on objects of domesticity that trigger childhood memories, I reveal how the act …

Encumbered By Stage Fright Or I’M Not Sure Why I Did That, Chris Scott

Graduate School of Art Theses

I hope to be as honest as possible. I’m hoping to be the star of the show. This is a series of onanistic musings, a rambling narrative that oscillates between truth and fabrication. There are instances of earnestness paired with ostentatious exaggeration. The frequent leaps from subject to subject, often seemingly unrelated to one another, reflect the ineluctably scatterbrained headspace that dictates how I operate in the studio, in every facet of life. Through this lens of storytelling I delve into a few artists, like Bruce Nauman, and rock and roll musicians, like Lou Reed, who I have been unable …

My Favorite Things, Alexander Klein

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis I discuss my material practice as it relates to a history of still-life painting, and the cyclical recurrence of assemblage in western art history. The traditional still-life object is examined through the lens of my material-gathering process at estate sales. Objects reconstituted at these sales are the impetus for an investigation of the still-life object’s connection to magic, the mutability of meaning, and the fading American middle class. The use of these objects for assemblage sculptures in the studio prompts a discussion of the history of assemblage and found-object sculpture in Dada, Merz, Surrealism, and contemporary practice. …

Crystal Queer: Fracturing The Binaries Of Matter, Creation, And Landscape, Sarah Knight

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis, I compile a series of fragments consisting an analysis of my artwork in the gendered contexts of landscape, self-identity, mythology, and philosophy. I develop my concept of a “queer mark” in my art that serves as a form of queering, a disruption of visual and conceptual cohesion. I form a picture of how our contemporary selves are influenced by our gendered understanding of the landscape through the analysis of philosophical, artistic, and mythological concepts of creation. I see my sculptures as an atlas to an alternative means of understanding identity, a queering of these historical and exclusionary …

The Darkness Needs To Cry, Damaris Dunham

Graduate School of Art Theses

I construct large-scale, layered, three-dimensional paintings that symbolically allude to both body and landscape. I attempt to use my hands and embodied self to form a space of contemplation for the viewer as she walks alongside the work, experiencing it. The work exists in the realm of the sensed and the sensorial and creates both spaces of excess and of lack that correlate with my thinking of philosophical notions of the grotesque and the void. In a way, I blend elements of psychoanalysis and art making together. I discuss the origins of the term, uncanny, as one of the few …

To Participate In The Image: Reification & Reproduction, Justine Xi

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Spanning sculpture, video, and installation, I develop my work through techniques of collage and (re)appropriation to investigate and criticize Western hegemonic perceptions and representations of the (Asian) Other. I investigate perceptions of Asianness in the Western imagination from Orientalism to Techno-Orientalism, demonization and fetishization, focusing on the circulation of imagery in art, media, and popular culture. Further, I draw attention to the internalization of these standards and what it means to participate in the construction and distribution of the image, its implications and perceptions.

Big Girl | Little Girl, Emily Mueller

Graduate School of Art Theses

In my thesis document, I unpack the relationship of my photographs to space, bodies, language, and childhood through a feminist lens. The interaction with these various aspects alludes to larger societal structures that inform identity. I am interested in the negotiation between gender and the way it informs the occupation of space, both photographic and physical. The intersection between subjects and objects is dissected using the definitions of these terms set forth by Judith Butler. Becoming a subject does not indicate that one is free from the power that creates it. The figure in my photographs wonders if attempting to …