Art and Design Commons^™

To Name A Thing: Painting Liminal Space, Chloe West

Graduate School of Art Theses

My work and this thesis engage in the language of fragmentation, the everyday, and liminality. I create work that both depicts and becomes liminal space, I am interested in the in-between, the indistinct. My paintings reside in an intermediate stage between representation and abstraction, embodiments of everyday surfaces and objects of banality: I look at the periphery. The work comes from a distinct awareness of the body in space and the gaze. I turn my gaze to the materials of liminal space: the threshold of linoleum tiles, the boundary of a window. The surfaces that I represent speak to space …

A Catalogue Of Thoughts, Whitney Meredith

Graduate School of Art Theses

The nature of experience is ephemeral, but drawing is a permanent record of change that can serve to concretize it. Drawing is about concentration, memory and failure, and it enables a depth of seeing. In my work, through drawing, collecting, and arranging, I struggle to store time and set an image against the tide of inevitable and constant change. The lens which I take is that of the fragment: the preeminent form, normative and unavoidable, which enables the distillation of personal narrative and memory in a way that speaks to the universal nature of existence. My analysis is built upon …

Time Passing: Image Of Reality And Reality Of Image, Yihuang Lu

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis examines how my practice addresses the subjective and metaphysical nature of the photographic and cinematic medium. Neither the assumed objectivity of a camera lens nor the objective reality suggested by the photograph exists. However, for me, the camera perceives the world by itself, subordinated to the photographer’s subjective interpretation. Along with my photographic/cinematic practice, this thesis examines how the camera perceives the world on its own way and how the audience member’s ultimate perception is formed not only by his or her personal experiences, but also by the camera and the photographer’s perceptions. Using a non-representational method, my …

Ten-Der-Ness, Brittany Jasin

Graduate School of Art Theses

Ten-der-ness. The title of this document defines the word, because one can easily forget all the meanings of a word. To be tender is to be compassionate and kind but also can mean to be in pain. “The quality of being easy to cut or chew” is my favorite definition; because to me that says that to be tender makes you vulnerable to being swallowed by reality. It’s a common saying that without suffering we would never know compassion but, within tenderness, compassion and suffering exist simultaneously in a ten letter word. Within my thesis I am exploring tenderness through …

My City Limits, Maggie Tarr

Graduate School of Art Theses

Many have taken part in the act of flanerie,[1] however, many have fallen victim to the flaneur; “the flaneur is the man who indulges in flanerie…”[2]. I am perpetually followed by the male gaze. I am a flaneuse, a surveyor of my surroundings at all times. “Outsider/insider is a border the flaneuse must skirmish on constantly, if only with herself.”[3]

This thesis is a first hand account of my negative experiences that are generated by the many flaneurs of sexualized culture and lustful society. It is an analysis of the paintings I have created as …

Flesh And Blood, Clayton Petras

Graduate School of Art Theses

In my work, I look for ways to visualize and document the degenerative mental disease of Parkinson’s and transform it into portrayals of the disease itself, its effects, and those it afflicts. Being a physical breakdown of the body, both popular culture and my own corporal understanding influence my interpretation and representation. This document outlines those influences and their buildup towards a shared understanding of the interests behind the work, as well as implies what the work does through these contexts.

How do we give identity to a disease that is difficult to diagnose or view on medical technology, currently …

Fighting Domestic Terrorism: Art's Role In Social Activism, Jonathan Cornell

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

Through a study into the complex web of Church and State, I describe how the American condition falters under a Capitalist regime. Throughout this thesis, I identify incongruences within pervading socio-political tropes. By dissections of religion and culture, I identify how the American people are subjugated by their own ideologies, thereby perpetuating a cycle of class struggle and social injustice. I assert that the American hero has failed in the face of material desire and blind faith to a ruling plutocracy, and that organized religion has been ultimately subsumed by politics as a tool of control. Using the visual …

Teleterrestrial: The Universe Of Technological And Natural Scenes, Nat Rainer

Graduate School of Art Theses

In the Universe of Technical and Natural scenes, is Telerrarin. Telerrain is composed from my point of view as an artist. This terrain of combined forms is seen in three scenes that assemble technology, humanity, and the natural world. Each scene is set in different landscapes: the desert, the countryside, and the ocean. As an artist, I see these settings with the vision of a director that drives the atmosphere, life forms, and cyclical verves that make these landscapes real. As a writer, my voice describes how technology, humanity, and the natural world fit together, and then asserts the kinds …

Phenomenal Marks, Ruptured Spaces, Relearning Language, Crossing Cultures, Meelee Ahn

Graduate School of Art Theses

The form of my thesis is one of interruptions, or “Ruptures,” as I call them. These are events of my personal history, or stories from the lives of artists, that intervene against my narrative through graphic and language devices meant to be understood as equivalent to the material affects in my painting. Important artists and movements mentioned are Gerhard Richter, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenhauler, Lee Ufan, Doho Suh, and Abstract Expressionism. Writers and philosophers Maurice Merlou-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Joan Banach, Sigmund Freud, John Gage, Brian Massumi, Allen Weiss, Clement Greenburg, Shin-Chulgyu, and Yoon-Dongju are also discussed. The idea discussed include …

Creatures Of Play, Melissa Shelton

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis explores my practice as an artist and my work’s cultural, theoretical and social contexts, such carnival theory, feminist studies and film studies, as well as references to mythology and my own biography. I discuss forms of representation of gendered identities through my work in drawing, performance, animation, video and installation.

The masks we wear become as real as our bare face. Through the act of doubling the representation, my thesis work BECOMING/a fine line situates the mask as the mediator between reflections, mirroring the identity and the notion of performativity. Embracing a certain incompleteness and embodying the theoretical …

The Lost Voices Of Women In Poverty And Feminist Discorse, Anna Maria Tucker

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

My statement is that women in poverty are now, as in the past, in circumstances of exclusion within the feminist struggle. This exclusion is mirrored in various cultural movements and milieus. I see my performance work as a vehicle to express the emotions of women in class struggle. This has taken center stage with the return of the political (Trump, etc.). My work gives emotion and lived experience primacy to assert the unique subjectivity of working-class and poor women. This pays homage to the women who were relegated to the backdrop of modernist art.

I will compare my lived …

Distraction And Community: The Magic Of Playtime, Heather Alfaro

Graduate School of Art Theses

Experiencing awkward encounters due to an anxious disposition, I create work that fulfills my own needs to fulfill the needs of others. By manipulating environments and providing props and crafted items, I take control of the situation to function within. Using craft, gift-giving and play, I encourage the audience to participate within my work—fostering community by providing an opportunity to play. Being ever fleeting, the encounters with the work and with the other participants distracts to allow the audience to lose themselves. When the work is gone, the memory lives on to comfort, and to inspire.

Contemplation Of A Place, Slow And Constant, Colton R. Carter

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis focuses on the complex nature of experience and the ability to capture its essence through forms of representation. I start with a narrative to give the reader my personal his- tory and context that drive my work. I then go on to examine the moment in which an experience exceeds the mundane and becomes significant. I also examine the object by focusing on its ability to act as a remnant of an experience, and therefore, it becomes a means of self-reflection. I use the work Box with the Sound of its own making by Robert Morris and Inhabited …

Satan's Beach Surf Them Webs 666, Shawn Burkard

Graduate School of Art Theses

It is crucial in today’s world to embrace technology, which is an essential component of our daily lives. It makes communication in our lives easier. Technology serves a variety of functions that help in the development of education, business, communication, and scientific research. The freedom it offers through social media platforms allows for personal connections at a global level to become feasible. Although the Internet provides ease of communication at a large scale, it is bound to have issues that pollute the intended connections. Virus, spam mail and cyberbullies are some of the items that contribute to it becoming a …

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

Prosaic (Dis)Appearance, Waller H. Austin

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis focuses on issues uncovered in my pursuit of acceptance as a visual artist. Through consolidating beliefs and ideals of art and juxtaposing historic themes and current trends with personal life experiences, I resolve to construct artworks as dizzying, thought-provoking environments. Recollections of memory are largely anachronistic and profound memories are typically associated with trauma or paradigm change within an abrogated system of faith or other conviction. I question the framework of conditioned vocabularies that inform judgment about any explicit perception.

Considering processes of thinking and the experiential re-engineering mechanisms that establish long-term memory, I endeavor to create works …

The Significance That Cause And Effect Might Have, Sara Fleenor

Graduate School of Art Theses

Growing up in Dayton, Ohio in the 90’s, I witnessed the withdrawal of manufacturing giant, General Motors, and was witness to the cascading evisceration of manufacturing in the Midwest. This creation of the rust belt not only littered the landscape with the ruins of empty manufacturing facilities, but the collapsed economy also created a dearth of aspiration that gave traction to a rising heroin epidemic.

In my work, I depict middle America not with the bucolic sunlight of a mythical heartland, but with the illumination of industrial collapse.

Adaptive Strategies In A Slow-Motion Apocalypse, Allana Ross

Graduate School of Art Theses

Nature is a construct inherited from Enlightenment thought. Our culture of nature—the way we construct, teach, communicate and perpetuate our concept of nature—has furthered the false dichotomy of an untamed nature versus a resource-consuming culture. This dualistic thinking has facilitated the current environmental crisis. We thus need a new culture of nature and a system of re-education that enables a symbiotic relationship between ourselves and our environment. A re-negotiation of this relationship is imperative to our continued survival on this planet; thus a reformation of the culture of nature can be viewed as an adaptive strategy. Systems-focused ecological art practice …

The Record In Question, Kari Varner

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis is an archive composed of text and image that catalogs the perpetual distance between the photograph and its subject. In my practice the fluidity of representation is examined through the frame of the photographic archive, while the notion of what constitutes a photographic archive is redefined. While seeking to describe the mutability of encounters with landscapes and past memories the materiality of the photograph is emphasized, the image and its substrate destabilized, and both experience and photograph are fleeting. In many cases water acts as the alchemical substance for transformation, leading the photographs closer to a state of …

Meaning In Perception: Metaphor In Figurative Sculpture, Tommy Riefe

Graduate School of Art Theses

The body is the intermediary between the immaterial and material world and allows for the expression of one’s psychological and physical identity. The perception of the body and mind within space and time provides opportunities for change. Representation through figurative sculpture is a common thread over historical time. Works from Greek Classicism, like Kritios Boy, exemplify how a body’s physical condition is directly contingent on an individual’s psychological state. Alberto Giacometti and Antony Gormley further expand upon this as they present the body as a channel between the mind and the surrounding enviroment. Each artist creates alterations in scale, …