Art and Design Commons^™

Hidden In Plain Sight: Image, Text, And Social Commentary In Victor Ekpuk's Cartoons For The Daily Times Of Nigeria, 1989-1998, Kaleb W. Jewell

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides an analysis of the cartoons produced by Victor Ekpuk for The Daily Times newspaper of Nigeria from 1989 through 1998 and the artist’s use of ancient nsibidi script to “hide in plain sight” his social commentaries on sociopolitical and economic issues in Nigeria. Victor Ekpuk’s original cartoons within the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art are examined in the context of indigenous masking practices and other indirect methods employed by indigenous comedians to protect themselves. Moreover, the cartoons’ use of caricature and their nsibidi scripts within are argued to provide a connotative …

Some Form Of Blue, Zena A. Zakanycz

Theses and Dissertations

Through my art process and material selection, I investigate how interior spaces long to accumulate memories and possessions. I am interested in encroaching floor to ceiling build-up of collected goods kept in the homes of individuals unable to discard or part with possessions. These individual’s daily movements through their space and their denial of the surrounding mass informs my work. My work is larger than human scale, made of multiple units, and dense; yet understated by the subtle use of color and repeated materials. When I make an installation it often begins with creating a wall or a floor that …

Cajamarca Ceramic Spoons From Northern Peru: Forming A Symbolic Function, Jeanette Louise Nicewinter

Theses and Dissertations

Ten painted Cajamarca-style ceramic spoons form the foundation for an investigation of the way that these seemingly utilitarian objects were bestowed with economic and symbolic value both within and outside of the borders of the Cajamarca region, located in the north highlands of present-day Peru. Since the ceramic spoons have been recovered from sites associated with large and powerful societies and states, such as the Moche of the north coast and the Wari of the central highlands, an analysis of the form, style and imagery present on these spoons reveals how these objects transcended cultural boundaries. To assess and evaluate …

Perspectives, Beatrice Modisett

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings are linked to a thirst for exploring new landscapes and perspectives, my interest in the extremes and subtleties of geological phenomenon and a desire to create, chase after, and teeter on a brink. Here I will discuss these topics and work to unpack my interest in avoiding comfort, my relationship to control and the creation and function of my paintings. To extract myself from my tactile and visual world of process and paint and enter the world of written language presents very different challenges than the ones fostered in the studio. The goal in both is to reveal …

It's Slapstick Design, Thanks! Wait! No "Thanks"- Just Slapstick Design ..., Curtis A. Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

I'm arguing for an approach to generating graphic form based on slapstick. Slapstick is a genre of physical comedy involving humorous portrayals of clumsiness, mistakes, and nonsense. I investigate it as an approach to form, content, process, and communication. These methods were used to construct an immersive installation loosely based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Graphic design is expected to function. It does this by conditioning users to its particular patterns or by skillfully implementing familiar patterns. A slapstick approach to graphic design is valuable as a critical tool for disrupting conditioned experiences for promoting empathy by relating …

No Woman Is An Island, Adele Ball

Theses and Dissertations

We have gathered the following pages to archive our time here in Richmond, Virginia. We have been here for two years, growing slowly, moving when needed to new anchorholds to avoid detection or arrest. We scrutinize the urban environment like modern archeologists. We collect stories and speculate about new uses of old things. It is imperative to be resourceful here, and we do so out of necessity but also in the spirit of practice. These pages were made en route, each an exploration of the tools at hand when on the move. The method of creation is just as important …

Loosely Bound, Alexander Martin

Theses and Dissertations

I take a poetic approach to graphic design practice. It is a subjectivist approach, which recognizes our human right to willful interpretation. Designers navigate form, culture, and history like poets through language. We are subjective, exploratory engines drawing formal inspiration from figural and analogical associations. Subjectivity in graphic design practice is complex, however. Subjectivity privileges the interaction between object and individual. When we designers interpret the literal world with the poet’s omni-directional sensitivity, we intentionally and intuitively create objects that accrete inexhaustible, extra-literal value for their audience.

Choreographic Space, Kelsey Sheaffer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis, Choreographic Space, and accompanying exhibit is an arrangement of contemporary work being done in the cross-over between movement, drawing, sound and architecture. The thesis develops a lineage of choreographic thinking through a fissure in the classification of a dance as necessarily the body in motion. Through the link of the “choreographic object,” Choreographic Space asks how an interdisciplinary exploration of the principles of movement can reveal novel ways to think about the body in space.

The Curiosity Of Con, Petrified Breath, And An Accident Known As Blue., Steven Randall

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis installation emerged from an interest in visualizing breath. The resulting work came to exist at the intersection between art, biology, and performance.

The unicorn tapestries were used as a generative point of departure to explore the preservation and transformation of images through time, by time, and with time. Reproductions of the six tapestries were each etched into paper and then submerged into solutions of Phenol Red dye, Ferric Ferrocyanide (also known as Prussian Blue), and various forms of sodium chloride. Exhaled breath was used to encrust these images of the tapestries into physical objects which gradually crystallized and …

A (Dis)Assemblage Of The Gallery-Growlery, Levester R. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

A (dis)Assemblage of the Gallery-Growlery exhibition and writing presents itself as a site of a morphological exploration of language, sound, and objects in tandem with the irreducibly venting black expression. Venting, the black expression never seeks wholeness within objects or language itself for it is a thing-in-itself. Its presence affords critical reception to a residue of delimiting forms. All growls eschew verbal objects for the manifestation of pure phonetics. A growl in a gallery is the growl. The growl resounds through the physicality of the objects and gallery. Also, it unwinds the object-among-objects as the phono-present stretches the discursive …

Death Vegas Valley, Eric M. Diehl

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores hallucinatory landscapes of the US American West by using a combination of painting styles outside of the Western painting canon. I cross-reference painting and cinema, interweaving video, acrylic paint and the panorama to create a satirical homage to the history and present state of the USA. However, through an earnest devotion to the medium - both painting and cinema - I find my criticisms also yearn to hold onto a belief in a myth I know to be false.

This is an American History conversation about artifice and consumerism through advertising. I use Las Vegas and the …

Sensible Nonsense, Timothy J. Woodbrey

Theses and Dissertations

“Truth happens only by establishing itself in the strife and the free space opened up by truth itself. Because truth is the opposition of clearing and concealing, there belongs to it what is here called establishing.”[i]—Martin Heidegger

All things contain their own individual existence. When I look at objects I notice material, tradition, individual history. These are starting points for my imagination to seed and germinate. My ideas are fragmented, nonlinear and nonsensical to others but they hold honesty to me. Honesty is powerful and is worth sharing.

This document is an examination of my work during …

Women At The Crossroads, Women At The Forefront, American Women In Letterpress Printing In The Nineteenth Century, Dianne L. Roman Ms

Theses and Dissertations

The significant role of the female printer in the American home-based print shops during the colonial and early republic periods has been documented in print history, socioeconomic, labor, and women studies, yet with the industrialization of the printing trade, women’s presence is thought to have disappeared. Contrary to the belief that industrialization of the print shop eradicated women’s involvement in skilled employments such as typesetting, the creation of the Women’s Cooperative Printing Union in California and the creation and chartering of the Women’s Typographical Union in New York, both in the late 1860s, clearly indicate that women continued to work …

Drawing On The Victorians: The Palimpsest Of Victorian And Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts, Anna Maria Jones, Rebecca N. Mitchell

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time.

From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism …

Cold Lapse, Tressa Jones

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

cold lapse addresses the abstract notions of time and loss while conveying the value of observing the present. The postmodern view of time, the grid’s vernacular, and the aesthetics of postminimalism are my foundation for communicating time’s passage and its consequential sensations of absence. The duration of a slow drip, the cycle of breath and the sequential motion of a hand folding paper each mark passing moments. By observing these signs the phenomenon of time may be appreciated. Care and ephemerality in the work require the viewer’s sensitivity when encountering and witnessing it, much like the demands of observing the …

Inconspicuous Fandom: Exploring Subtle Female's Expressions Of Science Fiction And Fantasy Fandom Through Dress, Dina C. Smith-Glaviana

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of the research was to understand women’s motivations for wearing inconspicuous fan dress (IFD) within various settings and social contexts, and to explore how IFD contributes to fans’ social and personal identities and personal distinctiveness. Prior to this research, there was one study conducted on fan dress (Shipley, 2010). Previous researchers studied fan cultures using the concept of brand community, but did so within limited social contexts (Kozinets, 2001; Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001; Schau, Muniz, & Arnould, 2009; Shipley, 2010; Thompson, 2009). Other researchers focused on costume relating to fandom rather than everyday forms of fan dress (Chen …