Art and Design Commons^™

Stations Or There Goes Nothing, Jeremy D. Lawson

Theses and Dissertations

Jeremy Lawson uses bright, expressive, abstract painting in conversation with minimalist sculpture to encourage a meditation on the death of the self, the potential for it's transformation, and the struggle to maintain the tools beyond language necessary to experience the sublime.

Song From A Chamber, Miguel A. Martinez

Theses and Dissertations

My work weaves a biomythography through figurative reimagining of syncretist religious iconographies. This thesis installation is composed of a mural reliquary in which a collection of twenty works on paper is displayed. The project exposes abstract dimensions of body and spirit in relation to my experience as a gay immigrant.

Interview, Elizabeth Naiden

Theses and Dissertations

An exploration of work by Liz Naiden in the form of a conversation discussing light and dark, attention and proprioception, and design and architectural theories of space in installation works. Addresses the role of voice, speech, and reading and speaking aloud, performing for oneself, and performing for others.

Typographic Interventions: Disruptive Letterforms In Public Space, Clark A. Goldsberry

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

We are surrounded by typography—on billboards, aluminum cans, pill bottles, and pixelated screens—but artists and art teachers, seeking out the materiality of their lived environments, should be able to look at text in different ways. Many artists utilize letterforms as a medium of juxtaposition and recontextualization (Gude, 2004) by placing text in places we don’t expect to see it, or they subvert the messages we expect to read. Typographic interventions can be seen everywhere, by all types of artists, makers, activists, and dissidents. These interruptions could be framed as forms of socially engaged art (Helguera, 2011; Mueller, 2020) that “suspend …

Body/Mind:Matter, Mary Ellen Ratcliff

LSU Master's Theses

Body/Mind:Matter presents the unfiltered experiences of living in a period of momentous instability. Three life-sized figurative sculptures stage my emotional journey towards mindfulness as a direct response to the pandemic and my growing concern for our collective future. A winding network of crocheted yarns and growing vines interweave the troubled figures to signify our complex dependencies upon one another and our environment.

The condition of the encumbered bodies is a result of the worried mind. Revitalized matter proposes reconciliation by introducing a sense of hope; decaying surfaces reveal new life; fused wires hold up under immense pressure; and soft woven …

Yellow, Sisi Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The following paper is a constellational unpacking of yellow through notes on critical race and feminist theories, myth, science, science fiction, disparate histories, cyborgs, biography, virtuality, materiality, fungi, porcelain, language, internalization, melancholia, smells, sounds, tastes, feels, and more feels.

In-Between Spaces, Trinity Kai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In-between Spaces is a paper based in personal narrative that uses Critical Race Theory and art to analyze the history of photography and systems of discrimination facilitated by hegemonic culture. Body is at the center as a symbol of the physical and psychological impacts systemic inequalities have on people that are classified as other and how one can be absent and present in institutional and public spaces.

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 …

An Unbearable Illumination Of Truth, Shanna Glawson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An Unbearable Illumination of Truth is a series of sculptures created to explore the connection between trauma and healing. The sculptural exhibition addresses economic, occupational, childhood, sexual, and gender-based trauma. These sculptures incorporate familiar motifs and visual metaphors to express narratives of varying types of traumas. A broad range of sculptural materials (such as wood, fabric, and found objects) and methods are used to create these symbolic, objective forms. The juxtaposition of shelters with other forms and materials visually enacts the themes of vulnerability and intrigue that characterizes traumatic incidents. Shelters are referenced throughout this entire body of work as …

The Good, The Bad, And The Unspoken: Complex Layers Of Motherhood, Casaundra R. Beard

MSU Graduate Theses

This body of work represents my frustrations about domestic life, by

communicating the raw, unfiltered side of how sometimes my anxiety and

motherhood coincide. By addressing the harsh stigmas society has towards both

anxiety and motherhood, I hope to normalize the reality rather than continue the

cycle of these idealized notions of what motherhood is supposed to be. Each piece

represents a small seemingly insignificant moment from my average day, but it is

when they start to accumulate together that results in an anxiety attack. The titles

of each piece are the positive mantras I repeat endlessly to convince myself …

Tomorrow Is The Worst Day Since Yesterday, Matthew Carlson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Susan Sontag wrote: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other space”.

This work addresses aspects of that citizenship. I used my experiences as a person living with a disability and as a parent to a son with Autism to explore the dichotomy of this dual citizenship. The …

The Weight Of It All, Amythest Warrington

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The impetus for this exhibition is to visualize the weight of loss and to focus attention on the need to recognize the inherent dichotomy between life’s beauty and loss. My mobile upbringing taught me that details may differ from group to group, but the core experiences of loss, empathy and belonging are a universal language that connects us. I utilize clay’s unique physical properties of malleability, recyclability and permanence once fired, to explore the dichotomy between strength and frailty associated with these universal connectors. The meticulously crafted beautiful objects draw one into serious and often taboo subjects. The work comforts …

Difficult Paintings, Hao (Damien) Ding

Theses and Dissertations

The sublime as a concept has a fraught and racist history. However, it remains the single most helpful idea in describing the deeply felt state of being when one comes across something ineffably powerful. From an art-making perspective, this thesis, and the accompanying exhibition of installations and paintings, proposes an alternative construction of the concept of the sublime. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual point of departure, a painter can manipulate the relationship of the viewer and paintings to create paradoxical moments of simultaneous intimacy and distance, which interact to create an alternative path towards the sublime. Through descriptions of …

As Many Names As Objects, Luke Herrigel

Senior Projects Spring 2021

“And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.

We rearrange it, then break down ourselves”

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Honesty is Unbelievable”

• A Bumper Sticker I Saw

For my senior show I used collected materials, found objects, personal ephemera (both genuine and fabricated), paintings and sculpture to make installations that I would change every night of the show’s duration. Each morning the installation would be photographed, left for only a few hours, and then would be uninstalled to make way for creating a new iteration. …

Hidden, Carlotta Rose Maruca

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Ex-Tensions: Material Entanglement And Intensities, Zohreh Galdizadeh Garmeh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of the intrinsic capacity of matter and material formations and utilization of art as a mode of inquiry. Ex-tensions: Material Entanglement and Intensities investigates the animism and vibrancy of objects and the hidden interplay between materials and intensities that flow through and around within the spaces that confine us. In this body of work, all forms of material configurations are understood as animated and agential and as different representations of the same substance that are only formally diverse.

A Constant State Of Change, Karianne Canfield

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Collecting the unwanted waste of life and compiling it into something beautiful. A reminder that all things can always continue to change. An assertion that I will continue to change with them. Expecting that despite the disregard for what it was, it can be valuable as something else. It is not new, this form which it is transformed into, it was always there as an opportunity for it to become. Made of items from across my past, this was always an option of what I could be. From here it will continue to reform and reuse its materials and meanings, …

Hold Me, Nell Anna Dreyfus

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Through this body of work, I have been exploring objects that hold. Each of these pieces are vessels or carriers that reference the body and its individual parts. Each item was carefully considered and alludes to so much more than their individual uses and purposes. I believe that all these objects have strong meanings and associations because of their presence in everyday life--they are universal and recognizable. I have brought attention to objects that often go unnoticed and overlooked because of their common uses in everyday life. By painting them the same color as the floor, I camouflaged them into …

Squeaky Clean, Dorothea L. Mcrae

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Dead Weightless, Isaiah Schwartz

Senior Projects Spring 2021

There is more than convenience embedded into my attraction to the unrefined materials that I work with. Shopping cart (baby size), palette, cheesecloth, bucket, and window. Each is rich with an individual history that expands beyond the use it was intended for. Suspending them in the air is my observance of the sanctity of their mundane uses. To create something new, also out of these unrefined materials, and to refuse to polish it. To have resolution in a thing that is also ambiguous. I can find intrigue in a million different things as soon as I pay attention to them. …

Down The Rabbit Hole: An Exhibition – And – Alice In Wonderland Engaging With The Reflexive Project Of The Self: An Exegesis, Shana James

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a culturally significant text that is widely known across many cultures. In this Victorian story, a little girl follows the talking White Rabbit down a rabbit hole to uncover a fantastical parallel world. Alice in Wonderland has remained in print for over 150 years, highlighting its continued relevance to generations of readers. This exegesis investigates the making of visual artwork that responds to this significant story, exploring the symbology and metaphorical nature of the text and seeing the story as a “reflexive project of the self” (Giddens, 1991, p. 5).

I began this research having …