Art and Design Commons^™

The Person-Less Portrait, Katelyn Ledford

Masters Theses

In an age of digital technologies, contemporary portraits look different than their predecessors did. Portraiture does not have to continue to rely only on the idea of physical likeness, even though that is generally how portraiture is conceived. Through our virtual lives, we build new versions of ourselves, gain an abundance of information, and consume technological visuals. These newfound engagements and understandings shape the portraits we build of ourselves and of other groups at large. In my painting practice, portraiture is a way to explore the contemporary landscape around me as a woman and a painter who engages in digital …

Groundwork, Marcus Peabody

Masters Theses

This is hardly groundbreaking, but graphic designers

(or at least this graphic designer)

should gather up information first hand

(rather than waiting to be handed content)

using multiple points of view

(because design needs to be rooted in the broader world)

and then address the resultant multiplicity

(which is chaotic and confusing)

by charting a somewhat linear path through it

(because I have an editorial point of view)

while still acknowledging the underlying complexity

(because it's not the only point of view)

giving structure that is coherent with the subject

(because without structure you just have a pile of content) …

Let's Meet Over There / Eury Kim., Eury Kim

Masters Theses

Small communities that were once reliant on the land for basic sustenance progressively grew into large urban states. Our current cities manufacture items that are exchanged for other goods, by building factories that exploit resources from the ground. These commodities are providing much more than just food and shelter. Industry makes sustenance a secondary need to production by objectifying nature.

Italian writer Italo Calvino compares the weight of two Industrial Revolutions, depicting the first with “rolling mills” and “molten steel,” the second “with bits of information that flow” also noting that everything we “value for lightness quickly reveals … unbearable …

Re-Creation : A Package Design For Daily Life, Wei-Hao Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis grows out of my observations of and inquiries into daily scenes,+ which are wrapped within what I am calling a package. The human mind often puts daily encounters into manageable packages to facilitate interaction with them. This process, however, makes us dull or neglectful. Looking into daily scenes allows me to unpack these packages and reflect on ubiquitous objects, notions and actions so that I am able to see them anew. To me, it offers a break from the habitual responses in life.

Re-creation: A Package Design for Daily Life intends to create a similar occasion for my …

Personal Analysis Of The Relationship Of Artist To The Subject In Figurative Painting, Zuhal Feraidon

Masters Theses

The work for my thesis includes a series of medium-scale paintings on wood panel in oil and acrylic. In these, I depict my friends, my relatives, and myself in full-body portrait style. I use a complementary color palette. The humans within my paintings are presented within an environment that has shallow spatial depth. The backgrounds in the paintings exist through flatness, serving as wallpaper behind the figure. The landscape backgrounds in my paintings are not specific to identifiable locations. The relationship between the figure and the ground is questioned through the overall composition. Both the background and the figure are …

Spontaneous Laughter, Laughter Without Reason, Evan Gilbert

Masters Theses

What is the function of humor in today's society? What is the role of the comedian in increasingly clownish times? How does humor challenge power structures in contemporary life and art? How can painting deploy these methods in an effective manner?

The archetype of the trickster has appeared in myth and literature around the world for many centuries. In all instances it represents the disruptive side of the human imagination, a being that lives outside the rules of conventional behavior who seems to have hidden knowledge or secret understanding of how society truly functions. The archetype of the trickster can …

Works And Process, Alex Hsu

Masters Theses

This thesis is a collection of furniture and objects that seek to embody the harmonious pleasantness of things through thoughtful consideration of their aesthetics, utility, and place. It reflects on the ownership and creation of objects and the role they play defining who we are. More specifically, it’s a reflection on how where I’ve come from and learning how to create have influenced these complex ideas. It’s a document that looks inward and serves as a manifestation of my developing process and its effects on my identity as a result. It grapples with my desire to create things that are …

Externalized : Origins Of Aesthetic Motivations, Tim Miller

Masters Theses

My thoughts and behaviors are influenced by a compulsive disorder. Observing this, I’ve learned how much my outlook can be shaped by my own ritualistic patterns. I live with a heightened sense of awareness toward my particular compulsions which has shaped how I see the world. In this thesis writing and collection of designed objects, I am seeking to further explore my own experience with compulsive thoughts and behaviors, unpacking how they manifest in the day-to-day, how they direct my perception, and ultimately how they serve as a driving force behind my design process. By observing these tendencies and articulating …

Stepping Aside, Juan Pablo Gutiérrez García

Masters Theses

Over time, our connection with materials has changed. Centuries ago, artists interacted with just one material for years, gradually integrating the knowledge of its different properties into their existing expertise. They were learning processes which were acquired through the sum of different personal experiences and the reciprocal action between artist and material. Now, times run fast; we are exposed to a wide range of materials, and knowledge is indirect. We learn through books or by copying established industry processes, replacing our practical experiences. New potentialities of material are not sought frequently, and we end up validating only what has already …

Awe-Struck, Emily Robertson

Masters Theses

Awe-struck is an exploration at the intersection of embodied and situated cognition, sight, sense-making and nature with an additional layer of artistic interpretation and emotional response. Adapting elements of Terrapin Bright Green’s biophilic design principles, this work pushes past the well researched benefits of incorporating nature into a designed space, to uncover an individual’s personal connection to an environment. The connection is multi-faceted—layered with observations of space, color and location, filtered through a lense of physical, philosophical and psychological reactions and then translated into an individual personal history. With a specific focus on wild spaces, where humans have designed and …

Interface Philosophy, June Yoon

Masters Theses

During a Grad Studio II crit in the spring of 2018, I presented my project Measurements of Space and Time (page 132) and right after I finished, someone said, “This is like interface philosophy.” I didn’t even know what that meant, but it just felt right. At that very moment, I knew Interface Philosophy would be the title of my thesis.

Interface Philosophy was built as much as it was written and designed. Its function is to define “interface philosophy.” To describe interface as a meeting point for communication; philosophy as a cognitive reasoning of structural patterns. What I have …

Plenty : Wanting, Choosing,, Overwhelming Unloading, Christopher Cote

Masters Theses

We seek well-being from products and fall prey to the media that promotes them to determine our wants and needs as equal. Consumption becomes an obsession. At some point we accumulate so much that we feel the need to organize or cleanse what’s overwhelmed us.

To highlight the aesthetics of consumption, advertisement, and brand proliferation, I turn their tactics against themselves. Plenty: Wanting, Choosing, Overwhelming, Unloading explores, points out, embraces, and edits the complexity we live within. With the hope of better navigating the abundance of consumer choice and its visual bombardment, Plenty tracks and exposes the cycle of material …

Abjad Orientations, Mohammed Nassem

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates verbal and visual language through a lens of translation, queerness, and diaspora . Looking at graphic design as a reconciliatory space , I make use of its formal and typographic systems as devices to tell stories , examine cultures , and negotiate conflicting principles .

Abjad Orientations is a process of shifting the focal viewpoint to reorient myself and/or my audience and allow for a closer probe of our cultural reality . My eclectic identity as a Queer , Muslim , multilingual Arab living in the United States drives the form and content of my design inquiries …

Record : From Signal To Atmosphere, And The Spaces Between Silence And Noise, Amy Auman

Masters Theses

Record is both a noun and a verb. Its meaning shifts through pronunciation, beginning with our cognitive interpretation and then emerging as a translation that we project from our mouths. This thesis book is an artifact, or record, of the past two years of artistic inquiry. My work, however, lives through movement in time—it records my impulses. This thesis is merely an open archive.

A range of stimuli competes for our conscious attention. The signals we choose to notice emerge from the periphery of our atmosphere, which includes everything from noise to silence. I use design to amplify and alter …

Making Common, Elaine Lopez

Masters Theses

Making Common sets conditions for communication around cultural diversity and inequality. Through my practice, I create new ways to share, honor, and celebrate the stories that have been neglected for too long due to white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of structural oppression. I create immersive graphic design experiences that challenge people to question and expand their worldview. This methodology models an alternative way for designers to work towards a more just society

Lateral Movements : In Multifaceted Time And Space, Jieun Kim

Masters Theses

Orient, shift, calibrate, and soar—these four lateral movements provoke new ways of seeing beyond flatness: the single fixed point of view. I question the reasons and consequences of the dominant point of view and suggest interpretative and playful versions of possibilities.

The distribution of the internet and satellite photography has heightened the perception, interaction, and access to the world—time and space have become flexible. I use these tools deceptively to shift toward dynamic and multiple perspectives both in physical and digital space.

I create graphic environments into which people can enter, inviting people to maneuver in this multifaceted time and …

Softweave, Annaka Olsen

Masters Theses

The contents of this volume are a weaving.1 The text lays parallel to a graphic design practice that emerges from research into computation, digital publishing and speculative design. I ask how we can change the structures of world building to become collaborative and ethical practices — resisting hierarchy and reclaiming agency in the spaces we occupy. By making soft modifications imbued with feminist praxis across a variety of automatic processes, softwares, feeds, and streams, this thesis explores ways to open up critical avenues of making in order to speculate on fluid futures that we can co-author.

Standards, Rules, Setting, Robert Mcconnell

Masters Theses

Greetings. Welcome to Standards, Rules, Setting. This short preamble serves as a user guide to the material that follows. It is, essentially, a set of standards that govern the organization and progression of the various items in this publication.

Everything in this book has been conceived and constructed in line with the Graphic Design Thesis Book Protocol. As my body of work deals with the communication of messages and the manipulation of their governing conventions and norms, this publication — as well — has been organized along similar principles.

There are five types of components in this thesis book: sections, …

The Line That Splits, Zahra Jewanjee

Masters Theses

The body of work I have created since beginning my MFA has been informed and impacted by my research into various inter-connected subject matters: subcultural spaces, the behaviours of crowds, micro and macro and territories and systems. These have been the philosophical and conceptual rationale of my studio practice. Meditation on these concepts is an important part in the preliminary stages of my process and the praxis of my studio work has been to interpret and implement these ideas. In many ways, this process suggests its own direction. I had no exact endpoint in mind but wanted to be driven …

Where We Are : Where We Thought We Were Going, Nathan Prebonick

Masters Theses

In this thesis I will discuss ideas of place, space and repurposing as they relate to my paintings. By tying these ideas back to specific hometown sites, I will trace the evolution of ideas back to their genesis to provide context for the aesthetics of the work. I reference the texts of Robert Smithson and Tim Cresswell, who wrote about transitive notions of place, as well as David Joselit, who’s “Painting Beside Itself” essay focused on painters concerned with the question of how painting enters a network. I hope to use these texts, in conjunction with personal descriptions of sites …

Addicts Of Nostalgia, Samuel Robert Campbell Drake

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I will reflect on issues of nostalgia through a series of work based upon the landscape where I grew up. I discuss how my paintings stage themes and negotiate criticality towards memory. The writing analyses my engagement towards the collaging of documentary and fictional sources: and how my paintings seek to dispel legibility and embrace slippage. Alongside discussions of personal experiences, I talk about the relationship of distancing in my practice, concerning tangible and geographic detachment. The thesis expresses my adoration for the history of British painting, and my efforts to internalize its traditions. Moreover, this investigation …

Instants // Intervals, Valerie James

Masters Theses

The structure of this thesis aligns directly with the ritual structure of the rites of passage as set forth by ethnographer Arnold van Gennep. I see myself as both a participant and purveyor of ritual, visualizing the liminal stages of my own life into tangible and intimate pieces of jewelry. According to Gennep, a participant progresses through a rite of passage in three stages: separation, liminality, and re-integration. 01 Each chapter is organized around these three categories, and on how the work and I pass in and out of the studio. Out/Separation describes the process of walking and the poetics …

Trademark, Cathryn Jasterzbski

Masters Theses

We are characterized by the assets which comprise our identity. These possessions provide us with numerous tools to navigate the social constructs that make up our lives. Growing up in a working-class family forced me to develop strategies to navigate various class structures as I engaged with them. This body of work redefines the value of the working class through a confluence of materials and techniques to bridge the two worlds that construct my identity—allowing me to coexist within both, yet bound by neither.

Biomatters : Future Of Biology As Material Source, Tareq Alzawawi

Masters Theses

Through the history of human evolution, we evolved dependent on many different biological species, which led us to understand the significance of biomatters cultivation. Biomatters are materials derived from living or once-living organisms which are or were subject to biological growth. The biomatters we use, need, and waste were and continue to be a major resource. Wheat, wood, and wool are all examples of a biomatter, yet each serves a different need. Given the range of current threatening environmental concerns, all rooted in our species treating nature as never-ending material resource, we need reactions and solutions that are urgent. Biomatters …

Mindful Interactions, Shreyans Bhandari

Masters Theses

Mindful Interactions illustrates how we’ve become addicted to our smart-phones, and how its use in our everyday life affects our physical, social, emotional health and wellbeing. This design study proposes four product designs that make us aware of using apps, and compel us to reconsider their use during bedtime, mealtime, on-the-go and at home. As our pocket sized devices continue to evolve, the outcome of this thesis becomes a case study for rediscovering and applying the “human” in human centered design.

Human Artist, Nicholas Costantino

Masters Theses

This Artist Book details the author's thoughts on being an artist, his studio practice, and being human.

Supposing Truth Is A Woman, Chloe Wilwerding

Masters Theses

This unbound print portfolio documents the author's spiritual search for meaning through text and image.

Unimproved : Land Observation At The Edge Of Progress, Adam Somers Bowen

Masters Theses

As residents of the United States, all of us have benefited from the resources that this land provides. Some of these resources are responsibly managed, like some logging operations and grazing land. Some are much more harmful, like hydroelectric dams that have drowned Indigenous lands, and block natural habitat. Whether through development or extraction, we as humans have the special ability to drastically change the world around us in a very short amount of time. In a time of rapid environmental change, we need to find ways to better connect, observe, and assess the landscape so that as a society, …

Mais Fica : More For Me, Gabrielle Marie Ferreira

Masters Theses

This book is as much a part of my thesis as the fabrics and patterns themselves, stitched together from moments and memories. You may take these stories with you, but those hidden moments between my words will always remain for me and me alone. No matter how many people take these stories with them, still mais fica.

Icarus : How To Survive The Fall, Emile Stark-Menneg

Masters Theses

In this writing I will explore several films, videos, performances, and photographs from the past century that resist capitalism’s tendency to crush hubris, exaltation, and indetermination. But first, I would like to reimagine the Greek myth of Icarus. How has the myth shaped our understanding of escape? Daedalus, Icarus’s father, attempts to escape exile from the island of Crete by building his son a pair of wax wings. He warns his son not to fly too close to the sun because the wax will melt, and not to fly too close to the sea because the wings will become waterlogged. …