Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

The Kinship Of Creatives, Saba Saif Ur Rehman

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This research essay contends that artists and creative individuals must recognize their agency in shaping societal narratives, particularly during times of technological and political upheaval. The essay draws on the insights and contributions of visionaries like Walter Benjamin, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Tomm Moore to emphasize the power of imagination and creativity in addressing real-world issues. It argues that previous technological advances have often reinforced hierarchical and oppressive systems, benefitting a select few while neglecting the masses. As we enter the fourth Industrial Revolution, this essay calls the artists to reclaim their tools from being co-opted for exclusionary and …

Transmutation, Sam Berger

MFA in Visual Art

My artistic practice is about change itself. I am inspired by the doubling and layering effects that came out of Surrealist Photography. Scale, fracture, and doubling are intentional components of my process. I combine those methods to create complex works of art, focusing on the untamable light that I hope to capture when making my images, which often are self portraits. Poetry is an integral element of this thesis text as well as my art making process. Through my poetic work I hope to offer my audience a glimpse into how I see and experience the world. This thesis text …

Veils Of The Unseen, Shinwoo Song

Art Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the dynamic interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness and how this relationship influences visual language in my art practice. My research investigates how unconscious impulses and conscious choices intersect in the creative process, shaping artistic expression and viewer interpretation. I examine how visual art can serve as a medium through which hidden emotional and psychological states, such as memory, desire, and internal conflict, emerge and take form. Rooted in the practice of automatism and influenced by Surrealist strategies, my work engages with theories by Jacques Lacan, particularly his notion of the gaze, and Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of extraction …

Collage As A Facilitator Of Connection And Belonging: An Application Of Art Therapy With Sgm Clients, Noa L. Shems

Expressive Therapies Theses

This research explored themes of connection and belonging in SGM clients in individual art therapy sessions through the medium of collage. An arts-based research method was developed utilizing the medium of collage in session with clients, followed with reflective response collages and journaling to analyze the data observed. Across 5 art therapy sessions, clients engaging in collage facilitated deeper therapeutic rapport and safety, enhanced a sense of connection with the self, and helped to process barriers and desires around clients’ close relationships.

Stitch Theory, Brittany Adeline Adama King

Theses and Dissertations

This paper weaves personal history together using “stitched” citational text, supporting the concept that an archive can function as support, as worn; as garment.

How Much Touch Can The Paper Withstand?, Aldrin Regina Valdez

Theses and Dissertations

Between embodiment and disembodiment, Aldrin Regina Valdez’s works on paper map histories of care, violence, and mourning, both personal and collective. They ask: how much touch can the paper withstand?

The Function Of Art, Magdalen O. M. Pickering

Theses and Dissertations

With the help of machines and the powers of perception, Magdalen Pickering introduces logic to strange and fantastical subjects. The Function of Art explores a hybrid of techniques in painting, screenprinting, and computer generated imagery as Magdalen attempts to use generative printing to obscure art historical consciousness. The installation crosses into virtual reality; reframing textiles, landscapes, and the gallery space through a metaphysical lens.

Folds, Bayan Abukiwan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the fold as an orienting metaphor and material gesture to linger on the minor details of intimacy that are severed by occupation and political violence. Through painting, drawing and ceramics, the work traces the more implicit modes of dehumanization—particularly in relation to Palestine—while engaging the domestic as a site of quiet and complexity. Influenced by artists like Jennifer Packer and Beatriz González, the practice embraces slowness, touch, and opacity to fold the viewer into a haptic encounter with the work.

4 In 10 Tiktok Users Find Their ‘For You’ Page Extremely Or Very Interesting, Aashish Gadani

Theses and Dissertations

Using video supercuts, sculptural forms, and digital prints on textiles in my work, I explore how images/videos can be used to reflect on cultural and personal trends. In this paper, I discuss how the structure of software recommendation systems combines with ideas of the post-internet image and creates unintended cultural consequences.

Fountain, Sadaf Azadehfar

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the intersections of water, power, identity, and architecture through the lens of colonial and postcolonial landscapes, focusing particularly on Persian gardens and fountain sculptures. Drawing on historical, cultural, and symbolic frameworks, the study explores how water systems embody both practical and spiritual roles, positioning water as a force of control, resistance, and regeneration. Central to this work are analyses of arches and garden designs, which serve as architectural metaphors for cosmic harmony, community gathering, and contested space. Through a combination of visual analysis, historical research, and personal artistic practice—including ceramic sculptures and multimedia installations—this thesis traces the …

Strange Looking Creature, Bernadette K. Curl

Graduate Artistry Projects and Performances

"Self portraiture does not involve ego, vanity, or narcissism. Self portraiture is an open confrontation with the discomforting feeling of being perceived by others through projecting and encountering one’s own form in strange and delicate parallel realities."

This work confronts issues in the photographic art of self-portraiture through experimentation and metaphysical theories, the issue of an artist dealing with past versions of the self, still life used as metaphor, and the problems and considerations for an artist choosing to make their own tools.

Raised Spirits The Visceral Journey Of Black Generational Female Trauma And The Transcendent Healing Power Of Spiritual Dance, Wendy Ann Powell

Theses and Dissertations

Black female bodies have endured sustained trauma globally since the transatlantic slave trade, and it continues into 2025. The collective consciousness has carried the generational burden and mobilized it within the womb. Powell uses this intergenerational knowledge to frame the basis for spiritual dance practices as a healing praxis.

Island Child: Sound, Memory, And The Diasporic Imagination, Rachel J. Oh

Theses and Dissertations

Island Child is an immersive audiovisual installation that explores how sound-based memory sustains personal and cultural identity. At its core, the piece reflects on the quiet yet shared emotion among those who have left home—the inevitability of departure, and the complex act of holding both loss and love. For many, leaving is not a choice, but a necessity. Yet the act of leaving leaves a permanent mark, etched in memory, time, and body.

This project creates a contemplative space for those silent truths, using sound and image to express the tension between separation and continuity. Traditional Korean lullabies, my grandmother’s …

Piecemeal, Max J. Eisenberg

Theses and Dissertations

Exploring the history of photographic manipulation both inside and outside of the camera from the late 19th century until today. My work plucks out cultural and local signifiers from the state of Florida, and the American South as a whole, and disseminates them using a constructed symbolic vernacular in the form of in-camera collaging on large format film.

The Dinner Table, Eric Juhola

Theses and Dissertations

The Dinner Table is a dual-projection installation exploring familial ritual, memory, and selfhood. Viewers sit at a circular table while projections unfold across the table and a suspended window, prompting reflection on how ritual functions as performance—and what remains of the self when those rituals fade or disappear.

Out From Under: Stories Of Endometriosis, Prisca Edwards

Theses and Dissertations

Six individuals. One diagnosis. In Out From Under, people living with endometriosis gather for an art-centered workshop. Through collage and conversation, they transform isolating medical experiences into paths of connection and collective healing.

Endometriosis affects approximately one in ten women of reproductive age, yet diagnosis is often delayed by nearly a decade. During this time, many suffer from debilitating symptoms without adequate care or accessible treatment. Out From Under explores the lived experience of endometriosis through the lens of socially engaged documentary filmmaking. Participants share their medical histories, emotions, and frustrations in a structured yet open environment designed for intimacy, …

Coffee Bindings, M. Ermolenko

Theses and Dissertations

Coffee Bindings is a multi-media interactive installation weaving themes of history, memory, death, and spaces that no longer exist through the lens of coffee readings and a mixture of physical and digital media. By navigating ghost spaces (spaces/places that used to exist but don’t anymore), and looking at survival through three time periods, Coffee Bindings jumps through liminal time and space, navigating the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the ethnic cleansing and displacement of Armenians from Artsakh in 2020-2024, while also tying them to personal family history with the death of my father and the loss of the physical space of …

What Is Art Hungry For? Food And The Collective Performance Of Life, Sophie Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines FOOD, the artist-run restaurant founded in 1971 SoHo, as a feminist, collective artwork. Centering overlooked figures like Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard, it explores how FOOD reimagined authorship, labor, and space, linking artistic, economic, and social experimentation through archival research, spatial theory, and feminist art history.

All You Can Eat, Kelly Schiesswohl

Theses and Dissertations

All You Can Eat is a 2D-animated horror short following the patrons and inhabitants of a bakery as they prepare for its annual pie-eating contest. As the contest nears, tensions rise after the discovery of a dark secret amongst the staff inspires rebellion. Through the visual metaphor of pie and the pie-eating contest, this film explores how sexual violence functions on a systemic level. It explores our collective conditioning to a range of behaviors that contribute to patriarchal oppression and the social cycles that reinforce them across generations. Through design and surreal storytelling, this film captures the urgent threat of …

Unplug: Psychological Impact Of Nature In The Age Of Media Technology, Haisi Hu

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores the psychological, cultural, and societal consequences of humanity's growing disconnection from the natural world, intensified by dependence on artificial environments such as media, technology, and generative AI.

Body Of Light, Lucy C. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Body of Light is a two channel video installation, incorporating a combination of archival material and present day footage to explore and speculate upon the traces of Audrey Munson’s life that remain, a ghostly presence creeping into our current world.

A Limit That Recedes, Chloe Wilcox

Theses and Dissertations

In "A Limit that Recedes", I discuss my art practice in terms of accumulation and techniques of reproduction, such as casting, printing, and repetitive actions. I contextualize my work among artists such as H.C. Westermann, Isa Genzken, and Paul Thek. The work featured in this thesis explores ideas of aspiration, longing, and failure, and explores themes of the fraught relationship of the human and nature.

Investigations Of Musical Constructs: An Analysis Of Graphic Scores And Their Spatial Relationships, Garrett J. Henderson

2025 Spring Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

This project seeks to understand, through creative production, how graphic scores and their purpose as a medium can be applied to architectural design. Graphic scores are an abstract representation of musical notation; they utilize unfamiliar concepts and shapes to illustrate musical ideas through unconventional means. Discovering how one can reverse-engineer these works of notation can allow architectural designers to rethink the representation of spaces and the underlying inspirations that form them. Research into broader artistic overlap, historical context, and precedent analysis culminated into a set of drawings that illustrate such concepts through an architectural lens. The production of these drawings …

All Mud In The End: Exploring Registration Between Handcraft And Digital Craft Through Ceramic 3d Printing, Emily Kloostra

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

The goal of this research was to investigate the possible interconnections between handcrafted objects and digital fabrication technologies, specifically in ceramic 3D printing workflows. Digital fabrication tools have advanced rapidly in recent years, raising questions about the role handcraft can still play in the making of objects and buildings. While many artistic endeavors have investigated how far digital technology can be pushed, this study was focused on bringing handcrafted objects back into the conversation. Specifically, it sought to understand how irregular, handcrafted objects may be registered in the digital space and then used in 3D printing processes.

The study used …

Cultural Constraints Of Mental Illness Among Black Males, Sabrina R. Hinton-Campbell

Theses

This research explores historical trauma, systemic racism, inequity of mental health care, and lack of access to culturally and responsive mental healthcare for the Black community, particularly Black males, therefore creating a legitimate distrust of the medical profession among Black males, which inspired this project: Cultural Constraints of Mental Illness Among Black Males. For this project, the researcher visually and explicitly depicts the literal mental health struggles using oil pastels with intentional directional strokes applied by using the sides of her fingers to blend the colors and for control and a blow dryer to bring the oils to the surface …

These Things Happen, Keleigh E. Mcmullen

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My artwork emerges from moments of emotional and physical violence—both small and large. Although rooted in my lived experience, the truths I tell in my work are far from unique. Violence often hides in plain sight, buried in the mundane spaces of daily life. Through ceramic sculpture, I spotlight these moments, inviting viewers into a world that is familiar and simultaneously unsettling.

Scale plays a crucial role in this narrative—objects shrink or expand based on their emotional gravity, their object authority, or my own relationship to them. By amplifying the small and shrinking the overwhelming, I reshape how viewers interact …

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

Untitled: Study., Annabela Cockrell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Untitled: Study is an exploration into “The Work”, which is a constant evolution of the idea of the same piece. Every new work is an evolution of the one before. Previous works are often reworked and self-cannibalized into the next generation. The Work will never be presented the same way twice. There is a temporality in making and installing the work this way, what with the form, the space, the ness of it never being the same. All the while conflicting by being viewed as being the same in the same breath.

Light Without Memory., John Day

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collective work and thesis sought to remedy a fragmented sense of self in the wake of addressing trauma (Personal and generational) through therapy and diagnosis. Visualizing the experience of isolation and loss through deterioration of gelatin and pixels, it exposes the fragility of memory and our tools of preservation in the presence of time. While the images of my family, past and present, cannot speak, they can activate memory evoking a desire to foster relationships with those closest to us. As I explore my identity through family photographs, I find myself embodied within them. Fragments of a whole, bound …

Recipe To Remember: An Exploration Of Self-Publishing Creative Agency, Janet L. Gerges

Honors College Theses

As a poet, I have learned some of the ins and outs of traditional poetry publication—which is anything but conventional—through other research endeavors. Majoring in creative writing at Pace University has given me access to a plethora of resources regarding ways to publish, including the atypical route of self-publishing zines, through the Pace Zine Library. Zines are an ultimately free creative outlet that many artists use to display multimedia work and produce a publication of a different, more homemade quality than that of traditionally published work.

The traditional, more harrowing approach to poetry publication is to break out by publishing …