Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Heretic Territories: Spells For Fracture, Mia Greenwald

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This monograph accompanies the MFA thesis exhibition, Heretic Territories: spells for fracture. The show uses video, weaving, clay, and bacterial/fungal bodies in three main bodies of work: Inter; Lost, remain, fracture; and For, Of Them. The pieces, and the relationship between them, explore themes of magic, the body, and land in contradiction and opposition to colonial and capitalist structures. I approach the artificial hierarchies that subjugate people, non-human creatures, and land while trying not to replicate the mistakes of posthumanist scholarship that bypasses the fact that not all people are afforded full access to the category …

This Memory Is Redacted But Not Gone, Wanda-Marie Rana

Art - All Scholarship

In this paper, This memory is redacted but not gone, I discuss how my artistic practice, my time in graduate school, and my own life experiences have led me to create my thesis project. The paper is split up into chapters describing the work I made while in graduate school along with my themes; memory, family, home, and identity, and methods; archive, collage, and investigation, of working. I then dedicate a chapter specifically to my thesis work before concluding the paper with my plans to continue my practice after graduate school.

Dirt Circus: Queering Sports And Home Through Filth, Hannah Patteson

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This monograph accompanies the MFA Thesis Exhibition, “Dirt Circus”. I outline the history of circus and carnival culture and the ways in which queer identities are expressed through these artistic modes. I describe the nonconforming expressions of gender in these arenas through bearded ladies, aerialists, clowns, and the freak show. I then explore various groups from the 70’s to present day, including Bread and Puppet Theater, The Cockettes, and Split Britches, who utilize performance to further their ideologies of gender freedom, anti-capitalism, and sexual liberation. I compare our differing uses of cheap art and public engagement within the realm of …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness, Megan Kenyon

MFA in Visual Art

I am a Midwestern, Christian, and feminist artist. I make work about the beautiful, broken, and absurd ways in which American evangelical culture influences lives, especially women’s lives. I’m dragging everything into the light by deconstructing and critiquing the world in which I live, move, and have my being. I do this by harnessing prophetic imagination and incarnational space to shine a light on how patriarchy infects evangelical Christian theology and practice. Using prophetic imagination through photographic self-portraiture and text (my own and found texts using the Bible), I seek to make plain the effects of white, Christian patriarchy on …

Elsewhere: In Defense Of Daydreaming, Alex Braden

MFA in Visual Art

Much like music, organic life is an absurd, improbable, and serendipitous instance. I set circular, electric, acoustic, and magnetic forces in motion and allow them to coalesce freely in the hopes of synthesizing unexpected moments of beauty, connection, and harmony.

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

Uni_Form Space: Exploring Environment Through Fashion+Architecture, Alanzo Price

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Henry Van de Velde advocated for the German concept, ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ which translates to ‘total work of art’. This concept became popular during the Art Nouveau Movement around the 1890s when architects began utilizing their knowledge of scale to design fashion and other everyday objects like silverware. Though this concept has produced intriguing designs, architects still shy away from design processes that seem ornamental assuming that they will not produce work that is ‘architectural’. The goal of this project is to create an architectural environment by curating designed elements that use a recognizable design language present in fashion and architecture. The …

Spit Brimming With Futures, Penny Molesso

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

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing …

Tied Together, Eiko Nishida

Theses and Dissertations

The paper is about a site-specific installation that questions a viewer’s norms and perspectives, through the use of multilingual newspapers as a sculptural material.

Uncanny Evolution, Will Baca

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

I like to think about reality and simulacra in the internet age as then and now. Then being everything before a conscious awakening and now being anything between consciousness and reading this. The image is an arranged landscape divided into thirds from right to left, similar to a timeline. I tried my best not to use square images, cutting out only the important objects or symbols. My image uses little to no negative space, somewhat of a sensory overload. All the images are different sizes and I used layer arrangement to embed smaller objects into any negative space. From the …

Integrating Art And Design With Environmental Science, Laura D. Hinson

The Confluence

This article demonstrates how combining art and design and environmental sciences would benefit both fields by analyzing how utilizing art and design in environmental sciences can help enhance aspects of the teaching process and environmental studies, specifically those dealing with climatology and pollution. Additionally, by taking an ecocritical approach to analyzing art and its creation, this article will detail how artists can become more conscious of the impacts creating certain types of art has on the environment while also noting environmental changes documented through art.

Transcendence: Exploring The Connections Between Transgender/Gender Non-Conforming Identities And Experiences Of Nature Through Art, Mc Jackson

Undergraduate Theses

“Transcendence: Exploring the connections between transgender/gender non-conforming identities and experiences of nature through art” is the written portion of a creative thesis revolving around an immersive art installation and short film. Transcendence, the installation, was created to promote connection by exploring the overlap between transgender and gender non-conforming (GNC) experiences and experiences of nature. Part of this installation is a short film of interviews conducted with transgender and GNC individuals about nature, their gender experiences, and the transcendent nature of the two. The written thesis analyzes existing literature on nature as a restorative, therapeutic, spiritual setting, offers insight into …

Inner Portraits, Bethany Salisbury

Graduate Theses

This paper investigates the many interconnected layers of women’s mental health through portraiture and how animal and plant symbolism can represent the way women's hormones and bodily health affect their mental health. I reveal how the artwork created presents these connections and inner mental health narratives to the viewer, creating a space of empathy, destigmatization, and self-reflection. This body of portraiture art connects five women through a series of both two-and three-dimensional portraits based on interviews using my own adaptation of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoots’ (1983) portrait methodology.

Women and non-binary individuals have always dealt with difficult interactions of bodily and mental …

Refigured: Separations In Portraiture, Caroline Myers

All Theses

Utilizing traditional painting techniques embedded with digital syntaxes, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, serves as a catalog of my experiences with communication in a hyperconnected world. Processing illegible information caused by my hearing loss informs the process of imposing similar boundaries within my paintings. Like a technical glitch, these obstructions create an illegible visual experience, with evidence of my process remaining as a clue for the viewer’s understanding of the image.

Though personal in nature, I expand from my experience with auditory communication to employ pertinent explorations into the sustained unpredictability of today’s ever-expanding medium that is technology. My paintings …

“Block Island Stories”: Preserving And Showcasing Block Island’S Rigorous History Through Virtual Adaptation, Alexander Pretorius

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

Personal Details, Ben Nathan

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In 2022 I lost my Paternal Grandmother. I found that in addition to the loss of a dear matriarch I mourned everyday things lost to the past. From furniture to childhood relationships, I was made keenly aware of their absence. As I longed to spend more time in the past, I created a studio practice of printing and drawing, whereby I enable myself to spend hours a day in quiet introspection, just drawing and reflecting on my life as expressed by personal details.

My work melds renderings of everyday spaces and objects from memories of childhood and my present experience …

The Siren Of San Francisco, Emily Gage

Whittier Scholars Program

The Siren of San Francisco is a story I have been interested in telling for the longest time focusing on the coming of age of the main character, Mia, and how she deals with change through gaining the power of shapeshifting. A lot of the graphic novel explores the relationships between Mia, her mom, and her close friends and how her relationships with them change during this transitional period.

The driving force behind this story was my enduring interest in relationships, identity, feminism, and how people can shape the people around them, including themselves. I approached this particular story from …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Someone, Stop Her! The Musical (The Gallery Show): The Thesis Document., Hannah Dewitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis document accompanies a body of work that is radically vulnerable, personally political, and emotionally complex. Through my work, I challenge myself and my audience to sit with discomfort and create an environment suitable to generate a nuanced appreciation of pain that approaches its acceptance through humor, confessionalism, and the subversion of tropes against themselves as an act of counter-mimicry. This document situates my work within art-historical context with a primary focus on performance art and applies insight from each artwork referenced to further analyze and defend my own work. Additionally, I use texts relating to Camp sensibility, binary …

I Come Creeping: Remembering The Battle Of Blair Mountain In Graphic Narrative, Ellie James

Senior Honors Theses

Between August 24 and September 4 of 1921, approximately 10,000 West Virginia coal miners marched to Blair Mountain in Logan County in a militant stand for their right to unionize. Despite its status as the largest labor uprising in United States history, few know or understand the impact of the Battle of Blair Mountain today, even within the borders of West Virginia. This creative project aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to memorialize this period of the West Virginia Mine Wars through the creation of a 10-page comic, titled I Come Creeping, which depicts and is informed by the …

Coded Ceramics: Computational Design Of Persian Ceramics, Nasrin Iravani

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research explores the use of computer-aided technology and robotics in the creation of digital art and crafts, while also considering the cultural history of digital design. It begins with an examination of the most recognizable styles of Persian ewers made between the years 1,000 and 1,400 AD in the Islamic era. After analyzing a hundred ewers from this period, I classified them based on distinctive features such as openings, necks, bodies, spouts, handles, and bases. Then I designed a series of 3D printed ceramic vessels – titled Coded Ceramics – that were inspired by elements of the historic ewers. …

Creating Character, Alexa Tenney

Honors Projects

This project explores the relationship between merchandise development and narrative development, with a specific focus on the creative development between dolls and animation. Through exploration of these creative mediums, I began to question: How does the creative process combining animation and merchandise develop, and what is the impact on the final product? This concept is broken down even further to focus specifically on characters, and how creative characters are developed for dolls. This project provides an overview of the history of animation and merchandising beginning with Felix the Cat in the 1920s. Felix represents an instance of an animated character …

Art Therapy And Internal Family Systems For Adolescents At A Therapeutic School: A Qualitative, Arts-Based Study, Emma Pici-D'Ottavio

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Adolescence is an important developmental period marked by a search for identity and an increase in impulsive behaviors and intense emotions. The current study explored how a combined art therapy and Internal Family Systems (IFS) model is beneficial and appropriate for adolescents in a school setting. A brief art therapy group was facilitated with students at a therapeutic high school. The intervention integrated IFS approaches, including externalization and guided visualizations, with the goal of understanding parts and increasing self-compassion. Three main themes emerged based on observations of the sessions: 1) the concept of parts encouraged self-understanding and reduced shame; 2) …

Am I Another You?, Laura Diane Cobb

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

On my birth certificate are the names of my parents, though the name of my father stands in opposition to my genealogy. The script of his signature conceals my birth as donor conceived (DC). The truth of my origin would lay dormant for years behind his scrawl, burying my true heritage beneath the stories of my social father’s ancestry.

Learning the truth, I began to reevaluate my identity. Searching for myself along waterways, I explored the shores of the Platte River as if by knowing its sandbars, flora, and fauna, I would come to know myself. In searching the land, …

Ideation And Iteration For Creatives, Sandee M. Chamberlain

KSU Distinguished Course Repository

This course addresses the development of visual literacy including concepting, initial approaches of creating an encompassing aesthetic, creating timelines for production, and exploring the refining aspects of creative production. Students will devise an advanced creative problem and provide a documented account of their creative journey to present as a process journal at the end of the course.

Zephyr: The Twenty-Third Issue, Zephyr Faculty Advisor, Skyler Garcia, Faye Botelho, Aliyah Walker-Pasko, Paige-Marie Merrill, Madelyn Asher

Zephyr

This is the twenty-third issue of Zephyr, the University of New England's journal of creative expression. Since 2000, Zephyr has published original drawings, paintings, photography, prose, and verse created by current and former members of the University community. Zephyr's Editorial Board is made up exclusively of matriculating students.

How Do Arts Contribute To Educational Research? A Book Review Of Arts-Based Research In Education: Foundations For Practice, Niroj Dahal

The Qualitative Report

I write this review as a recommendation for potential readers: those who are new to and veterans with respect to arts-based research. Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice is edited by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund, with contributions from 22 authors and a cover artist. In addition to providing some information from a usual structure around contents, central themes and concepts, intended audience, genres of writing styles, strengths and weaknesses, and uniquenesses, I primarily focus on the content of the chapter entitled “Four guiding principles for arts-based research practice” which I found extraordinarily significant in the second edition of …

Hi-05 Helen Dupré Moseley: Painter, Author, Roller-Coaster Fan, And Air Stewardess Of Flying Saucers, Lizzie Richards, Karen H. Goodchild Dr., Youmi Efurd Dr.

SC Upstate Research Symposium

Without having any formal training in the arts, Helen Dupré Moseley (1887-1984) made art for around fifty years of her life in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Utilizing different media and formal qualities, Moseley created fantastic works of art that forced viewers to use their imagination and make their own choices in interpretation.

In addition to works of art, she was also an avid writer and thinker, producing many short stories and unpublished children’s books. What makes her distinct is how she was formally untrained as an artist yet was not excluded from the art world, as she had the ability to …

African American Fashion Legacies, Yasmeen Orozco

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

This was an exploration of how African American Designers, former and current have contributed to fashion legacies. Key points that will be presented will be – brief biographies of seven African American designers, that covers their upbringing, education, and their fashion legacies. The seven fashion designers that will be discussed include - Patrick Kelly, Willie Smith, Anna Lowe, Stephine Burrows, Laquan Smith, Dapper Dan, and Zelda Wynn Valdes.

The study further features fashion trends that originated from the African American community. Notably, African Americans have been a pioneering force with creative styles that have been ignored and rebutted. Finally, the …