Painting Commons^™

Containment, Quin Mittelstead

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores “containment" (the act of keeping something within limits) as both oppressive control and a mode of self-regulation, grounded in the author’s experience with epilepsy. Paintings deploy grayscale grounds, restrained palettes, and contrasting rapid/slow gestures; emergent color, texture, and altered substrates map psychological states, bodily impulses, and reactive processes. Research into witchcraft, remedial items, and eugenics (notably Buck v. Bell) informs works that link historical censorship and institutional violence to contemporary stigma. Sculptural installations (nets, jute, flawed Faraday-like enclosures) and cannibalized studio materials probe systems that restrain thought, media, and bodies. By introducing unpredictable variables with found supports, …

Desert Ghost, Jessica Downs

All Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between landscape, memory, and the body through handmade paper installations inspired by the deserts of southwestern Utah. Drawing from personal experience of place and the loss of a childhood home, the work considers how environments are internalized and persist as shifting, sensory impressions rather than fixed geographies. The desert becomes a generative site for examining presence, transformation, and the passage of time, both geologic and personal.

I use handmade paper and installation to translate my experience of place into physical form. Paper serves as both material and metaphor; its fibers, textures, and muted tones emulate …

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.

It Is Not Her Fault She Didn’T Know Mary Had A Lamb, Samer Ridikkuluz

Theses and Dissertations

“It is not her fault she didn’t know Mary had a lamb” is not an Arab Queer conflict. It is the genocide of everything they told me art was and the decolonial clarity of what art can be. Whether it be bridging the gap between the East and the West, the straights and the gays, or me and the world—I investigate the human condition, the parts we play, and how identity evolves and hides.

How Eye See, Now I See, Michael Anthony Simon

Theses and Dissertations

Michael Anthony Simon’s paper addresses ideas surrounding the fluid nature of perception, time, and ideas of control, or lack there-of. Creating a symbolic relationship between paintings and sculpture. Simon both embraces and confuses the notion that understanding is never truly stable or secure.

The J In Danger, Zachary Delamater

Theses and Dissertations

“The J in Danger” merges autobiographic and formal concerns in sculpture and installation to describe the existential hazards contemporary life poses to Queer and Disabled individuals. The paper utilizes silent letters as thematic device to connect notions of precarity to a broader sense of contemporary “doomerism.”

Place-Conscious Vs. Place-Bound, Julie Avetisyan

Theses and Dissertations

Julie Avetisyan’s installation of sculptures, paintings and printmaking works are driven by an exploration of constructed identity that is not place-bound, but place-conscious. In this paper, she explores how her art practice generates world building under the context of the Armenian Diaspora – considering histories of indigeneity, migration, and assimilation.

Objects And Apparitions: A Portable Museum, Yesuk Seo

Masters Theses

My work transcends the boundaries between painterly printmaking and sculpture. Through hand-pulled silkscreen prints, I create abstract pixelated images depicting our constantly changing relationship with meaning and reality. Memories are often glamorized and distorted whether it is our childhood home, our neighborhood, or the city. My practice archives my family history and traces patterns in memory and space by using invisibility as a phenomena to render newer explorations of abstraction, in time and in urban landscapes. Objects & Apparitions: A Portable Museum, pairs moiré patterns of ghostly printmaking with wooden objects in specific arrangements. It captures my nomadic journey between …

Insulin Is My Fuel, Jean Paul Vivas

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The assertion that moments of play empower individuals to find balance amidst the tension of creation and destruction is a central tenet of my artistic philosophy. Through the expressive medium of painting, I have discovered that playfulness can serve as a responsive process that facilitates a flexible approach to coping with the complexities of identity, ideology, and morality. This fertile ground for creativity has become a means of defining a sense of life that is informed by my ongoing struggles with a diabetic medical condition. As my body's dependency on insulin necessitates a constant movement between the frustrations of daily …

Symbols In Sketchbooks, Diana Rice

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My installation is an expression of the sketchbook in the sense that it is an object bound by time. Specifically, it is the assemblage of time, cognition, and the materiality of the sketchbook. The installation consists of various sized papers interlinked by tied thread. On the papers are drawings and sketches arranged in proximity to other sketches that are the inspiration or iteration of one another. Thus, a web of evolution is created. This project is an exploration of how images are created and evolved, such as symbols, and how the material construction and physical presentation of the installation affects …

Pace/Place/Space/Tempo—The Choreography Of Equity And Expressions Of Black Living, Vessna Scheff

Masters Theses

My skin is natural. My skin is political. My hair is natural. My hair is political. My speech is natural. My speech is political. There’s no such thing as apolitical.

My current interdisciplinary practice in painting and performance focuses on how Black diasporic identities hold, create, and process subsistence narratives. For this research, I am asking the questions: What role does pace play in resistance strategies and how can it be communicated through tempo? How are unspoken histories conveyed through movement, silence, the glance of an eye, fat crackling in a cast iron, pushing play on a walkman, and seeds …

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.

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 …

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 …

Rhythms Of Light, Jessica R. Csanky

CGU MFA Theses

My works are visual expressions of a true love for movement, rhythm, and saturated color. In making art, I present lived experiences that are rendered abstract. These formal representations originate from an energetic space or sensory association and express a connection to places I have been, whether physically or emotionally.

Integral to my practice is the uninhibited exploration of materials and tools. I am committed to deepening my understanding of what paint can do when combined with drawing and installation techniques.

My compositions address architecture, landscape, memory, as well as psychological and physical spaces that we move through during our …

Enmesh: The Art Of Trauma And Recovery, Joanna Pottle

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Liminal Space is an artistic installation within the ongoing, interdisciplinary creative/research project "Enmesh: The Art of Trauma and Recovery.” Utilizing a combination of research methods, creative processes, and cultural inspirations, this project asks the following questions: how can the artistic process (this project serving as a preliminary case study) parallel various modes of recovery and healing? How can this objective be visually communicated through a mixed media approach of drawing, painting, and printmaking and how can this approach be an effective tool of communication? What can we conclude from both modes of work (solitarily or collectively)? How do they accomplish …

North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell

Theses and Dissertations

North American Data fractures and reconfigures pre-existing narratives into new, unauthorized forms of storytelling. Core samples extracted from various narrative sources are reassigned new roles according to their proximity to each other. This paper functions as an introduction to the essential actors and their dramatic inclinations within fluctuating scenarios.

Between The Bars, Unique Shaw-Smith Dr, Eliese Maxwell, Victoria Otero, Catherine Trujillo, Habib Placencia Adissi

Creative Works

“Between the Bars” is a senior project exhibition, in collaboration with Cal Poly Sociology Professor Dr. Unique Shaw-Smith. Featuring artwork produced by incarcerated artists, the goal is to undo negative stereotypes and to empower the rehabilitation of incarcerated artists individually and collectively through art.The exhibit demonstrates that rehabilitation does occur in prison and emphasizes that art has the power to transcend all social differences and divisions. The exhibit features more than 60 works in diverse mediums including sculpture, painting, and poetry by 34 incarcerated artists from California Men’s Colony.

This catalog represents the onsite exhibit of the same name, which …

Jun-Jun Sta.Ana Interview, Jackson Hughlett

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Jun-Jun Sta.Ana is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist born on September 19, 1963 to Remigio Benavidez Sta.Ana and Emma Cecilio Catral in Manila, Philippines. He moved to the United States at the age of 24, shortly after finishing a degree in Dentistry. He started his art career late just before he was turning 40- having a solo show of digital works using appropriated images from free porn sites which he deconstructed and embellished with images and symbols culled from Filipino talismans. His practice has become multi-disciplinary, and while still utilizing found images and materials, he also employs the technique of …

Vida En Sombras, Tommy Canales Burns

CGU MFA Theses

Verisimilitude. What is reality? Subconsciously we are acting out and absorbing information collating data and in turn responding with instincts. Learning processes to view and shape this world. I think of the Hermann Hesse’s doppelganger, the idea of a shadow self. Group identities can also have strange shadow selves. It is bizarre to look back at history and see the changing context of social norms, fashions, traditions, scientific, philosophical, and political thought. Art is a sign of the times, creating space for the inner dialogue of collective consciousness to be purged and hashed out.

Kimono, Elizabeth D. Hoffman

CGU MFA Theses

Globalization opens up opportunities for the international community to push for freedom of expression. It is precisely because the history of kimonos is a multi-cultural one, invented by the Chinese, then adapted and adopted by the Japanese, then altered by Western colonialists and changed as it permutated from the aristocracy to the middle class and to laborers, that I felt that it was relevant to today and the cross-cultural influences of globalization. This summer, I purchased two authentic Japanese kimonos, (one an everyday cotton one to use as a model for my drawings, and the second, an elaborate silk one …

Dollhouse, Whitney Goller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses the work in DollHouse, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition on display at Tipton Gallery, Johnson City, Tennessee from January 25 to February 5, 2016. The exhibition was an installation consisting of five sets, each containing furniture - both 2D and 3D - and a mask with instructions relating to a room found within a dollhouse.

The sets and supporting thesis explore the ideas of social norms, feminism, and identity, and how submission to ideologies can create emptiness, while engagement can prompt social change. Topics include the process and evolution of the work and the artists who …

Remembrance: Drink While The Water Is Clean, Marissa Angel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper supports the Artist’s Master of Fine Arts exhibition held at the Tipton Gallery, located in downtown Johnson City TN from November 30, 2015 through January 22, 2016. The works Included in the exhibition consists of a series of mixed media collage paintings, a large scale etching combined with clay and a site specific installation.

The Exhibit features work that delves into the concept of nature as a subject of beauty, as well as a symbol of the resiliency of life. The work in this exhibit exposes the separation that exists between humanity and the natural world. Through …