Printmaking Commons^™

Sweet Is The Work, Allie M. Wheeler

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

Sweet is the Work is a collection of collagraph prints, collages, and sculptural artworks created through a dialogue between surface textures, colors, and imagery, sourced from personal experiences and the home environment that nurtured them. My artwork functions as a visual journal of my memories of living on a family farm in Delta, Utah, in an engaged religious lifestyle. Daily life at home was filled with responsibilities, from sweeping the floor to tending crops and livestock. Tasks like preserving food were guided less by necessity than by tradition. A history of family record keeping inspires my process of documentation. Each …

Illustrating Identity: Ethel Reed’S Art Posters And Women's Claims To Public Space In Fin-De-Siècle Boston, Miranda R. Knofczynski

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

Much scholarship has uncovered the history of women illustrators during the late nineteenth century. The rebuilding of these lost histories calls for research which theorizes women’s contributions to the burgeoning arts scene of the fin-de-siècle. This thesis will examine the posters Ethel Reed created for different companies during the height of the 1890s poster craze and discuss how she articulated women in public space in them. Reed’s art offers an aestheticized yet feminist visualization of women engaging in leisure activities such as exploring the city, reading, or attending the theatre. Many have described the women in her posters as merely …

Syncretic Spirits / Espíritus Sincréticos, Angelica Tapia - Estrada

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

Syncretic Spirits / Espíritus Sincréticos is a multimedia exhibition that invites viewers into a fantastical space where cultural identity and perception intertwine. Colorful shaped panels, sculptural installations, prints, and drawings bridge physical and metaphysical realms. Personal archetypes intuitively inspired by natural forms drive the work.

Influenced by the dualities of my upbringing as a first-generation Mexican American, I was immersed in Mexican culture through my family traditions while finding a home in the nurturing embrace of the heartland. The work has become a means of reclaiming a new layered sense of self, disentangling from my Catholic upbringing, embracing indigenous healing …

Is It Gonna Be Fun?, Kim Tomlinson

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

I am a multidisciplinary artist working across digital and analog forms of printmaking, installation, playing, drawing, and writing. I incorporate elements of humor, autobiography, and nostalgic pop culture references to tell stories and facilitate connections.

At the heart of my work is the desire to be seen and feel connected. This starts with self reflection and building a personal archive of important references and symbols. Through recurring characters rooted in personal and historical pop culture references, I incorporate layers of complexity and inside jokes into the work. Humor is an essential tool to maintain levity, engage participants, and challenge traditional …

The Ghosts Shed Tears, Sarah Jentsch

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

Before I was taught what made us different, I thought my brother and I were the same. The only difference between a doe and a buck was the antlers. As I grew, I noticed differences—in the way people spoke to us, in what was expected of us, in the questions we were asked. In what our futures were supposed to look like. The difference between the doe and the buck was still the antlers, but those antlers made one a trophy and the other venison.

Many of my formative experiences I came to understand through animals. My family home, cradled …

Devastation Experienced When Two Individuals Stop Kissing One Another, Isaiah Jones

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

The work in Devastation Experienced When Two Individuals Stop Kissing One Another is an excavation of the private self in relation to love and desire and an exploration of the chaos that ensues in their passage. Desire describes a state of attachment to a person, an object, or an idea. It produces a cloud of optimism between that which is desired and she who is full of desire . It presses against need, the obsessive 1 phenomena of all amorous sentiment, and in its dissolution, total devastation ensues2. With this work, I explore my own desires, observations, uncertainty, and anger, …

What The Eyes See And The Mind Knows, Amanda Durig

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

Every morning as I set out for a walk, my mind starts trailing off as my eyes scan my neighborhood; I begin to wander into a daydream, tuning in to the pictures that I paint in my mind, imposing what I am observing into a new possibility of reality. This exploration into the lives of others in this world is a breath of fresh air, a reprieve from the demands of daily life. I am inspired by the narrative that is unknowingly being written into the earth by my neighbors, intrigued by the solutions that they come up with for …

A Walk Through Shadows, Nicholas Sheldon

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

“A Walk Through Shadows” is an investigation of dream states and their emotional and psychological effects, which I have been exploring for this past year with large-scale black and white copper plate aquatint prints. Each work is a response to the surreal and bizarre nature of dreaming and the themes and topics that seep from my own subconscious. Each work allows for the examination of the fantastical and the absurd with imagery that can suggest universal concepts from life and death, to love and war.

These prints break from the traditionally printed square plate centrally placed on the paper, to …

It Can't Leave You The Way It Finds You, Kyle Nobles

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

There’s a beautiful innocence in childhood where, although the world is large and new, it feels as though your place in it and the roles that you play are stable and unchanging. In our youth, outside of extraordinary circumstances, we are unburdened by the awareness that everything and everyone is subject to radical change—including our own sense of self. As we grow older though, looking back it becomes clear that this was never the case. In a matter of years, you can change so dramatically that you did not even notice as you became an entirely new person. For me, …

Time And Lines, Richard Pecos Pryor

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

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” -Annie Dillard

I want to make art that is worthwhile, that shares something important. This desire often overwhelms and hinders me from starting projects. I find myself questioning the purpose of art altogether. Yet, once I relinquish control into action—just simply start and keep going—the unforeseen meaning eventually presents itself.

Drawings begin with lines. Partnered with curiosity, I began this series by exploring the potential of drawing materials. How far and for how long can a single sharpened pencil last? What does a mile of lines look …

Two-Faced And Vulnerable, Stephanie Wright

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

A helpless calf suspended by a balloon. A dog attempting to focus through a set of blinders. Vultures circling over an abandoned bed. The situations in which these animals find themselves might seem, at first glance, quirky or ambiguous. But we can easily empathize with their perceivable state. Through fables, myths, religion, everyday interaction, and animal husbandry, we have made animals and emotions recognizable metaphors for humankind. These animals address broader human experience; certainly the notions of “human nature” and culture are themselves human constructs. We self-consciously work to define our existence through the separation of the concept of “society” …

Zero Street, Keith Graham

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

“It becomes oppressive when important events, important changes, can’t break through to the surface of life and are continually unable to fulfill themselves. The still invisible and uncrystallized fact that is to be realized in the future is already growing, swelling, beginning to push through into a preexisting reality, which, however, doesn’t want to yield. It gets tighter and tighter, and therefore more and more suffocating. The lack of air increases our feeling of helplessness. We watch the gathering of the clouds and wait for a voice to speak from them, reading us the inexorable verdict of fate.” -Ryszard Kapúscínski …