Raisin Fingers, Sophia Hatzikos

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am a sculptor that uses site reactive interactions, video documentation, and studio-based processes to explore landscape. I investigate my multifaceted relationship of self to my sensorial memory of landscape. Through themes of memory, loss and longing intertwined with my personal connection to water. I identify the intersections of sculpture and landscape seeking ways in which environments shapes decisions in the making process.

Through case studies of two distinct landscapes, Malaki and Tyson, I look at how these environments serve as sources of inspiration and material for experimentation. By identifying the ways in which I researched at each site respectively …

[W]Hole: Journey To Fullness, Joni P. Gordon

MFA in Visual Art

My work raises critical questions about Black history, race, gender, beauty, and privilege. My practice also highlights the intersectionality of colorism and racism. I use materials such as cardboard rectangles with handwritten words, brown paper, doors defaced by scratches, fire, printed images, newspaper, and projected photographs to ask and answer those questions. I also use Work and Travel documents, broom and brush bristle, mop fiber, towels, and audio recordings of oral histories to exhibit invisible scars wrought by racist actions as physical and material manifestations.

My practice began after experiencing racial discrimination for the first time on a US work …

Out In Thin Air, Daiqing Zhang

Masters Theses

My work often takes form in experience-charged installations underscored by phenomenology. The whys and hows behind the work mostly remain unspoken, since I would rather my work speak for itself. This writing project offered me the opportunity to comb through and tell the stories and thoughts that informed the work.

I have built a collection of documentation about the experience of having a sensitivity to moments of wonder in everyday life. These archives recorded sensuous imprints in life composed of mundane phenomena. In the collection there are images/footage of a glimpse of light leaking through cloud crevices; a brush of …

This Side Of Silver, Bennett Wood

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Above And Below, Kristen Brown

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

My recent graduate artwork uses abstraction of form to describe the intersection between humans and the environment while relating the landscape of our skin to the ever-changing qualities of the natural landscape surrounding us. The photographic material is stressed into three dimensional shapes, producing creasing and tears as it is being contorted by human impact. At the same time that I am creating something new, I am manipulating artifactual evidence of something that already exists in everyday life. This is akin to how our bodies are distorted by outer influence, as well as our own autonomy. Above and below the …

Winding Down River Road, Gillian Harper

LSU Master's Theses

As a mechanism to explore my temporary home in Louisiana, Winding Down River Road is a collection of artworks that integrates natural materials collected from landscapes in southern Louisiana with steel and petroleum-based products. My interest in researching environmental issues, ecology, and industry has shaped my vehicles for observation and how I generate data. Through a variety of methodologies, I am considering how climate change is forcing many of us to re-contextualize how our home can be affected by the very industries we rely on. Personal engagement with residents living in the dystopian atmosphere of southern Louisiana’s industrial corridor and …

My Sitayana: Sewing Seeds Of Empowerment, Dhea Kothari

Honors Theses

This thesis is an exploration of sculpture and installation. My project depicts a narrative of generational emancipation of women. The narrative was inspired by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel, ‘Forest of Enchantments,’ in which she rewrites the ‘Ramayana’ with Sita, the female character, as the protagonist instead. The Ramayana is a popular Hindu mythological story that revolves around Prince Rama’s quest to rescue his wife Sita from the perils of the villain Raavana. This story encapsulates the undertones of the patriarchal culture in India. This My thesis installation stands as a symbol of generational transformation of love and what it means …

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Nest, Camillia Elci

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The major themes in this body of work are time and layers. These themes are linked by the materiality of the work. Intentional destruction and recreation, perpetually. The work is constantly being made, destroyed, and remade. It is always partly past and partly future. Nest is a self portrait displaying objects acquired and made over the past several years.

Boring Magic, Madison Svendgard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Boring Magic encompasses an interest in labor, boredom, and exhaustion. Simultaneously, I am exploring what relief and escapism from these things look like. Escapism acts as the core of my work- what escapism looks like and what creates the need for escapism. I create narrative pieces that are always slightly removed from reality as a way to reflect on what I view as present-day dystopias. The worlds built to create this work are a combination of my lived experiences and invented characters and stories, which culminate in an alternate timeline set in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Relating to …

I Want To Go Home, Amber Boris

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

The significance of a home lies within the memories of the space. I Want to Go Home is a body of work that explores this idea through a collection of sculptures and drawings depicting my childhood home. This house holds meaning to me not only because it is where I grew up, but because it was also my mother’s childhood home. Six generations of our family have passed through the house, creating a long history of associated stories, memories, and emotions.

I have constructed scaled down sculptures of rooms for these memories to live in. The spaces are left empty, …

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

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

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.

Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei

Theses and Dissertations

This article elaborates Xiong Wei's inspiration and experience from different cultural, political, social systems and art environment as a Chinese artist living in the United States, and the logic and methodology of how he went from a social realist sculptor to a contemporary artist.

Long Time, Jacob V. Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Jake Reed’s work is driven by the idea that architectural ornament can be imbued with meaning not native to its construction or use. To find that meaning, he deconstructs and reassembles elements from the architectural and ornamental histories he studies, using the growing climate crisis as a generative framework.

"Illumination The Sculpture Of James O. Clark" Catalogue, T. Michael Martin

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

It has been a challenging journey to mine and sift through the body of work of James O. Clark to select a representation of his studio practice and 50-year career. While curating "Illumination: the Sculpture of James O. Clark," I encountered more than the common curatorial concerns such as artwork availability, scale, aesthetic and conceptual themes, transportation and presentation issues. During my conversations with Clark, we found ourselves in an unprecedented pandemic – impacting travel, shipping, and studio visits.Throughout this process, Clark and I remained flexible to ensure a representation of his career could be exhibited without compromise. Selections for …

Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit

Masters Theses

As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. …

Heartwork, Lance Taylor Loftin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heartwork is a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the many ways identity is shaped by familial histories and personal memory. Focusing on my time growing up on a pine tree farm in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 90s, Heartwork explores gender, religion, regional traditions, family, and art. Through conversations and collaborations with my family, painting acts as an impetus for strengthening relationships. By reevaluating the past, I am able to create a web of interconnected narratives that inform and shift my understanding of the present.

Saga Beyond The Gate: Chapter One, The Coming Of The Gate Ghost, Tristan B. Miller

MSU Graduate Theses

“Saga Beyond the Gate: Chapter One, the Coming of the Gate Ghost” explores performance sculpture used as religious ritual. My work emphasizes ritual, creation myths, relics, physical manifestations of lived religion, and the power of narrative belief. One often turns to religion, science, or spirituality, to seek answers to questions about being a conscious entity, and one’s journey to the end. This saga uses scripts from all three of these schools of thought, placing the world of the Gate Ghost into tangible reality, as a play on a stage. Artefacts represent objects of power and mystery. Characters embody morality tales, …

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 …

Dead Weightless, Isaiah Schwartz

Senior Projects Spring 2021

There is more than convenience embedded into my attraction to the unrefined materials that I work with. Shopping cart (baby size), palette, cheesecloth, bucket, and window. Each is rich with an individual history that expands beyond the use it was intended for. Suspending them in the air is my observance of the sanctity of their mundane uses. To create something new, also out of these unrefined materials, and to refuse to polish it. To have resolution in a thing that is also ambiguous. I can find intrigue in a million different things as soon as I pay attention to them. …

De La Nature Au Processus D’Artification. Matière [Forme/Objet] Sens, Alexandre Melay

The Goose

Les progrès technologiques modifient radicalement ce qui nous était autrefois familier. Ce sentiment troublant venu de l’ère Anthropocène met en lumière l’impact humain sur la nature. Mais la perte d’un monde naturel nous oblige à gérer notre environnement en tant qu’environnement artificiel. Face à cette mutation profonde du concept même de nature, l’art opère un processus d’artification, renouvelant la nature dans de nouvelles formes néoarchéologiques et de nouvelles esthétiques, par le « passage du non-art en art ».

Snake Tube Adventure Racing… And More!, Jane Marie M. Tardo

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My work revolves around using a specialized blend of art, design, and craft to interpret political narratives through fabricated products. These objects weave contemporary commentary and consumer indulgences into sculptural cultures. Each product is designed to mimic its own marketed culture—offering an enticingly tactile, interactive experience that is equal parts confusing, concerning, and delightful. The products are accompanied by investment opportunities in the form of popular, limited released merchandized objects, such as hats and patches. Using humor and subtlety, my gamelike installations explore arenas such as agency, autonomy, intimacy, and dueling realities in a time of ecological collapse and cultural …

Tenacity, Order & Disorder, Lucy Manalo

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about empowerment. The idea of using metal comes from my past experience as a welder/machinist in the Air Force. Metal is a tough medium and I believe it conveys the themes of strength and tenacity through it’s materiality.

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

Memory Bread, Nisiqi

Art + Design Masters Theses

Memory Bread, constituting a daily performance ritual and the post-action objects, seeks to address the generational decline of mother language use in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a post-colonized province of China. I chose to eat sliced white bread in the performance and later casted concrete sculptures as the extension of the action for both substances’ capitalistic nature. Being an invasive material that took over the traditional architectural lifestyle, the use of concrete mirrors the pervasive cultural and ethnic assimilation in China. Meanwhile, the materiality of concrete being a mixture of various substances also metaphors the mixed culture that Chinese-Mongolians …

In The Shadows And Folds, Julia Mueller

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In the shadows and folds is the result of a mental scavenger hunt that I began this past year, to uncover myself and find what is hidden in my crevices. It was spurred by my fear of memory loss which had grown to such a size that it sat visible in the back of my mind unaddressed for some time. The reason for this fear is not large but it feels monumental. I have been existing in various states of sadness and disconnect, which have acted like a thick blanket over my mind. This blanket is simultaneously protective and damaging, …

I Think You Were In My Dream Last Night, Josie Cotton

Senior Projects Spring 2020

I Think You Were In My Dream Last Night

I have always worked by creating opportunities for mistakes and then fixing them. I’ve taken inspiration from the things I pick up every day: cups, necklaces, coat hangers, tables, chairs. I’ve taken inspiration from my dreams. They are always based in reality but twisted into a shape I’ve never seen before, and I wonder where these ideas come from. When I wake up, the people or the places I dreamt about are changed forever by a new perspective, out of my control. That is an idea I wanted to sift through …

Dredge The Foundry | For Dirt And Era, Woody Stauffer

Master's Theses

Billions of years are past us and billions of years await. Shaping earthen material into sculptural abstractions is my way to sense and convey the lethargic natural progression of the planet. Fossilization, rot, dirt, plant growth, animal existence, and rust are aesthetics I endow with new perspectives and form through mold making and casting. The dichotomy between the eons of time behind us and the endless possibility of a technological future has inspired the addition of a science fiction aesthetic. To rust these computerized constructed geometric forms demonstrates how futuristic ideals will also wither away. In many ways we are …