Sculpture Commons^™

Fragmented Bodies, Lauren Careese Alexander

Art Theses and Dissertations

Through Memory Webs and fragmented ceramic vessels, I express what it feels like to grow up living in a biracial body. I utilize mixed media to emulate a mixed-race experience. My Memory Webs are fashioned by painting on scraps of canvas and attaching them with crocheted wire and ribbon to speak to how my memory has impacted my identity. My fragmented ceramic vessels are cut up and stitched back together to represent disjointedness and un-belonging. All of my work is contextualized through the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and what the Monster may represent for people of color. I also …

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

Or To Be Eaten Alive, Christopher Williams

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

“or to be eaten alive'' is a multimedia exhibition in which I merge my own coming of age story with a mythological ecology. In this work I reclaim my queer identity by communing with my past selves in a fantasy world created through the lens of Queer Ecology and Queer Eco-Futurism. The visuals in this exhibition obscure reality. They are abstractions of the landscapes I occupy—particularly the Tallgrass prairie and Ozark ecoregions. Through a speculative, fantasy world the exhibition introduces moments of adoration, death, fracturing, growth, joy, and failure. I form, draw, color and arrange the work embracing mistakes and …

The Hospitality Of Doubt, Ian Grieve

Art Theses and Dissertations

This paper discusses the last two years of research toward a Master of Fine Art in Studio Art. I mainly address my painting practice, but while in the program, I have worked in collage, ceramics, intaglio printmaking, and sculpture. My paintings are thick, multilayered, and often contain ambiguous narratives. The pictures develop through engagement, openness, and response within the work. I seek and embrace connection with viewers of the work. The spectator ‘completes’ the art and enhances or alters the artworks meaning by observing it and applying their individual perspectives. I seek to incorporate a sense of nostalgia and familiarity. …

Artistic Representation And Self Esteem, Brianna Davis

Honors College Theses

Dependent upon the constructs of the perception of self and the viewpoint of others, humans base the value of their self esteem on outer perspectives rather than internal ones. For this thesis in particular, the outer perspective to be examined is representation in the field of the arts. This thesis project explores the process of self esteem, artistic representation in the arts, how one affects the other, a history of the correlation between the two, and ways to inform and educate the masses with the tools necessary to advance representation in the arts thus raising the self esteem of its …

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 …

Worcester Public Art For Esl Students, Eleanor Rueffer

Visual and Performing Arts

Funded by the Steinbrecher Fellowship, "Worcester Public Art for ESL Students" are original teaching materials (a 28-page booklet and worksheets) that utilize simple English to introduce some of Worcester's iconic public artworks. While the intended audience is English learners, the focus is on the content and is encouraged for use by anyone looking to enjoy and learn about Worcester history and art.

The booklet includes descriptions and histories of six Worcester artworks (Burnside Fountain, Soldiers' Monument, Major Taylor Statue, Mechanics Hall Mural, Rogers-Kennedy Memorial, and Chamberlain Fountain) with technical terms or difficult words bolded and explained in a glossary.

Eleanor …

In-Between Spaces, Trinity Kai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In-between Spaces is a paper based in personal narrative that uses Critical Race Theory and art to analyze the history of photography and systems of discrimination facilitated by hegemonic culture. Body is at the center as a symbol of the physical and psychological impacts systemic inequalities have on people that are classified as other and how one can be absent and present in institutional and public spaces.

Paper Making: Finding The Scaffold, Tino Ward

Art Theses and Dissertations

Paper making combines my proclivity towards using found materials and the need to produce my own painting supports. This first part of this thesis chronicles the reasons I arrived at paper as my chosen medium, the objects I began to produce, and the projects that stemmed from those early experiments. The second half outlines my final work, a 1:4 scale model in paper of the 1966 exhibition 10, held in New York at the Dwan Gallery, which showcased the early minimal works of Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Ad Reinhardt, …

Rockhounding, Seafaring, And Other Material Tales For The End Of The World, Noemie Fortin

The Goose

In the face of accelerated environmental degradation and climate instability, the future of the Earth and of all life on earth is difficult to visualize. Therefore, the different mediums through which we consider environmental issues are just as important as the actions we take to address them. Focusing on three projects combining art, science, and activism, this article suggests a compilation of material tales. They tell stories of plastic rocks and aluminum nuggets where the protagonists are partly finely crafted objects, partly waste materials, and sometimes both at once. Artists Kelly Jazvac, Yesenia Thibeault-Picazo, and the collective Studio Swine collaborate …

Capacity, Rachel Baydian

CGU MFA Theses

This Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition by Rachel Baydian is an installation of ceramic sculptures that function as a stand-in for the human body, touching on relationship, interconnectivity, and imperfection. Using abstracted forms that derive from the earth, these art objects are sculpted to mimic nature and its processes. The work highlights our human connection to nature as integrative and vital. Through experience and tactility, there is more of an awareness of space and heightened senses. The work taps into the awe and seduction of the mystery of nature through seemingly ordinary elements of the physical world.

Hut Annandale: Humblest Dwelling, Ruiqi Zhu

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Lots of us have a dream deep down in the heart: to get away from the congested cities and live in a hut in nature. French port Jean Wahl once wrote: The frothing of the hedges I keep deep inside me. In my project, he explored this dream and constructed a group of architectural structures by hand for those potential hermits. Studying at Bard College, I have found this region is a place with a great hermit culture. With the picturesque scene of nature and the location near the New York Metropolitan area, here the mid-Hudson Valley has attracted lots …

The Home As An Object: Material Culture In The Age Of Ikea, Maxwell Harling Fertik

Senior Theses and Projects

The curiosity of everyday objects looms large in every human’s life. And naturally, these objects are almost as diverse in character as the person who bought them. This variation can be in style, period, shape, origin but also in the arrangement it is given in relation to other objects or persons in a space. On one level, the objects we surround ourselves with are meaningless, purely functional, utilitarian and banal. Especially on a budget, one may not consider aesthetic or design issues at all and purely buy a toaster because they want toast. Why would one buy a SMEG+Dolce and …

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray

Theses and Dissertations

The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

Ode To The Sea: Art From Guantanamo, Erin L. Thompson, Charles Shields, Paige Laino

Publications and Research

Exhibition catalogue for “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo” (October 16, 2017-January 26, 2018, President's Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York). Detainees at the United States military prison camp known as Guantánamo Bay have made art from the time they arrived. The exhibit displays some of these evocative works, made by eight men: four who have since been cleared and released from Guantánamo, and four who remain there. They paint the sea again and again although they cannot reach it. The catalog includes contributions by Trevor Paglen, Solmaz Sharif, Natasha Trethewey, Jericho Brown, and current and …

Desert Pool {If Every Desert Was Once A Sea}, Karen Miranda Abel

The Goose

Desert Pool {If every desert was once a sea} is a site-specific art project by Canadian artist Karen Miranda Abel completed in 2016 while artist-in-residence at Joya: arte + ecología, an arts-led research centre situated in an alpine desert within a national park in southern Spain. The elemental installation represents an envisioning of the ancient sea that occupied the Sierra de María-Los Vélez Natural Park millions of years before the current desert ecology, a time when its highest mountain peaks may have been islands.

Prevail: In The Moment..., Nicole Stahl

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This body of work is composed of sculptural mixed media objects and scenes that heavily utilize cast glass. These pieces are physical representations of my quest to seek mental balance by focusing on what brings me happiness and comfort while still honoring mortality.

Moldmaking and repetition of process innate within casting and other aspects of this work makes me focus and revisit an idea, repetitively, like a meditation or a prayer. The intense focus required helps combat my anxiety and translates anxious energy into more positive, productive, balanced way of living.

Part of this balance requires the acknowledgment of the …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Northwest Coast Native American Art: The Relationship Between Museums, Native Americans And Artists, Karrie E. Myers

Museum Studies Theses

Museums today have many responsibilities, including protecting and understanding objects in their care. Many also have relationships with groups of people whose items or artworks are housed within their institutions. This paper explores the relationship between museums and Northwest Coast Native Americans and their artists. Participating museums include those in and out of the Northwest Coast region, such as the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Burke Museum, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Museum. Museum professionals who conducted research for some of these museums included Franz Boas, …

Roman Archaism In Depictions Of Apollo In The Augustan Period, Alisha Sanders

Honors Projects

At the end of the first century BCE, in order to spread the values and concepts that he wanted to perpetuate in his new political order, Augustus Caesar revived an archaistic art style based on that of the archaic period of ancient Greece. It was in this time that the Roman Empire was being established, and Augustus was taking sole power of the Roman world. This study is focused on works that include depictions of Apollo because one of the first and most studied examples of Augustus’s use of Roman archaism was the decorative program of the Temple of Apollo …

Recognizing The Parallels Between Fashion And Art: The Designs Of Elsa Schiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent And Rei Kawakubo, Alexa S. Runsdorf

Senior Projects Spring 2016

My project explores the parallels and overlaps between the worlds of fashion and art through surveying the designs of Elsa Schiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent and Rei Kawakubo.

Silent Protest And The Art Of Paper Folding: The Golden Venture Paper Sculptures At The Museum Of Chinese In America, Sandra Cheng

Publications and Research

Housed in the Museum of Chinese in America is the Fly to Freedom collection of paper art, which were produced by a traditional folk method of Chinese paper folding. The 123 paper works were created by detainees of the Golden Venture, a freighter used to smuggle undocumented immigrants into the U.S. On the evening of June 6, 1993, the ship ran aground off the Rockaways in New York City and nearly 300 migrants, gaunt from the four-month ordeal at sea, poured out of the cramped windowless hold of the vessel. Several drowned that night, a few escaped, but the majority …

The Figure In Art: Selections From The Gettysburg College Collection, Yan Sun, Diane Brennan, Rebecca S. Duffy, Kristy L. Garcia, Megan R. Haugh, Dakota D. Homsey, Molly R. Lindberg, Kathya M. Lopez, Kelly A. Maguire, Carolyn E. Mcbrady, Kylie C. Mcbride, Erica M. Schaumberg

Schmucker Art Catalogs

The Figure in Art: Selections from the Gettysburg College Collection is the second annual exhibition curated by students enrolled in the Art History Methods class. This exhibition is an exciting academic endeavor and provides an incredible opportunity for engaged learning, research, and curatorial experience. The eleven student curators are Diane Brennan, Rebecca Duffy, Kristy Garcia, Megan Haugh, Dakota Homsey, Molly Lindberg, Kathya Lopez, Kelly Maguire, Kylie McBride, Carolyn McBrady and Erica Schaumberg. Their research presents a multifaceted view of the representation of figures in various art forms from different periods and cultures.