Sculpture Commons^™

A Thesis, Or Digressions On Sculptural Practice: In Which, Concepts & Influences Thereof Are Explained, Set Forth, Catalogued, Or Divulged By Way Of Commentaries To A Poem, First Conceived By The Artist, Fed Through Chatg.P.T., And Re-Edited By The Artist, To Which Are Added, Annotated References, Impressions And Ruminations Thereof, Also Including Private Thoughts & Personal Accounts Of The Artist, Jaimie An

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exercise in, perhaps a futile, attempt to trace just some of the ideas, stories, and musings I might meander through in my process. It’s not quite a map, nor is it a neat catalogue; it is a haphazard collection of tickets and receipts from a travel abroad, carelessly tossed in a carry-on, only to be stashed upon returning home. These ideas are derived from much greater thinkers and authors than myself; I am a mere collector or a translator, if that, and not a very good one, for much is lost. I do not claim comprehensive …

(Meta-)Physical Artworks: Digital Augmentation In Art Observation, Macy A. Toppan

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Augmented art— the subgenre of art that incorporates physical and digital artwork— is a rapidly growing field driven by advancing technology and a new generation for whom that tech is a given. Yet the presence of media like augmented and virtual reality in exhibition remains a controversial subject. Rather than focusing on the many theoretical debates about whether digital pieces can qualify as "good" art, we study it in practice through the eyes of the casual art observer. This paper highlights the audience in a within-participant study that asked viewers to take in a physical sculpture intentionally built with virtual …

Material Analysis And Conservation Treatment Of Louise Nevelson’S Sculpture Dawn’S Image, Night, Kaela Nurmi

Art Conservation Master's Projects

Louise Nevelson’s large-scale, matte black assemblage sculpture Dawn’s Image, Night, 1969, is owned by and currently on display at SUNY Buffalo State College. The paint layers exhibited significant amounts of dust, some damages, vandalism, and unsightly fingerprints. Extensive scientific analysis and archival research were utilized to design an appropriate treatment and long-term preservation plan. Methods of analysis include: Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, microchemical testing, and xray fluorescence spectroscopy. The project also addresses the ethical considerations surrounding the prior removal of original components for safety considerations, repainting as a possible treatment, and the overall obstacles of treating a …

Echoed Sites And The Unknowable Object, Joseph Canizales

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis will discuss the expanded field of sculpture, simulacra, digital technology, and two terms I’ve devised: the unknowable object, and echoed sites. Within these two terms, I’m concerned with the complicated relationship between humans and geology and how we extract material from the ground without reflecting on the geologic history of the site. In echoed sites I create sculptures with and without a geologic site or object, by way of digital technology. These forms display two states paradoxically in balance, where what’s presented leaves more questions than answers. Thus, as part of echoed sites, exists the unknowable object. …

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 …

Crystal Queer: Fracturing The Binaries Of Matter, Creation, And Landscape, Sarah Knight

Graduate School of Art Theses

In this thesis, I compile a series of fragments consisting an analysis of my artwork in the gendered contexts of landscape, self-identity, mythology, and philosophy. I develop my concept of a “queer mark” in my art that serves as a form of queering, a disruption of visual and conceptual cohesion. I form a picture of how our contemporary selves are influenced by our gendered understanding of the landscape through the analysis of philosophical, artistic, and mythological concepts of creation. I see my sculptures as an atlas to an alternative means of understanding identity, a queering of these historical and exclusionary …

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 …

Sealed For Your Protection, Olive Dunham Werby

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In this project, I ruminate on the shiny, shape shifting polymer saturated world we are continuously creating. Oil, plastic, and fossil fuels are all very convenient for turning a profit, for consuming more and more, for the structures in place today. Concurrently, it is becoming increasingly inconvenient for our future generations to avoid extinction.

About Time: Visualizing Time At Burning Man, Gordon D. Hoople, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Nathaniel Parde, Diane Hoffoss, Max Mellette, Rachel Nishimura, Virginia Gutman

The STEAM Journal

About Time was a 30 foot long, 3000 pound wooden sundial that went up in flames at Burning Man 2019. The piece reflected on the role time plays in our lives. We organize our lives around time—are enslaved to time—and yet we know so little about it. Physicists and philosophers continue to grapple with deep puzzles of time—Is time a fundamental quantity, independent of human actions or observations or is it an emergent property of our perception? This installation projected time using two sundials: a horizontal dial which swept time out across the desert floor and an …

Wish You Were Here, Janie Stamm, Janie I. Stamm

Graduate School of Art Theses

The State of Florida is under threat from the effects of climate change. Rising sea levels are creeping up on to Florida’s coast, eroding the beaches and encroaching on heavily populated cities. Over my lifetime I will watch the water spill over the streets of my home town. I will watch the water flood the Everglades, pushing saltwater into freshwater habitats. I will watch the water begin to drown the state, taking Florida’s many little known histories along with it. This thesis serves as a document of Floridian life during the Anthropocene.

Within this thesis, I tell the story of …

Unfolding Humanity: Cross-Disciplinary Sculpture Design, Gordon D. Hoople, Nate Parde, Quinn Pratt, Sydney Platt, Michael Sween, Ava Bellizzi, Viktoriya Alekseyeva, Alex Splide, Nicholas Cardoza, Christiana Salvosa, Eduardo Ortega, Elizabeth Sampson

The STEAM Journal

Unfolding Humanity is a 12 foot tall, 30 foot wide, 2 ton interactive metal sculpture that calls attention to the tension between technology and humanity. This sculpture was conceived, designed, and built by a large group (80+) of faculty, students, and community volunteers at the University of San Diego (USD). The piece is a dodecahedron whose pentagonal walls unfold under human power, an engineered design that alludes to Albrecht Dürer's 500-year-old unsolved math problem on unfolding polyhedra. When closed, the mirrored interior of the sculpture makes visitors feel as though they are at the center of the universe. The idea …

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.

Assessing The Protective Quality Of Wax Coatings On Bronze Sculptures Using Hydrogel Patches In Impedance Measurements, Alice H. England, Kathryn N. Hosbein, Capri A. Price, Morgan K. Wylder, Kenna S. Miller, Tami Lasseter Clare

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this work, we used chemically cross-linked acrylamide-based hydrogel patches that have been specifically developed for use as solid electrolytes in Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy to measure the impedance of two waxed bronze sculptures at the Seattle Art Museum’s (SAM) Olympic Sculpture Park (OSP) and compare those results to laboratory test panels. We determined that the impedance response in the frequency range in which measurements may be taken (10 kHz to 1 MHz) is mostly capacitive and that a freshly applied wax coating should ideally be less than 1 nF·cm⁻²for optimal protective performance.

Artscience, Dustin Swiers

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

My thesis show opened on Friday, March 11, 2016 at the 410 project's art gallery, located in downtown Mankato.

The artwork consisted of sculptures displayed on pedestals, hanging on the walls, sitting on specifically constructed arrangements, and hanging from the ceiling. The materials I used to create these sculptures have a dramatically contrasting appearance, but have one universal similarity. At some point most of the materials used were liquid or fluid. I used metals, ceramics, hand blown glass, plastics, and wax. I like to work with these materials in that fluid state because of the added flexibility and forgiveness they …

Loopy, George W. Hart

Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal

No abstract provided.