Sculpture Commons^™

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. …

Is It Real?, Hana Al-Saadi

Masters Theses

The architecture of Doha, Qatar is defined by skins of glass. When the sun shines upon the layers of glass, it creates a shimmery reflective grid across the surface of the city. These reflections, while visually intriguing, conceal many private realities behind the surface.

As a multidisciplinary artist, I attempt to maneuver in the space between the opacity of the facade and stories that lie behind. Specifically, I use this space to directly expose the contradictions that I encounter here.

Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The absence of happiness, the absence of nature, the absence of justice, the absence of absence, which is presence. My desire is to make these voids visible and sensible by connecting to and with others, from our intimate and collective life experiences, with empathy, and by sharing. Through a hybrid of sculpture, installation, and performance, I move within this tense in-between space, asking myself about that void, if it is possible for it to be filled, or if it is perhaps too big, or if it is perhaps too late.

Lost In Translation, Amanda Barr

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Lost in Translation addresses the issues that trauma can create in communication; whether that be a physical trauma that damages ability to speak, think, or understand language, or mental and emotional trauma that significantly effects abilities to process, connect, and manage interpersonal relationships. My work is my voice, and a way to help others connect, to feel heard, and to even help them begin to communicate.

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 …

Murmur/Murmuro, Paola M. Di Tolla

Theses and Dissertations

By using repetition or misplacing intonations and accents, etc. one can imitate the slipperiness of spoken language. However, it is the accidental slippage that I find most revealing and exciting because it allows for two conversations to exist in one. Once spoken language is transcribed as text, it is put through another filter and the risk of [accidental] slippage increases by a different measure. Fingers don’t keep up or autocorrect insists on taking matters into its own hands.

Sawft.Servindat... [V1.7], Ray Ferreira

Theses and Dissertations

A descriptor of my artistic practice, a text piece, a series of linguistic musings, and more, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] attempts to explore the dance between language, embodiment, and performativity. More specifically, the text moves through metaphor and metonym, Englishes, Spanishes, and Images, the performativity of representation and the representation of performativity —my body. My body moving across spaces and times. As part of the Sawft.servindat… series, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] uses the scroll down format of most PDF reading software to activate the inherently embodied experience of intra-acting with technologies, resisting the dichotomy between the virtual and analog. Englishes juxtaposed with Spanishes juxtaposed …