Art Practice Commons^™

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

Soul Furnace / فرن الأرواح, Isa Ghanayem

Masters Theses

“This is the good washing, this is (the washing) which separates the dirty body from the pure body. This is like silver mixed with lead, it is separated from it by this (process): one makes for it a cupel of bones, which is what is called the “head of the dog” and of which the common name is kūja-which is the crucible—and this must be made of burnt bones. One melts the silver in it, one gives it a strong fire: the cupel will absorb and receive the lead, the fire will make its subtle (part) fly away and extirpate …

Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang

Masters Theses

Disillusioned by my transnational identity, I have come to realize that my sense of belonging is no longer attached to any physical location, but instead to a state of mind, to an intimacy with the world. My notion of home is an obscure and unsettled—at times utopian—idea, which can be infinitely decoded, re-positioned and re-established psychologically. This thesis is an investigation of that liminal state, questioning the paradoxical place at the intersection of longing and belonging, interior and exterior, rootedness and uprootedness. Through a collection of short essays that accompany projects, I seek to unpack the precarious emotional complexities that …

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

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. …

Complexity Of Perfection, Ayanna M. Johnson

Honors Capstones

Many of the first art galleries and museums existed in places where elite individuals were allowed. The constant pursuit of achieving perfection in many circumstances may stem from a white supremacist narrative that often stagnates creativity from achieving its full potential. This sends a series of alarming messages to artists as they tend to lose the initial interest they have for their medium by attempting to achieve a level of perfection that is unattainable. As a result, this notion can shed light on the social impact art can have in society and the relationship with the type of artwork displayed. …

Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao

Theses and Dissertations

Jordany's paper congregates their archival research into an art practice that examines the decolonial impulse to excavate the self and produce autonomy. Using ceramics to reference and re-animate Taino ritual objects found in museums, resulting in alternative museology, their work seeks to honor Caribbean ancestors by subverting colonial history.

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

(Not) Knowing, Jared Friedman

Theses and Dissertations

Jared Friedman’s work creates monuments out of banal common objects. Through acrylic paintings on- Astroturf, burlap, canvas, and upholstery fabric- he explores the ambiguity of the unremarkable, such as the condenser coils on the back of a refrigerator. In, (Not) Knowing, he parses the difference between knowing and understanding.

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Refigured: Separations In Portraiture, Caroline Myers

All Theses

Utilizing traditional painting techniques embedded with digital syntaxes, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, serves as a catalog of my experiences with communication in a hyperconnected world. Processing illegible information caused by my hearing loss informs the process of imposing similar boundaries within my paintings. Like a technical glitch, these obstructions create an illegible visual experience, with evidence of my process remaining as a clue for the viewer’s understanding of the image.

Though personal in nature, I expand from my experience with auditory communication to employ pertinent explorations into the sustained unpredictability of today’s ever-expanding medium that is technology. My paintings …

Coded Ceramics: Computational Design Of Persian Ceramics, Nasrin Iravani

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research explores the use of computer-aided technology and robotics in the creation of digital art and crafts, while also considering the cultural history of digital design. It begins with an examination of the most recognizable styles of Persian ewers made between the years 1,000 and 1,400 AD in the Islamic era. After analyzing a hundred ewers from this period, I classified them based on distinctive features such as openings, necks, bodies, spouts, handles, and bases. Then I designed a series of 3D printed ceramic vessels – titled Coded Ceramics – that were inspired by elements of the historic ewers. …

Artificial Minds, Lara Bayer

MA Projects

This paper explores the artistic possibilities of artificial intelligence, as well as its ability to act as a creative being through its learned knowledge from the collective consciousness of human beings, whether this learned knowledge can be used by the AI to represent reality, and whether this can be problematic regarding learned biases from the preexisting ones of our own. Looking at the history of how far artificial intelligence has come within the creative artistic realm, examining the technical aspects of how exactly an AI is able to generate original art, and examining four artists that all collaborate with artificially …

Laying Out A Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions Of The Soul, Erin D. Yerby

Theses and Dissertations

Laying out a Space: Spectral Geographies, Fictions of the Soul, arises out of my artistic practice, and thoughts behind my current project and MFA exhibition, Spectral Geographies.

Linking the problem of the world ‘out there’ or external space, to inner experience through painting as both medium and practice, my work expresses what I call inner geographies, spaces where intimate immensities, folding inside and outside, find expression. I think of my paintings as beginning with this gesture of laying out a between-space where the intimacies of waking dreams and visions are opened by, and grow into, actual places, …

Sana Sana: Unlearning Generational Expectation Through Performance, Jalen R. Ash

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

My work is an exploration of identity as a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) body traversing through the generational histories of my family and the struggle of cultural loss to our assimilation of Whiteness. Through the multi-faceted medium of performance, my work uses physical and mental spaces of self and technology to understand how the body functions as a screen. Our bodies house projections of generational expectations that have trickled down from the past into the present. These projections shape our own unique identities along with the personal experiences we gather as we move through the various spaces of …

Introduction To Contemporary Art Across Political Divides, Alla Myzelev, Tijen Tunali

Art History

This book addresses the need for a more sustained knowledge and multidisciplinary understanding of what art and artists can do to create democratic spaces, forms and languages in a world devastated by multiple crises. The book’s main inquiry is whether contemporary art can or cannot cultivate an “agonistic” way of togetherness and facilitate difficult conversations through a multitude of contradictions, diverging views and conflicting visions. With Marxist, feminist and ecologist perspectives, the contributors analyze contemporary art worlds across the globe in relation to memory, conflict, trauma, transitional justice, social engagement, social resistance and activism.

In this volume artists, activists, art …

Death Spaces And Distant Skies (Every Day We Say Goodbye), Renee Estee

Theses and Dissertations

Linking ideas and imagery of the Australian Outback, Hauntology and Orphism, my practice highlights myth-making and rituals surrounding mourning, celebration and commemoration. Operating as visual love letters and epitaphs, my paintings coalesce figuration and abstraction to conjure spaces where I can commune with the deceased and contend with future loss.

Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?, Jackie Ta, Ngoc Uyen Phuong Ta

All Theses

“Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?”

In Saigon, “Ai… hông?” is a phrase that street vendors often shout to advertise what they sell for the day. This body of work, “Aiii Sài Gòn Hông?” (Translates: “Saigon, anyone?”) invites the audience to take a glimpse into the vivid everyday life in contemporary Vietnam through a perspective of a Saigon local. Utilizing the modalities of painting and sculpture, I collect, accumulate and organize parts of the streets and marketplace by manipulating and amplifying certain key visual elements. The goal of the work is to reconstruct an experiential space that speaks not only to the …

The Office Of Possible Projects, Juliette Walker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This writing is a companion to the MFA thesis projects that I presented in the Spring 2022 semester at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. My thesis work did not exist as a singular, solo exhibition in a traditional gallery space like it did for most of the artists in my graduating cohort; rather, I completed three different but substantial and interrelated projects, many of which occurred outside of traditional art spaces: the Office of Possible Projects at the Fayetteville Public Library, the Cake Stand Biennale which took place across the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the office of …

The Ephemerality Of The Living And The Persistence Of The Inanimate, Erin Johnston

MFA in Visual Art

I create fragile, sculptural works with paper. Either cast from pre-existing objects or constructed forms, my three-dimensional works ultimately become pure paper objects. I use the visual language of absence, memory, ruin and ephemerality to present modern artifacts and address the now. I am interested in how the manufactured crumbs we leave behind as a species reveal our collective desires, and our relationship to the body and mortality. I am fascinated with, and even enchanted by, the proliferation of material objects and their tendency to surpass the lifespan of any single human. Perhaps this behavior of producing lasting creations is …

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 …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

The Screen To Desire, Joseph Parra

Theses and Dissertations

Joseph Parra reflects on our often embellished online personas and their effect on our desires. Through luscious 3-dimensional painting Parra translates the seductive desire of the hypermasculine male-presenting figure through glorification and criticality. The tactile painting also acts as a rebellion to accurately represent “real” life on the digital screen.

The Sole Result Is The Game, Julia Taszycka

Theses and Dissertations

I address the idea of the game understood both from the perspective of the art world and the socio-economic system. My recent projects have been based almost entirely on found objects, bearing strong traces of damage, deterioration, and destruction.

Políticas Visuales Y Acción Colectiva: Un Investigación Sobre Las Articulaciones Estético-Políticas En Manifestaciones De Arte Público En Ushuaia Y El Bolsón / Visual Politics And Collective Action: An Investigation Of Aesthetic-Political Articulations In Manifestations Of Public Art In Ushuaia And El Bolsón, Laura Woodhouse

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Art in the public sphere is an integral tool of communication that transcends the vertical hierarchies of social organization by infiltrating the popular consciousness with disruptive mediums and reclamations of visual space. Because of the specific accessibility of a variety of forms of public art, for both creators and observers, manifestations of public art have become a popular method through which counter-hegemonic social narratives can be constructed and mediated; in Argentina, a profound history of disruptive art has has been intricately intertwined with an equally rich history of popular activism. With a focus in El Bolsón and Ushuaia, two localities …

Visual Diaries: Towards Art History As Storytelling, Alpesh Kantilal Patel

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

This essay examines variants of what I refer to as “visual diaries” – or thinking through images and written or oral language – as important “worldmaking” exercises, essential for students of color, women, sexual minorities, or other marginalized subjects. I provide my reflections on assigning this dynamic and student-centered, practice-based assignment in my contemporary art courses at a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) of higher education and a summer art residency program unaffiliated with a university. Besides my reflections on my pedagogy, I also share student feedback from unsolicited testimonials and answers to questionnaires. I argue that visual diaries transform students into …

Craftivism Between Nationalism And Activism In Ukraine And Belarus, Alla Myzelev

Art History

This article outlines the history and significance of Craftivism in Eastern Europe. Using two case studies of artists it investigates the use of the craft language in Eastern Europe and its usability for activism. Do-It-Yourself culture, of which Craftivism is part, rejects the commercialism, gender norms and the conventional lifestyle in the Global North. Use of crafts as a language of political and social struggle allows to convey the message in a less confrontational but nevertheless very pertinent way. The craftivism is a successful language for the feminist political struggle in the Eastern Europe.

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.