Art Practice Commons^™

Considering Perspectives, Cynthia Epps

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This body of work, Considering Perspectives, explores the ideas of perspective, not only in terms of spatial perspective in art, but also regarding how our vantage point and presumptions affect how we feel about certain subjects. The subjects of my work are spaces or objects often overlooked or considered mundane. When we approach a work of art, we typically do so with a multitude of presuppositions that influence our response. Often, we are not even aware of this. By splicing together multiple perspectives I use my work to create awareness that there may be more than one way not …

In Search Of Communication, Usman O. Oladeinde

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines the work included in Usman Oladeinde’s MFA thesis exhibition. The goal of this thesis paper is to explore major themes such as communication, identity, change, centeredness, landscapes, and language. These paintings present Arabic letter forms transformed into illegible shapes which are painted on landscape backgrounds, often depicting an aesthetic of textual elements receding into space. All these works are inspired by the Qibla, which is represented in the abstract and painted using acrylic media. Occasionally image transfers are mounted on the painted surface.

Visual representations like mine are communicative without forcing the viewer to one specific idea. …

Field Guide, Madeline Helland

Scripps Senior Theses

Field Guide is a mixed-media artist book detailing the exploration of a fictitious culture through cartography, narrative, and illustration. It is presented through the lens of an amateur archaeologist, navigating a chain of islands to search for ruins and artifacts. In part, the project is focused on the fantasy of an imagined world. The island chain is a place entirely of my own creation. By creating the viewpoint of an outside explorer, it was possible to navigate through this world. Although I, as the artist, can know everything about this fictitious world, adopting the perspective of someone distanced by time …

Under The Influence: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Psychedelics, Jody Roun

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The following research will outline the effects of psychedelics from an interdisciplinary approach, which is to say that I will explore the neuroscience behind psychedelic drugs and how it relates to creativity, as a primary focus, while examining the role of additional points included along the way. The goal of this research, is to gain a deeper understanding of psychedelics and truly decipher what it means to be under the influence, as the most important goal of this human existence is to achieve understanding. The aforementioned is a point that great minds like Albert Einstein and Humphry Osmond impressed on …

After The Big Wind Stops I See Gentle Waves, Eunji (Jubee) Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis covers my reflections on the inspirations and the motivations behind selected works including my candidacy exhibition; Resonance and my thesis exhibition; after the big wind stops I see gentle waves. It contains my life throughout my MFA studies and the development of my art practice. Through its story-within-a-story method of narration and my describing streams of my thoughts, I am attempting to explain the processes of my development and the discoveries I have made, the little things in my daily life, and the big turning points that inspired me. My work and this document have been strongly determined …

Embedded In These Walls, Trish J. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

Embedded In These Walls uses photographic imagery, archival ephemera, and written text to examine a specific history of generational trauma through the lens of a singular family of a southern tradition to point to a larger systemic breakdown of accountability and truthfulness regarding abuse

Power Suit, Clarice Cuda

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

The focus of this project began in utilizing hair as a vehicle to investigate rituals associated with mourning, grief, and the liminal space that exists between life and death. After an in depth search into the cultural, physical, spiritual, and material aspects of hair, I enacted process and labor to create a sculptural form that performs in response to grief.

I chose to work with acrylic hair, as it exists in a space between the real and unreal, and visually is absorbed as the uncanny representation of the separated body. I wanted to discuss the body, while emphasizing its absence. …

Quotations Like The Sharpest Claws, Johanna Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

Quotations like the Sharpest Claws describes a multimedia installation composed of paintings and sound that explores the theory of cognitive dissonance, a controversial psychological model that attempts to explain how we deal with inconsistency in incompatible beliefs. Imagination is given primacy as a source for truth-seeking and world-building. The uncanny and surreal are used as entry points into this topic.

The title is derived from a description of Eileen Myles’ poetry I once read in an anonymous review. Their writing was described as beyond poetry in a way that it could only be described as such when surrounded by “quotations …

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Untitled, Daliya Jokondo

Theses and Dissertations

My practice is concerned with the activation of fragmentation, concealment and evasiveness as practical tools for surviving (the danger of visibility when positioned in the margins) while moving or engaging with oppressive power structures. The aforementioned appear in my practice as complete forms of erasure, adornment and costuming, in addition to language play. My thesis’ concern is the desire to speak the autobiographical in relation to generational trauma. Herein lives the voices of three generations of survivors.

Path, Evan Galbicka

Theses and Dissertations

Path is a collaborative system that developed over the course of five months of studio activity and continued through the duration of the exhibition. The system’s main collaborators were a land snail native to eastern North America (Neohelix albolabris), myself, and a digital cellular automaton. These prime agents interwove processes and exchanges between one another into a complex network of folded fractal feedback loops. Cyclic processes produced artifacts and infrastructures to support communication between the components and agents of Path. As a whole, Path spoke to the possibilities for interspecies, cyber-physical, and ecological collaboration to create an …

Ordinary Disorder, Jonathan S. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

The pictorial spaces in my paintings are found through many drawings, based on memories. In these drawings I use the architectural technique of paraline drawing, in pointed contrast to one or two point perspective. With a fixed point of view unavailable, the viewer or reader becomes the writer too. This is what I intend. The paraline method also engages specific corners of art history to which I relate, including woodblock prints of Japanese interiors, Chinese brush painting landscapes with houses, and the shifting, rotating perspectives found in Baroque painting. My intensely personal memories/drawings are transfused into highly material finished paintings. …

Motive Through Automotive Compassionately Criticizing The Desires Of Car Culture, Erika R. Lehrmann

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My artwork represents my admiration and criticisms of car culture I have gathered throughout my personal experiences beginning at a very early age. The work exists in the form of drawings, paintings, prints, collage and sculpture. This work is created through the elements of personal narrative, desires, obsessions, and questions surrounding car culture and its influences. My intention to refurbish the icons of this culture has involved creating work that is both obsessive and critical for personal exploration and understanding of past memories.

Stumbling Into The Spiral: A Serendipitous Steam Exploration, David Rufo

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

An artist-educator discovers how a STEAM-based approach to making art brings together a variety of subject areas in surprising ways.

Passing, Paul Kelley

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Passing is a Site-specific public installation assembled with plastic and an iPad. At its center, the iPad displays a video loop of a human image repeatedly walking in and out of the frame. The work maintains my foundational interest in having the viewer slow down to have a more thoughtful and absorptive experience with the work and surrounding space – continuing my practice of challenging viewer’s expectations and putting them in a position to stop and question.

Combining An Intuitive Art Workshop And Neuroscience Rituals To Make Us Happy, Audrey Gran Weinberg

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

One might wonder how intuitive art can connect to neuroscience and how this could be accomplished. In this descriptive article, research connecting art therapy and neuroscience has been collected and a workshop on Intuitive Painting has been described in detail. The connection was made by the author based on an article by Barker (2017), ‘4 Rituals to be more Happy,’ who writes a popular science blog. The rituals: gratefulness, expressing negative emotions, decision making and human touch were combined with Dr. Pinkie Feinstein’s method of Intuitive Painting in a small group setting. Although subjective, it would seem that at least …

Elements Of Art, Mike Doyle

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Through these paintings and my writing I share how elements of art and science overlap in the strokes of paint that create the perceptions of something familiar in our minds.

Discovering And Demonstrating Patterns, Maria Klawe

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Harvey Mudd College's President Maria Klawe shares her personal journey in combining a love of mathematics and art.

Invisible Invisibility, Eugina Song

Theses and Dissertations

White America assumes its culture is the default, and Asian culture as foreign and irrelevant. I address Asian invisibility by using canvas structure as a Western framing device of painting, and make this cultural barrier visible by breaking out of the frame. Deriving from Dansaekhwa, I challenge the Western painting structure with materiality.

A Chair In The Woods, Victoria Dolloff

Theses and Dissertations

Victoria Dolloff's MFA Thesis considers traces of play and perception in the development of her artwork, exploring the idea of reorientation through subtleties of the absurd. Her installation Untitled (Landscape) questions object as place and place as memory utilizing fragmentation as reconstruction.

Healthy People Are Bad For Capitalism, Eri King

Theses and Dissertations

Healthy People are Bad For Capitalism is a four part installation that creates an alternative space for the chemicals, Red 40 and Monosodium Glutamate. Presented as a holistic center that offers healing services and remedies, Center for the Red 40 and MSG Healing explores the homeopathic doctrine of Like Cures Like (what make a human ill also cures them) through the relationship between Traditional Japanese Healing Practices, and Western Capitalism.

Healthy People are Bad For Capitalism presents Red 40 MSG Apothecary, Red 40 Zen MSG Healing Rock Garden, Theta Wave Eternal Flame Meditation and Red 40 MSG …

Why Munch?, Robert Jensen

Art and Visual Studies Presentations

Why Munch? was a keynote lecture for the conference "Marketing the North," sponsored by the society Munch, Markets and Modernism, in November 2017. In asking the question, the paper explores Munch's canonical status, especially vis-a-vis other Scandinavian artists of his time. In particular, the essay addresses the evolving nature of artistic professionalism at the end of the 19th century, and how Munch's personal and artistic behavior evoked a new definition of bohemianism that resonated deeply with the rise of European modernism and the post-1900 avant-gardes.

Embroidered Meteorology, Bettina L. Matzkuhn

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Weathering is a series of embroidered works that explore the symbolic and cartographic language of meteorology. Through research, mentorship and the physical work, my understanding and anxiety around weather has grown. Making art is a learning process for me: the haptic is a means for understanding. From embroidered world maps to animation to painted laundry, I conflate the intricacy of textiles with the complicated nature of the atmosphere.

When Art Is Rooted In Place: Strawtown Studio's Environmental Education And Water Advocacy, Laurie Seeman, Joanna Dickey

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

When art is rooted in place, it gives voice to the place. To create art from the earth and to advocate for the natural places we know and love is our work as Strawtown artists and educators. We develop place-based arts programs that connect people with their natural surroundings and show them new ways of seeing and being.

The Abandoned Garden_Paintings From 2016 To 2017, Juan A. Negroni

Art Theses and Dissertations

This thesis articulates my process of conceiving and creating a cohesive body of work based on imagery rooted in the domestic garden. By the depiction of floral motifs, I explore and visit the garden, a place of transcendental importance for me and my father. It now symbolizes a portal between two worlds and a moment and space to have a last conversation with him. By exploring the presence and roles of the garden and the household environment in the work of Myrna Báez and Arnaldo Roche-Rabell the thesis explicates the constant appearance of these elements in my practice. I approach …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

Es-Sen-Tial, Lyn A. Govette

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is in support of the exhibition entitled ES-SEN-TIAL on display in Tipton Gallery located in Downtown Johnson City from February 27, 2017 to March 10, 2017.

The exhibition is a presentation in fiber medium of the human impact on the landscape, specifically using the extractive industry of coal mining as example. This is accomplished through the use of digital imagery printed on textiles, hand and machine embroidery, and surface design techniques of dyeing and layering. This body of work reflects the artist’s interest in art activism and the utilization of photography, fiber arts, ideas and techniques, as creative …

At The Center Of Things: How An Academic Library Built A Bridge Between Art And Science On Campus, Michelle Catalano, Catherine Essinger, Suzanne Ferimer, Stephanie Lewin-Lane, Porcia Vaughn

Collaborative Librarianship

The University of Houston Libraries sponsored an interdisciplinary event for students, faculty, and the public, titled the Artists’ Health and Wellness Colloquium and Resource Fair. Aspiring and working artists were instructed in how to maintain good health and to avoid overstressing their bodies as they practice their art. Scholars presented both historical and trending perspectives on the intersection of art and health science. The event was held in order to facilitate learning in two key research areas and to demonstrate the library's ability to bridge disparate disciplines and forge new partnerships with multiple academic units simultaneously. This article presents planning …

A Fine Arts Marketing Elective: Justification Of Need And Proposed Course Content, Kimball P. Marshall Ph.D., Rene Desborde, Sharon Thach

Atlantic Marketing Journal

This paper explains the need for a marketing elective course that would address the business field of fine arts marketing with an emphasis on visual arts including painting in various media including drawings and print reproductions, photography, and sculpture. The proposed course would be intended for general business students, marketing majors, and fine arts majors. The paper first reviews the overall business impact of fine arts marketing from a global business and United States perspective. The paper then suggests major topics and readings that would be included in such a course and the order in which these topics might be …