Art Practice Commons^™

Au-Delà De La Nature : The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories De Julian Charrière, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou

The Goose

In this short article - case study, I explore the question of how art may help us reflect on the new conception of nature that the Anthropocene confronts us with. I focus on the photographic series The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories I,II,III (2013) by Swiss artist Julian Charrière and its reassessment of an idea of nature inherited from the romantic period. I analyse the way in which these pictures reinterpret romantic landscape painting in order to suggest an equal relation of human and nature, where human and non-human entities hold equal sway. My theoretical framework is based on Timothy Morton’s …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

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 …

Tipping Point, Pang Z. Vang

Theses and Dissertations

What happens to a woman at the tipping point under oppression in a patriarchal society? How does she behave? Pulling from the vagina dentata mythologies, and personal and collective experiences of rape culture, I formed a body of work which problematize the stereotypical narrative of victim/perpetrator. As a visual and conceptual exploration, my work explores the themes of desire, agency/non-agency, and violence [as it manifests within and outside of the body]. Utilizing visual and conceptual quotations from film, pornography and sex toys, these works subvert the exoticized stereotype of the Asian woman as sexual plaything.

Catherine Cajandig Interview, Rebecca Murphy

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio:

Catherine Cajandig is a painter, printmaker, muralist and curator. At an early age, she showed an interest in art that was encouraged by her parents and teachers. She attended classes in the SAIC Junior School. In 1960, she was juried into The Chicago Society of Artists and has remained an active member. She has served as a board member that included various committees and was the President for one year. She is the committee chairwoman that publishes the yearly CSA Print and Drawing Calendar.

Her images are of personal topics and observations, developed through series and recurring themes. She …

Invisible Forces, Sarah E. Mullin

Theses and Dissertations

I seek abstract forms evocative of the underlying structures in nature. I paint sensations of vibrating light, deep space, and vast scale in an imagined image. These paintings combine an inner abstract dimension with landscape imagery to communicate to the viewer that we are a part of what we sense in nature.

Tuff Breeches, Arkadiy Ryabin

Theses and Dissertations

In consideration of language and it’s relationship to information and knowledge, the author explores personal set of events in relationship to that of the public, via forms of orality. 19th century American literature is posited as a hangover influencing contemporary events.

Absence Is Presence With Distance, James Bayard

Theses and Dissertations

Prompting obvious considerations for freedom and nationalism, language and race, time, and decay, the work asks not only what it means to be an American today, but also, more broadly, what it means to be human—to breathe and act, to live and die.

Summer Light, Sara Dolatabadi

Theses and Dissertations

"Summer Light" is a film about family dynamics. Using light as a defining factor, it looks at the relationship between the director’s parents and her daughter. It is the her response to a desire to record and safeguard intimate moments of an ordinary day before they disappear.

The Blue That Blew Bloo, Daniel Ray Martinez

Art Theses and Dissertations

My work is a combination of videos, objects, and performances with a multidisciplinary practice that engages with the formal language of sculpture, photography, video/cinema, and drawing while being in dialogue with concepts and concerns about the image, the surface, and the space of representation. I am interested in the poetics and phenomenology of life; and the way one interacts in an environment; and the way digital/virtual media has shifted our experiences in life. Rethinking the way one finds boredom to get away from virtual capitalist spaces is a concern for me. I find inspiration in the wandering through spaces. I …

Perspective, Karie D. Cooper

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

As an artist, I am interested in understanding how and why humans interact with the natural world. I examine my own individual behaviors and practices and research impacts made on nature by humans as a whole. I am drawn to nature for a multitude of reasons, including aesthetic beauty, psychological wellness, unraveling the mysteries of the universe and trying to understand the origins of life. As an artist I explore the dialectic relationship between everything we perceive outside of ourselves as the environment, and the way we think of ourselves in relation to that environment. I believe in the interconnectedness …

Beginner's Mind, Martin L. Benson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art distills my relationship to spirituality, digital culture, and the practices and side-effects therein, into a simplified visual language. The work manifests in the form of paintings, drawings, and light sculptures. Meditation and mindfulness training are a large part of my influence and interests. I often wonder how mindfulness practice can be mirrored in my artwork, not only in my process for creating the work, but also with what the resulting imagery does for the viewer. My intention is to provide an art form that invites one to look and experience one’s own capacity to observe, without the need …

Ten-Der-Ness, Brittany Jasin

Graduate School of Art Theses

Ten-der-ness. The title of this document defines the word, because one can easily forget all the meanings of a word. To be tender is to be compassionate and kind but also can mean to be in pain. “The quality of being easy to cut or chew” is my favorite definition; because to me that says that to be tender makes you vulnerable to being swallowed by reality. It’s a common saying that without suffering we would never know compassion but, within tenderness, compassion and suffering exist simultaneously in a ten letter word. Within my thesis I am exploring tenderness through …

Light On, Baby. No Future, Shane Dollinger

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This project is a realistic depiction of the circularity of experience. As Images of ourselves and our experiences become increasingly inescapable, the repetitive and nonlinear nature of those experiences is amplified. This issue is explored in looking at contemporary artists/filmmakers whose handling of inundation in representation and narrative distinctly embraces multiplicity. Queering structures of representation, the work holds a mirror to the way that we experience living, encountering images, narrative structures and memories.

[Insert Body Here], Katie Yun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The personal is political. Using humor and my individual narrative, I illustrate the main three factors that drive my work and relate them to corresponding theoretical frameworks: 1) My OCD tendencies and labor as art concept 2) Assimilation and the appeal of the White Cube 3) Reclamation of identity and Abject art. Through textual and visual research, I provide scholarly backing and precedents set by other artists to situate these personal narratives as part of a larger structural system of oppression, while being transparent of my culpability and participation in these structures. I posit that my work provides a nuanced …

Remembering Virtual Worlds: Painting And Video Games, Nathaniel M. St. Amour

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Video games create the feeling of great achievement and place the player into a role that turns them into a great hero. These experiences feel significant because they require great time and emotional investment. The monumentality of these experiences, however, are at odds with the transience of the electrical virtual worlds. The medium of oil painting helps overcome the sense of transience because of oil painting’s durable permanent way of image making and stillness. Painting’s inherent nod to history also creates a dissonance between the newness of the video game medium and the antiquity of painting, a contrast exacerbated by …

Material Poetics, Ellen G. Reid

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

quench: /kwen(t)SH/

a : put out, extinguish

b : to put out the light or fire

c : to cool suddenly by immersion

d : to cause to lose heat or warmth

e : to bring to an end typically by satisfying, damping, cooling, or

decreasing

f : to relieve or satisfy with liquid

This is often how projects begin, a haunting idea, word, or experience inundates my consciousness and sub-consciousness. How could the body directly relate to an experience of quenching? This provoked the idea of the extreme sport: freediving. To adequately depict the definition of quenching, any …

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

Man/Boy., Nick Hartman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Verisimilitude, or the appearance of being true, is a concept I turn upside down; relating it to a guise I wear as a contemporary male in a society dictated by learned social behavior and gender norms. Cultural iconography and expected gender norms are tropes I confront within my artwork. Drawings of seemingly everyday objects act as meditations or a fetishized repetition of supposed unobtainable objects and ideals that deal with masculine societal norms. Manliness, machismo, masculinity… it is all a culturally learned and expected pose placed on all men. Coming to the realization that I do not necessarily fit …

Meditative Art: A Diversion From Stress And Anxiety, Hannah T. Justis 4239670221

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I wished to present a body of work that visually represented my own meditative process of managing stress and anxiety. Towards the end of studying for my undergraduate, I began preparing for my Final Exhibition Show, and with these preparations, my life, as well as my work, changed drastically. Within the past two years, my drawings began to take on a meditative therapeutic process. It was this development that then helped manage my growing stress levels and well as the symptoms that stemmed from high levels of anxiety and bloomed from losing control in my day to day life. It …

The Record In Question, Kari Varner

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis is an archive composed of text and image that catalogs the perpetual distance between the photograph and its subject. In my practice the fluidity of representation is examined through the frame of the photographic archive, while the notion of what constitutes a photographic archive is redefined. While seeking to describe the mutability of encounters with landscapes and past memories the materiality of the photograph is emphasized, the image and its substrate destabilized, and both experience and photograph are fleeting. In many cases water acts as the alchemical substance for transformation, leading the photographs closer to a state of …

Patricia Nguyen Interview, Joyce Shoults

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Patricia Nguyen is an artist, educator, and scholar born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans. Her research and performance work examines critical refugee studies, political economy, forced migration, oral histories, inherited trauma, torture, and nation building in the United States and Vietnam. She has published work in Women Studies Quarterly, Harvard Kennedy School's Asian American Policy Review, and The Methuen Drama Anthology of Modern Asian Plays edited by Siyuan Liu and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Patricia is currently …

Aesthetic Survival, Adrienne Devine

CGU MFA Theses

I am a mixed media artist and my creative process is guided by cultural memory, the materials I use, and the pleasure I find in the activity of making. My compulsion to make things is accompanied by a propensity for scholarship, hence, my thesis exhibition incorporates Index Obscura; a growing visual and text-based corpus of research into the history and presence of African American artists in the tapestry of American art and culture. I work with a variety of materials and techniques, and consider wide-ranging themes, connected by recurring motifs, gestures, and attributes. Abstraction creates space wherein viewers can …

Domestic Curiosities, Larry D. Buller

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

My art at first glance suggests the domestic, ornamental nature of ceramic objects, but upon closer inspection one discovers a showy, transgressive content that is conceptualized around issues of gay sexuality, the phallus and fetish objects. I create decorative sculptures that resonate with my varied experiences as a gay man. Clay with its endless possibilities for form and surface, is the ideal medium for my subversive intentions. It allows me to blend the rich historical language of ceramic art with the low-brow, and in my case, kitsch nature of craft that one might find in second hand stores. I invite …

Ephemeral Permanence, Emily Reason

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

Traditional pottery forms and images of flora, fauna and rural architecture in Ephemeral Permanence awaken memory through the sensations and associations they suggest. These works are memorials to beauty, craft, culture and nature. I capture what is fleeting, make it tangible and endow it with longevity. Graceful movement paired with an element of danger reveals the complicated nature of beauty, waning culture is depicted with meticulous stability to conjure nostalgia, and form and surface celebrate craft and beauty. Icons of nature and culture in this work play a metaphoric role and serve to ignite memories.

I am fascinated with the …

Flora & Fauna, Elisa N. Griego

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

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Jon Yamashiro Interview, Ciera Stokes

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Jon Masuo Yamashiro was born the oldest son and raised as a third-generation Okinawan American in the “cultural pastiche” of Honolulu, HI. He traveled from the islands to study at Washington University in St. Louis and received his BFA in 1985, then went on to earn an MFA in photography from Indiana University in 1991. Since the fall of 1993, he has had the privilege of teaching photography to college students at Miami University. Jon lives in Liberty, Indiana, with his wife Jennifer and their daughter Lydia and son Luke. http://yamashirophoto.com/

Mayumi Lake Interview, Raegen Balton-Watkins

Asian American Art Oral History Project

“Mayumi Lake is a Chicago-based artist. Her photography and video work delve into childhood and pubescent dreams, phobia and desires. She employs herself and others as her models, as well as dolls, toys, weapons, vintage clothes, and altered landscape as her props.” - http://mayumilake.com/about.html-

BFA, 1997, MFA, 2000, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions/screenings: Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, Asia Society, Art in General, Artists Space, New York; Fotograpie Forum International, Frankfurt; Cornelius Pleser Galerie, Munich; Director's Lounge, Berlin; Bangkok International Art Festival, Bangkok; Galleria PaciArte, Brescia; FOTOAMERICA, Santiago; Ellen Curlee Gallery, St. Louis; O Gallery, Tokyo. Monograph: Poo-Chi, …

Kaveri Raina Interview, Eva Swiecki

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Kaveri Raina is an artist working in Chicago, IL. She was born and raised in New Delhi, India and moved to the States at the age of eleven. In 2011 she received her BFA in Painting and Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and in 2016 her MFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Raina was a 2016 recipient of the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, Fred and Joanna Lazarus Scholarship, amongst others. In fall 2016 she completed a five-week residency at Ox-Bow, in Saugatuck, MI. Raina has exhibited in Chicago, New …

Matthew Avignone Interview, Alicia Urquizo

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Matthew Avignone is a Korean-American photographer born in 1987. In 2011, he obtained his B.A. in photography from Columbia College, Chicago. He has been exhibited at the Aperture Foundation, the Pingyao Photography Festival (China), and the Camden Image Gallery (London), among others. His first artist book, An Unfinished Body (2011), is part of the collections of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film and the International Center for Photography. In October 2014, after working for five years on documenting his own family, he released his self-published book, Stranger Than Family. The story of this project, …