Art Practice Commons^™

Lay Your Burdens Down, Whitnee Levon Davis

CGU MFA Theses

I’m not of this world, but since I’m here I will do everything I can to live out my purpose; to tell stories that validate, affirm, and make people that look like me visible. Every culture has its storytellers. I translate written stories into images. Those stories can be in the form of a poem, song, novel, or play. The stories are works that I create. I often find my greatest inspiration starts from reading literary works. I am constantly seeking ways to make sure that Black people, especially Black women, are visually represented. Since my background is in poetry, …

The Fragile Bee: Nancy Macko At Moah, Kathleen Stewart Howe, Carole Ann Klonarides, Stephen Nowlin, Nancy Macko

Pomona Faculty Books

“The Fragile Bee” was exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA and is an outcry to the plight of the bees in relationship to the environment. This accompanying catalog critically examines the work in the exhibition beginning with a foreword by Andi Campognone, museum manager and curator at MOAH. Artist Nancy Macko established a garden for native bee-attracting plants in order to document them throughout the year. The resulting series of photographs, "Botanical Portraits", are the subject of the essay by museum director Kathleen Stewart Howe. Contemporary art writer and curator Carole Ann Klonarides writes in …

Art You Alright, Yun Lung

CGU MFA Theses

My works are mirrors that reflect my life, my thoughts, my heart and my soul. Since my works are about my experience and reactions toward my life, cultural differences between east and west culture have a tremendous impact on my works. Moving to America was a turning point to me these years. The surrounding is totally different and everything is new to me. I found that I’m not only learning art but also learning how to live in a foreign place. Once my life was occupied by these unknown things, my works manifest every emotions I have in every moment. …

Pattern And Disorder: Anxiety And The Art Of Yayoi Kusama, Susanna S. Ferrell

Scripps Senior Theses

Yayoi Kusama is undoubtedly one of the most esteemed artists today, and yet she is continually written off as "crazy." Kusama's work draws not from insanity, but from her experiences with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and acts as a tool to both process and temper her obsessions and compulsions. In my own work, I reflect on the necessarily obsessive faculty of hand-drawn animation, in an effort to communicate the feeling of OCD.

Infinity, Carmen Fodoreanu

CGU MFA Theses

My current paintings are not finite objects. They test the quantum world of possibilities by exploring the idea of continuity and change. They generate, with each viewer, a state of self-reflection that in exchange promotes a wide range of unpredictable feelings and reactions that became thoughts and beliefs. For a painting of mine, there are multiple or infinite solutions and I, along with the viewers, search for answers. To suggest this state of infinity I extend the paint from the actual canvas onto the walls that host it. My paintings present no borders, no frames: just fluidity.

Jack Wilson Mfa Thesis 2014: Chasing The Unicorn, Jack T. Wilson

CGU MFA Theses

More than anything, my art practice is about overcoming the proclivity to collude with stagnation. Somewhere in the middle of the endless pugilistic battle between consciousness and unconsciousness lies my work, positioned in between the tension of the known and the unknown. The line and the absence of it. The edge and the center. Instinctively, we surround the unknown/other with fear. When encountering a dark shape lying in my path, I automatically jump. The stick might be a snake. Although my survival mechanisms have built walls between the light and the dark, through my work I wish to illuminate things …

Le Corps Propre, Andrea M. Breiling

CGU MFA Theses

Le Corpse Propre, is a series of large scaled paintings; performative archaeological stripteases through which layers of material stratigraphy reveal themselves through a deliberate process of revealing and concealing.

Patch Wright, Patch Wright

CGU MFA Theses

Wright is a contemporary sculptor whose work focuses on history, symbolism, and the experience of materials and objects.

Labor, Vera Bauluz

CGU MFA Theses

I make sacred objects from scratch, from ready mades, from industrial materials, and sometimes from trash or recycling. I treat those objects with love and reverence to embed them with essence and soul. I propose conversations with objects exquisitely executed, that question our social order and the machine, easily understood by everybody, although still challenging our understanding of contemporary art.

The placement of the work and the lighting, as fundamental part of the installation, attempts to generate strokes of conscience that enhance human understanding and capabilities beyond a specific discourse.

Humor and sacred coexist in my installation and in my …

Sally Bruno, Sally Bruno

CGU MFA Theses

My investigation starts with an examination of color, form and line. It continues with an examination of how these elements collide and collude to form objects both abstract and representational. What interests me is the intersection between formal abstraction and representational imagery. My goal is to combine these practices in a rigorous, epistemological inquiry into how human beings make sense of their surroundings, using our minds and our bodies, our perceptions and our expectations, to come to understand the visible world and our embodied relationship to it.

Making Rich Use Of "Leisure", Augusto Sandroni

CGU MFA Theses

I make paintings, drawings, installations and sculptures using oils, acrylics and everyday materials such as burlap, reclaimed wood, cardboard and duct tape. More than any other, Matisse’s work was always a point of reference. Everything I do is partially informed, even if not directly by the work of my predecessors, with Matisse toping the list: the element of joy, play and expression of visual beauty is something I’m not ashamed to strive for. I also embrace risk taking, not conforming with establish norms or methodology; I’m always hoping for novel ideas and methods to infiltrate my workflow.

Projectordinary, Paul M. Kelley

CGU MFA Theses

These works are slices, reflections and projections of life. They celebrate what seems humdrum and humble. With stripped-down almost deadpan effects that are nearly as dull as the objects, my works lie somewhere between 2D and 3D, blurring the lines of physical space with the digital. The spatial and sculptural qualities that they attain induce a playful illusion in the moment of trying to make sense of what the eye sees. With a bit of precision, it is vital to make use of the negative space and align animations and digitally repeated forms with objects to retain believability, normality and …

K-12 Students See Steam Everyday, Meghan Reilly Michaud

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Today’s students exist in a visual world. A new semiotic language has emerged in the digital age. It consists of an ever-evolving vocabulary of signs and symbols that one can rapidly decipher. Icons represent applications and functions on a plethora of modern devices. Sounds indicate changes and the start and end of activity. The exposure of new audio and visual media are part of everyday communication, now more than ever. The Arts teach our students to better perceive these cues and the information that they deliver.

Found Objects Observations, Heidi Florio

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

On Thursday 28th March, 2013 we had the launch event for the inaugural issue of The STEAM Journal!
At the event each attendee was given a small colored clear cylindrical containers that was filled with small found objects (any combination of seeds, foil, thread, beads, sequins, miniature gears, parts of watches, small nails and other natural and synthetic materials). Individuals took these home as a gift from The STEAM Journal. We asked "What do you think/do with the found objects?" This project was open to anyone (those who attended, those who did not attend)..submissions about found objects were sent in …

Geology – Future Continent, Joy Wulke

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Terra Mirabila, a multi-media presentation illustrating the geological story of Stony Creek Granite back through complex sequence of geological events that spanned some 600 million years of early history.

Mana & Ea, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This work, Mana and Ea, expresses Polynesian indigenous sovereignty struggles with colonialism and globalism in the Pacific Islands.

Big Horned, Juniper Harrower

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Tinta y tinto (Spanish for black ink and red wine)
Through a process of oxidation, reduction, and light manipulation, Juniper stains and colors paper with red wine and a rich black pigment made of the wild harvested mushroom Coprinopsis atramentaria.

Design In Nature, Farhana Azim

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Floral Designs are a combination of, line, form and space. By creating balance while incorporating all these three elements in proportion to the space allowed, with an eye on the use of color and contrast, enabling the smooth visual flow of the design one produces the perfect arrangement.

"Mr. Lee", Bin Li

CGU MFA Theses

My paintings are a territory where I express, fight, question and discover what is happening around me. Each element in them struggles with others. They reveal a world almost entirely comprised by conflict and confusion. My goal is to build a connection between my work and myself, to communicate with viewers and to question myself and my audience by representing my personal experience in ways that are revealing and new to me. Somehow, this also offers viewers the opportunity to rethink their relationships to the world around them.

01:04:30:08:34:25 Retrospectively, Jo Anna Rose Zelano

CGU MFA Theses

To regenerate. Things break down, get destroyed. We rebuild. We rebuild our mental worlds and our material worlds. I make remnants, collect remnants, of performances and sculptures, and of process. The remnants become the work, the physical and the video, the scars and the tattoo; the evidence is subjected to understanding. What lives through us is not what happens to us, but what remnants we hold on to. What remnants we hold on to in our physical world, what remnants we hold on to in our mental world.

Dark Inventory, Abdul Mazid

CGU MFA Theses

Using a conceptual framework to explore the presence of conflicting ideologies, power structures, and paradigms; Mazid transforms well-known materials and imagery into unexpected and charged artistic declarations, working across a wide range of media, including drawing, painting, video, installation, and sculpture. Pulling freely from a range of sources—personal, historical, social, economic and political—his visual language is simultaneously layered, sensitive, controversial, radical, and banal. His art addresses the underlying cause and effects of globalized society on the individual, often using his own personal circumstances as a point of departure.

All The Things Left Unsaid, Philip Kim

CGU MFA Theses

I search in my paintings a state of constant glide; meditational state by flooding my senses as my eyes wander from scene to scene onto a daze of perpetual visual stimuli.

They are the frozen amalgamation of its transient state – A crosscut of fog condensing into honey. And the burning shadows of a golden hour vaporizing into electric haze. I try to keep the image in perpetual limbo, confused by their nature, wondering if they will be pickled in the vinegar of the web as digital ghosts or finally disintegrate from being a substance. I want to capture in …

Spragga, Johnny Guerrero

CGU MFA Theses

I produce experience generators: mystifying, quirky entities capable of creating their own atmosphere, making subtle but implacable demands for recognition and interaction. In order to cultivate work as evocative as it is provocative, I hybridize, bastardize and stylize any and everything I find interesting with special attention given to objects that have been discarded, forgotten or broken. These become hybrid creatures--not quite paintings, not quite sculptures--that teeter between form and formlessness, between coming together and falling apart, between blind hubris and aching vulnerability.

Rope-A-Dope, Gabriel L. Perez

CGU MFA Theses

I create from everyday items, coming from everyday people. I do not think that what I create is too difficult for anyone to understand but I know that although I created it, it eludes me. Plastic containers, disposables, and clothing reach out to eyes that see them differently. I’m not trying to make people see things differently; I’m just trying to make you look. Call it theatrics but with a history of various performance experiences, I am not above pulling a cheap trick to get your attention. Nor will I shun the lingo and logic of decoration since I am …

The White Room Disruption, Jamaal Hasef Tolbert

CGU MFA Theses

My artistic practices range from sculpture, video art, performance, and painting. Streaming most of my ideas from the African Diaspora and the American Social Structure, I introduce my viewers to a world of topics that are not often discussed in society. I invite viewers to think about how they have been trained to stereotype and label skin tones. This opens up conversation on everyone’s unconscious minds and socially structured beliefs, which often touch up on the topic of race issues. I also use the media whether it is the internet or social media to reach viewers globally and to engage …

Borders, Anwar I. Alzeer

CGU MFA Theses

Abstraction provides me with great freedom. Mixing abstraction and imagery introduces emotions and feelings. Color plays a vitally important role in my paintings. It can sway your thinking, change your actions, and cause reactions. It can irritate or soothe your eyes, raise your blood pressure or suppress your appetite, when used in the right ways.

Indefinability2013c.E., Clayton T. Ehman

CGU MFA Theses

I am a multidisciplinary artist; because I am committed to art that engages a broad array of subjects and ideas. This is reflected in my works which consist of diverse mediums and processes including graphic design, digital imagery, printmaking, painting, sculpting, poetry, song composition, clothing, website design, drawing, video, lighting, installation art, abstract art, Op art, conceptual art, political art, black light art, maximalist art, and various combinations of these.

Falling Apart While Awake, Crystal Erlendson

CGU MFA Theses

Crystal Erlendson conceals surfaces with irreverent, ornamental gestures to reveal a daft logic in space.

Find additional websites of the artist's work here and here.

Paradise Maintenance Department, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin

CGU MFA Theses

Based on personal and artistic research in Samoa, Polynesia, Oceania, and the South Pacific Islands, "Paradise Maintenance Department" investigates the contemporary colonial relationship between the U.S. Territory of American Samoa and the United States, while engaging in a poetic expression of f'a'afafine queer Samoan life.

Kind Of Blue Artist's Statement, Leslie Love Stone

CGU MFA Theses

Leslie Love Stone is a conceptual painter whose work often focuses on the models we build to make sense of the world and ourselves. The beauty of order is exemplified through the geometric abstraction of statistical information; complicated content is eloquently transparent with her use of negative space, repeating patterns, and color.