Everything, Everything Seemed Once-Upon-A-Time, Denisse Leung Liu

CGU MFA Theses

The pleasant feeling of being relaxed is what I want the viewer to feel with my work. The art I make is the source of peacefulness and tranquility I treasure, in a way that there is tranquility and absence of noise, yet it whispers quietly to the viewer.

Artist Statement, Chaoyi Wu

CGU MFA Theses

I make my work to create an experience for the viewer, so that they can have their own experience of their world. Their bodies interact with my pieces to re-recognize themselves and their lives. In this experience their body is independent of everything else but their awareness. Their sense of movement, their vision and their tactile sensations come together into my artwork for them to have their own experience. This is what I call self-body awareness.

Everything, Everything Seemed Once-Upon-A-Time, Denisse Leung Liu

CGU MFA Theses

The pleasant feeling of being relaxed is what I want the viewer to feel with my work. The art I make is the source of peacefulness and tranquility I treasure, in a way that there is tranquility and absence of noise, yet it whispers quietly to the viewer.

Letian Luo Thesis Statement, Letian Luo

CGU MFA Theses

My work started out originating from my dreams, but recently it has moved away from that source. To make the cut outs, I would scribble on the back of a small sheet of scarp paper. Then I discovered that if I cut out the scribble, it become more interesting than the dream work. So I developed the scribbles further. I enlarged them, made them more complex and gestural, and then cut them out, meticulously and with painstaking attentiveness. The process allowed me to draw with knife. I very enjoy the process of me making the cut outs. It got increasingly …

Temp Permit, Zhaoyang Zheng

CGU MFA Theses

My work focus on the isolation and alienation between society and individual. As an artist, I also regard myself as a tourist, tourists are people who would like to explore and find special things which are not familiar to them. Usually a tourist is isolated from others because of his unfamiliarity with culture and language. It is hard for a tourist to fit into society which is same for artists: they like to explore different and most of the time they are isolated from main stream society.

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 …

Finding The Surface, Rafaella F. Suarez

CGU MFA Theses

I find the relationship of pool structures and water fascinating. The architecture of pools is often hard edged and geometric while water is a fluid and formless, an organic substance that takes the shape of whatever contains it. I am drawn to that paradox. Rather than pulling them apart because of their conflicting existences, they create a space that’s cohesive but inexplicable, a space that’s both reciprocally intertwined and interdependent. My work is set up within the idea of creating a conflicting yet cohesive space. Visually, corporally and conceptually, it creates experiences that are disorienting.

My work serves as a …

I Promise, Maya Luque

CGU MFA Theses

This exhibition is about Chinese burial sites and the practices that accompany the loss of a loved one. The Chinese have a practice where they build large earthen mounds as burial sites; they then visit the sites of their ancestors once a year. I have made my own burial site out of beeswax-dipped paper, which I have then stitched together, like a quilt, to form a hollow version of this mound. In traditional Western home economics quilt making is important; in my installation I use the stitch work to represent a home. In this installation my aim is for the …

She-Ra, Jennifer King

CGU MFA Theses

Painting primarily in oils on canvas, my work confronts themes of femininity and power in contemporary life. I create images through a mix of the imagined and the observed, focusing on the female form. The figures I paint exude feelings of uncertainty, unease, disconnect, but also strength and heightened awareness. There exists a sense of longing and desire to break out of her confined space, to be a strong female individual, ignoring anyone's expectations. Subtle expressions are contrasted with vibrant, sensual colors; her way of grabbing your attention. My goal is to portray a female perspective regarding identity in an …

My Flesh Is Your Pasture, Dakota Noot

CGU MFA Theses

Painting my body frees it from the limits of reality. My body exists in a collaged state between man and woman, human and animal, abstract and figurative. By embracing my body’s power as an object, it isn’t limited to being a representation of myself. My painted body can be owned or identified with. It can be feared, hated, and lusted after. I submit my body, blasting it with horror, humor, and a sheer sense of enjoyment.

Fugitive Fragment, Diana Campuzano

CGU MFA Theses

My work explores the fugitive beauty around us and tries to capture and embody it. For my work IC5070 I began with an image of a nebula IC5070, I created a work that hung from the ceiling and was 27 feet square and hung down 8 feet to just above the viewers. I explore the micro and the macro worlds with many of my works crossing back and forth between

Frankenstein's Onion, Chien Tai

CGU MFA Theses

Gas Lamps, Laura Wilde

CGU MFA Theses

My work investigates the role and dynamic of society, culture, and familial influence on the masculinity and femininity within our individuality. It specifically deals with my on going discovery of the masculine side of my personality, and how the feminine roll is influenced, or not influenced, by this. I have been applying Jungian psychology and the theory of individuation, archetypes, and so forth, to my process. I have made several bodies of work in a quest to understand the fundamental roles that femininity and masculinity have affected my choices and individual understanding. Documenting old and new relationships, I make puppets, …

Young Chicanx On The Move: Folklórico Dance Education As A Mechanism Of Self-Assertion And Social Empowerment, Maya Salas

Scripps Senior Theses

In the context of Chicanx experiences in the United States, where varying generations of Chicanxs experience bicultural realities, this study shows how embodied knowledge performed through the body’s movements in folklórico dance by Chicanx youth from multiple generations, acts as a mechanism for reconnecting youth to cultural ties, reevaluating educational practices, and emplacing within youth, the ability to foster the confidence to express and create imagined futures. Data collection incorporated a series of interviews with eight Chicanx youth and adults who have either taught or danced folklórico in the Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Coachella Valley areas. Interview participants revealed a …

Trauma And Recovery: A Confessional Process, Mia Siracusa

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper is about a confessional painting series, which appropriates Abstract Expressionist techniques, and is on geometric canvas reliefs. The main focus through out the series is the process of my recovery from a traumatic event and the process of the creation of a language through abstraction.

Daughter, Wife, Mother: Women As Emblems Of Indian Authenticity Throughout The Diaspora, Saloni Kaur Kalkat

Scripps Senior Theses

It has been over a century since the maternal side of my family has resided in the natal land of our cultural heritage and religious proclivities – Punjab, India, where Sikhism was established. As an American I continue this extension of our roots from their source. Through the process of shifting location, cultural confluence, and passing time the experiences of the women in each successive generation of my family have altered significantly through our diasporic existence. However, even in the aftermath of colonization and immigration, the enduring responsibility of women is reliant upon their relation to family.

This ideology is …

Spreading Seeds: Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds And His Performative Personality Received In The West, Wei Wu

Scripps Senior Theses

In 2010, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds made its debut in Tate Modern, which promoted Ai to be one of the most famous and respected contemporary Chinese artists. This Conceptual art work has multiple layers of meanings, which all corresponds to the Western expectations for a successful contemporary Chinese artist. In fact, the Western art world has long held bias and stereotypes towards international artists. Ai chose to perform his personality to conform to the expectations and Western ideologies, which brought him international fame. On the other hand, other Chinese artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Zhou Chunya, don't totally agree with …

Vida En Sombras, Tommy Canales Burns

CGU MFA Theses

Verisimilitude. What is reality? Subconsciously we are acting out and absorbing information collating data and in turn responding with instincts. Learning processes to view and shape this world. I think of the Hermann Hesse’s doppelganger, the idea of a shadow self. Group identities can also have strange shadow selves. It is bizarre to look back at history and see the changing context of social norms, fashions, traditions, scientific, philosophical, and political thought. Art is a sign of the times, creating space for the inner dialogue of collective consciousness to be purged and hashed out.

When I'M With You, Jenny Ziomek

CGU MFA Theses

Everything I make is related to books. My artwork functions as visual storyboards or is used directly in books. Props and videos are inspiration for drawings. My paintings are meant to feel like pages from a larger narrative. Often, the formats through which stories are told are as important as the stories themselves.

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.

Tapestry, Alana Medina

CGU MFA Theses

The wall pieces are intentionally left to be crude, unrefined, and raw. A look at the world with a border, walking backwards to a beginning, what it was like before the traffic of the mind. Itinerant qualities along with an objective dissidence bring about an experience of tribal nomadic earthy hues. The paintings stay close to my interpretation of the earth, similar to the sculptures. Like twins born in the same embrace with contemporaneous qualities they exist together with a connection in materiality. There is a relationship between my paintings and sculptures; a mutual dependence seen and experienced together that …

Transforming Body, Angelina Prendergast

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This is a reflection about the use of balls for body therapy.

Engaging The Community: Reflections On A Steam Institute, Dennis Doyle, Yat-Long Sam Poon

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Staff at an elementary school working with artists from a non-profit arts integration professional development organization developed a highly engaging full day STEAM Institute to engage the community in experiential STEAM learning practices and to leverage the experience for systemic impact. This reflection considers the outcomes that went well beyond the original goals.

Gary Brewer - Dark Matter Series, Gary Brewer

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

In the Dark Matter series of paintings I am abstracting images from NASA’s efforts to map dark matter using the Hubble Space Telescope. From these abstractions I create diaphanous veils of blue that convey a sense of movement; the movement suggests primal forces: wind, water air and fire.

The figure in the foreground is one of the elements: gold, copper, silver, which develop into a variety of fantastic shapes. The ‘elements’ which are the foundation of life on earth, are born in the heart of a star and explode out into the universe upon its death and collapse. The force …

Cold Hard Facts, Paul Kelley

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

COLD HARD FACTS is an ephemeral installation composed of a projector, digital images and ice. The work continues my interest in having the viewer slow down to have a more thoughtful and absorptive experience with the work and surrounding space. With a short-lived duration, the piece considers the transitory nature of things and how truths can be misconstrued as facts, whereas truths are malleable and facts are not. They are cold, hard and indifferent.

Pineapple, 022, Conversation – Behind The Cover Art, Jesse W. Standlea

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Many sources date the pit-firing process as a 30,000 plus years-old ceramic firing technique. Every year I take my AP 3D Design class to the beach to fire ceramic pieces using this method. Being a contemporary sculptor who shows in Los Angeles I have always appreciated pit-fired pieces but never used one in my own art practice until now. A connection between the first method of firing ceramics and my art practice seemed unrelated. The title for my piece might add to the disconnect; and yet these seemingly unrelated elements force the work into a place where the artistic process …

Stratum, Raneem Fadul

CGU MFA Theses

My work is an expression of the relationship between my own culture, and the American culture and way of life that I have had a chance to interact with, observe, and reflect on throughout the past few years. My concepts were inspired by the industrial nature of the area that I live in, where I gradually realized that I was surrounded by dozens of workshops and garages. Given that my home is the spiritually-rich, fairly traditional, and non-industrial Saudi Arabia, this typical American experience has been, to me, one with much room for reflection, due to the extreme contrast. The …

20,082,026, Ruoxi Li

CGU MFA Theses

The whole idea of my work came from me questioning about the relationship between industrialization and human beings. Our generation look and think conforming to a public standard. When being asked question our answer is not based on our preferences, but whether it matches what we’ve been taught.

Sharon Si-Chen Ye Artist Statement, Si-Chen Ye

CGU MFA Theses

Everyone is a separate individual. When individuals become aware that they are alone in this world, they can spend more time getting along with themselves and listening to the voice coming from the depths of their heart. This is the main idea of my works. I want to build a silent world with many creatures to make people feel and know that they are alone without feeling lonely.

Aesthesia, Cindy G. Garcia

CGU MFA Theses

My art practice in itself, is first and foremost about me as a Human on this planet. Second, I am drawn to the cognitive dissonance that happens within each individual, this is key to the majority of my work. For this show I really wanted to emphasize; A: The textural, corporal involvement that I personally really enjoy and get satisfaction out of. B: The color of Life. C: The beauty in very introspective particular instances that happen in day to day life.