Art Practice Commons^™

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 …

"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.

Bearing Likeness, Christine M. Salama

CGU MFA Theses

The world is saturated with images and things. I have chosen to put more images and things into the world. In doing so, I complicate and further saturate these connections, but I also find clarity and answers through the mark, the gesture, the image, and material. I make marks with materials that are closely related to the meanings of the things I depict. The images and objects I make are ones that I know and understand because they are close to me, but the process of making leaves room for inquiry and unfamiliarity with these same objects.

I am guided …

Isolated Infinite, Kelsey M. Kimmel

CGU MFA Theses

I explore the relationship between human borders and digital space. The porous borders between these entities shape contemporary culture and identity. Amid the digital current, I find myself over-stimulated, fighting to stay afloat through multitasking, immediacy and cramming. My sculptural installations investigate how I see, experience, interact with and react to digital space.

These Things Happen: New American Landscapes, Clarke Latta Henry Iii

CGU MFA Theses

i take pictures in order to learn through confrontation how to be a better person. won't you shamble gaily forward with me. Rainbow warriors FTW.

Verdurous, Adrian R. Culverson

CGU MFA Theses

Adrian Culverson is a painter and sculptor who uses mixed media to create installations that focus on splices of real and imagined worlds.

All Cats Are Grey In The Dark, Kristen Bradford

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Water Riot Territory, Dominique Ovalle

CGU MFA Theses

The old world has fallen away; we look for the New World now. I entreat you with symbols, signs and code-talking—a new language I’ve learned while prowling the jungles of angst in this “Romantic Life,” which is utterly unromantic. Sometimes I run away, and enter into emptiness. Inside darkness cannot comprehend the light that searches for us. On the bottom of the ocean, light must be generated from within. But something does not come from nothing. What was something born of?

My paintings operate as a map to strange destinations—charting weird trips through swampy, melancholic emptiness, as well as encounters …

Reflexions, Takeshi Kanemura

CGU MFA Theses

Through my art, I offer viewers environments that function in a manner similar to public parks. People visit parks not to talk about the park and its elements, but to have their own time and space to interact with themselves and/or others. Although each of my offerings is distinct, all are united by the way they function: to create the possibility of human interaction. Even when I am not present, the spaces I have created are interactive performances. After visitors leave, my art again becomes incomplete, and an invitation for other viewers. The whole process encompasses the production of the …

Working Title, Nathanael Thomas Little

CGU MFA Theses

(Working Title) is an exploration into the interaction of the idea spaces of installation art and the theme park, through Nate Little's narrative environment of Arboria. Plush Characters populate an environment that fills the gallery space.

Dab Shunt Spoor, Jen Grabarczyk

CGU MFA Theses

My work functions as an act of bearing witness. In it, I process consciousness, memory, narrative and time through the choreographed integration of cerebral representations and bodily movement. Through forms both strange and elegant, I seek to activate a viewer’s memory and consciousness–psychologically and corporeally.

Kyla Hansen Mfa Thesis Statement, Kyla M. Hansen

CGU MFA Theses

My work traces the migration of meaning, mashing up cultural signifiers of place to create absurd objects and physical spaces that employ the hazy nature of belief, memory, and nostalgia. I’m interested in the exportability and malleability of experiences both culturally (through objects in movies, music, and media) and personally (through memories that change over time). My work explores the elusiveness of realness, creating slippery spaces, where the real and fake overlap, and certainty and uncertainty intermingle.

Lumen Essence, Brian Thomas Jones

CGU MFA Theses

I am intrigued by power relationships among the physical, psychological and political realms of experience. The various ways we respond to both the voluntary and involuntary restrictions of power ignite the ideas behind my investigations. The examination of power dynamics utilizing scale, spectacle and theatricality is what excites my process.

By providing an environment for immersive visceral participation, I invite the visitor to collaborate in the process of art-making through their human interaction with the formal constructions of the exhibition. Engaging the visitor in an activated, sensate experience is the artistic objective. The visitor's willingness to slow down the art …

Being-There, Atilio A. Pernisco

CGU MFA Theses

I blend figures with backgrounds to define pensive areas of focus and delve between figuration and abstraction. These paintings connect the viewer with the strangeness of the ordinary world. This is the moment of unconsciousness. It is then where elements of a narrative emerge. I depict the figure in movements of awkwardness. Images of the familiar environments of children involved in some kind of work-play activity, the inheritors of generational trauma, reoccur in my work--a parade of daydreamers in direction to witness the uncertain.

White Light, Tessie Whitmore

CGU MFA Theses

The work is about nothing and everything. It is about belief systems engaged with everyday, monotonous theories of repetitious acts that will deliver freedom and freewill or acceptance and enlightenment. These acts become systems, which are bought into with ridiculous dedication. What is left is the void, potential death, fleeting mortality.

I use the highway as a place of investigation and motivation building a relationship between its physical and psychological aspects. I focus on moments from the drive: tension, the possible crash, monotony, and the trance state. I use materials from high culture and low culture to form a cultural …