Art Practice Commons^™

Line Language, Albert Avi Arenfeld

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

I consider utility and beauty in the functional pots that I make. In making pottery I continue a history of typography as ornament and a tradition of making objects by hand. My designs are informed by my personal background as well as cultural and historic influences.

The pots that I make are inspired by anthropomorphic form and architectural structure. I reference the geometry of the human body as well as buildings seen in my travels to Japan and the Middle East. The internal structure of the pot is both bones and framing, the surface of the pot is both skin …

A Collection: Simulations Of The Home, Liana M. Owad

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

The collection of objects of which a home is comprised changes and grows over time. We inherit furniture and accumulate these pieces to create our own particular atmosphere of home. Our furniture and belongings range from handmade articles to store bought manufactured items. These items we live with everyday perform several different roles. A dining room table does not only have the function of serving food, but is also embedded with the memories of many family dinner conversations. Objects in the home have this layered purpose of utilitarian function and placeholder for memories.

After moving away from home, I drew …

A Language In Becoming, Camille C. Hawbaker

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

Words as I have known them are evolving concepts in the landscape of human language, where the meanings of words are interwoven with layers of history and culture. The boundaries of language are defined by words, and around the edges are instinctive sounds that precede and exceed meaning. These sounds are an interrupting force that unsettles the linguistic structure. We often use them for expression in the form of sobs, grunts, moans, murmurs, chants, obscenities and exclamations. They appear in times of spontaneous emotion that words cannot convey. They can also be used purposely, poetically, “…to shatter [one’s] judging consciousness …

Path - Loss, Gregory S. Cook

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

The term “path loss” could be considered somewhat idiomatic – it refers at once to a very specific technical definition and an easily relatable conceptualization, but perhaps its most immediate read is one of defeat, literally “a path, lost.” I find this beautifully problematic. In its original end as a term in radio-engineering, it’s used to describe the attenuation of a signal through physical space on its way to a receiver – that is, “path loss” describes some kind of thin-ness of intensity, the parts of something snagged along the way; parts caught in bedrock, lost in soil, or tangled …

Geographies Of Story, Emma Nishimura

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

Family stories are told and retold, evolving over time with new details and other layers. One story merges with the next, while photographic images, oral and written accounts dissolve into the fabric of memory, building the family narrative. Both individual and collective, these histories continue to grow and transform as a new language is created, one that is visual, written, spoken and unspoken. As the complexities develop, the impact of these stories on our lives and the need to make sense of them in relation to our own identities increases. Yet, as I wade through my own family’s tales, the …

Constructions, Sean Ryan Larson

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

I have always been drawn to investigating the nature of ambiguous objects; objects whose role is unclear; objects that fall between distinct categories, and that exist in what appears to be transitional stages. The pieces I make provoke the imagination by building in experimental self-defined systems that refer to contemporary architecture, as well as comment on the ceramic and non-ceramic process. My pieces vary in form and intention just as the skyline carries changes in form and order. I want to make experimental objects that develop in front of me from the ground up, without a pre-planned result. Using fundamental …

Transcendent Materiality, Lauren E. Mabry

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

I make painterly, abstract, ceramic objects. My obsession with surface and materiality compels me to investigate the relationship between images and objects through the inherent qualities of ceramic material. Primarily my work communicates directly, through its formal and aesthetic qualities, but it may also be understood in relationship to abstract painting, minimal work, and process art. I exploit the intrinsic qualities of ceramic material producing works that are warm, seductive, and surprising. Ultimately, my work is a synthesis of intuitive, expressive surfaces and elemental forms.

In this body of work there are two main forms: cylinders and curved planes- as …

Someone/No One, Jamie L. Fritz

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

I am obsessed with the pieces of existence; the memories, experiences and emotions that make up human identity. Our lives are defined by entropy that causes these pieces to fragment and become distorted over time. Looking back at the pieces they become almost unrecognizable, and it becomes unclear if they are something or if they are nothing. My work centers on a compulsive desire to put these pieces into something that makes sense. The photograph serves as a representation of the memory and experience, broken down into parts that remove them as a piece of an identifiable whole. The photographs …

Measured Chance, Brian R. Kluge

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

In my practice I use clay to make enigmatic, non-representational sculptures that employ reductive geometry and archetypal forms. By pressing clay into a variety of molds, it is my intention to contrast a primal crudeness with a skilled precision in my handling of the material. I fabricate objects that range in scale from handheld to human- size. In this work, I combine references to the forms of manmade things with surfaces that allude to age and wear resulting from natural patinas that occur on stone, wood, or metal. This body of work shares qualities with the Minimalist and Earth Art …

Maelstrom, Gertrude L. Teijink

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

My work is a confrontation with the conflict between our everyday activities, and the fleetingness of our existence. We are dragged through time and through space, but ultimately we are unavoidably lost in a swirl of oblivion. Given this dissonance, I question the meaning of our everyday activities. Can we find satisfaction with what we do? And why are we compelled to do it? The case I try to make for the meaning of life’s repetitive or renewal actions is made largely in reference to myself, which gives my work an undeniable autobiographical component.

For my thesis work, I photograph …

From Baa To Eye: Language As Images, Yinghua Zhu

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

From Baa to Eye: Language as Images

Languages, as I understood, are the most direct confrontation of cultures because of their inherent culture iconicity. My approach to employ the English language as a subject matter is to interpret the culture it represents. I use language as a metaphor to address the boundary, the inadequacy, the longing, the contradiction, the adaptation, the curiosity, and the frustration that one encounters when different cultures clash. These clashes are valuable because they help me recognize and appreciate the differences, or in other words, the otherness. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. It …

Breathe... Keep Breathing., Shaun C. Kiel

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

I work with short-duration seamless video loops. My work simultaneously depicts and emulates the material composition of time, specifically how action composes time and how time can compose or construct objects.

My work is self-reflexive. Self-reflexive means that a product actively considers or examines its own production. In video this means breaking either the illusion of depicted time as real time or the illusion of the depicted image as real space. Video loops are self-reflexive by function. Their periodic recurrence points out the artifact of the medium.

The periodic recurrence of video loops also changes the narrative quality of the …

Once-Removed (And Other Familiar Relations), Emily Newman

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

Conventional perceptions of space rouse my investigation of images as stand-ins for an objects reference. Removing the context of an object changes the once tangible form. No longer able to be touched, used or relate to its original environment, an object transformed into an image exists solely for our visual and psychological perceptions.

In substituting one for the other, image for object and vise versa, a hierarchy occurs. Its previous existence now establishes a mental presence, shifting the future recollection of such an image to precede or replace the actual object in memory. Proxy of image for object and object …

Cut, Bryan Drew

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

The act of cutting is to sever, to divide an object or even an idea into separate parts of its original state. Non-tangibles can also in a sense be ‘cut’, like gaps in memories or modifications of beliefs or ideas. My work encompasses these definitions of cutting. Working mostly from photos, I use imagery from personal experience, such as meat from my hunting experience, patterns from nostalgic blankets, or photos of people in my life. Other times, I choose imagery simply because I feel compelled to paint it, or it feels somehow needed within the composition. My process begins by …

I'Ve Fallen In Love With Every One Of You..., Kayleigh L. Speck

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

Photographs best show and describe the world, capturing a split second in time without necessarily providing the viewer with any sort of explanation or answer as to why something looks the way it does. Although the camera captures images of the “real,” it has the ability to tell lies. It changes our perception of space, the color of light, and the way things look overall. This is the reason I have chosen this medium; I want to see what my world looks like in a photograph.

Through these photographs of the every day lives of my subjects and myself, I …

Black, White, Brown, Aisha S. Harrison

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

BLACK, WHITE, BROWN Aisha Shani Harrison, M.F.A University of Nebraska, 2010

Adviser: Gail Kendall

I address emotions and perceptions that are complex and multifaceted. My goal is for the work to communicate these emotions in a way that makes them accessible to others. Most people have felt disconnected, longing, anticipation, relief, anger, frustration and have experienced internal conflict. While this work touches on these emotions, there is, because of who I am, a set of questions I am asking regarding racial identity.

This autobiographical work is a series of ceramic figures that are engaged with symbolic objects which together form …

Good Girl, Erika C. Navarrete Anderson

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

I have always had a narrative sensibility, drawing from memory, stories, and personal experience. Perhaps it was the abundance of story telling and gossip I absorbed growing up. The dominance of women in my family had a profound influence on how I created narratives in my earlier work. They remain core influences, and through them I have developed further, reaching out past linear narrative and specific story to focus on the psychology of internal and external experience.

When I began my MF A it was the first time in two years I was 'getting intensive feedback on my work. What …