Art Practice Commons^™

From Here And Now: Monuments Of Today And Everyday, Adam Shaw

Theses and Dissertations

The arc of my educational narrative was drawing to a close. I was a month out from my thesis exhibition, the culmination of a three-year experience. The studio was full of an energy I had been longing to feel. I was just beginning. Then came the Pause.

An Escapist Utopia, Sara Eh Denney

Theses and Dissertations

As an active pursuit of avoiding excellence, my work acts as a space for failure, play, experimentation and imperfection. This document and final installation acts as a pause along a lifelong journey of object-making, creation, and spirituality. My work, specifically my working practice, rather than any one object or moment, is an escapist utopia for myself. My work is the process, the journey, not the ending or the completion of any one thing. The repetition, distortion, and production that I engage throughout my working practice acts as a spiritual exercise of meaning—making through creation. I fall deeply in love with …

Straight Through My Heart, Raul A. Aguilar Canela

Theses and Dissertations

Straight through my heart is an exhibition that explores the concept of heartbreak as a socio-political phenomenon. Through the affect of sadness the thesis analyses the way in which subjects are formed under cognitive capitalism. Paying particular interest to the collateral effects of neoliberal culture —hyper-stimulation, self-exploitation, competition, and obsession with productivity—and the pathologies they create —depression, anxiety, body aches, fatigue— this work shifts the burden of sadness from the individual to the community. By doing so it proposes heartbreak as a public feeling.

Enduring Covid-19 As Nyc Subway Riders, Ruben Cuevas

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis paper describes my master art project of paintings about the New York City Subway riders commuting routine prior and during the Coronavirus. As a regular subway rider myself I am closely connected with this particular art project because I witnessed the subway riders endure the most contagious viral pandemic of the 21st century. My thesis recounts how from a few sketches and photo shots of people in the subway this art project developed into a collection of paintings carefully completed on large linen canvas and acrylic medium. The initial set of my paintings narrate typical NYC subway rider …

Beyond The Social: Artist Project Spaces, 2003 To 2016., Clare L. Van Loenen

Theses and Dissertations

This research examines storefront project spaces in the early 2000s that offered alternative approaches to the programming, organizing, and archiving found in conventional museums. I propose that such sites impacted participatory visual culture by offering a reformulatory role for arts’ practices, one that organized itself across disciplinary boundaries, chose a collaborative rather than competitive approach, and processed the ideological implications of their group work. Focused on three specific sites—Machine Project in Los Angeles, Elsewhere in Greensboro, and Mess Hall in Chicago—this study details the museological, pedagogical, and archival challenges of these artist-convened organizations. My interdisciplinary investigation offers a reference point …

Earth Tone Sigh Spell, Martha Glenn

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to the artist’s thesis exhibition titled Earth Tone Sigh Spell, conceived during the years 2020-21 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from May 1–15, 2021.

The following thesis explores themes of personal memory, geo-theory, myth, symbol, and historical event. The artist uses research and stream of consciousness writing methods as a way to weave these concepts together and tie them back to her own practice with installation, sculpture, and new media.

Drowning In Our Tears, Kelley-Ann A. Lindo

Theses and Dissertations

Drowning in our Tears is a series of works – installation, print media, and sculpture that explores themes of precarity, ephemerality, collective memory, and vulnerability. The need to create and preserve an archive has been the of the driving forces behind the works. I am interested in this notion of creating new language and perspectives from past trauma and hardships. The archive presents us with a site where excavation of meaning can occur, identities preserved, and new identities formed. In my work, I try to bridge the gaps, using the fragments of memory, the past and present experiences to create …

Reanimator/Reflection: 
Creating Mirrors Through Time 
With Ai, Sound, Video And Live-Generated Art In The Dark Age Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Eric Millikin

Theses and Dissertations

For my MFA thesis exhibition entitled Reanimator/Reflection, I used artificial intelligence to create three new works of sound and live-generated video art, each based on mirror reflections and 100-year-old racist post-pandemic horror literature by early 20th century American author H. P. Lovecraft. The themes of these writings mirror the issues of our current time. The primary works of Lovecraft that I referenced in the exhibition are “Herbert West: Reanimator,” (1922) a serialized tale about graduate school experiments which attempted to return the dead to life during a plague, and “Nyarlathotep,” (1920) a prose poem that suggests even our dreams …

Shape Shifting: Bodies, Sound, And Queerness, Cordylia B. Vann

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual and sonic thesis, Performing Ourselves. The paper examines the relationship between the labor of creating a queer body in how it moves and feels to the creation of choreography, sound, and graphic scores

Heavy Hold: A Physical Score, Alexandra Velozo

Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of essays, stories, and fictional interviews that are in conversation with my performance, teaching, and sculpture practice. My research and work considers chronic illness, disability, the historic cultural connection between swamplands and illness, the medical industrial complex, medical theater, the medical gaze, disabled performers, metatactile space, sensory learning, and access.

Difficult Paintings, Hao (Damien) Ding

Theses and Dissertations

The sublime as a concept has a fraught and racist history. However, it remains the single most helpful idea in describing the deeply felt state of being when one comes across something ineffably powerful. From an art-making perspective, this thesis, and the accompanying exhibition of installations and paintings, proposes an alternative construction of the concept of the sublime. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual point of departure, a painter can manipulate the relationship of the viewer and paintings to create paradoxical moments of simultaneous intimacy and distance, which interact to create an alternative path towards the sublime. Through descriptions of …

L, M, N, O, P, Matt Jones

Theses and Dissertations

A meditation on my painting and drawing practice in relation to the work of Philip Guston, Nancy Spero, and Frank Moore, among others, just before and during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some Way In Between, Noah D. Stitt

Theses and Dissertations

Merging the subjective and objective through paintings and small objects, my work uses humor, subtlety, and suspension to create specifically ambiguous images that encourage a narrative reading.

Notes On Relations, Anna Kristina Schmidt

Theses and Dissertations

In 2018, I made the first two out of one hundred paintings, all showing myself in an interior space. The impulse for the paintings was to propose a visual situation, and to observe how it would feel to see myself in it, like making an inventory as the first step of finding a new way. The figures (self-portraits) are simplified to an almost cartoonish nature, the emblematized emotions range from neutral to curious to annoyed; all find their origins in the chart of emoticons on my iPhone.

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

Bitter Fruit, Ronald J. Green

Theses and Dissertations

Pain is a phenomenon like fear, belief, and love -- among the forces that determine the course of our lives long before we are born. These conditions generate the layers of the human soul, marrying one life with others past, present and future.

There is an unconscious consensus on the linearity of time. Our lives, memories, dreams and reflections constantly present a challenge to this general agreement. Life, like time, is a series of interlocking awarenesses. Paths intersect, the actions of individuals deposit change into an internal pool of collective experience. Freud once believed that the past is not fixed …

Not Much ∆, Patrick C. Mohundro

Theses and Dissertations

In the paper, Patrick Carlin Mohundro processes his relationship to the loss of his father, painting, and mythologies filtered through his mother and female-identifying conceptualist, artists, and theorists.

Feminism And The Staged Uncanny, Jessica C. Mensch

Theses and Dissertations

In my Thesis, I work towards a new definition of the uncanny and show the transformation of its sense in the modern period. I will then show how this transformed sense appears in the media of mechanical reproduction—stage theatrics, photography and film—and, then, specifically in my art practice.

Promiscuous Waves, Xuan Zheng

Theses and Dissertations

For the project, I invited friends, lovers, and mentors to share their experiences and memories of cruising in public spaces. Growing up in China, I never had the chance to publicly discuss my concerns with my sexuality, and the sense of liberation in the West had always served as a source of hope. Only after I came to the United States, did I realize that the liberation was nothing more than an illusion. I made two road trips across America to take photographs and embrace a sense of freedom, but on the trips, I ended up having sex with many …

An Open Bag, Matilde Benmayor

Theses and Dissertations

What do we take with us? How much space should we leave in the bag for what we might find? This paper is a journey from under the rug and onto the pavement. Sowing spiderweb maps I try to make a new city my own.

The Potency Of Emptiness, Kennedy L. Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

I investigate language and neurology by integrating intangible personal experiences with painted manifestations of rupture within structures. I utilize a hyperbolic translation of white and black to investigate the dismantling of a structure as an explicit quotation of space, matter, existence, and mind.

...A Placebo, An Embryo, A Mosquito, My Libido, Andy Ralph

Theses and Dissertations

This blood-sucking song and dance is a trivial example of an absurd imbalance. In my universe, though, trivial and momentous are equally unranked qualities.

Industrial Strength Charmer, Hannah Beerman

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings and me fight and wrestle. We leave room for the absurd and the comic.

Sometimes we make out.

Fear Not The Harsh Winter, Emily D. Janowick

Theses and Dissertations

With rhythmic contraction and relaxation, blood vessels propel our life force through miles of mazes to the heart. This (peristaltic) rhythm moves us in waves. We mirror our insides outside, vessels carrying what matters, instinctively drawn to carry the patterns of those who came before us.

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo, Luis A. Vasquez La Roche

Theses and Dissertations

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo is a series of works--sculpture, installations, and performances--that explore themes of shame, failure, commodity, ephemerality, ritual, resilience, erasure, race, and death. The research and interest in these themes stem from a page of the Trinidad and Tobago Slave Registry. I use the research that surrounds this document to highlight different moments in history, in my personal life, and to imagine near futures.

Paul By Paul By Paul, Paul Finch

Theses and Dissertations

In 2020 flamboyant fashion is associated with queer performativity. Psychologist Alan Downs and queer theorist madison moore understand this to be a response to a culture that is hostile to sexual behaviour and gender expression that falls outside a rigid binary. I study the history of flamboyant aesthetics and camp sensibilities from an intersectional perspective, and locate designers and artists who have produced clothes in ways that materialize the political implications of fashion. As a studio-based artist, I employ traditional sewing techniques, digital technologies, and performance to create clothes and new media works that demonstrate a circular understanding of time, …

Moving Parts, Andrew Lowrie

Theses and Dissertations

Material bodies, human and non-human, exist in a constant state of doing and undoing. As bodies change over time, so too do the objects they wear. In this way, a jewelry object is never finished and is constantly being made. In contemporary art practice, this is described as relational ontology by Amelia Jones, who reaches this terminology through the eco-political writings of Jane Bennett and Karen Barad. Through this framework we are able to understand the way artists like Gabriel Orozco and Helen Carnac resist the notion of a finished object or artwork. By engaging with the ways that process …

...And Yet The Devil Exists, John Hee Taek Chae

Theses and Dissertations

...And Yet the Devil Exists is a project that explores the ways in which ideology determines reality. It is an installation that plots and connects the historical and personal narratives that have defined my sense of identity–narratives in which perceptions of reality shatter, mutate, or hybridize when confronted with power, opportunity, or coercion. The installation component of the project consists of three parts. The first is an infrastructure made of wooden beams upon which paintings and images are installed; I call this the lantern. In the center of this is a round table on top of which is a nonsensical …

The Power Of Artistic Activism, Julio Hanson

Theses and Dissertations

This phenomenological study highlights the ability of artistic activists to utilize art for political, creative, and social change. Artistic activism is a tool that can be used to mobilize people from different backgrounds to achieve a goal or challenge injustices (Mouffe, 2007). The best practices of artistic activists can be shared with others to positively transform society and address sensitive issues. Increased access to the internet and social media has facilitated the proliferation of art, politics, and culture which has caused a greater influence on people on local, national, and worldwide levels. This influence can have profound effects on the …

Chupa Chuparosas Y Chupacabras, Ruben U. Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

A Rascuache Nahual that uses therianthropy on the border between the US and Mexico border.