Art Practice Commons^™

Embedded In These Walls, Trish J. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

Embedded In These Walls uses photographic imagery, archival ephemera, and written text to examine a specific history of generational trauma through the lens of a singular family of a southern tradition to point to a larger systemic breakdown of accountability and truthfulness regarding abuse

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

Ultrasound—Re:Viewing Bodies, Minjee Jeon

Theses and Dissertations

A medical evaluation of physical impairment imposes the additional burden of “labeling” the patient with the condition. The binary nature of the normal versus abnormal label emphasizes difference and can lead to trauma. Understanding differences, however, can lead to the generation of new forms and thus, more sensitive differentiation and representation. Tension is created by exploring different bodily forms—a dialectic between form and essence. I am designing a space that visualizes and illuminates difference as a source of trauma and amplifying the tension by comparing figures that represent varying degrees of normalcy. This forms a critique of idealized form and …

Quotations Like The Sharpest Claws, Johanna Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

Quotations like the Sharpest Claws describes a multimedia installation composed of paintings and sound that explores the theory of cognitive dissonance, a controversial psychological model that attempts to explain how we deal with inconsistency in incompatible beliefs. Imagination is given primacy as a source for truth-seeking and world-building. The uncanny and surreal are used as entry points into this topic.

The title is derived from a description of Eileen Myles’ poetry I once read in an anonymous review. Their writing was described as beyond poetry in a way that it could only be described as such when surrounded by “quotations …

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

Enact In Disappearance, Stephanie Demer

Theses and Dissertations

Enact in Disappearance excavates the unseen through the medium of photography in order to chart a new strategy for knowing and communing with a complicated world.

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Untitled, Daliya Jokondo

Theses and Dissertations

My practice is concerned with the activation of fragmentation, concealment and evasiveness as practical tools for surviving (the danger of visibility when positioned in the margins) while moving or engaging with oppressive power structures. The aforementioned appear in my practice as complete forms of erasure, adornment and costuming, in addition to language play. My thesis’ concern is the desire to speak the autobiographical in relation to generational trauma. Herein lives the voices of three generations of survivors.

Path, Evan Galbicka

Theses and Dissertations

Path is a collaborative system that developed over the course of five months of studio activity and continued through the duration of the exhibition. The system’s main collaborators were a land snail native to eastern North America (Neohelix albolabris), myself, and a digital cellular automaton. These prime agents interwove processes and exchanges between one another into a complex network of folded fractal feedback loops. Cyclic processes produced artifacts and infrastructures to support communication between the components and agents of Path. As a whole, Path spoke to the possibilities for interspecies, cyber-physical, and ecological collaboration to create an …

Ordinary Disorder, Jonathan S. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

The pictorial spaces in my paintings are found through many drawings, based on memories. In these drawings I use the architectural technique of paraline drawing, in pointed contrast to one or two point perspective. With a fixed point of view unavailable, the viewer or reader becomes the writer too. This is what I intend. The paraline method also engages specific corners of art history to which I relate, including woodblock prints of Japanese interiors, Chinese brush painting landscapes with houses, and the shifting, rotating perspectives found in Baroque painting. My intensely personal memories/drawings are transfused into highly material finished paintings. …

Invisible Invisibility, Eugina Song

Theses and Dissertations

White America assumes its culture is the default, and Asian culture as foreign and irrelevant. I address Asian invisibility by using canvas structure as a Western framing device of painting, and make this cultural barrier visible by breaking out of the frame. Deriving from Dansaekhwa, I challenge the Western painting structure with materiality.

Maybe That's What It Means, Anael Berkovitz

Theses and Dissertations

Anael Berkovitz explores personal and collective memory through the use of storytelling and interpretation. Focusing on how identity is shaped by stories, her three part video details the nomadic nature of her own family, the obfuscation of language in translation and the incorporation of an invasive species into a culture.

A Chair In The Woods, Victoria Dolloff

Theses and Dissertations

Victoria Dolloff's MFA Thesis considers traces of play and perception in the development of her artwork, exploring the idea of reorientation through subtleties of the absurd. Her installation Untitled (Landscape) questions object as place and place as memory utilizing fragmentation as reconstruction.

Pockets Of Proximity, Christian Breed

Theses and Dissertations

My current paintings begin with images of people from the back, wearing hijabs, turbans, saris, kufis, or rasta gauzy shawls. I do not paint my subjects frontally, because I do not have access to them personally or culturally, and because it is their cultural indicators that fascinate me.

Healthy People Are Bad For Capitalism, Eri King

Theses and Dissertations

Healthy People are Bad For Capitalism is a four part installation that creates an alternative space for the chemicals, Red 40 and Monosodium Glutamate. Presented as a holistic center that offers healing services and remedies, Center for the Red 40 and MSG Healing explores the homeopathic doctrine of Like Cures Like (what make a human ill also cures them) through the relationship between Traditional Japanese Healing Practices, and Western Capitalism.

Healthy People are Bad For Capitalism presents Red 40 MSG Apothecary, Red 40 Zen MSG Healing Rock Garden, Theta Wave Eternal Flame Meditation and Red 40 MSG …

Music From The Harpsichord House, Julie Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

Music from the Harpsichord House is an installation and series of concerts that exists in the binary of in and out of performance. During a concert, the harpsichordist is hidden inside the house and his face is live-projected outside. Fifteen new musical compositions were commissioned for the harpsichord house.

"Nothing Is Wrong With You", Carlos Rigau

Theses and Dissertations

Just as one object can give rise to multiple percepts, so an object may fail to give rise to any percept at all: if the percept has no grounding in a person's experience, the person may literally not perceive it.”

Perception literally guides human understanding as to what reality and truth is. My work intends to ruffle up commonly understood western percepts and their normality. I consistently choose media comprised of static images, moving images and sculpture. These forms are used to convey a singular and independent meaning, as well as a larger collective expression.

Everything I Thought I Was Supposed To Do, Jeff Conefry

Theses and Dissertations

It is within the liminal space between traditional mediums that my creative practice deconstructs the materiality of painting to subvert historical expectations. The irony associated with this deconstruction, excavates one medium to generate the building blocks for something inimitable. These blocks are most easily re-categorized into Words, Limits, and Power. It is these three themes that are the foundation of my thesis exhibition.

The Status Is Not Quo: Unraveling Music Videos, Gary T. Hanby

Theses and Dissertations

The Utah State Standards for media arts are general and therefore give teachers a great deal of freedom in how they present the content for media arts courses. How the teacher engages students and project assignments are left to the teacher as they walk the students through the process of making films. This thesis explores how an art teacher might use music videos to teach filmmaking techniques and engage students in the process of meaning making. My research hypothesis is that, by educating students to understand and interpret the messages they consume through media, I can help them recognize the …

You Can Teach Design: A Survival Guide For Studio Art Professors, Katharine Anne Grierson-Merryweather

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis defines both design and the role of a designer, and includes an exploration of the differences between art and design. Additional topics covered are the history of design education, the principles of design, and the expectations for design education held by students and the design industry itself. From my own research and experiences as a professional designer and design instructor, I have outlined a curriculum on how to produce students who can create good designs, as well as know how to act as professional designers.

The King’S Daughter, Reout Essiminy Feldman

Theses and Dissertations

The King’s Daughter is a spatial video installation that depicts an oversized projection of a woman’s head. Her eyes are closed, and there are necklaces with words coming out of them. The necklaces disappear into the black surface. The King’s Daughter happens in a black room, where the viewer can only view the installation through a window.

Tipping Point, Pang Z. Vang

Theses and Dissertations

What happens to a woman at the tipping point under oppression in a patriarchal society? How does she behave? Pulling from the vagina dentata mythologies, and personal and collective experiences of rape culture, I formed a body of work which problematize the stereotypical narrative of victim/perpetrator. As a visual and conceptual exploration, my work explores the themes of desire, agency/non-agency, and violence [as it manifests within and outside of the body]. Utilizing visual and conceptual quotations from film, pornography and sex toys, these works subvert the exoticized stereotype of the Asian woman as sexual plaything.

Invisible Forces, Sarah E. Mullin

Theses and Dissertations

I seek abstract forms evocative of the underlying structures in nature. I paint sensations of vibrating light, deep space, and vast scale in an imagined image. These paintings combine an inner abstract dimension with landscape imagery to communicate to the viewer that we are a part of what we sense in nature.

Tuff Breeches, Arkadiy Ryabin

Theses and Dissertations

In consideration of language and it’s relationship to information and knowledge, the author explores personal set of events in relationship to that of the public, via forms of orality. 19th century American literature is posited as a hangover influencing contemporary events.

Welcome To My Dream – Quasi Queer Fiction, Christian A. Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Roseate and bodacious, the hand formed surfaces of Christian Rogers' paintings explore gay culture and history though a quasi-fictional lens. While utilizing folk like imagery, Christian depicts dramatic moments of love, lust, sex and violence as he takes us to queer realms.

No-Self, Impermanence And The Search For Freedom, Ahna Serendren

Theses and Dissertations

Ahna Serendren’s MFA thesis draws upon the Buddhist principles of anatta (no-self), anicca (impermanence), and nibbana (liberation), using them as a framework through which to explore her own artwork and the work of other historical and contemporary artists.

Absence Is Presence With Distance, James Bayard

Theses and Dissertations

Prompting obvious considerations for freedom and nationalism, language and race, time, and decay, the work asks not only what it means to be an American today, but also, more broadly, what it means to be human—to breathe and act, to live and die.

Summer Light, Sara Dolatabadi

Theses and Dissertations

"Summer Light" is a film about family dynamics. Using light as a defining factor, it looks at the relationship between the director’s parents and her daughter. It is the her response to a desire to record and safeguard intimate moments of an ordinary day before they disappear.

Nature, Essence And Spirit: An Artistic Process Of Space, Lines And Color From The Level Of Cells To The Large Oceanic Water World, Odra O. Arriaga

Theses and Dissertations

The methods, experimentations, philosophies and influential artists mentioned in this thesis all form part of my artistic exploration and art from the level of cells to the large oceanic water world. As an artist of Fine Arts at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, my main emphasis is to associate these concepts with my personal experiences, cultural traditions and artistic perspectives with my likes for lines, colors and spaces in what I called, Nature, Essence and Spirit. Furthermore, my artistic approach was mostly influenced by the views of artists such as, Vasily Kandinsky, Frank Stella, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, …

Border Crossing: One Teacher's Journey Toward Becoming A Culturally Competent Art Educator, Lindsay Renea Ruiz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores one secondary art teacher's journey into multicultural education, multicultural art education and issues in holistic education. It delves into the difficulties and expectations in creating a classroom culture where all students feel validated and respected, and mutual understanding is fostered across cultural borders. Specific needs of multicultural students are addressed in regards to their education. Then due to an unexpected turn of events which led to a five week study abroad in India, the research looks at ways to incorporate a holistic approach, and spiritual dimension, to multicultural education based on Tibetan Buddhist principles. This narrative looks …