Art Practice Commons^™

Ghost Water Exhibition, Michael G. Sharp

Theses and Dissertations

The Ghost Water exhibition of artworks by Michael Sharp was comprised of four main works titled: 30 x 60 Minute Grid Series, Suspension, History/Prehistory, and Lake Bonneville Remnants. The artwork was created as a reaction to the land that once held the prehistoric Lake Bonneville and to its current remnant Great Salt Lake. The work explores the dialogue between absence and presence.

A Case Study Of The Springville Museum Of Art Pre-Exhibition Workshop, Tammara L. Ballard

Theses and Dissertations

The author designs a traveling professional development opportunity, Pre-Exhibition Workshop, for the Springville Museum of Art (SMA) Educational Outreach Program. All Utah high school art teachers and their students are invited to attend one of twenty-five presentations throughout the state's school districts. This thesis examines the challenges and benefits of including students in the process of preparing their own entries for the 2014 42^nd Annual Utah All-State High School Art Show. The curriculum for the workshop follows a new lesson plan model of including enduring understandings and essential questions as outlined by the 2014 National Core Art Standards. …

Cozy Mart: Convenient Aesthetics, Eric John Edvalson

Theses and Dissertations

Convenience stores in their various forms are not only commercial outlets of foodstuffs and sundry items but are also experiential in nature; the act of going to a convenience store is a culturally shared experience. In homage to these spaces, Cozy Mart is a public art installation and performance which recreates this shared experience in an idealized form. Based on do-it-yourself culture, appropriation of public space, and artistic traditions of sculpture and printmaking, Cozy Mart invites interaction with art outside of the traditional gallery space and capitalizes on alternative methods of art distribution.

I Like America: Painting In The Expanded Field, Isaac Aden

Theses and Dissertations

Using Structuralist theory, Krauss created a Klein group diagram. the diagram included site sculpture, construction, marked sites, and axiomatic structures.Could the same strategy be applied to painting? As I attempted to engage painting from a critical perspective, I formed of a body of work entitled Painting in the Expanded Field.

The Untitled Black Burlesque History Project, Sekiya Dorsett

Theses and Dissertations

The Untitled Black Burlesque History Project is a character driven short documentary featuring Chicava Honeychild, a neo-burlesque1 dancer who is unearthing a hidden Black burlesque history. As Chicava searches for her “stripper grandmas,” she mentors a new generation of burlesque performers who are of women of color. Chicava Honeychild first meeting with Black burlesque Jean Idelle is interwoven with the burlesque journey of Henrietta, Chicava Honeychild’s burlesque student. As Henrietta is honing her burlesque craft in preparation for her first performance, we learn about Jean’s dynamic life as a burlesque dancer in the 1940s and 1950s. Utilizing burlesque as a …

Restoration, Shannon M. Slaight-Brown

Theses and Dissertations

The marks I make in clay have different characteristics, and the physical mark of one’s fingertips or visual record of the hand is personal and intimate. This visible activity is the evidence of my constant presence and control within each object. Its repetitive meditation produces a private relief from my persistent anxieties. This exploration for me is not only visual, but also physical. This is the start of my infatuation with the idea of pattern. It has its own discrete visual language and modes of communication; and through my research I am developing a method of intercommunication.

Understanding The Expressive Cartoon Drawings Of A Student With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Michael S. Collins

Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the highly expressive comic drawings of Amy, a child with autism. This study connects larger fields of research: the study of how people with autism spectrum disorder [ASD] process faces and emotions; and, research about artists with ASD. Amy's understanding of emotion was analyzed by asking her to view and identify humans and cartoon characters expressing different emotions. Her ability to illustrate emotion is tested by asking her to respond to various drawing prompts. The study concluded that Amy has difficulty identifying the emotions of humans and cartoons, but she does have the ability to illustrate …

Plantiod Planet, Roxana Hojat

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines my studio practice and research during my studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Photo & Film MFA program, which has culminated into my thesis exhibition. Through traditional portraiture and landscape photography that utilize contemporary photographic practices such as digital processing and material studies, my work in Plantiod Planet creates a fiction which examines plant intelligence and the gendering of landscape.

Skinface, Islam Shehab

Theses and Dissertations

Throughout history, skin manipulation was primarily practiced for cultural, tribal, or religious purposes. In the contemporary landscape, skin manipulation has been objectified and commercialized. This is exemplified through bio-upholstery, foreign materials under our skin and changing the skin structure.

This thesis investigates skin manipulation, with the intent to focus experimentation on the skin’s lines of cleavage, a topographical map drawn on our skin and used to define the direction where skin has the most and least flexibility. The aim is to connect and explore materials that can be used as a second skin, while at the same time examining and …

Sub For More, Chelsea Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This written thesis unpacks the thoughts and motivations behind the decisions I have made in my artistic practice that have ultimately culminated in my M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition: Sub for More. By merging images of my own work as well as internet sourced images of the culture that drives my work, I have created a platform to begin to understand my experience during graduate school. This text examines and explores my belief in the inherent power in pop culture, my obsession with fame, celebrity, and my self-identity as a participant in current pop-culture.

Interface: Fringe Landscapes And Identity, Elizabeth T. Lewin

Theses and Dissertations

An MFA thesis that weaves together: virtual landscapes, escapism, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, utopia, family, and identity.

Fear And Nostalgia In Immigration, Daniel A. Matthews

Theses and Dissertations

Fear and Nostalgia in Immigration is a project that uses re-occuring memory and experiential memory to help us understand our common histories. The projects asks individuals to first share a re-occuring memory by writing it on a chalkboard. The next step is to then write an experiential memory about immigration, this can be a story you might have heard or it could be something from your own family history. These two tasks are done on a communal table where several individuals are engage in the same task at the same time. This aim of this exercise is to have something …

Deaccessioning The Studio, Ayla Rexroth

Theses and Dissertations

I have created several micro-businesses that provide tools and facilitate experiences to help people meet their potential. The form of the businesses has ranged from a street based art gallery inside the drawers of a modern dresser to a business that sews more and bigger pockets into women’s outerwear.

Private Conversation, Gahee Park

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis paper "Private Conversation" discusses the themes, contexts, and influences relevant to paintings and drawings I made during my MFA studies.

Art Beyond The Object? Art Beyond Grad School? (A Kickstarter Fundraiser): Help Me Complete My Mfa And Kickstart My Life As An Artist., Hsini D. Leary

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this paper and Kickstarter project is to enable the production of my last semester’s work and thesis exhibition, and also to aid in the post-graduation transition to a sustainable art practice that does not rely on the current gallery structure.

The New York With Instance, Or Abject In The Personal Environment, Liam Kirby

Theses and Dissertations

This paper was produced by an artificial neural network. An algorithm iteratively taught itself how to write by studying the text of thesis papers from the Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 MFA semesters. After hundreds of generations of self-education, the program can produce endless thesis papers, writing letter-by-letter. The images were created through an identical process, using 8000 installation photographs from the website Contemporary Art Daily as a dataset.

Creativity & Religion: A Self-Study Of Mormon Mindset In The Art Classroom, Shon Scot Feller

Theses and Dissertations

A high school art teacher investigates the relationship of his religious beliefs with his notions of what it means to be creative. This Mormon teacher examines his religious and experiential life through self-study, by drawing from autoethnographic and hermeneutic phenomenological strategies. He believes that everyone, including himself and his students, has a creative potential. He also analyzes how his Mormon religion affects his view of creativity and how creativity has affected his behavior as a Mormon. The conclusions he reaches uncover the need for balance between his creative self and his Mormon self and outlines several ways to merge these …

Searching For The Sublime, Kheng Saik Lim

Theses and Dissertations

The influential philosophers Edmund Burke and Emmanuel Kant understand the sublime as events and objects that cause an emotional reaction so magnificent that the intellect fails to comprehend it. It is thus deeply felt and experienced but remains undefined and non-understood. Searching for the Sublime is a suite of paintings that seek to respond to these definitions of the sublime. Together they address and evoke themes of mystery, fear, power, and the unknowable through the medium of painting.

An Aesthetic Theory Of Gamesmanship, Derek A. Fordjour

Theses and Dissertations

An Aesthetic Theory of Gamesmanship is an in-depth analysis of the personal, sociological, and historical elements contained within the art of Derek Fordjour with considerations given to artistic and literary influences that inform his intention and goals in the work. Also included are illustrations of specific art works and descriptions.

Discovering Self Together: An Art Teacher Exploring Her Role In Helping Adolescent Students On Their Journey To Self-Awareness, Rachel Jayne Romney

Theses and Dissertations

A case study of a junior high and high school art classroom that examines students' development of identity and self-awareness through reflective practice in a caring community. This project considers what the role of teaching is and how working through vulnerability to create caring relationships can inspire teachers and aid adolescent students, within an art curriculum, to discover their true selves.

Symbiosis Now, Priscilla Fusco

Theses and Dissertations

As we narrow the world’s parameters with our activities, we crowd other organisms that support us. Scientists and philosophers including Charles Sanders Peirce, Lynn Margulis, Thomas Khun and Dave Goulson articulate the role of the biomass, an intelligence that offers fertile dialogue for sculptors.

Bodies In Repose, Christopher Aque

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines my artistic practice and its intersection with histories of homosexual desire and exclusion, contemporary surveillance, political complicity, and the legacies of Minimalism. As the cultural landscape has shifted post-AIDS, so too have the strategies to police, regulate, and control bodies.

Departing From Photography. Place, Space, Non-Place, And The Quotidian: Painting From Pictures Of The Everyday, Mathew A. Tucker

Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates the relationship between photography and painting. It explores the way in which Mathew Tucker's paintings have been informed by his photographs of everyday places and the ways that they depart from those images and express new and different meanings.

Digital Photography As Experience Artifact, Ryan V. Brennan

Theses and Dissertations

Through the screen interface, the boundary between personal and collective experience is being redefined both spatially and temporally. Here, memories are given independent mediated existence, taking form in digital photographic artifacts that can be communally shared and manipulated into a synthetic continuum.

On Negotiating Between The Virtual And Material In Art Historical Reproduction, Zorawar S. Sidhu

Theses and Dissertations

A discussion of the role of art historical reproduction in the works of Nicholas Poussin and the theories of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, in relation to artworks by Zorawar Sidhu.

Navel Gazing, Andrew J. Macasil

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to present work that disrupts the heteronormative binary that has dominated the representation of the human form in painting. The navel is employed as a bodily metaphor to address the universality of unique bodily experiences, which are tied to one’s identity.

A Performative Script: Play With(In) Me, Erik Patton

Theses and Dissertations

Patton continues his interest in the body, its relation to material, the notion of abstraction (specifically related to queerness), and the phenomenological with this performative script. Enter the bath first; you must wash your dirty asshole, as you shat only two hours ago. Collect your body in the Silver Pond.

Moving From The Gray Area : What Is (My) Art [{At Hunter} Right Now]?, Rachel Schragis

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis at Hunter College is a culmination of three years of investigation of the potential to create an artistic practice in service of popular organizing in NYC. In my thesis paper, I trace the history, and challenges of this work during my time in the Hunter MFA program. I lay out goals and core questions of my thesis exhibition in relationship to both my political life and my studio practice.

David Alfaro Siqueiros’S Pivotal Endeavor: Realizing The “Manifiesto De New York” In The Siqueiros Experimental Workshop Of 1936, Emily Schlemowitz

Theses and Dissertations

The Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, initiated by David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) in 1936, is often considered a pivotal moment for the artist. This thesis unveils new documentation about the Workshop, illuminating heretofore-unobserved aspects of the group’s governance, political aims, and theoretical framework put forth by Siqueiros in his critical “Manifiesto de New York.”

Paradise Lost, Peggy Janeane Hughes

Theses and Dissertations

The worldwide gap between rich and poor is widening. Status seeking and status keeping are fueled by the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods. These bright shiny objects are staples in a restricted economy in which only the wealthy participate. The notion of gaining riches for the purpose of helping the poor is fading. Materialism, luxury and riches have been the subject of religious and secular inquiry. In this quest, wealth has been condemned and applauded. Prestige-obsessed consumers are becoming blind to worsening social conditions.