Art Practice Commons^™

Tutti Frutti, Damaris G. Rivera

CGU MFA Theses

Mark making is equivalent with making a place one's own. Demarcation of a site is not solely a negative act. The negation of a space is pre-transcribed, presupposed. The point is to take the negative and invert it. It’s not a one-way street. In order to change the building you have to move through the building and let the building move through you. Once the building lives in the occupant the experience of the building can be altered. Total absorption of architecture and its environment can provide a means to live in a unified expressive way. It’s about the person. …

A.F.M., Adam P. Mason

CGU MFA Theses

Sculpture happens.

The Threes, Clifford Eberly

CGU MFA Theses

In the physical world I explore and gather regenerative clues that vivify the installations I build. The harshness and unforgiving power of nature’s nature, combined with the infinity of the cosmos, inspires me to cobble together sculptures that defy absorption into a finite, descriptive category. Like our beings change from second to second, I work diachronically, chugging along, shifting the purposes of supplies until they manifest like organisms that pulled themselves together from shiny and dirty matter or arrived from an extraterrestrial playground. By reusing and layering a complex blend of materials, I blur the ambiguous origins of the objects …

G-Plex Psi, Jacques Louis David

CGU MFA Theses

Monumental metal sculpture that incidentally creates sound. Heaviness and lightness displayed via large, heavy, metal sculptures of abstract geometric forms suspended from the ceiling by seemingly fragile wires that not only appear to defy gravity but provide tonal expression when plucked, hammered, or bowed. Further conversation associated with the micro to the macro is easily revealed when the sounds and shapes are compared to the vibration of life identified with imagined subatomic movement.

Travis Novak, Travis Novak

CGU MFA Theses

Flawed memory is a tool that allows an altered reality to exist in the disconnect between a past reality and a present fiction. My work starts with scenarios that evolve into things bigger than themselves, going beyond nostalgia to become celebrations, landmarks, or memorials. Exaggeration, embellishment, adornment, stylization, modification, and customization are methods I use to move through these scenarios and often arrive at a transformative shift...

This preservation process begins the moment a thing dies. Its optimum resides in the past allowing the function of the memory to operate as a preserver. This is the human longing for greater …

Perry B Marks • Artist Statement, Perry B. Marks

CGU MFA Theses

My work cuts through the distractions and travesties of modern American life, revealing the nonsense that multinational corporations spew. Consumption as a way of life is now a familiar part of the global culture. Political and corporate icons have made their way into individual identity by means of branding, product placement and crossover promotion. They are ubiquitous, embedded in myriad experiences to attract, entertain and satisfy artificially stimulated appetites. Similar to placating drugs, they function like the bread and circuses of the Roman Empire.

My process breaks down elements and symbols from the past and present, remixing old and new …

Go Big Or Go Home, Concepcion M. Sanford

CGU MFA Theses

My work embodies my response to the American Dream. Big houses, flashy cars and glamorous lifestyles are what many of us work for. Coming from a military family, I grew up moving often without an idealized connection to a single structure. In response to this, I use artwork to create translucent, ephemeral sculptures of these items, revealing them as tangible, hollow shells of their former selves. Clear plastic and packing tape sculptures leave a ghostlike reflection of what was. These shells of inanimate objects are personified through their creation, a process similar to what I compare to mummification or embalming. …

Mihyang Kim - Mfa Thesis Show, Mihyang Kim

CGU MFA Theses

My works are a sort of journal, which is truly personal but at the same time belongs to the public. All of my experiences are connected to the outside world and each piece is connected to a story. I paint abstract emblems that stem from my interactions with people expecting their deaths, living as immigrants, or being disconnected from their pasts. My work represents my sympathy and compassion for the pain they have. I record my emotional and experiential individuality, based on the situations in which I have found myself. The precarious state of nature and the human environment are …

Flotsam & Jetsam, Nicolas S. Shake

CGU MFA Theses

My work is pastoral and post-apocalyptic with one foot firmly planted in historical painting and the other in traditional still-life, so it is entropic and sanguine, gleeful, despondent, and matter of fact. It comes at a point in time when the fiction of Nature as a refuge is no longer viable, persuasive or convincing. But rather than rehash this fact, my work celebrates the pastoral’s everyday ordinariness, the capacity for the viewer to experience something wondrous amidst decline. I focus on the cast-off household and utilitarian items that show up in the desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The …

Potential Space, Jocelyn R. Grau

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Dislocation, Kevin E. Moore

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Tangled Up In Blue, Bryan E. Miller

CGU MFA Theses

No abstract provided.

Between, Summer Janelle

CGU MFA Theses

My art evolves out of deep attentiveness to idiosyncratic aspects of mundane experience. These aspects of experience are manifested through body language, gestures, facial expressions, and the peripheral hunch. They arise from the awkward and pleasurable peculiarities of interacting with humanity on a daily basis. My work also touches upon fantasies and private thoughts that can determine behavior when individuals interact.Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

Yarell Castellanos, Artist Statement, Yarell Castellanos

CGU MFA Theses

My work explores the beautiful aspects of the grotesque elements in nature. My goal is to make conflicted and contradictory pieces in which abstraction and representation interact. I find that contradictions and extreme behaviors in nature to be stimulating.

The City With Rolling Hills, Andrew Ballstaedt

CGU MFA Theses

I use painting as a form of ritual and meditation where I often spend lots of time painting and repeating simple marks over and over again. On occasion, I am able to make quick paintings that are successful but most of the time I am compelled to spend repetitive hours making marks in order to reach my state of personal mediation through the ritual of painting. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

Élan Vital, Sharon Mealey

CGU MFA Theses

My art explores the inner qualities of life, focusing on adaptability and resiliency. I am interested in the mysterious vital force philosophers call élan vital that animates human beings. I investigate the transitory nature of life where it intersects with élan vital. My paintings accommodate the ephemeral and the perpetual. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.