Art Practice Commons^™

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In A Document that Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction and Reality, I first present a historical analysis of photography that complicates traditional assumptions of how photographs operate in the world. Rather than functioning as merely an objective record, the photograph takes on a dual status as both a document and an abstraction from reality. The photograph’s ability to selectively decontextualize the origins from which it came from and present itself as something other than what it simply records becomes the core of my artistic practice. This paper will also discuss my conceptual investigations into how we perceive photographs when they …

Paradise Entertainment's Feature Of The Week: Splint, Brittney Callahan

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Watching television has been part of my daily ritual since childhood. Every time it was turned on, I was able to enter into new worlds that were exotic compared to my house. Each story on the screen filled me with hope, inspired me with passion, and took me to a place where everything, no matter how terrible, seemed to have a purpose, an arc, and an end. These visual narratives birthed the idea of an equational life, one that seemed simple and mathematical. After I realized that life couldn’t be firmly calculated, I decided to invent my own alternative realities …

Retour À L’Authenticité In The City: A Photo Essay, Ruth Sacks Dr

Artl@s Bulletin

These photographs were taken as part of a larger research project tracing Mobutu Sese Seko’s construction projects in Kinshasa in the late 1960s and 1970s. The sites were part of a drive initially taking place under Mobutu’s cultural policy of retour à l’authenticité, instigated in 1967 as a means of taking recourse in pre-colonial Congolese traditions. This gave rise to a wide variety of architectural styles, adorned by artworks largely commissioned from a group called the avant-gardists. The selection of photos seen here presents glimpses of some of the sites and their artworks.

Kleptomaniac, Leslie Frank

CGU MFA Theses

I am a Kleptomaniac of public and private moments. Using my iPhone, I steal images of people and objects in public environments and frame these moments with the addition of my own poetic essence. I feel that Los Angeles is a unique city built on imagination, expectations and disappointments. Another aspect that is satisfying to me is the validation that I feel when I am at the right place at the right time. We don't always get to feel this in everyday life. Whether the experience is similar or foreign, the empathy is significant.

A Woman's Power & Place Vs. A Man's Power & Place, Christine Stoddard

The Crambo

Digital writing and photography.

Among The Ruins, Edie Steiner

The Goose

Photographic essay, a version of which was first presented at the 2011 Green Words/Green Worlds Conference, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto. Images previously presented in the exhibition Abject Transformations at Arcadia Art Gallery, Toronto.

(Disambiguation), Amy Johnson

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

disambiguation, means to make something clear. I want to make a few things clear. I also want to give a few things the ambiguity they deserve.

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.

All Glory Is Fleeting, Steven Beswick

CGU MFA Theses

The statement is specifically linked to my MFA thesis exhibition.

The Process That Eats Itself, Brent Houzenga

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Chance and the found object set the stage for artworks that illustrate the clash between the everyman, popular culture and high art. The investigation of my process, surroundings and interests leads to an infinite amount of possibilities in a process that is beginning to eat itself.

Everything, Everything Seemed Once-Upon-A-Time, Denisse Leung Liu

CGU MFA Theses

The pleasant feeling of being relaxed is what I want the viewer to feel with my work. The art I make is the source of peacefulness and tranquility I treasure, in a way that there is tranquility and absence of noise, yet it whispers quietly to the viewer.

Everything, Everything Seemed Once-Upon-A-Time, Denisse Leung Liu

CGU MFA Theses

The pleasant feeling of being relaxed is what I want the viewer to feel with my work. The art I make is the source of peacefulness and tranquility I treasure, in a way that there is tranquility and absence of noise, yet it whispers quietly to the viewer.

Jon Yamashiro Interview, Ciera Stokes

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Jon Masuo Yamashiro was born the oldest son and raised as a third-generation Okinawan American in the “cultural pastiche” of Honolulu, HI. He traveled from the islands to study at Washington University in St. Louis and received his BFA in 1985, then went on to earn an MFA in photography from Indiana University in 1991. Since the fall of 1993, he has had the privilege of teaching photography to college students at Miami University. Jon lives in Liberty, Indiana, with his wife Jennifer and their daughter Lydia and son Luke. http://yamashirophoto.com/

Renluka Maharaj Interview, Steven Zych

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Renluka Maharaj grew up in the country of Trinidad and Tobago and moved to New York as a child where spent most of her life. Her Eastern and Western background wrapped with modern sensibilities is evident in her bodies of work. Her interests are centered on gender roles, sexuality, colonialism, mythology, iconography and fetishism. Some of the artists that have influenced her work are Yinka Shonibare and Yasumasa Morimura.

Ms. Maharaj completed her BFA at the University of Colorado Boulder and is currently completing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the …

Jun-Jun Sta.Ana Interview, Jackson Hughlett

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Jun-Jun Sta.Ana is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist born on September 19, 1963 to Remigio Benavidez Sta.Ana and Emma Cecilio Catral in Manila, Philippines. He moved to the United States at the age of 24, shortly after finishing a degree in Dentistry. He started his art career late just before he was turning 40- having a solo show of digital works using appropriated images from free porn sites which he deconstructed and embellished with images and symbols culled from Filipino talismans. His practice has become multi-disciplinary, and while still utilizing found images and materials, he also employs the technique of …

Kevin J. Miyazaki Interview, Anthony Santoro

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Kevin J. Miyazaki is an artist and photographer born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Japanese American parents originally from Hawai‘i and Washington state. His artwork often focuses on issues of ethnicity, family history and memory. The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is of particular interest to Miyazaki, whose father spent time at both Tule Lake and Heart Mountain camps. His work has been exhibited in a variety of locations, including The Center for Photography at Woodstock (New York), The Haggerty Museum of Art (Milwaukee) The Rayko Photo Center (San Francisco) and Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle). …

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.

Maria Deau Senior Art Portfolio, Maria Deau

Senior Art Portfolios

No abstract provided.

15 Photographs 15 Curators, Matty Cunningham, Ryan Dee, Shane Farritor, Charlie Foster, Derrick Goss, Richard Graham, Pablo Morales, Carrie Morgan, Walker Pickering, Judith Sasso-Mason, David J. Sellmyer, Jamie Swartz, Sriyani Tidball, Elizabeth Vanwormer, Michelle Waite

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

The museum invited fifteen individuals from the university community—faculty, students, staff, administrators—to each choose a photograph from Sheldon’s permanent collection and write a brief reflection on or response to the work. The selected images span history, genres, and styles, just as the participants represent diverse intellectual and creative interests on campus. Equally varied are the reflections themselves. Some participants describe qualities that have drawn them to particular images; others consider the ways art provides a fresh lens for their specialized work in other disciplines.

Photographs:

Monte Gerlach Rising Form

Sarah Charlesworth Candle

Stanley Truman Joinery, Coloma, California

Carrie Mae Weems …

Vida En Sombras, Tommy Canales Burns

CGU MFA Theses

Verisimilitude. What is reality? Subconsciously we are acting out and absorbing information collating data and in turn responding with instincts. Learning processes to view and shape this world. I think of the Hermann Hesse’s doppelganger, the idea of a shadow self. Group identities can also have strange shadow selves. It is bizarre to look back at history and see the changing context of social norms, fashions, traditions, scientific, philosophical, and political thought. Art is a sign of the times, creating space for the inner dialogue of collective consciousness to be purged and hashed out.

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.

Aesthesia, Cindy G. Garcia

CGU MFA Theses

My art practice in itself, is first and foremost about me as a Human on this planet. Second, I am drawn to the cognitive dissonance that happens within each individual, this is key to the majority of my work. For this show I really wanted to emphasize; A: The textural, corporal involvement that I personally really enjoy and get satisfaction out of. B: The color of Life. C: The beauty in very introspective particular instances that happen in day to day life.

Taking In: A Juried Selection Of Undergraduate Photography 2016, Lucad Students

Taking In

Taking In is a juried annual student-run publication that showcases the best of LUCAD undergraduate photography and video. The project focuses on the business of promoting art and culminates each year with a juried exhibition, publication, and website all designed to promote selected works of AIB artists. The selected pieces were chosen anonymously by a jury of distinguished members of the Boston art community. The book in your hand is the end result of a collective effort by those in the class.

Lens On Habitat Destruction: A Photo Essay In Double Exposure, Bethany Holtz

Student Publications

Human greed and ignorance bulldoze through nature, leaving behind scarred landscapes and broken ecosystems. Within the world’s aquatic environments, human actions have irreversibly fragmented and shattered habitats of countless animals. Voiceless, these displaced animals suffer largely in silence—their stories untold and invisible. Using my lens to expose their cries, my photography uncovers the narrative of habitat destruction.

In this photo essay, I juxtapose the pristine and degraded habitats of five threatened aquatic species using double exposure techniques, a method where two disconnected images are merged to create one unified work. By balancing light, opacity, color, and transparency, I focus attention …

Lara Salmon, Thesis Statement, Lara Salmon

CGU MFA Theses

My art brings together materials and ideas inspired by personal experience that do not usually exist side by side. My body is the primary mechanism with which I make work, incidentally making me the subject matter of the work. I use my physical self as an instrument to coalesce and transform other materiality. Through live performance and photographic installations I create tension and balance between crude biology and bright, polished formalism. This body of work focuses on Millennial Feminism and the Middle East.

Osamu James Nakagawa Interview, Myumi Ware

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City; raised in Tokyo, Japan and returned to Houston, Texas at the age of 15. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1993 He is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of Art at Indiana University and a recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 Higashikawa Award: New Photographer of the Year, and 2015 Sagamihara Photographer of the Year in Japan. Nakagawa's work is shown internationally and his monograph GAMA Caves was published by Aka Aka Art Publishing in January 2014.

His recent work, BANTA …

Transitors, Sarah B. Crofts

Theses and Dissertations

As an expression of integrated languages and an extension of my art practice, Transitors operates at the intersection of data, photography and language to explore the fragmentation and disintegration of the human psyche and bodily awareness through the effects of digital technology and contemporary social dissociation. Elements of the text simultaneously function as formulas, facts, and data interspersed with expository and narrative writing, all relating mimetically to various registers of this dissociation. The text moves amongst these levels, shifting from the personal to hints of a technological sublime to exemplify the predicament of the individual in relation to systems of …

So Much Apparent Nothing, Emily Mcbride

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on motivations behind selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition so much apparent nothing. Through journal excerpts and analysis of my own psychology, I attempt to put into words my thoughts concurrent to my making, indirect as they may be. The following text shares my personal conflicts and ideologies surrounding art-making, the permanence of objects, and the acceptance of an identity in flux.