Art Practice Commons^™

Some Assembly Required, Tanner Maxey

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The dead do not carry their memory. We do. But when memory becomes the only way we can continue to hold on to our loved ones, how do we derive meaning from the fragments when memory begins to fade? Some Assembly Required examines loss as a condition in which meaning is no longer stable, but must be constructed from what remains. Through an interdisciplinary practice that combines ceramics, textiles, and installation, this work explores how domestic objects—once associated with care, function, and familiarity—can be transformed into fragile, unusable forms that persist as evidence of what has been lost. These objects …

Arts Cures: A Business Plan For Integrating Art As A Biometric Tool For Sensory Wellbeing In Commercial Ecosystems, Xinuo Zhang

MA Projects

In an era of heightened connectivity and data-driven metrics, modern society faces a crisis of sensory impoverishment and emotional disconnection. While technology quantifies human experience, it often fails to address the visceral need for authentic feeling. This business plan proposes "Arts Cures," a venture that repositions art from a passive commodity to an active, systemic solution for well-being. By leveraging insights from neuroscience, design theory, and existential philosophy, Arts Cures develops a suite of B2B and B2C services that integrate art as functional, biometric-responsive infrastructure. Our core offerings include AI-driven sensory pods for real-time emotional regulation, data-informed curatorial services for …

The Lost Art Of Club Photography: Capturing Nyc’S Nightlife And Cultural Legacy From The 1980s To The 1990s, Madeleine M. Canfield

MA Theses

This thesis examines how club photography in New York City’s nightlife of the 1980s and 1990s both shaped and reflected cultural identity, and investigates why this visual practice has largely disappeared in the age of social media. By focusing on photographer Steve Eichner and his documentation of iconic moments from one of Peter Gatien’s four mega-clubs, this thesis analyzes published photographs and articles to examine how visual representation shaped the culture it portrayed. The research demonstrates that club photography was instrumental in shaping public perception of nightlife, capturing the spontaneity, creativity, and energy of the era. It also highlights how …

Constructing Minimalism: Canon Formation, Exclusion, And The Afterlives Of An Aesthetic, Lucy Ewert

MA Theses

Academics, critics, curators, and artists alike have perpetually struggled to agree on a coherent definition of Minimalism since its inception. Who is included in the historical canon, what its defining characteristics are, and the movement's legacy have long since been contested. This thesis will explore the origins of Minimalism, tracing its emergence from movements such as Abstract Expressionism, and discuss the early values that shaped its perception through a handful of fundamental voices. The study will also survey three of Minimalism’s modernist predecessors, questioning the extent of influence these movements may have had.  Understanding the origins of Minimalism will set …

Creativity In A Flash: Exploring The Perceived Therapeutic Effects Of Combining Creative Arts Therapies And Flash Technique, Celia J. Gagnon

Art Therapy | Doctoral Dissertations

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, research has revealed a significant strain on mental healthcare systems and healthcare professionals. Concurrently, there has been a rapid escalation in the prevalence of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and adolescent suicide rates, all of which have reached critical levels (World Health Organization, 2025; World Health Organization, 2022; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2025; American Psychiatric Association, 2024). Post-pandemic, these statistics continue to rise across all nations and socioeconomic groups (WHO, 2025). Consequently, there is an urgent need to intensify research that supports the enhancement of mental health services globally (Institute for Health Metrics …

Corals, Creation, And Conservation: Evaluating Human-Marine Relations Through Coral Reef Biology And Artistic Practice, Emma Gray Garman

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the relationship between humans and marine ecosystems through two complementary lenses: scientific research and artistic practice. The biology chapter proposes a five-year coral reef monitoring study across four Queensland, Australia islands — two heavily visited and inhabited (Fitzroy and Green Islands) and two minimally visited and uninhabited (High and Woody Islands) — to assess whether human activity correlates with bleaching severity over time. Grounded in preliminary survey data from Green Island in 2024, which revealed approximately 54% of coral bleached or dead, the study hypothesizes that reefs adjacent to inhabited islands will exhibit greater bleaching severity, consistent …

Till Death Does Us Part: An Analysis Of Influences And Ideas Behind The Exhibition, Milo F. Rippe

Honors College Theses

“Till Death Does Us Part,” is a ceramic work created by Milo Rippe in the fall of 2025. The installation includes fifteen faceless figures, ten organ-inspired plates, and one big central figure. Also featured are three homemade stains and two homemade glazes. The figures are hand-built from slabs, combined to form a single piece. The plates were also cut from slabs, and then hand-rolled rims were added to each shape with slip. Stains and glazes are made by methodically measuring out each ingredient on a triple-beam scale, combining all ingredients with water, and running the mixture through a strainer to …

Reconciliation, Draper Matthews

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis exhibition, Reconciliation, examines how memory, loss, and lived experience shape personal identity over time. Through sculptural works composed of cast, blown, and hot-sculpted glass combined with mixed media, the exhibition explores the pressures that life events place upon individuals and the ways those pressures persist, transform, and become integrated into the self. The work considers identity not as a fixed state but as a continual process of negotiation between past experiences, present circumstances, and future possibilities.

Central to the project is the material analogy between glass and human experience. Glass, a material formed under extreme heat and pressure …

Rustic Fall Showpiece, Aislyn Ford

Student Publications

Small decorative amenity inspired by fall, featuring colorful tones of reds, yellows, browns, wheat stocks and rusty beams to create a rustic cozy feel to my piece!

A Community Affair: An Exploration Of The Queer Community, Nightlife, Performance Art And Their Adjacent Qualities, Tatiana M. Castro

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores the importance and roll of community in queer artwork, such as drag and burlesque and retroactively also all the work that I create. This paper aims to express this importance by exploring my personal relationship with building community. By interviewing performers selected through a customized-for-savannah voting process, I allowed the community to directly influence my thesis, as well as directly referencing photos of the hands of community members as a continued motif used throughout my work to represent community. This culminated in a two night thesis performance and installation  exhibition that explored performance and how its environment …

Spieltrieb, Edward F. Newcomb

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis investigates the creative and pedagogical intersections of nostalgia, play, and neurodivergent experience through a mixed-media studio practice. Grounded in Friedrich Schiller’s concept of Spieltrieb—the human drive to play as a balance between sensual and rational impulses—this work explores how childhood memory, instinct, and impulsive mark making inform both artistic production and art education.

Drawing on theoretical frameworks by Susan Sontag and John Berger, the work resists overinterpretation in favor of sensory immediacy, inviting viewers into direct, embodied encounters with material form. Sontag’s critique of mimetic representation and Berger’s analysis of reproducibility and context inform a practice that …

Untalented: What Is The Role Of “Talent” In Art Class?, Sean Bianchi

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The concept of talent in art education is widely accepted yet rarely challenged or questioned. This essay critically examines the construction of artistic talent perceptions, the sociohistorical roots of the term itself, and the implications of what talent does for art education. This speculative essay problematizes talent as a persuasive force over art students and art teachers alike, criticizes the accessibility of art to the naïve and art enthusiast alike, as well as the consequences of talent constructs over the future of artistic instruction within public education. Utilizing an aesthetic framework, I explore what the role of talent in art …

Ni De Aqui, Nor There. Pero As The In-Between, Vanessa Franquez

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores first-generation Mexican American identity as a lived experience of translation and survival. Drawing from Judith Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Jack Burnham, the work frames identity as performative, embodied, and shaped by overlapping cultural systems. Insects function as models of adaptation, camouflage, and defense, paralleling survival strategies such as code-switching and cultural hybridity. Through sculptural processes including tufting, felting, sewing, layering, and the inscription of Spanglish text, repetition and puncture become material metaphors for pressure, repair, and resilience. Language operates as both subject and substance, resisting grammatical purity in favor of hybridity. The work ultimately positions the in-between …

So There I Was, Jesse Marie Baggett

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This written thesis provides a description and analysis of my thesis exhibition, So There I Was, which presents a body of ceramic sculptures and paintings that explore themes of adventure, travel, and shared experiences. The work reimagines personal experiences through a cast of animal characters, with a rabbit acting as a stand-in for myself. These narratives are inspired by events from my own life and are transformed into imaginative scenes that emphasize playfulness, wonder, and storytelling.

The sculptures combine toy-like animal figures, pull carts, and miniature architectural structures to create playful environments that resemble playsets or staged scenes where …

Herp Count 2025, Camryn Gulledge

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Herp Count 2025 is a process-based project in which I log and document every herp (reptile or amphibian) I encounter in the wild while investigating the realities of human impact on ecosystems. During 2025, I observed 1,406 individual herps, most of which appeared not in remote wilderness but in the compromised margins of human spaces. When I observe them in a littered area, I collect nearby trash and bring it back to my studio to combine it with a detailed drawing of that specific individual. In my Contact series, I use a clean-touch printmaking process that involves a stretched plastic …

My Mouth Is A Glutton, My Mouth Is A Lover., Cole Kamerick Eller

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a reflection on my relationship with jewelry. I discuss the impact of jewelry

and its materials. What are the ramifications of these objects? Politically, socially, and

spiritually. I reflect on material agency, cultural unconscious, and value systems, and

how I relate to jewelry, my love for it, and my grief for it. This work is the result of ritual

and impulse. The writing is my reflection on the results of that ritual.

Light And Unseen, Daša Kulikova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a body of paintings and two poetic fragments. Shaped by distance and displacement, the work finds its ground in the tension between the desire to be free from the past and heal, and longing for home and connection. Painting practice becomes an event of contact with what is lost, or unclear, or in the process of becoming through accumulating layers, marks, erasures, and traces of the process of its making.

Spilt Milk, Fatima Kaleem

Theses and Dissertations

Spilt Milk explores how institutional discipline is rehearsed across the Pakistani home, school, and television soap opera. These seemingly domestic spaces converge at the military-industrial complex, where media propaganda (ISPR) and consumer commodities collaborate to manufacture a unified national identity.

Through an installation of school desks and re-fabricated cereal boxes, this project examines the ‘cereal/serial’ as a site of ideological consumption. By refabricating these boxes with embroidery, drawing, lace, and synthetic hair, the work subverts state-mandated narratives. These material interventions replace assembly lines with spills of hair and sweat to highlight the vulnerability of the body under surveillance. This project …

The Weight, Hammet Reavis

Theses and Dissertations

What follows drifts between out to under, argument to object, learned to unlearned, and then back again, for now. What remains is not erased, but held in tension - pressed forward by an unspoken weight. However, let's go on record and retrace this gesture, not by means of crossthru, but as underline.

"Spectrum", Mackinzey H. Critzer

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

These body of works explores themes centered around ASD/Autism Spectrum Disorder, including symptoms involved, my personal views/experiences of it, social issues, and other related topics. My work consists of various mediums, digital pieces/prints and physical installations that involve bright color tones, human/humanoid figures, and various symbols.

Emotions As Work Material: On Dancers' Refined Use Of Affectivity, Camille S. Buttingsrud

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

As part of their professional practice, dancers allow their affectivity to enhance their kinesthetic work. Their intentional and disciplined use of personal, emotional resources ensures both creativity, interpretation, absorption, and connections in ways that extend beyond the traditional phenomenological understanding of affectivity as pre-reflectively based. The affective regulations dancers employ can be seen as an “artistic epoché,” and their layered performance awareness corresponds with Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of “image-consciousness.” Through qualitative interviews with three professional dancers, phenomenological theory, and additional supportive literature, this article shows how affectivity can be experienced through high-order levels of Leib, constituting states of “bodily …

With Images In Time. Atmosphere And Art: Mediation And Dialogue, Pauline Von Bonsdorff

Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology

The article challenges the idea that atmospheres are always sensed immediately. Instead, atmospheres in art are mediated and arise in a dialogue between work and audience. To understand how, we should pay attention to temporal structures in and around the work, such as the dynamics and duration of aesthetic experience and the historicity of both work and perceiver, including pasts and present. Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological aesthetics, complemented with insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of perception, offer resources for this. Writing on expression, Dufrenne distinguishes “presence,” in which sense is felt immediately and firmly connected to embodiment, and “sentiment,” which arises …

Subculture And Identity As An Escape From The Societal Norms Of Power Imbalance And Authoritative Abuse, Sarah Goldberg

Master's Theses

By definition, a “bolthole” is an animal’s escape or burrow; or, a person’s escape or place of refuge. It also connotes construction, building, even sculpture - relating proletarian materials to themes of working-class labor and the need for escape. Through sculpture, installation, drawing, and oil painting, Bolthole as a body of work examines power imbalance as a societal norm, and identity and subculture as a rejection of the influence of capitalist institutions. Animal symbolism is used in combination with figurative work and portraiture, directly comparing power imbalances between humans to those in nature; such as predator and prey, parent and …

Dissolving Glass, Rachel Heartwood

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

My work is a visual aut-ethnography that explores the profound loneliness of being a neurodivergent person, now amplified by living in a foreign country. This series of photographs represents the deepening of my personal "fishbowl," a metaphor for the isolation of my complex, forever-changing/evolving inner self from the outside world. For me, this feeling is not new; it is a long-standing pattern of being misunderstood, misjudged and under/overestimated by others. Having recently moved to Germany, I've found that the language barrier has increased the opacity on the glass, blurring my ability to understand/be understood by …

Effectiveness Of Drill And Imitation Methods In The Application Of Canon And Broken Design Techniques In Feto Hitu Dance, Kadek Paramitha Hariswari, Natalsya Vandana Sape

Jurnal Pendidikan: Teori, Penelitian, dan Pengembangan

This study was motivated by the need to identify effective dance learning methods that enhance dancers’ technical and aesthetic abilities, particularly in applying canon and broken design techniques to creatively reconstructed traditional dances. The purpose of this research is to analyze the effectiveness of the drill and imitation methods in developing dancers’ ability to apply canon and broken techniques in the Feto Hitu dance. The study employed a qualitative descriptive approach using field action methods. Data were collected through observations of the training process, interviews with instructors and dancers, and video documentation at the Dance Studio of the Music Education …

Art Therapists' Experience Utilizing Virtual Reality’S Multibrush In Group Art Making With Young Adults., Lidice Cohen

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

Young adults aged 20-35 experience disproportionately high rates of mental health conditions yet exhibit low treatment-seeking behaviors, creating a significant care gap. Digital interventions—particularly Virtual Reality (VR)—show promise for reaching this tech-savvy group. The primary research question explored art therapists' insights utilizing this modality, while a secondary aim examined whether creating VR response art (VRRA) enhanced understanding of the group process. Three credentialed art therapists and nine young adults participated, sharing insights via interviews after VR group sessions and VRRA creation. Thematic analysis revealed that adaptation to VR influenced group dynamics, self-expression through embodiment, collaboration, boundary management, sensory stimulation, and …

A Burlesque: The Shimmering Body Of Revealing, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

A Burlesque: The Shimmer Manuscript is a hybrid critical–creative work that examines burlesque as an embodied methodology and a mode of knowledge production. Drawing from my two decades as a performer–scholar, the work reframes glamour, desire, and adornment as epistemological practices rather than theatrical ornamentation. The project is significant in that it expands understandings of performance studies, autotheory, and feminist aesthetics by foregrounding the performer’s body as an intelligent, sensing, world-making apparatus.

The methodology is creative practice research and archive-driven, integrating backstage documentation, AI-assisted photomontage, and theoretical reflection. The work draws from poststructuralist and feminist frameworks (Irigaray, Deleuze & Guattari, …

Harnessing Irrationality, Jennifer E. Smith

All Theses

My thesis work considers the presence of objectifying gazes in representations of women in Western visual media and pop culture. I reference film, television, short form content shared on social media, and pornography to identify and repurpose tools of objectification in my large scale drawings and animated GIFs. I compare the objectifying tropes present in contemporary entertainment media and pop culture to those present in the Western art historical tradition of the reclining female nude, mythology and folklore, and pornography. Using these comparisons, I discuss objectification in terms of passive and active, consumption and appetite, and idealization and devaluation. I …

Processing Self, Ethan B. Mckellar

All Theses

Processing Self is a body of sculptural and utilitarian ceramic work that explores the intersection of the materiality of clay with the expression of grief and vulnerability. In this work I utilize the process of building unstable ceramic vessels and the communal action of wood firing to translate the experiences of grief and care into physical forms. As I build, I manipulate the clay to its limits, allowing it to falter under its own weight, and display the breakage and damage. By committing to support each vessel through its creation, I make a promise to persevere, echoing the commitment I …

Even Flow, Marianne Koleng

be Still

This piece attempts to connect the "ebb and flow" of music and art with the sometimes strict interpretation of anatomy. It calls to attention what often seem as opposites - the cold nature of medicine and science with the seemingly warm and free nature of music and art. While many see them as opposites, this piece attempts to convey they are really two sides of the same coin.