Visual Studies Commons^™

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Appropriation Of The Highest Order: A Study Of Harry Smith’S Master Work, Film No. 18 Mahagonny In Relation To The Brecht-Weill Opera The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny And Duchamp’S The Large Glass, Rose V. Marcus

Theses and Dissertations

Harry Smith’s Film No. 18, Mahagonny, 1970 – 1980, is a transmutation of the original Brecht-Weill opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a 1930, into a feature-length experimental film. This paper shows how the original opera and Duchamp's The Large Glass prove inherent to Smith’s double-pronged homage to both original works of art. The failure in the opera narrative and the chance shattering of The Large Glass inform Smith’s complex methodology to approach and spatialize cinema. Harry Smith’s use of the tools of the screening apparatus are traced in order to study Mahagonny in detail. The …

Final Master's Portfolio, Jonathan Correa

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Jonathan G. Correa's Master's Portfolio

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients itself toward everyday practitioners …

Saga Beyond The Gate: Chapter One, The Coming Of The Gate Ghost, Tristan B. Miller

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

“Saga Beyond the Gate: Chapter One, the Coming of the Gate Ghost” explores performance sculpture used as religious ritual. My work emphasizes ritual, creation myths, relics, physical manifestations of lived religion, and the power of narrative belief. One often turns to religion, science, or spirituality, to seek answers to questions about being a conscious entity, and one’s journey to the end. This saga uses scripts from all three of these schools of thought, placing the world of the Gate Ghost into tangible reality, as a play on a stage. Artefacts represent objects of power and mystery. Characters embody morality tales, …

Beautiful People: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Fashion Industry's Thin Ideal, Shane White

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Negative body image among women has become an extremely relevant topic in the last decade. The “ideal” female body image and what a person should look like according to marketing and advertising has become a highly controversial issue. This project seeks to show how the fashion industry has, over centuries, shaped how people think they need to look and in today’s time and show how it has been a root cause of issues like body image complexes leading to negative self-perception, eating disorders, mental illnesses like anxiety, depression and addiction, and even suicide. Over the last three to four decades, …

Understanding Spaces Of Abandonment Through Virtual Frameworks In Landscape Architecture, Aus Perez

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In recent years, design professionals have implemented many contemporary landscape architecture projects across the United States. With a primary goal of returning nature to urban environments, contemporary landscape architects and other transdisciplinary partners work diligently to sculpt physical spaces that reflect the human-living experience. However, a leap into the world of video game design could allow landscape architects and urban planners to more freely create virtual social environments to address rising issues of abandonment in today’s urban and rural spaces. Video game mechanics and methodologies can be used extensively in the disciplines of design that value participatory processes, like landscape …

The Retablos Of Teabo And Mani: The Evolution Of Renaissance Altars In Colonial Yucatán, C. Cody Barteet

Visual Arts Publications

From the turn to seventeenth through the early eighteenth century, three retablos (altarpieces) were created in Yucatán that relied on a similar Renaissance design. The retablos located in the ex-convents of Mani and Teabo all adopt the Spanish sixteenth-century Renaissance style of the Plateresque. Further, the retablos are connected by the inclusion of caryatid framing devices that establishes a strong affinity among the works. Two of the retablos are located in Mani: the Retablo of San Antonio de Padua and the Retablo of Nuestra Señora de Soledad (or sometimes called the Dolores Retablo). At Teabo is the Retablo de Santa …

How To Build A World Art: The Strategic Universalism Of Colour Reproductions And The Unesco Prize (1953-1968), Chiara Vitali

Artl@s Bulletin

What role did UNESCO play in the art world of the post-war era? This article makes use of published and archival sources in order to clarify the utopia of a “World Art” that shaped UNESCO and led to the “Archives of Colour Reproductions of Works of Art”, a project of worldwide collect and diffusion of images of “masterworks” inspired by Malraux’s “Museum without walls”. This case study focuses on one particular aspect of the project, the “UNESCO Prize”, conceived by the Brazilian art critic and Marxist intellectual Mario Pedrosa for the 1953 São Paulo Biennial.

Looking While Reading I, Ii, Iii, Sarah Minor

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article introduces the term “visual essay” by tracing the genre’s history through the concrete poetry movement and the rise of the lyric essay. In describing the aims of visual essays, Minor distinguishes between “illustrative” and “non-illustrative” shaped texts, and suggests connections between “non-illustrative” examples and the aims of “Intersectional Form,” a term coined by scholar Jen Soriano.

Selections From Divinatio Diver, Sculptural Antipathia In Atonement Transcendo, And Mechanika Momento: Creatio Forecaster, Antonie Frankie Aquino

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

It is fated inspiration which penetrates the heart, satisfies the collective soul, and offers its spirit to the vastness of ceremonial vision. Vision becomes sound and sound forms a poetic voice displaced— this displacement radiates a mythologized poetic voice serving as a lyrical object, theogonic lyre, and the genealogical muse. Selected poems from Divinatio Diver, Sculptural Antipathia: In Atonement Transcendo and Mechanika Momento: Creatio Forerunner, the collected poems orchestrate a tryptic voice that dismantles the outward magnitude of the self by subverting the antithetical self through spiritual and organic sensualness.This mythopoeic tripartism simultaneously interconnects with religion, theology, and metaphysics which …

Auto®Ficción Latinx De Nueva York (1999–2020), Jacqueline Herranz Brooks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research on the intersection of Literary Criticism, Latino Studies, Persona Studies, and Performance Studies has led me to question the accepted definitions of autoficción (Doubrovsky, Gasparini, Alberca, Casas, Schlikers) and expand that definition into a more multifaceted and operational term. Hence, I created auto®ficción, a new term describing the hybrid creations of a group of underrepresented contemporary Latinx authors living/producing/circulating their work in New York City, during the first two decades of the 21^st Century. For these authors, their life experiences and quotidian uses of this city’s spaces are the subjects of their work. Auto®ficción draws attention …

Step By Step : Walk Your Way To... : Fall 2020 The Arts Of Storytelling Student Exhibition, Yan Yan Mak

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

The works presented in this catalogue demonstrate the outcome of artistic and cultural interactions between Ms Yan Yan Mak and her students in the Fall semester of 2020-21. The Department of Visual Studies is very grateful for their contribution in promoting creativity and art appreciation within and beyond the Lingnan community.

Reimagining Abandoned Community Space In A Post-Pandemic Environment, Julia Drooff

Scripps Senior Theses

Earlier this year, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the demise of the Great American Mall by forcing temporary and permanent closures across the country. The low-end malls that remain are dealing with crippling debt and the closing of key department stores like JC Penney and Neiman Marcus[1]. With only super-luxury malls thriving, many of the standard malls set up in the eighties are just abandoned parts of a community. So, what should happen to these abandoned malls? And what role does that space now play in the post-pandemic community? Since malls began to shut-down pre-Covid-19 did the need for …

In/Visible, Raymond Thompson Jr

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

My MFA thesis and supporting exhibition focus on challenging the United States’ photographic archive that often left out African-American people. The work, through the use of appropriation and alternative photographic processes, disrupts America’s historical visual archive and notions that surround the white gaze. Through the unsettling of this visual space, new speculative narratives can be created to help imagine new futures. This work is the beginning of a process of mourning histories I have never known and reclaiming a place for myself and my family in the American landscape that is free of racial trauma.

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Wetland To Wasteland, Plantation To Plant: The Visual Legacy Of Plantations In The South Louisiana Landscape Of Environmental Justice, Ella Mcintire

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Southeast Louisiana landscape sits at the intersection of a number of environmental and humanitarian crises. Violence against man and land endemic to the Plantation Era development of the Lower Mississippi laid the foundation for modern issues of coastal land loss, habitat destruction, pollution, environmental racism, and displacement. Land-use patterns of the Plantation economy made the region optimal for petrochemical processing, turning wetland to wasteland, and plantation to plant. The exhibit Climates of Inequality: Standing Up On River Road uses photography, cinematography, 360-video, and soundscapes to explore the dialogic relationship between fragile natural spaces in southern Louisiana and the historically …

Plastic Goes Concrete: "Plasticnic" And "Plasticpoems", Two Animated Poetry Videos About Plastic Pollution, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Nhat Truong, Tisha Deb Pillai

The Goose

The author describes the creation of two short animated video poems about plastic pollution that originated in concrete/visual poems. "Plasticnic" is a humorous and colourful narrated video based on a shaped poem depicting how we enjoy nature while simultaneously harming it through plastic consumption. "Plasticpoems" is a text-based, unnarrated animated video poem about plastic pollution based on two shaped/visual/concrete poems.

De La Gravure Scientifique À La Gravure Artistique : Le Burin De Pierre Lyonet Et De Cécile Reims, Hélène Laulan, Caroline Anthérieu-Yagbasan

The Goose

Comment l’image peut-elle nous faire habiter le monde ? Pour répondre à cette problématique, nous cherchons ici à interroger la tension peut-être trop tranchée entre images scientifiques et images artistiques, pour construire un questionnement ontologique sur l’image. Cette réflexion s’appuiera sur la pratique de deux graveurs, l'un dit « scientifique », et l'autre « artiste ».

Undocumented Migration And Political Community In Susan Meiselas's Crossings Photographs, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

In 1989, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) photographed irregular border crossings in southern California. At the time, it was relatively easy for undocumented migrants from Central America and Mexico to cross between ports of entry, even as there was growing pressure on American officials to address border security.1 One photograph in Meiselas’s Crossings series depicts a border patrol officer apprehending a migrant off the interstate near Oceanside (fig. 1). Two torsos fill the center of the image. The officer grasps the man’s clothing, propelling him toward the nearby vehicle. With heads cut off by the frame and backs turned, …

Knights Of The Round Table Mesa: A Brief Study In The Paintings And Books On The American West, Mitchell A. Gehman

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

This article investigates how printed material and visual arts helped create the image of the cowboy in American popular culture. This perception did much to influence the popular memory of the American West and had significant consequences for the development of American identity.

Poetry For Seers Or The Peruvian Visual Poetic Tradition In Front Of New Media, Michael Hurtado, Pamela Medina, Enrique García, Michael Prado

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Since the first decades of the twentieth century, Peruvian poetic tradition has been characterized by experimental uses of language. Among these possibilities, some records tensioned this medium from the link with the plastic arts, as in the case of the poetry of José María Eguren, while others opted for the playing with the spatiality and visuality of the blank sheet, such as in the case of the work of Carlos Oquendo de Amat. However, it is not until the appearance of the poetry of César Vallejo, specifically with a poems like Trilce in 1922, that these breakages force us to …

Productive Misreading In Intermedia Art: Four Approaches By A Musician, Jeff Morris, Elisabeth Blair

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

This discussion examines the evolution and lessons of four artistic performance works that engage with text and imagery with the mindset of a composer, rather than as an author or visual artist. The works involve computer music, improvisation, video art, generative art techniques, and challenging aesthetics. An analytical discussion reveals that different forms and mechanisms of reading are manifest in the artworks, and reflections upon these elucidate the intermedial nature of reading and the productive, expressive potential of interfering with these processes.

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

Cat & Mouse, Leah Flook

Art Theses and Dissertations

An early and pervasive paranormal experience cements my interest in the invisible link between predator, prey, and bait. My sculptural installations and drawings create spaces to evade, lure, misdirect, and trap my elusive phantom. I divide my research into three sections; The Stadium, The Players, and The Game. The Stadium is a separate world, one that holds different laws and physics. Here, I explore the correlation between Slapstick Comedy and Horror genres and their ability to bend reality in order to create a story arch. The Players references tropes played out within these genres, Ophelia and the Final Girl, and …

Simulating Destruction Effects In Sidefx Houdini, Ethan B. Elkins

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As movies, television shows, and other forms of media have progressed over the last century, the use of destruction sequences as a form of entertainment have seemingly grown exponentially. From ginormous explosions to cities collapsing, more destruction sequences have drawn people’s attention in ways that are quite captivating. However, as content producers continue to push the limit of what is possible, the reliance on practical effects starts to dwindle in comparison to the usage of computer generated scenes. This thesis acknowledges the trend and dissects the entire process of how a general destruction sequence is made, from the research and …

Dunidedcudigunadie, Lawrence Reid

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses his Master of Fine Arts exhibit, titled DUNIDEDCUDIGUNADIE. The exhibit is to be held at the Tipton Gallery in downtown Johnson City, TN, from April 2nd to April 10th, 2020. A live reception will be held the evening of April 3rd, featuring a performance with the work, titled Look at You!

The following thesis explores the artist’s formative years – investigating how childhood experiences combine with artistic and theoretical influences to inform his art-making process.

Remixing The Archives: Indigenous Interpretations Of History And The Future, Marcella Alexis Ernest

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing the master narratives. The project tracks how film and photography—historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism—are being reclaimed by the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. The project shows how multidisciplinary artists use technology to remix audiovisual archives from a specific time in American history: portrait photography and ethnographic filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s frontier representations of Indianness in twentieth-century motion pictures, social guidance classroom films from the 1950s, and digital …

Drawing Under Construction, Nathalie V. Alfonso

Art Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The thesis, Drawing Under Construction navigates notions of invisible labor, repetition, and endurance. I explore aspects of labor and movement through the use of drawing, installation, performance, and video. Unseen work, an exercise of emotional control, is central to this investigation, transforming notions of invisibility and visibility into tools to explore three concepts; "Unfolding the Line,", "The Line Under Construction," and "Locating the Line." It is through these three areas of study that I further analyze “my hand” versus “the universal hand” and “my body” versus “the universal body” and create a system where my body and work live …

Living Stillness, Nunzio Paci

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

The artist-in-residence in the Fall of 2019-2020 was Mr Nunzio Paci, an Italian artist whose paintings and drawings bring out unexpected connections between human or animal anatomy on the one hand, and plants and flowers on the other hand. The intertwining of the human form with other natural forms is a motif in Art Nouveau art, but Paci’s drawing style seems to owe more to Renaissance anatomical and botanical drawings such as Leonardo da Vinci’s.

Moreover, like Leonardo, Paci relies on close observation, for example, of anatomical wax models and even genuine human corpses. In other words, he draws from …