Visual Studies Commons^™

Aproximaciones A La Cultura Contemporánea: Un Encuentro De La Visualidad, La Narrativa, La Semiótica Y Su Didáctica, Romano Ponce-Díaz Phd, Iván Ávila-González Phd, Emilce Beatriz Sánchez Castellón Phd, Gabriel Segundo Iguarán Montiel Msc, Juan Carlos González Vidal Phd, Ximena Díaz-Santillán B.A., Andrea Alejandra Echeverría Barrios B.A, Diana Estefanía Martínez Dagnino B.A, Edgar Ávila González Phd, Diana Esperanza Álvarez Campos B.A, Aurora Mariazell Romero Martínez Msc, José Abraham Mitre Lázaro Msc

STEM for Success Resources

Este volumen reúne reflexiones críticas y propuestas analíticas que convergen en tres ejes:

La voz, la identidad y el cuerpo.

Producto de la colaboración entre la Uniguajira y la Facultad de Letras de la Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Aproximaciones a la Cultura Contemporánea: un encuentro de la visualidad, la narrativa, la semiótica y su didáctica articula un corpus interdisciplinario que examina fenómenos culturales actuales desde perspectivas semióticas, literarias, pedagógicas y visuales.

A través de una estructura rizomática, el libro desborda los límites tradicionales de los campos académicos para ofrecer una cartografía flexible de lectura, en la que …

Swing Landscape, Yingwen Lin

Masters Theses

The text will consist of my self-introduction and short articles. Roughly speaking, the narrative is built upon my background and personal transformation. Geographically, I was born in Shenzhen (largest migrant city in China), lived in Shanghai (China’s largest economic center and a major international financial hub), and now reside on the East Coast of the United States, as a particle moving between different cultures, global commodities, and online media. I engage subjectively in these objective changes, with objects and events shaping who I am. I consider myself an outsider, an observer, an economic enthusiast, and a newspaper reader, participating in …

How To Walk On Water: Living Through The Absurd, Esther Du

Masters Theses

Set in a speculative world submerged by water, this thesis constructs a fragmented, nonlinear narrative that reflects on survival, memory, and displacement in the aftermath of catastrophe. Through three interwoven chapters—The Outcast, The Researcher, and The World—the project explores the emotional and psychological landscapes of individuals navigating a post-apocalyptic existence where the past is irretrievable and the future uncertain. Using an interdisciplinary form of visual storytelling, writing, and sound, the work draws from personal experience and collective trauma to examine how people reconstruct identity and meaning after loss. Rather than offering a definitive answer to existential …

Chasing The Sacred: A Personal Archive, Yiko Yang

Masters Theses

The relationship between humans and nature is like that of a child to a mother, or consciousness to the unconscious. The former arises from the latter, which always holds and shapes it. As human consciousness evolves, the desire to return to the unconscious remains—we are always looking back, searching for that first glimpse of the world.

Thinking back to my childhood, certain fundamental images—archetypes—come to mind. Rooted in the research of Carl Jung and Erich Neumann, this concept also stems from my family’s cultural heritage and my deep, lasting connection with nature as a child. These archetypes reflect the natural …

Covered In Snow, Katelynn M. Rogers

Masters Theses

Covered in Snow is a photographic exploration into the ripple effect of maternal loss and environmental decay in my hometown of Canton, Ohio. In the wake of a miscarriage, the woods I had grown up within began calling to me, urging me to return. Unbeknownst to me, a series of accidental deaths of women had been happening throughout these trees my entire life, their stories only coming to the surface as I looked to the trees for solace. This series of inexplicable deaths in the woods I so desperately loved began to alter my relationship to the trees, a distrust …

The Navel Of The Dream, Ella C. Baum

Masters Theses

The images in The Navel of the Dream evoke a state of groundlessness. In this body of work, photographs act as thresholds between what is seen and what is felt, between daydreams and nightmares, and memories and myths. The camera is used as a means to engage with feelings of loss, and reenact the mythos of childhood, as well as the deep waters of the subconscious.

Created in Southern Sweden between 2022 and 2025, these photographs investigate the fallow winter landscape, the liminal space of deep, dark Scandinavian nights and the transformative qualities of ice, snow and …

The Portals: Jewelry As A Site Of Escape And Solace, Jung Ki Min

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates jewelry as a medium for emotional escape and psychological refuge, offering multisensory alternative forms of escapism. Rooted in personal experiences of continuous change and instability, the work explores how imagined spaces—constructed through AI-generated and digitally assisted visuals and layered material processes—can serve as intimate sanctuaries. Drawing from psychological theories, surrealism, and escapism, the study positions jewelry as a portable interface that enables temporary retreat without full detachment from reality. The series of work, which integrates transparent acrylic, visual layering, and subtle dimensionality, materializes these imagined spaces into wearable forms. These pieces invite reflective engagement, allowing wearers to …

The Kinship Of Creatives, Saba Saif Ur Rehman

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This research essay contends that artists and creative individuals must recognize their agency in shaping societal narratives, particularly during times of technological and political upheaval. The essay draws on the insights and contributions of visionaries like Walter Benjamin, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Tomm Moore to emphasize the power of imagination and creativity in addressing real-world issues. It argues that previous technological advances have often reinforced hierarchical and oppressive systems, benefitting a select few while neglecting the masses. As we enter the fourth Industrial Revolution, this essay calls the artists to reclaim their tools from being co-opted for exclusionary and …

Woe Be Gone, Yuhan Hu

Theses and Dissertations

In Woe be gone, Yuhan Hu explores the porous boundaries between image, memory, perception, and material through a deeply personal and reflective multimedia practice. Drawing on influences from film, literature, and game environments, Yuhan investigates how moments—fleeting or fixed—transform when mediated through photography, digital frames, and sculptural assemblage. Anchored by a series of installations and image-based works, the thesis unpacks the poetics of poor images, the failures and promises of translation, and the emotional residue of digital and physical touch. With a tactile sensitivity to materials like wood, wax, solder, and horsehair, Yuhan contemplates impermanence, miscommunication, and care, embracing …

Folds, Bayan Abukiwan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the fold as an orienting metaphor and material gesture to linger on the minor details of intimacy that are severed by occupation and political violence. Through painting, drawing and ceramics, the work traces the more implicit modes of dehumanization—particularly in relation to Palestine—while engaging the domestic as a site of quiet and complexity. Influenced by artists like Jennifer Packer and Beatriz González, the practice embraces slowness, touch, and opacity to fold the viewer into a haptic encounter with the work.

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

Parody And Mis-Unda-Stendings In Comics Art World: Bridging The Gap With New Criteria, Yannis Koukoulas

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The word parody and its many cognates such as appropriation, adaptation, pastiche, travesty, forgery, homage, tribute, swipe, etc., have often been at the centre of fierce debates within the traditional Artworld and various criteria have been proposed for the critical evaluation of visual and literary works. In particular, parody as a dominant practice in postmodern art is a concept that is subject to misunderstandings as to its content and meaning. In Comics Artworld, however, within which recontextualizing practices are very common, often with humorous content, the attempt to describe artists' works and intentions by the criteria applied to other arts, …

Saintly Cinema: Modelling The Icon In The Flowers Of St. Francis And Andrei Rublev, Alexander Hart

Journal of Religion & Film

Throughout the history of the cinema, filmmakers have turned to the visual arts for inspiration in creating spiritual styles on film. In this essay, it is argued that Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966) were influenced by Giotto di Bondone’s frescos and Andrei Rublev’s Eastern Orthodox icons, respectively. Committed to realism, Rossellini adopts Giotto’s proto-Renaissance, humanist art as a model for a spiritual style in which the Transcendent is manifested through the natural world. Subverting terrestrial reality, Tarkovsky adopts the aesthetic principles of the Eastern Orthodox icon, translating Pavel Florensky’s concepts of …

Pathos, Spring 2025, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Adriana Stanzione

Trespassers Of Space: Rewriting Female Narratives In Mexican Cinema, Andrea Ruvalcaba

Undergraduate Theses in Art History

How have Mexican cultural figures such as Maria Novaro and Adela Sequeyo made space for themselves in the male-dominated film realm? How and why have these women dared to become “contrabandistas,” or trespassers, in a social fabric defined and governed by men? The same questions apply to the world of Mexican cinema — more specifically Mexican Feminist cinema. Throughout these pages, I will explore how the film Los Pasos de Ana (1991), by the Mexican filmmaker Marysa Sistach, integrates women’s perspectives into Mexican film culture to counteract the neutralization of powerful female representations played out across various facets of Mexican …

Victim/Perpetrator, David D. Moy

Theses and Dissertations

Throughout this text, David Moy will discuss the inner working of his investigation on image overload and materialization. Through tactics of blurring, erasure, and layering he achieves obfuscation in his printed media. In doing so, he questions the compounding nature of image/text that negate themselves in the larger context of time in the digital age.

You Get That From Me, Robyn Duncan

Theses and Dissertations

You Get That From Me is a mixed-media, collage-based film that integrates personal portraits, allegorical maps, and digital collages with spoken narration to craft a stylistic memoir of a pivotal period in my life: the transition from childhood to motherhood.

Nft And The Future Of Art, Ying Kang

MA Theses

This thesis focuses on exploring the history of NFT, the effects of NFT on art and the future of art. There are many factors affecting NFT, including human subjective factors, such as the pursuit of economic interests and the psychology of blindly following the trend, as well as objective factors, such as macroeconomic policy changes, technological developments, COVID-19 pandemic, cultural advocacy for diversity and democratization, Russia-Ukraine conflict, collapse of major cryptocurrency entities, financial regulation, and endogenous flaws. These economic, political, technological, social, cultural and other factors are complicated and mutually influential, leading to NFT ups and downs in the past. …

Pathos, Winter 2025, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Adriana Stanzione

Post Opera, Suzy Lykins

Theses and Dissertations

Post Opera is a spell and work of embodied research which explores medicalization, desire, labor, and belief. Through methods of performance, sound, text and installation, I facilitate encounters of trans-femininity, spiritual power and connectivity. An opening wound, a set of psychic scalpels, sutures and bandages prepare this text for your consumption, take care to digest her well.

The Creative Front, Aleksandr O. Barrett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss my thesis exhibition, The Creative Front, focusing on my materials, content, and context as they relate to each piece or body of work. This exhibition is the culmination of my work, which centers on my experience with the Russo-Ukrainian war. My work can be interpreted metaphorically, poetically, and directly through sculpture, installation, sound, and film. I am portraying very human stories and experiences from a full-scale war raging in Europe. My work is immersive, placing the viewer in an atmosphere of war, and conveying a sense of urgency and compassion for those who …

Pathos, Fall 2024, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Adriana Stanzione

America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah

Masters Theses

There is a version

of America

that exists

only in dreams,

a kind of folklore,

shrouded in images,

technicolor interiors,

wrapped in plastic,

ghosts of recent past

to haunt and guide;

a constant reminder.

Wishful thinking

a constructed imaginary,

one I can hold in my hand.

Popular culture and spectacle, America and the domestic ideal, capitalism and the collective unconscious of a national identity. As an artist, I am interested in the myriad images that manifest for a viewer when they think of the spectacle of American pop culture, its domestic archetypes, and the material worship it revolves around. My …

Winter Solstice, Jingwen Cao

Masters Theses

For a long time, I have been thinking about what contemporary photography is, what its position is, and what the relationship is between artists and audiences. At the same time, I was developing my concepts and photographic directions and trying to make my work and my perspective on photography relevant. Winter Solstice includes a series of essays that locate my thinking and my work. Its title references the longest night of the year.

The position of photography has changed significantly over the past few decades. The way people read photos is also changing. Perhaps because of reverence for art and …

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

The Fuller The Bucket Is, The Harder It Is To Fly, Jacob Littlejohn

Theses and Dissertations

My abstract paintings are informed by the momentary sublime rooted in the vastness of the natural world. Based on imagined and real landscapes, the work evokes minutia and phenomena that affect our perceptions of reality, and signifies a longing to reconnect with the natural world.

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

In A State Of Becoming, Benjamin Conley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses his Master of Fine Arts exhibition titled, In a State of Becoming. The exhibition was on view at the Tipton Gallery in downtown Johnson City, TN from February 26 March 8, 2024. In a State of Becoming showcased three large scale paintings, five multimedia prints, two sculptural installations, and a video projection installation. Conley's thesis research and current artistic practice revolve around the interfaces, connections, and relationships of humans and animals. Conley explicitly uses language like "animal" to describe "non-human animals" in his work's context. The exhibited works focused primarily on how the artist and/or the viewer …