Visual Studies Commons^™

Rodcon, Flier, 2025, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

RodCon
Saturday April 5, 2025
10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Rod Library
Cedar Falls, IA
Free and Open to the Public
Games | Costume Contests | Kidzone | Artist Alley

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Rodcon, Program, 2025, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

No abstract provided.

Arenas Of Resistance: How Oklahoma's Black Rodeos Preserved Environmental Wisdom And Community Power, Rorie Johnson

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how Black rodeos in Oklahoma emerged from post-emancipation agricultural labor and ranching traditions, serving as powerful sites of cultural preservation, knowledge transmission, and resistance to dominant narratives of the American West. Through analysis of historical records, photographic evidence, and personal family narratives, this research demonstrates how Black Oklahomans developed unique relationships with land and animals that encompassed both the "ecological burden" of agricultural labor and the "beauty" of cultural expression and community-building. Drawing on theoretical frameworks including Kimberly Ruffin's "ecological burden-and-beauty paradox," George Lipsitz's "Black spatial imaginaries," bell hooks' "oppositional gaze," and Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory," …

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 …

Architectural And Curatorial Extensions Of Extraction At The Royal Ontario Museum, Camille-Mary Sharp

Visual Arts Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

Embodied Visions: Interactive Installations That Reimagine Bodily Presence In Digital Imaging Apparatuses As Shadows, Yunzi Shi

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Contextualized within a history of technological development, the evolution of imaging devices and technologies is accompanied by the abstraction of spatial relationships between the body of the observer, the apparatus, and physical reality, which leads to disembodying experiences for the observing subject. Compared with devices and interactive experiences, critical reflection on the epistemological impact of digital imaging devices has less priority in computational imaging and human-computer interaction research. Taking an artistic approach, this thesis describes Embodied Visions, an exhibition featuring three interactive installations exploring the technical infrastructure for imaging and reflecting on the (dis)embodied experiences in the digital age. …

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 …

User Perception Of Gender Studies In Video Games, Quinn T. Gienapp

Honors Thesis

Alongside the increase in video game popularity, a subclass of games was formed that offer very unconventional gaming experiences. These games offer different stories that differ greatly from games made on multi-million-dollar budgets. Many of these types of games exist on the fringes of the industry and portray LGBTQ+ themes through their writing or gameplay. One of these games uses the medium of video games to process their trauma by relaying their own story. The game “He Fucked the Girl Out of Me” is an autobiographical video game that highlights the story of the Author and their experiences with …

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.

Retrieving Images From Tarnished Daguerreotypes Using X-Ray Fluorescence Imaging With An X-Ray Micro Beam With Tunable Energy, Tsun-Kong Sham, Y. Zou Finfrock, Qunfeng Xiao, Renfei Feng, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

We report recent observations using a synchrotron X-ray micro-beam to retrieve images from tarnished 19th century daguerreotypes. We confirm that high quality image can always be retrieved from tarnished plates using Hg Lα XRF as long as the bulk of the image particles and their distribution remains intact. We also report results from using tunable tender X-rays (2 - 7 keV) to conduct imaging in high vacuum at energy above the Ag L-edge and the Hg M-edge, extracting images using Ag Lα and Hg Mα, respectively among others (e.g., S to track corrosion). Images obtained with the surface sensitive total …

Cinema's Poetic Function: Creating An Amorous Distance, William Yonts

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The aim of this thesis is to examine how cinema can embrace its poetic function to avoid its assimilation into preexisting hermeneutic structures, which would leave it vulnerable to myth as defined by Roland Barthes, and instead be a generative force, encouraging its viewer to engage with the full potential of the text. This mode of spectatorship is termed the “amorous distance,” which Barthes describes as his simultaneous fascination with the film and that which exceeds it. The amorous distance finds further articulation through the work of Roman Jakobson and Julia Kristeva. Jakobson’s schema of six language functions describes the …

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 …

Trevor Paglen's Border Abstractions In The Age Of Machine Vision, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

Over the past two decades, machine vision and artificial intelligence (AI) have become integrated into many aspects of daily life, and with machines generating images for other machines, humans are no longer at the centre of the image world. To explore the implications of the age of machine vision, this article focuses on a selection of work by American artist Trevor Paglen made between 2008 and 2018. It examines the significance of the US-Mexico border region as a site of his investigations and the role of abstraction in repositioning machine vision within the human-centred visual language of art. The article …

Without Us There Is No Britain: Black British Photography And Film Networks, 1950-1989, Maria T. Quinata

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tracks three moments from 1950 to 1989, when images were put to work by Black photographers and filmmakers to stake individual and communal claims to Britain and Britishness: first, through the emergence of photographic portraiture taken in domestic living spaces during the 1950s to 1970s; second, through the Black Panther Movement and their use of photography in the late 1960s to mid 1970s, and last, with the efflorescence of Black film and video collectives in the 1980s. At each of these moments, I attend to the simultaneous production, negotiation, and co-mingling of new social identities that were diasporic, …

Rodcon, Flier, 2024, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

RodCon
Saturday April 6, 2024
10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Free & Open to the Public
Rod Library, UNI Campus

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Rodcon, Program, 2024, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Contents:

--- Welcome
--- Locations
--- Events Schedule
--- What's That?: Event Descriptions
--- Artist Alley
--- Food Options
--- Raffle
--- Additional Info
--- On Your Radar
--- Sponsors

War And Peace. The Film Iconeme Of The Urban Square As Image Of Europe In Transition (1944-1948), Paolo Villa

Artl@s Bulletin

A central feature of European urban landscapes, the square represents the public space par excellence. At the end of WW2 and in the immediate postwar time, the role of cinema in representing and reimagining urban squares was crucial. Through film images, they became the stage and the mirror of a Europe in transition. This contribution, examining Italian, French, German, and Czechoslovak cases, posits the square as an essential iconeme in postwar nonfiction cinema and visual culture, acting as a fil rouge to visually retrace the path of Europe from war to peace, and into new forms of political tension.

Photography And 21st-Century Migration, Sarah Bassnett, Blessy Augustine

Visual Arts Publications

No abstract provided.

Family, Diaspora, And The Politics Of Care In Griselda San Martin’S The Wall , 2015-16, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

This article examines a series of photographs by Griselda San Martin, a Spanish journalist and documentary photographer based in New York City and Mexico City. The series focuses on the experiences of people at Friendship Park, a bi-national park located in the border region of San Diego, United States, and Tijuana, Mexico. Working in Tijuana, San Martin engaged with families as they attempted to connect with loved ones across the border in San Diego. Many of the people she met at Friendship Park had become separated from family members after living as undocumented migrants in the US and then being …

Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang

Masters Theses

Disillusioned by my transnational identity, I have come to realize that my sense of belonging is no longer attached to any physical location, but instead to a state of mind, to an intimacy with the world. My notion of home is an obscure and unsettled—at times utopian—idea, which can be infinitely decoded, re-positioned and re-established psychologically. This thesis is an investigation of that liminal state, questioning the paradoxical place at the intersection of longing and belonging, interior and exterior, rootedness and uprootedness. Through a collection of short essays that accompany projects, I seek to unpack the precarious emotional complexities that …

Becoming George Lucas: From Avant-Garde, Auteur, Independent Artist To Studio Executive, Ryan Thompson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Because of the unprecedented popularity of Star Wars, George Lucas, the creator of the multi-media franchise, is one of the most well-known filmmakers in history. What makes Lucas’s relationship with Star Wars unique is that because the franchise has continually been exploited rather than left as a single unchanging, static text, its artistic value, along with Lucas’s legacy, is in constant flux and is often misunderstood. In other words, depending on Star Wars’s position in the public zeitgeist at a given time, Lucas is either revered, detested, or considered incompetent as a filmmaker. While there is no denying …

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

The Well-Tempered Android: Philosophical Posthumanism In Science Fiction Cinema., Cody Gault

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines philosophical posthumanism as a means for critical analysis of the interaction between humans and nonhuman androids in select science fiction cinematic universes. The interaction is analyzed through several facets, notably the interactions between humans and nonhuman androids, particularly as interactions between the human and nonhuman are often sites of violence. Chapter one is an introduction. Chapter two describes the development of philosophical posthumanism from humanism, also including an analysis of philosophical posthumanism, and how it can be used as a critical lens. Chapter three begins an analysis of science fiction cinema by examining the Blade Runner films …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Lars Gustaf Sellstedt: Art In Buffalo And The Buffalo Fine Art Academy, Shannon N. Gilmartin

History Theses

This Master’s Thesis Project researches the life of a forgotten Buffalo artist, Lars Gustaf Sellstedt. He was born in Sundsvall, Sweden and started his life as a sailor when he became a cabin boy as an early teenager. For most of his young life until his mid-twenties, Sellstedt was a sailor traveling to all corners of the world. He started his journey as an artist while in between sailing jobs. Over many decades he portraits locally and abroad mainly in the Caribbean Islands. Sellstedt was one of the few artists in 19th century Buffalo, sharing the profession with William J. …

Menetekel: Ishmael's Black Whale And The Semiotics Of Doom, Todd Tyner Cronkhite

English Language and Literature ETDs

This study employs the narrator of Moby Dick, Ishmael, as a focal critic to interpret several potential examples of ominous writing on the wall, or menetekel. It concludes that the message of such writing, owing primarily to its irrevocably deictic relationship with the surface it is written on, is fundamentally apocalyptic in nature, regardless of its explicit content. The physical walls of the “kingdom” are incorporated into the grammar of the menetekel as object, so that its elemental message, “I was here,” becomes not only an admission of criminal trespass, but also a direct threat to the current order and …

Animal Imagery In Eastern Han Tomb Reliefs From Shanbei 陝北, Leslie V. Wallace

Visual Arts

Wild and fantastical animals climb, fly, scamper, and prance across pictorial stone carvings decorating Eastern Han tomb doors in northern Shaanxi. Alongside dragons and other mythical animals, bears felicitously dance, tigers grin opening their mouths to roar, and other wild animals frolic in swirling cloudscapes. While the same animals can be found in Eastern Han tomb reliefs and mortuary art in other regions, their frequency, emphasis on plasticity and movement, and combination with the yunqi 雲氣 motif are unique to the region. Originating in a hybrid style of art that was created during the Mid-Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE), …