Visual Studies Commons^™

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

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.

Diy The Process Of Healing From Trauma Through Woodworking, And Living Off Grid, Rachel A. Pollock

Theses and Dissertations

DIY is a website and short hybrid documentary that explores off-grid living, the longing for authenticity and healing from trauma. It is also about clinging to memories, even ones that may be painful, and the desire to move on. The website, Bare Minimums explores healing through the written word, and the short documentary “Home Is Where You Park It” explores the processing of trauma through video. They are two different approaches that evoke completely different emotions and outcomes. Processing memories and trauma through these mediums shows a kind of nostalgia for what once was, mixed with uncomfortable feelings that anticipate …

Contestant Theology: Toward A Play Theology Of Religions, Greg Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How can a Christian theology of religions navigate the interreligious dialogical problems of 1) the inability to fully articulate faith, 2) the lack of persuasive religious language, 3) the reality of violence among religions, and 4) the liquescent “truth” of modern times? This dissertation answers this question with a theology of religions considered through the lens of play theology. Contestant theology navigates these problems as 1) a space of cooperation and contest which 2) incorporates assertiveness (exclusivism), compassion (inclusivism), openness (pluralism) and free participation (Trinitarianism) to 3) hold together enriching and diminishing relationalities among diverse religious peoples with a view …

Cause Branding Lizzo And The Body Positivity Movement, Natalie Pesqueira

Whittier Scholars Program

Known for her songs about self love and acceptance, Lizzo has become a body positive icon and a role model for so many people with larger bodies since her rise to fame. This paper is an analysis of Lizzo’s place in the current body positive moment as a fat, Black woman and the ways in which she has been forced to participate in fat activism and fat resistance due to her identity. This paper will also analyze the ways in which Lizzo’s shapewear brand Yitty is branded– is it positive inclusion or is it a case of cause branding?

“Everything And Nothing”: Exhibiting Irishness At The Chicago World Fair Of 1893, Jessica Bocinski

English (MA) Theses

This project employs a cultural studies approach to investigate the overlapping productions of Irish identity at the Irish Villages of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Conceptualized and designed by two British philanthropists and businesswomen, the Irish Villages presented an Irishness shaped by Ireland’s long history of colonial rule. For Irish Americans living in the United States during the late nineteenth century, the Irish Villages offered a particularly well-suited opportunity to present an identity that would facilitate their acceptance into American society. Rather than challenging or negating the colonial representations of Irishness that existed at places like the Chicago World’s …

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. …

Representations Of Time In Time-Based Media: An Exploration Of The Human Experience Of Temporality In Film And Tv, Nelea Fong

Honors Thesis

Time is an aspect of the human experience that fascinates us but eludes our understanding. Humans have turned to science, philosophy, and theology in our endeavor to understand time, but our shared love and history of storytelling drives us to explore temporality through visual medias that have a structural foundation in time. Expanding our understanding of the human experience of time through time-based media such as movies and TV can point us toward comprehending various forms of time and how each person can perceive said time differently. Using film and TV theory, informed by scientific and philosophical explorations in the …

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 …

I Come Creeping: Remembering The Battle Of Blair Mountain In Graphic Narrative, Ellie James

Senior Honors Theses

Between August 24 and September 4 of 1921, approximately 10,000 West Virginia coal miners marched to Blair Mountain in Logan County in a militant stand for their right to unionize. Despite its status as the largest labor uprising in United States history, few know or understand the impact of the Battle of Blair Mountain today, even within the borders of West Virginia. This creative project aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to memorialize this period of the West Virginia Mine Wars through the creation of a 10-page comic, titled I Come Creeping, which depicts and is informed by the …

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 …

Pathos, Spring 2023, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Stephanie Gresham

The Migrant Communities Of South Sioux City, Graciela Deanda

Honors Thesis

The Migrant Communities of South Sioux City is a photographic series that showcases the individual stories, intimate spaces, older generation insights and hopes for their future lives. Stories are a great way to connect with, inspire, and influence humans. Personal storytelling—the kind that reveals who we are and what we care about— are the most potent and effective ways to connect with the world around us. This project seeks out the stories of migrant workers living in the same region but from different countries. In this series, I ask questions to hear everyone’s stories and allows others to hear and …

Baraka: A World Without Words: A Guided Meditation, Wanda E. Avila

Journal of Religion & Film

Baraka: A World Beyond Words (1992) is a guided meditation that aims to induce the transcendent experience in the viewer. Through the eyes of a Zen Buddhist monk, the viewer is invited to meditate on the various phenomena that testify to the existence of the transcendent (the first eight chapters), to experience the everyday world where the transcendent is painfully absent (the next eleven chapters), and to finally arrive at stasis (the last two chapters). This paper is a description of and commentary on each of the 21 chapters of the film.

The Owl House: Queerness And Witchcraft In Modern Media, Gray E. Takahashi

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

The Owl House is a groundbreaking television series on Disney Channel created by Dana Terrace. The show follows Luz, a young human, as she makes a new home for herself in a magical realm called the Boiling Isles. (Vorrasi-Banis 102). Within the series, there are many queer elements, in terms of literal LGBTQ+ representation as well as in a more expansive and critical sense. The Owl House is unique because of its willingness to break and queer a multitude of social conventions. This paper examines the evolution of the witch as both figure and trope of patriarchal resistance as well …

Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes a diffractive, onto-epistemological approach to everyday practices with salt in order to articulate an expanded understanding of meaning making and knowledge production. This research reckons with and challenges dominant modes of knowing that engage a Cartesian perspective to situate knowing as the exclusive domain of the mind in both form and topic of inquiry. This research acts simultaneously as both a direct practice of and metacognition about knowledge production by examining 1. the embodied (including sensory and emotional aspects) and 2. the relational (including interpersonal and socio-cultural) dimensions of experience as visceral knowing. This articulation of …

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), …

Sitting Here With You In The Future: Reimagining The Human Through Digital Art, Jared Z. Sloan

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This paper presents a novel construction of the Human that arises from digital art. Taking an interdisciplinary approach incorporating perspectives from queer theory, afropessimism, science and technology studies, and more, I analyze the works of three digital artists: Lucas LaRochelle, Arafa Hamadi, and Natalie Paneng. I chart the ways in which these artists negotiate borders between the physical and digital, human and non-human, and real and fantastical to challenge hegemonic Western ideas about humanity and the individual. I claim that by restricting the information available to the user in various ways, the picture of the Human that emerges from each …

The Influence Of The Abraham Accords On The Visual Coverage Of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict In Arab Media: A Comparative Analysis, Mona Alsaba

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the influence of the official signing of the Abraham Accords on the Arab media visual coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This study operationalized visual frames in terms of the human-interest vs technical frame and peace vs war frame, and explored the use of graphic portrayal as a framing device, in order to compare between the Arab media visual framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before and after the official signing of the Abraham Accords to examine the impact of foreign policy on the coverage among news outlets of different Arab countries. A comparative analysis was conducted relying on …

Metamorphis, Luca Lee Sobarzo Faust

Theses and Dissertations

Web3D interactive experience that explores time, communication, and transformation, from a personal storytelling perspective. Hosted on a web platform, the experience displays three environments: Metamorphis, Cuir AI, and Hain. These spaces propose a fragmented narrative that seeks to interrogate both the characters and the viewer’s perception on the linearity of time

Developing Mexico: History, Architecture, Photography, And Esther Born’S The New Architecture In Mexico, Tyler Considine

Theses and Dissertations

Esther Born’s The New Architecture in Mexico (1937) presents the first survey of Mexican modern architecture and documents early works by Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, among other Mexican modernists. This thesis examines Born’s architectural photography alongside that of Lola Álvarez Bravo, Guillermo Kahlo, and other photographers and within discourses of modernity, history, and representation.

Gallery Film And Contemporary Chinese Art : On Yang Fudong’S Beyond God And Evil-First Chapter And Endless Peaks, Bingxi Wang

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Gallery films are cinematic installations assembled and displayed in an art gallery as a combined exhibition of moving images and contemporary art. As such, a gallery film signifies the evolution of film presentation from a black-box screen to a white-cube space, a characteristic of contemporary art. This research examines Yang Fudong’s (b. 1971) two exhibitions Beyond GOD and Evil-First Chapter (Suzhou Museum, September to December 2019) and Endless Peaks (ShanghART Gallery, November 2020 to January 2021) by employing theories from art history as well as film and media studies, including theories of Chinese landscape painting, discourses on the picturesque and …

Rodcon, Program, 2023, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Contents:

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Rescue Politics: Richard Mosse’S Thermal Imaging And The Containment Of Migration, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

This article focuses on a body of work by Mosse that includes the multichannel video installation Incoming, shown as a 52:12 minute three-channel video installation with 7.3 surround sound, and the photographic series Heat Maps (2015–2017) (Fig. 1). While Incoming concentrates on migration routes, Heat Maps portrays the architecture of refugee camps.4 I consider how the artist’s use of thermal imaging and his immersive mode of documentary complicates tropes used to represent migration. I reflect on the way Mosse’s artwork intersects with a long-standing interest by practitioners and theorists of film and photography in the idea of the camera as …

Magic Show: Themed Experiences Utilizing Animation, Emma Cuitino

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Magic Show is an animated short film created in the Unity game engine that follows a mischievous fairy named Faye, who attempts to deceive her human audience, the viewer, into believing she can do magic. My goal in the program was to create a themed entertainment experience. I created a point-of-view animated film as an alternative to traditional theme park 3D/4D attractions that typically take place in a theatrical setting with large audiences. This allows for a more intimate experience and accessibility in the absence of a physical theater. The storyline itself is a study of imposter syndrome. Instead of …

Uno Sguardo Oltre I Bordi Della Fotografia Coloniale, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Interface: Technology & Portraiture, Mullins Sydney

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2023

In Interface, five Kentucky-area artists explore a new language of representation with the aid of digital tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automatic Facial Recognition Software (AFR). Some artists use algorithms to alter celebrity faces beyond recognition, others feed data sets of existing art to AI models in an attempt to generate portraits of no one in particular. Others still create tools for understanding the very act of facial recognition or obfuscation. All have one thing in common: they wish to stretch the limits of and critique the genre of portraiture, as well as to cause viewers to question …

Rodcon, Flier, 2023, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

RodCon
Saturday April 1, 2023
10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Free & Open to the Public
Rod Library, UNI Campus

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Mascs: Masculinity Reimagined, Josh Porter

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2023

MASCS: Masculinity Reimagined explores how performances of contemporary masculinities can counteract traditional binary understandings of gender. Justin Korver, John Paul Morabito, Betsy Odom, Moises Salazar, and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell expose, question, and subvert the ways that we culturally define masculinity by focusing on gender as performance. These artists not only critique cisgender, heteronormative binary understandings of masculinity, but also embrace the performative nature of gender and celebrate non-normative, alternative, and queer masculinities. By encompassing a range of gender and sexual identifications, these artists share their own personal experiences, interpretations, performances, rejections, and embodiments of masculinity. Breaking down the barrier created …