Nest, Camillia Elci

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The major themes in this body of work are time and layers. These themes are linked by the materiality of the work. Intentional destruction and recreation, perpetually. The work is constantly being made, destroyed, and remade. It is always partly past and partly future. Nest is a self portrait displaying objects acquired and made over the past several years.

Spinning Plates, Anikó K.L. Sáfrán

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Spinning Plates is an intermedia exhibition based on multitasking, at times to an absurd level, to address the gendered division of care labor in a typical, heteronormative household. One hundred years into the pursuit of passing an Equal Rights Amendment, women are still taking on the majority of duties related to managing and caretaking the household and its children, even though most women have also joined the income-generating labor force. At the core of the exhibit are performance-based videos of the mother-artist multitasking, completing household chores, exercising, and creating art. Some of the artworks are action paintings, others are drawings …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

Buzz Buzz, Sarah Heinemann

Theses and Dissertations

Taking the form of a series of notes and notations, this document serves as an account of color in my painting practice as it intersects through personal memory, research, and my studio and professional practices.

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

New Animals, Alina Iakirevitch

Theses and Dissertations

To transfer the rhythms of the body into the earth, in Lippard’s language, one has to engage in a non verbal, illogical action. Art is the sphere of this action. Staying engaged with the unpredictable in us, the random, the primal, is the core of art making and encountering art.

Break Time, Quinlan Maggio

Theses and Dissertations

In this graduate thesis artist Quinlan Maggio describes their two-part art project in which they create site-specific private/public spaces and encounters within a larger public, specifically, that of the Hunter MFA community and its art-viewing audience.

Scene By Scene, Katita Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Katita Miller’s paintings and drawings depict quotidian scenes through the filter of an overactive mind. Populated by spectral figures and swirling portals, her interiors and landscapes fluctuate between the mundane and the fantastical. This paper explores the parallels between painting and theater and the context and process behind five paintings.

The Screen To Desire, Joseph Parra

Theses and Dissertations

Joseph Parra reflects on our often embellished online personas and their effect on our desires. Through luscious 3-dimensional painting Parra translates the seductive desire of the hypermasculine male-presenting figure through glorification and criticality. The tactile painting also acts as a rebellion to accurately represent “real” life on the digital screen.

Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes, Pol Morton

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores ideas of transness, chronic illness, and injury. Through assemblage and repetition, my larger-than-life paintings address the dissociation and fragility of a body that is unmapped by society. These autobiographical works attempt to locate the self when it is trapped, whether in a bed, in the home, or within the body itself.

I Still Love You, Despite Everything, Amy Bravo

Theses and Dissertations

My practice seeks to reconcile the family—be it a found, queer family, or blood relatives. Addressing ancestral conflict, the complications of US/Cuba relations and my physical and cultural distance from the island I hail from, my work offers another world for communing with those you cannot physically reach.

Meet Everyone With Art At Location And Time; M.E.A.L.T. Phase 1, Michael Louis Leblanc

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As an artist who participates in socially engaged arts, it is paramount in my practice to cultivate the balanced power relationship between the audience and artist by providing an ongoing safe environment, accessible subject matter and venue location, and a mechanism that not only calls for participation from the audience but empowers them through direct action. Meet Everyone with Art at Location and Time or M. E. A. L. T. Phase 1 is a mobilizable art exhibition with the long-term goal to meet the audience where they are and to offer an alternative to traditional person-to-person interaction and socializing.

M. …

Crying At Nothing But Colors, Maryalice Carroll

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

crying at nothing but colors is an installation of ceramic works that explores the abstraction of feelings, both physical and emotional. The installation itself is a house made out of tension cables that stretch wall to wall in the gallery space. Inside the house are 7 ceramic objects placed on wooden pedestals paired with tufted rugs.

Throughout this essay, I will describe the abstract ceramic objects as Beings. They are colorful and have textured glaze on the surface with a gloopy opalescent glaze oozing out of holes that cover each piece. They are an extension of myself. They are the …

As The Sun Yellows The Green Of The Maple Tree, Adam Fulwiler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the Sun Yellows the Green of the Maple Tree is a body of paintings investigating communication, improvisation, play, and painting’s capacity for transformation.

Reflecting on my childhood spent with my brother, Austin, who experiences sensory differences due to autism, I establish a painted space that is both forcibly disjointed and meaningfully connected, invoking the uncertainty and complexity of perception and communication. Through chromatic nuance, physicality, representational ambiguity, and visual tempo, I invite the viewer into the act of slow looking—to encounter each work as a living, breathing, individual entity.

In the studio, I invent rules and aleatoric devices, mimicking …

Boring Magic, Madison Svendgard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Boring Magic encompasses an interest in labor, boredom, and exhaustion. Simultaneously, I am exploring what relief and escapism from these things look like. Escapism acts as the core of my work- what escapism looks like and what creates the need for escapism. I create narrative pieces that are always slightly removed from reality as a way to reflect on what I view as present-day dystopias. The worlds built to create this work are a combination of my lived experiences and invented characters and stories, which culminate in an alternate timeline set in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Relating to …

Invisible Until, Markeith Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

“Invisible Until” explores my personal experiences while working full time at Tyson Foods in Pine Bluff, AR up until moving to Fayetteville for graduate school. The body of artwork comes from reflecting on past a present while drawing from inspiration from Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel, and more. Using history as a tool to break down the American struggle I used conversations amongst my high school classmates to pull from their direct experiences to convey life and what it means to come from Pine Bluff. By using real people and their life events of trying to achieve progress, …

Nba: No (Anti-) Blackness Allowed, Rontaye M. Butler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper serves as the foundational pillar in my art practice. This paper combines my experiences, influences, motivations, hopes, dreams, methodologies, historical research and contemporary analyses into a single document ripe for revisions. This document lives and breathes; its contents are constantly evolving, and should be continually challenged and evaluated for relevancy and validity. Part memoir, part manifesto, and part artist statement, it establishes where my work sits in the canon of fine art, even as I don’t know yet what that means. My writings, visual artworks and all other creative actions are tethered to this document and vice versa. …

Data Narratives: Aesthetic Activation Of Urban Space Through Augmented Reality, Conor Mcgarrigle Dr., John Buckley

Books/Book Chapters

This chapter discusses Data Narratives, a commissioned augmented reality artwork resulting from a period as artist in residence with Dublin City Dashboard. Data Narratives focused on working with city data to create hybrid artistic representations of Dublin’s ongoing housing affordability crisis, acting both as activist artistic engagement with the socio-political-economic space of the city and aesthetic activation of urban space through augmented reality. As data describes and defines so much of our digital every day, the project and residency programme asked how it could be leveraged as a medium for artistic creation and how could art supply new insights …

Line As Site And Material, Analise Minjarez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This paper recounts my artistic practice over the last three years. I will describe the places, artists, artworks, and processes that have been meaningful to me in this time as I pursued my MFA and worked to understand my relationship to the living world. In the thesis Line as Site and Material, I respond to materiality and site through installation, sculpture, drawing, and video. I work with clay harvested from my hometown of El Paso, TX to connect to the personal histories of the borderlands and geological time. In the Second River Series, I walk in the empty riverbed of …

..., Claire Alfonso

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Words are fickle, easily misunderstood, and often put us at a loss... but we all have so much we feel we need to express. This begs the question: Is there any safe way of communication? Can anything ever really be communicated how you mean it? Will you ever see the reflection of what you feel, think, and dream outside of yourself? In response to this existential dilemma, I imagine an alternative language of images, sounds, color, feelings, and non-identification. My thesis is a meditation on the issues with standard language and the idea of alternative language. In my argument I …

Echoes Of Home, Hanna Traynham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Echoes of Home, held at the Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, Tennessee on display March 15 through April 8, 2022. The author provides insight into concepts and influences relating to the creation of the exhibition with perspective on her intimate connection with place and memory.

The exhibit features five installations addressing home, elusive memory, and the change and continuity of cultural traditions over time. The works consist of a series of large-scale wild clay vessels, gestural clay bookends, a wall installation of cups with a line drawing, suspended porcelain slabs, …

Me Tengo Que Ir, Eddy Leonel Aldana

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In Spanish, me tengo que ir means “I have to go.” “I have to go” as in go home, or back to one’s home country. As in leaving home for the unforeseeable future, hang up the phone, or pass away. me tengo que ir is also the name of a song by Adolescent’s Orquesta — a song about love, loss, and heartbreak over time that was always played at family parties when I was growing up.

In me tengo que ir, I use world history and personal memory to examine my family’s place within the Guatemalan diaspora. Diaspora is …

100 Seconds To Midnight, Melissa Medina

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My artistic practice focuses on the concept of mortality and investigates the human condition. Through my work, I often personify the concept of death and investigate the several forms that it may take across several cultures. The skull is most often used as a symbol of mortality, and it serves as one of the key elements in my work. I am drawn to the elements portrayed in classical memento mori paintings, and as a result, I have borrowed certain objects commonly used in these works and have paired them alongside more modern elements to create a new narrative. With this …

Inequality In Renaissance Art; A Study Into The Lack Of Female Representation, Kaitlyn Anderson

Honors College Theses

This paper explores how female biblical figures were under-represented during the Renaissance period. It explores possible reasonings, consequences, and then takes a physical exploration into the renaissance style through newly created artworks. It also explores in greater detail, two specific female biblical figures, their multifaceted stories, and their previous portrayals. Lastly homage is paid to the female artists throughout history who have been working to level the playing field in the art-world.

New Myths And My Religion, Pallas Lane Umbra

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

New Myths and My Religion
Pallas Lane Umbra
Faculty Advisor: Katie Mitchell

As every civilization has had its myth and legends, this creative thesis project introduces a new mythology. This world is born of our own, shaped by the experience of growing up queer in the Appalachian South. There is a specific exploration of love, rage, and spirituality. Inspired by Greco-Roman mythology while also reflecting on personal experience, this body of work shares a visual, symbolic language that is interpretable; one myth can tell many stories. Along with this new iconography, the work strips the viewer of ease and comfort …

Craftivism Between Nationalism And Activism In Ukraine And Belarus, Alla Myzelev

Art History

This article outlines the history and significance of Craftivism in Eastern Europe. Using two case studies of artists it investigates the use of the craft language in Eastern Europe and its usability for activism. Do-It-Yourself culture, of which Craftivism is part, rejects the commercialism, gender norms and the conventional lifestyle in the Global North. Use of crafts as a language of political and social struggle allows to convey the message in a less confrontational but nevertheless very pertinent way. The craftivism is a successful language for the feminist political struggle in the Eastern Europe.

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.

Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei

Theses and Dissertations

This article elaborates Xiong Wei's inspiration and experience from different cultural, political, social systems and art environment as a Chinese artist living in the United States, and the logic and methodology of how he went from a social realist sculptor to a contemporary artist.

Long Time, Jacob V. Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Jake Reed’s work is driven by the idea that architectural ornament can be imbued with meaning not native to its construction or use. To find that meaning, he deconstructs and reassembles elements from the architectural and ornamental histories he studies, using the growing climate crisis as a generative framework.

Game Up (Exhibition 2022), Conor Mcgarrigle Dr.

Exhibition Catalogues

Game Up was an exhibition curated by Green On Red Gallery Dublin in Transmediale Studio, Silent Green Kulturquartier Berlin.

GAME UP seeks to get under the skin of our increasingly digital planet as a springboard to new thinking and new action through the work of artists, Alan Butler, Elaine Hoey, Conor McGarrigle, Rosa Menkman, David O'Reilly and Paper Rad/Cory Arcangel. GAME UP is a reckoning, a rear mirror view and a look at the future of our hyper-connected world.

What are the rules of engagement in this electronic superhighway and who is policing them? What …