Fine Arts Commons^™

Complete Issue 1, Volume 9

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

The complete issue 1 of volume 9, Landscapes Journal.

Pathos, Spring 2019, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Sadie Jordan

Reworking The White-Masculine Ideal, Steven H. Gonzalez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This text functions as an exploration of self through artistic practice, a designated space for reflection on contemporary Queer experience. In looking specifically at the permeation of the idealized-white-masculine figure as found within Western visual culture, social media and gay pornography become isolated as sites where these figures are commonly found. This line of inquiry defines how the ideal is reified through these differing digital platforms and the social implications the homogenized male form has on raced individuals. In addition to determining the image of the perfect masculine physique through research, this text expands on how its' imaged representation becomes …

Advancing Film Through Art & Design: A Study Of The Influence That Film And Fine Art Have On The Independent Film Market, Jamall Rashaud Mcmillan

Masters Theses

The Influence of Graphic Design and Fine Art in Film is a exploration into the impact that an investment of the arts has on film and more specifically the independent film market. Most independent filmmakers have to develop their productions with little to no budget. In doing so they must work to create a marketable film to the best of their ability. There in-lies the issue; they are doing it to the best of “their” ability. The issue that is in focus with the notion of ability is that a major component that is left out of the equation to …

En Quête D’Image(S) : L’Emploi Des Archives Pour La Construction D’Une Mémoire (Visuelle) Palestinienne, Charlotte Schwarzinger

Regards

By relying on the works of two Palestinian directors – one being a found-footage documentary and the other an experimental piece – this article examines the importance of archives in the elaboration of Palestinian visual memory. Through its complex cinematographic history and the “missing image / ‘invisibled’ image,” Palestinian creators today use the medium of film to bear witness to their presence. The author aims to think through the use of archives in this struggle against invisibility and toward the recognition of a history, a culture, and a memory that are constantly threatened by erasure. At the border between historical …

Iconoclasme, Blasphème Et Liberté De L’Art, Hassouna Mansouri

Regards

Based on two films – La Ricotta by Pier Paolo Pasolini and The Message by Mustapha Akkad – this paper examines the relationship between art and religion. At the core of this debate lies an opposition between two semiotic approaches, defined by Umberto Eco as in verbis and in factis. In dealing with works of art, I will highlight the connection between these two concepts and the idea of “The Open Work.” I will then argue that the conflict arises from a shift in the debate from aesthetics to politics, and thus revolves around a certain margin of tolerance …

الهامش باعتباره خياراً والتحلّي بالهشاشة مقابل العنف, Abdullah Al-Kafri

Regards

.قراءة في بعض ما يُقدَّم ضمن مشهد فنون الأداء في بيروت خلال عامي 2017 و2018

« Regards », Nouvelle Formule, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Après vingt ans d’existence, la revue Regards se métamorphose entièrement. D’une revue annuelle limitée à une diffusion interne et rédigée en grande partie par des enseignants et des étudiants de l’Institut d’Études Scéniques, Audiovisuelles et Cinématographiques (IESAV) de l’Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth (USJ), elle passe à une publication semestrielle et comprend désormais un comité scientifique et un comité de lecture internationaux. Elle s’ouvre également aux contributions de chercheurs et d’universitaires, aussi bien locaux qu’étrangers...

Mémoire Et Conflit Dans « Le Dernier Jour Du Printemps » (آخر يوم في الربيع" 2018") De Fidaa Zidan, Najla Nakhlé-Cerruti

Regards

Last Day of Spring (آخر يوم في الربيع" 2018") is a monodrama written and performed by Fidaa Zidan (فداء زيدان, b. 1989), premiered in July 2018 at the National Palestinian Theatre/El-Hakawati in Jerusalem. The play tells, in the first person, the story of a young girl from a Druze village in the Galilee who finds herself alone with her parents after the death of her brother during his military service in the Israeli army, compulsory for men of the Druze community in Israel since 1956, and who had been buried in a military cemetery. The sister wants to fulfil her …

La Mémoire Comme Ressource Et Enjeu De Lutte Dans Les Documentaires Syriens De L’Après 2011, Nicolas Appelt

Regards

In Syrian cinematographic creation – essentially documentary – which escapes the control of the regime, memory occupies an important place in the representation of the conflict that tears the country apart. Drawing from three Syrian documentary films shot after 2011 – Houses without Doors, 194, Us Children of the Camp and The Taste of Cement – we will put into perspective how the memory of one side is mobilized as a resource for representing the conflict, including after leaving Syria, and, on the other hand, how it is an issue in reclaiming the story of this conflict, in a …

De L’Historien Au Citoyen : Une Nouvelle Génération D’Artistes Libanais À La Conquête De La Réconciliation D’Après-Guerre, Joséphine Parenthou

Regards

Twenty-eight years after the ceasefire, the Lebanese civil war remains a constant theme for Beirut artworks and speeches, whereas society and institutions have made it a taboo. Art constitutes a fortunate entrance for apprehending the social world and its evolutions in a context of a long post-war period. The effectiveness of the reconciliation process, even its takeover by artworld actors, can be measured through unofficial paths. Moreover, the transformation of war social representations within the artworld, between a war generation and a post-war generation, reflects a redefinition of both the artist’s figure and function in its relationship to politics: formerly …

Decay As Political Metaphor In Ely Dagher's "Waves '98" And Mounia Akl's "Submarine", Joey Ayoub

Regards

Lebanese cinema serves as a useful tool with which to assess postwar dynamics given the dominance of the civil war in artistic production since 1990. As the first postwar generation reached adulthood, we have been witnessing the inevitable rise of a “second wave” of postwar Lebanese cinema – defined as the generation of filmmakers born towards the end of or after the civil war. This essay analyses two postwar Lebanese films, Ely Dagher’s 2015 Waves ’98 and Mounia Akl’s 2016 Submarine, as unique responses to a feeling of despair brought about by the city/nation, explored through the theme of …

Ya Omri (104 Wrinkles) De Hady Zaccak, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Elle est dure, la vieillesse. Simone de Beauvoir en sait quelque chose. Ici, l’âge de Henriette (104 ans), l’héroïne du film et grand-mère maternelle du réalisateur, ne laisse place à aucun euphémisme. Elle n’est pas une personne âgée, ni une femme d’un certain âge, mais bel et bien une vieille, et même une très vieille dame, car les stigmates des années vécues sont flagrants […]

Entretien Avec Hady Zaccak, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

Pourquoi un film sur votre grand-mère ? Aviez-vous un rapport particulier avec elle ou vous vous êtes intéressé à elle parce qu’elle est un cas rare d’une centenaire encore alerte ? Quand est-ce que vous avez commencé à la filmer ?
Un film sur ma grand-mère car le documentaire est un moyen de lutter contre la mort et de préserver la mémoire de ceux qu’on aime […]

« Cinematheque Beirut » Entretien Avec Nour Ouayda, Yara Nashawaty

Regards

En juin 2018, Cinematheque Beirut, un projet dédié à la conservation de l’héritage cinématographique libanais, fut inauguré par l’association Metropolis Cinema. Ce dernier-né est sans doute son projet le plus ambitieux, car il résulte d’une multitude d’initiatives déjà mises en place par l’association et ne pourrait réellement évoluer qu’en s’inscrivant dans la durée. De plus, miser sur la préservation d’un héritage en danger relève d’une lourde responsabilité auprès d’un public souvent sceptique, témoin impuissant du bafouage, voire du sabotage, de son héritage culturel depuis le début de la guerre civile, puis durant la période dite de reconstruction dans les années …

Filming Against The System In North Africa: Pioneering Women Documentary Makers And Their Common Aesthetics, Stefanie Van De Peer

Regards

This article draws attention to the pioneering women of North African documentary making, and specifically their work in addressing the image of women on screen in rapidly changing societies. Highlighting the creativity of the filmmakers in defying the contemporary censor or addressing taboo topics such as women’s rights, the history of women contributing to politics, or women’s roles in the wars for independence, this article uncovers neglected “feminist” histories and the ways in which women documentary makers tackle audio-visually challenging topics. The films under discussion show their creative potential to address difficult themes through a poetics of permissibility. This is …

Recipe For Disaster, Zac Travis

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

Today’s rapid advances in algorithmic processes are creating and generating predictions through common applications, including speech recognition, natural language (text) generation, search engine prediction, social media personalization, and product recommendations. These algorithmic processes rapidly sort through streams of computational calculations and personal digital footprints to predict, make decisions, translate, and attempt to mimic human cognitive function as closely as possible. This is known as machine learning.

The project Recipe for Disaster was developed by exploring automation in technology, specifically through the use of machine learning and recurrent neural networks. These algorithmic models feed on large amounts of data as a …

Behind Closet Doors: Horror And Dislocation In The Queer Closet, Corey C. Allen

Theses and Dissertations

“Behind Closet Doors: Horror and Dislocation in the Queer Closet,” is composed of a collection of sculptures, videos, and sound works that are directly associated with themes of horror and anxiety derived from the precarious space of the queer closet as detailed in this thesis of the same name.

(And I Can't Stress This Enough) In My Mouth: Extradiegetic Affect As Material, C. Klockner

Theses and Dissertations

(and i can’t stress this enough) in my mouth: Extradiegetic Affect as Material is a non-linear exploration into the structures of feeling that exist in relation to cinema in its role as a technology for generating subjectivity. In the development of this research, a proposal of cinema’s likeness to the ecological circulation of microplastics is drawn in order to illustrate cinema’s materiality and nearly invisible ubiquity. The notion of extradiegetic affect is outlined as a post-cinematic condition in which lived experience becomes secondary to cinematic representation and which, simultaneously, becomes directly shaped by engaging with these representations.

Pathos, Winter 2019, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Sadie Jordan

Graphic Content Warning; Personal And Political Traumas, Emily K. Wardell

Theses and Dissertations

The written portion of this thesis work is meant to address and further investigate the visual work created using mediums of print and found video. This artistic research has been interested in examining varying associations with truth, recollection, and evidence. This includes the recollection of public histories and news-media narratives as well as my own history and trauma. Through this work my aim was to create a deconstruction and revolt against how associations are formed, and how to understand imagery as information. This thesis first discusses my relationship to appropriated imagery, then connects and examines it through the addition of …

Humans Aren't Boxes, Art Isn't Finite, Brianne Alta Humphreys

Theses and Dissertations

I am bored. All around me are systems that perpetuate repetitive, reductive, and mundane modes of living. In an attempt to counter a culture obsessed with singular ways of existence and bite-sized perfection, I utilize moving mediums of video and performance to dive head first into a vast array of sloppy sincerity. The crisp, white-washed, analytical, and restrictive is loudly replaced with the empirical, haphazard, and instinctual. My intention is to create and encourage raw, performative-based work that is as multifaceted as unbridled life itself. This alive and physical practice hosts a conglomeration of sweat, memories, heartbreaks, hymn singing, line …

Pathos, Fall 2018, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Sadie Jordan

Illusions Of "Blackness" In Contemporary Visual Culture, Michaël Dorn

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

My thesis begins with a primer of the historical concept of “black(ness)” and the roots of its racialization. Intertwined throughout my discussion in Section I, I will highlight a few of my research findings and discuss some of the installation images that I created as I studied the work of contemporary artists who use lexical and literal figurative “blackness” in their work—in particular, the oeuvre of Kerry James Marshall as featured in his retrospective exhibition Mastry. My discourse unfolds with a brief etymological review of both the English word “black” and its precedent conceptual forms in Section II. Section …

Complete Issue

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

The complete issue 1 of volume 8, Landscapes Journal.

Murmur/Murmuro, Paola M. Di Tolla

Theses and Dissertations

By using repetition or misplacing intonations and accents, etc. one can imitate the slipperiness of spoken language. However, it is the accidental slippage that I find most revealing and exciting because it allows for two conversations to exist in one. Once spoken language is transcribed as text, it is put through another filter and the risk of [accidental] slippage increases by a different measure. Fingers don’t keep up or autocorrect insists on taking matters into its own hands.

Private Rainbows, Mikey F. Estes

Theses and Dissertations

I make art that refers to how the self is mediated through structures, objects, and images — a kind of self-portraiture that circles around its subject, reflecting a state of simultaneous formation and disintegration. Over the past few years, I have used my iPhone as a tool to make images of everyday life. As the user of this device, I am defined by both my presence and absence. I am interested in the process of locating the self within the scattered yet ordered space of the screen.

Learning Culture: Cultural Relationship In Masked Lanterns, Yuxuan Ding

Graduate School of Art Theses

Culture shock, or culture conflict, is the unfamiliarity or disorientation an individual experiences after encountering a culture different than their own. To better understand the people around us who share a different culture and the way of life it creates, we need to first respect and understand their culture. In general, Chinese culture stresses that individuals must see themselves as part of a larger group for the benefit of society, while American culture stresses the importance of individualism.

Based on my experiences in graphic design, I decided to further my studies in a studio art context to understand how the …

It's Pink And Nice But We Are Done With It, Taylor Elizabeth Yocom

Graduate School of Art Theses

My work in video, installation, performance, sound, and photography is influenced and inspired by my experience of being a woman. In my work, I draw pink flowers and create pink backdrops. I smash things, eat, drink, drop things, smile, nod, and look at you. Through these works, I explore the gender performativity of female niceness, synthesizing these two separate theories as a social condition and expectation for women. I argue that female niceness consists of bodily and linguistic patterns that women must perform in order to be perceived as feminine.

In my video and installation work, I use a “sickeningly” …

Stray Cats, Christian P. Chesnut

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This paper details the making of Stray Cats, a University of New Orleans thesis film. It examines the process of creating the film in three parts. Part one will detail the pre-production, including the conceptualization, writing, and preparation for the project. Part two will cover the production, including the directing, production design, cinematography, and on-set operations. Part three will describe the post-production process, including the editing, color correction, sound design, and musical score. These three components will then be referenced in regards to the theme of the film, and will conclude by analyzing whether or not the final film …