Fine Arts Commons^™

Flow And Performance Competency In Modern And Ballet Dancers, Ella Wilson

Scripps Senior Theses

A qualitative investigation is proposed to examine flow experiences in professional ballet modern dancers in order understand the nature of this psychological experience. It is not well understood where and when professional dancers experience flow, and whether or not their subjective experience is correlated to what an audience evaluates in a dancer’s performance. The study of performance quality and subjective experience of the dancer has not been studied within the dance movement analysis literature. This is an important topic to research to further understand what factors facilitate or debilitate a professional dancer’s well-being. This study aims to determine any facilitating …

The Room Without A View, Antione L. Leonard

CGU MFA Theses

My work excites conversation about the creation of aesthetic sensations on the human eye while confronting ideas about the pervasive effects of beauty on the mind, body, and emotional sensitivities. Imagination is integral to my work, both in terms of how I make paintings and how they demand to be seen by viewers. I create individuality with the use of an anti-institutional spray paint next to institutional oil paint. I search my everyday lived experiences to find information that has been taken for granted to enhance my art, through natural behaviors within and outside of my studio environment, physically drawing …

Magic Bullet, Karen Haydock

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Two of the most powerful types of corporations in the world today are those that produce pharmaceuticals and weapons. While the corporations are concerned with increasing their profits, we wonder if their products have any magical powers.

[India ink on rag paper]

This poster explores the military-industrial complex. The weapons industry profits through imperialism. The pharmaceutical industry profits through by taking advantage of people’s illnesses.

The poster has multiple interpretations, hopefully encouraging the viewer to participate by asking relevant questions, such as:

“What is that person drinking?”

”Are they pills or bombs?”

“Medicines cure us - how can a pill …

Tunnel Boring Machine At Night, Alex Vietti

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

My paintings of construction workers tell how they transform the world, turning old buildings into ghosts using jack hammers and wrecking balls. From their daily labor, they give birth to the new structures. Buildings, bridges, the houses we live in, give us a feeling of security needed to perform our daily tasks. The luxury of stasis, manifested brick by brick by laborers, is assured to be provided to those preoccupied with the function of these structures. Observing them working has given me the chance to look into another world, a constantly fluctuating world that lays the foundation for my own.

Pigs Feet, Jesse W. Standlea

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

My sculpture “Pigs Feet” has literal foundations upon casts of live pig’s feet. I locally sourced the pig’s feet before casting them. My sculpture makes use of a once cutting edge casting technology, alginate. Alginate molds were once the standard in dentistry. Alginate is an appealing casting material as it is refined from brown seaweeds, is both food and skin safe, it is suitable for educators, for artists and engineers alike.

Prancing Shadow Connecting Worlds, Tiffany D. Randle

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

The practice of being conscious about the environment and how shadows, light, and movement create an intellectual space for different interpretations allows the viewer to make their own associations. Concrete, the ground that people of different shades walk on, to one person can look and seem like an ethereal and unknown environment, but to another may seem like a moving body of liquid. When artists stop and look at the simple things such a concrete, and water, or passersby they can capture a moment in time that transcends the mundane and suddenly the artist is in a position to present …

Reference Frames And Movement, Michael S. Russell

CGU MFA Theses

The subjects I investigate are often symptomatic of society’s nervousness and its shortage of self-criticality. I search for phenomena that at one time felt strange and new, but have since been accepted and reduced to being commonplace and unchallenged. My drawings take a position of political ambiguity and exemplify the condition of cultural fatigue that arises out of our instant media climate. By not passing judgment on issues that may be present, such as violence, race, our faith in technology, or even the art world, my drawings point to conversations greater than themselves. This level of detachment allows for the …

Tiktak, Fang Li

CGU MFA Theses

TikTak

My works present the inherent nature of space and light. A chemical process is approached in a way, which has similarly quality to a natural process. I’m interested in how the material can change itself and how I can manipulate that change. Transparency, reflection, pattern, harmony, and movement are engaged.

I use a wide range of materials as much as to match my ideas and the form. They are presented in simple, unified or repeating forms. There is a physical, innermost satisfaction in the activity of working with simple materials. I materialize them and allow them to be both …

Standing Still, Young Tseng Wong

CGU MFA Theses

I am drawn to the in-between — to movement at the corners of the eyes, to the moments between one breath and the next. When we want to catch such moments we stand still, we pause, we wait, "with bated breath." At such moments, I believe, the potential exists for taking on different perspectives and for finding other points of view.

Standing still, in a state of stillness, is an action that encapsulates many of my concerns. My work takes form in objects and architecture that collaborate with bodies moving inside them. The space is structured, not as a system, …

Nothing's Wrong, Christina Mesiti

CGU MFA Theses

I adjust the edges of materials both physically and intellectually. I work with flexible containers. Physically, I push two or more materials together so that they can find their own form, their own edge. I pour the plaster into different kinds of flexible emptinesses like envelopes or discarded gift wrap so that the two materials can exercise their own material agency and vitality, the materials working with themselves and the space to decide their own inevitable shapes. I allow the pieces their own logic.

I want to level the space, the objects, and the viewer so that none of the …

Belly, Evan Trine

CGU MFA Theses

My thesis discusses the ideas from my MFA Exhibition, involving image creation, data and information appropriation in digital media and contemporary fine arts.

Ecotones, Chas Schroeder

CGU MFA Theses

My work explores the intersection of pastoral, urban and idiosyncratic visions. It may reveal the aesthetic and emotional possibilities inherent in the broad-ranging subjects I employ: game animals, advertising, colonialism, love, numerals, textiles, drugs, abstraction, competitive sports, displacement, architecture, gender-bending, civil-rights movements, transgressive literature, social media, indigenous peoples, graphic design, glamour, fashion, hip-hop, rock-n-roll, graffiti, cowboy, exhibitionism and other niche cultures in America. Pieces emerge intuitively via personal narrative and lodged memories as guides. The disjunctive compositions are a breed of contemporary formalism mated with abstraction.

Making History: How Art Museums In The French Revolution Crafted A National Identity, 1789-1799, Anna E. Sido

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper compares two art museums, both created during the French Revolution, that fostered national unity by promoting a cultural identity. By analyzing the use of preexisting architecture from the ancien régime, innovative displays of art and redefinitions of the museum visitor as an Enlightened citizen, this thesis explores the application of eighteenth-century philosophy to the formation of two museums. The first is the Musée Central des Arts in the Louvre and the second is the Musée des Monuments Français, both housed in buildings taken over by the Revolutionary government and present the seized property of the royal family and …

Grotesque Depictions And Seduction: Exotification Of Asian/American Women, Mabelle Bong

Scripps Senior Theses

My senior art project is an exploration of contemporary representations of women of Asian descent in the United States, specifically looking at issues of body image, sexuality, and exotification. I will examine the lack of representation of Asian women in America in media and art, specifically painting and mixed media. Ultimately, I will elucidate on why I chose this topic and used certain techniques and materials to explore the contemporary features and symbolic representations of Asian women in America.

Queering The Freeways: Deconstructing Landscape And The Potential In Spaces Of Destabilization, Anna R. Aqua

Scripps Senior Theses

Abstract

This paper begins by introducing the concepts of urban anthropology and poststructuralism that lay a basis for my project and referencing some of the themes that will be explored in further chapters. Chapter I analyzes conceptualizations of Los Angeles in terms of center and edge, and discusses the ways in which Greater Los Angeles can be an interesting site in terms of queer possibilities of built spaces. In Chapter II the focus shifts to Los Angeles freeways, distinguishing them as in-between spaces of the built landscape and examining how they have been conceptualized by prominent scholars and artists. Chapter …

The Biomorphic Grotesque In Modernist And Contemporary Painting, Audrey Howell

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper looks at the concepts of the biomorphic and grotesque in art from the start of the 20^th century to the present with a focus on painting and drawing. Included in the discussion of the grotesque throughout history are the works of Dadaist Otto Dix, painter Georg Baselitz, and feminist artists Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta. Each used grotesque imagery to comment or react to a larger sociopolitical issue. Biomorphic artworks from the 20^th century are mentioned as well, with specific examples of work by Lee Krasner, Willem DeKooning, and Hans Bellmer. These artists together …

Labor, Vera Bauluz

CGU MFA Theses

I make sacred objects from scratch, from ready mades, from industrial materials, and sometimes from trash or recycling. I treat those objects with love and reverence to embed them with essence and soul. I propose conversations with objects exquisitely executed, that question our social order and the machine, easily understood by everybody, although still challenging our understanding of contemporary art.

The placement of the work and the lighting, as fundamental part of the installation, attempts to generate strokes of conscience that enhance human understanding and capabilities beyond a specific discourse.

Humor and sacred coexist in my installation and in my …

Sally Bruno, Sally Bruno

CGU MFA Theses

My investigation starts with an examination of color, form and line. It continues with an examination of how these elements collide and collude to form objects both abstract and representational. What interests me is the intersection between formal abstraction and representational imagery. My goal is to combine these practices in a rigorous, epistemological inquiry into how human beings make sense of their surroundings, using our minds and our bodies, our perceptions and our expectations, to come to understand the visible world and our embodied relationship to it.

Making Rich Use Of "Leisure", Augusto Sandroni

CGU MFA Theses

I make paintings, drawings, installations and sculptures using oils, acrylics and everyday materials such as burlap, reclaimed wood, cardboard and duct tape. More than any other, Matisse’s work was always a point of reference. Everything I do is partially informed, even if not directly by the work of my predecessors, with Matisse toping the list: the element of joy, play and expression of visual beauty is something I’m not ashamed to strive for. I also embrace risk taking, not conforming with establish norms or methodology; I’m always hoping for novel ideas and methods to infiltrate my workflow.

From The Inside Out, And Through., Dominique Ovalle

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

These photographs describe “Science” born of consumerism, hijacked by me, economically disenfranchised, or rather—temporarily embarrassed, artist. I was putzing around Malibu—my old college stomping ground, looking for free food; maybe a sample of some gourmet $5 chocolate, and all I got were these photographs.

Musings From A Year Of Ste[A]M...How It Looks Walking Down The Path, Ruth Catchen

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This is a follow up article to one in the inaugural issue which describes the beginnings of implementing a STE[a]M curriculum in a school with a high at-risk student population. This article discusses the outcomes and the future after a year of STE[a]M.

Can Art Stress?, Bojana Joksimovic-Ginn

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Presented in this paper is an interactive, acoustic installation morphologically and functionally influenced by the evolutionarily developed phenomena of two particular defense mechanisms. The first one is the prey’s reduction of noise once a predator is detected; the second one is an internal physiological response to danger known as stress. Conducted in a manner of an experiment, this interactive artistic project has interesting and unpredicted results.

Mana & Ea, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This work, Mana and Ea, expresses Polynesian indigenous sovereignty struggles with colonialism and globalism in the Pacific Islands.

Crochet As A Model For The Elasticity Of Skin Cells, Jaqueline (Jackie) Bell Johnson

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

My artwork is a result of the exploration of materials through process. The sculptures I make are the solutions to problems of how to combine materials, and create structure and form that I am able to build and transport on my own.

Design In Nature, Farhana Azim

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Floral Designs are a combination of, line, form and space. By creating balance while incorporating all these three elements in proportion to the space allowed, with an eye on the use of color and contrast, enabling the smooth visual flow of the design one produces the perfect arrangement.

Would You Come With Me, Chin-Hsin Chen

CGU MFA Theses

I believe we are connected with everyone and everything around us, and we are all connected by invisible lines. In my generation, loneliness is common. We are living on the border of virtual and physical spaces, reality and imagination mix together and create chaos. We send out signals through both these virtual and physical spaces even though it is becoming harder and harder for us to tell the difference between the virtual and real world these days. But we still need these two world to process our emotions, to digest our daily stress, and to make sure that we are …

The Frozen Moment: Representations Of Space, Time And The Experiential In Installation Art, Alexandra Trimm

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper examines the history of installation art and explains the concept and themes within my installation component of the studio art major. It details how readymades, site-specificity, and an emphasis on experiential work all contributed to the creation of installation art as a medium. Next, I turn to my own work, exploring the theme of representing time and altering the perceptions of the viewer. Through a web of fishing line and tempered glass, the installation visually imitates a single, frozen moment of an explosion that the viewer can walk into and explore. The paper continues with a discussion of …

Indefinability2013c.E., Clayton T. Ehman

CGU MFA Theses

I am a multidisciplinary artist; because I am committed to art that engages a broad array of subjects and ideas. This is reflected in my works which consist of diverse mediums and processes including graphic design, digital imagery, printmaking, painting, sculpting, poetry, song composition, clothing, website design, drawing, video, lighting, installation art, abstract art, Op art, conceptual art, political art, black light art, maximalist art, and various combinations of these.

Falling Apart While Awake, Crystal Erlendson

CGU MFA Theses

Crystal Erlendson conceals surfaces with irreverent, ornamental gestures to reveal a daft logic in space.

Find additional websites of the artist's work here and here.

Bearing Likeness, Christine M. Salama

CGU MFA Theses

The world is saturated with images and things. I have chosen to put more images and things into the world. In doing so, I complicate and further saturate these connections, but I also find clarity and answers through the mark, the gesture, the image, and material. I make marks with materials that are closely related to the meanings of the things I depict. The images and objects I make are ones that I know and understand because they are close to me, but the process of making leaves room for inquiry and unfamiliarity with these same objects.

I am guided …