Fine Arts Commons^™

Camping Out, Mike Linskie

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores my personal mythology, and its relation to all things found not only in my studio practice but the work itself. Biographical anecdotes are shared as well as ideas on drawing, home décor, collecting, craft, art history, storytelling, and camp. Camp provides the space in which all aspects of my practice and work reside.

Untitled, Adriane Connerton

Theses and Dissertations

This text is an exploration of the ideas and work that I made in 2014.

Necessary Movements, Janelle Proulx

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis follows the trajectory of my artistic practice over the past two years which has led me to the creation of the installation REVERB. While incorporating performance, installation, and video into my modes of creation, I’ve likewise expanded my conceptual research regarding the influential capabilities of touch, gesture, and environment. By focusing on the relationship of REVERB to a broader discussion regarding these themes, I hope to situate the work among its art, cultural, and scientific referents.

The Devil Can’T Find You If You Hum: Post-Environmental Conductivity, Thomas Burkett

Theses and Dissertations

What would a repositioned concept of environmentalism look like, one that is specifically determined by the geography and the human rights at stake within the environmental politics of a place? I am interested in determining how performative engagements act as an art form that counters dispossessing industrial, political and environmental regimes. Within this discussion of environmental dispossession I will discuss ways I have used drawing as a conceptual space to explore resistance, redefine cultural capital and challenge archeological structures of knowledge, through my presence and protest.

Untitled, Michael Hunter

Theses and Dissertations

The following is an exploration of ideas and themes related to my studio work, past and present, concrete and aspirational. I approach painting as an experience of pleasure and as a mode of resistance and critique. I will discuss how my work is aligned with many of the themes found in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s. I will also identify alliances that my work has with DIY, networks, and the contemporary art scene as discussed in Lane Relyea’s "Your Everyday Art World". I describe my mode of working in the context of "workable resistance," which Jan Verwoert …

Child As Other: The Crisis Of Representing Childhood, Cynthia Henebry

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores my own work in the context of historical and contemporary representations of children. Because the child’s experience is essentially unknowable to the adult, issues of control that are always at play between photographer and subject are highlighted when an adult is the photographer and a child is the subject. This is evident when we examine and compare the photographs of children that have so far existed as well as the contexts in which they were made. While I believe that complete resolution of these issues is all but impossible, my work and research is motivated by a …

Anti-Heroics, Modesty, And Bad Taste, Philip Hinge

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis work revolves around investigating painting’s relationship with “bad taste” and heroism. By comparing my paintings to illustrative depictions of “heroism”, artists who turn bad art good, ideas concerning modesty, humor, and invention I will contextualize my stance towards “heroism” and bad taste. By establishing my relationship to the aforementioned examples I will trace the growth of my work over the past few years and discuss how its role within contemporary painting has changed as well as how it interacts with various cultural references.

Waveform Analogy, Experimentation, And Optimism, Aaron Storck

Theses and Dissertations

This paper offers a contextualization of my art practice, within particular trends in contemporary art and its discourse. It traces an expressed interest in networked objects, and the indeterminacy of meaning in art; from researched examples and texts, through specific expressions of these ideas in my thesis art exhibition. The paper then outlines key areas of practical interest to the experimental viability of my art practice. The paper goes on to explore the relationships between indeterminacy, experimentation, and creativity in the arts; within the context of an original thought experiment that draws an analogy between topics in physics and the …

In The Right Mirror: We Are All Gods, Aaron Koehn

Theses and Dissertations

I look to the common and mundane as sources for inspiration and imagination. In an attempt to evolve a veneer away from representing a coveted material, I have taken phenomenological events from my own personal experience and have searched for commonalities with them to create a new idea for veneering. My exploratory use of Google as a grammar-less machine deciphers the very nature of naming and its ambiguous attachment to an image. I am interested in the multiplicity of personal associations that become attached to images, and the subjectivity thus involved in the naming of an image.

Transformational Directing: An Analysis On How Leadership Affects The Creative Process, James Clayton Winters

Theses and Dissertations

Leadership is often ascribed as a quality one either possess or doesn’t. We often hear phrases like “She is born leader” or “All eyes are on you”, these are thrown around without discretion in the classroom, conference rooms, social gatherings, and business meetings. This work contends that leadership and in particular leadership that grows and transforms its participants is less an inherent character trait, than an outlook and set of core principles that lead to transformation. Through the application of current and developing business leadership theory and its effect on creativity and a cross analysis of “Best in Class” theatre …

Studies Of The Middle Class, Scott S. Stanard

Theses and Dissertations

I create oil paintings and drypoints that bring attention to scenes of American middle class life. I present crowds of people engaged in community activities and festivals. This enables me to depict a cross section of the residents of a given region. I also create a counterpoint to these peopled gatherings by painting and drawing the exteriors of middle class homes. In my work, I attempt to imbue a sense of intrigue and pathos.

I work from candid photos that I take of people and their living spaces. In these photos, I modify and delete elements to optimize narrative and …

Fred Kabotie, Elizabeth Willis Dehuff, And The Genesis Of The Santa Fe Style, Jessica W. Welton

Theses and Dissertations

Those scholars who have overlooked the relevance of Fred Kabotie and the Santa Fe Style he developed have missed an important historical segment of early Native American painting. This dissertation underscores the convergence of diverse intellectual, artistic and cultural backgrounds, especially those of Kabotie and Elizabeth Willis DeHuff, his first art teacher, which led to the formation of the Santa Fe Style in 1918. This style was formative for Dorothy Dunn’s later Studio School at the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School.

This first generation of the Santa Fe Style of watercolor painting was empowered by highly educated men and women, …

Full Export, Thomas Simon

Theses and Dissertations

The presentation of a variety of research pertaining to the graduate work of Thomas Jefferson Simon and his thesis show "Full Export".

Modular Envelops, Rotem Tamir

Theses and Dissertations

This texts in about my thesis show; Modular envelopes which was presented in the Anderson gallery at may 2013. The text speaks about my individual process of making both this particular work and art in general.

A Hole In The Wall, Carl Marin

Theses and Dissertations

A collection of life experiences, and inter-monologues that attempt to shed light on my artistic process.

Fragments Of Social Life, Rachel Leah Cohn

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines selected events from biography and how those events have influenced my philosophies about art-making as well as the work I have produced while a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University. This thesis is an attempt to give an expanded context for my work through various lenses, including the personal, the traumatic, the historical and the material.

No Love For Illusion, Alexander Hayden

Theses and Dissertations

I remember being young and being told that birds had special pads on their feet which prevent them from getting electrocuted when they sit on electrical lines. I was told on a different occasion not to put my finger into electrical sockets, so, one day I tried a key. I do not have special pads on my hands. In middle school science class I explained the fascinating pad theory to my class only to find out that I was wrong, and if I aim to be so serious sometimes, perhaps I could at least be funny.

We Dream Of An Age That Is Equal To Our Passions, William Winks

Theses and Dissertations

We dream of an age that is equal to our passions is a series of soliloquies and ideas that look at the false narratives I tell myself in order to get out bed in the morning, at the depression that came after failed revolutions, at the unrealistic hopes of my politics, and of my desire to become a whole human being.

Remembering To Look Down: A Thing Not A Thesis, George Ian Mcmahon

Theses and Dissertations

Thoughts on magic, spectacle, arena, material, materiality, marrow, invincibility, repetition, performance, sculpture, time, decay, temporality, tools, marks, gestures, writing, coaxing, site, stage, architecture, and movement.

Shift, Gittins George

Theses and Dissertations

Using Eduard Manet and Alex Katz as an entry point into my work, I will discuss seven of my paintings in detail. I will examine formal structures within the work such as color and space and how they relate to the content. I will discuss ideas of voyeurism and notions of the gaze while examining film as a presence. Artifice, art history, desire, personal memory, nostalgia and everyday life are starting points for formal explorations within the work.

Hissār, Sohail Abdullah

Theses and Dissertations

Hissaar is a noun and a verb, it is the periphery and the extremities, and the walls and the fortress. And it is to encircle, to wrap and to contain. This paper is an inexhaustive account of thoughts, experiences and lessons learned, of varying forms that influence my aesthetic sensibilities, my art-value system, and my art- ethical concerns. They provide for my art the impetus for its perpetual (and perhaps circular) journey. It is about finding connections between the fraying ends of free floating ideas. The following fragments explores how words make ideas, ideas make images, images make memory; memory …

Naturalis Historia, Reconstructed, Sarah Briland

Theses and Dissertations

When Pliny the Elder wrote Naturalis Historia around 70 A.D., the idea of natural history contained and connected biology, geology, and mineralogy with the history of painting and sculpture. Art was an extension of the natural world as its materials were extracted from plants, animals, and, particularly, mined and quarried pigments, stone, and metals. In my developing body of work, Incidents of Naturalis Historia, Reconstructed, I combine wasps’ nests, architectural fragments, and other found objects excavated from my surrounding environment with elements of glass that resemble lichen, crystallization, and geologic specimens. These works simulate artifacts of an alternative history; one …

Locus, Claire Krueger

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores my practice as it has progressed into video and video installation. I detail my use of cinematic tropes and mechanisms as they function within a spatial installation. I discuss the relationship of my work to other artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Kevin Cooley who also deal with themes of landscape, spatial displacement, and video viewing. My work has evolved to video installation from a need to experience the traditionally flat viewing plane of photography in a more experiential way. The Locus installation is multi sensory, in that it addresses smell, …

Chapter Three, Ruby Troup

Theses and Dissertations

Where does the story begin and what are the different chapters? What forest is she traveling through and where does she store her baggage? Where are the doors that she needs to open and why must this path, follow her like a shadow? What does she shelter and what does she let sit out in the rain? What does she allow to fracture and will a wall be broken? Is she searching for something that can be found and did she leave enough breadcrumbs to find her way back?

Underlying Conditions, Mariam Eqbal

Theses and Dissertations

The following is a collection of lines, curves, and dots on a plane, representing words fashioned to communicate my ideas about relationships between the thing and the nothing. This thesis is like a map, a contour drawing, an assortment of lines, speaking my thoughts about things in relation to space and time. As something moving, developing into another thing, as a thing sentient, I am viewing, performing, and processing incremental acts. I am looking at water and I can see my reflection break into a thousand pieces. It is like watching time.

Subduer, Lauren B. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

By reclaiming and translating the use of material in my work, I speak of oneness on a basic physical level. As the body in the images slips in and out of focus in abstraction of material, the objects patiently wait to be interjected into the composition of the space as a whole.

The Economy Of Indifference, Nicholas Irzyk

Theses and Dissertations

The following monologue examines the personal, cultural and ethical viability of abstraction in a contemporary painting practice, conducted on the eve of my thesis exhibition.

Birds Of Prey, Shauna Kirkland

Theses and Dissertations

As a child growing up, I was always in love with the ritual of “dress up”. Whether it was my dolls, various reluctant pets, or myself, it was always an activity I loved. It is not surprising then that adornment has become the medium through which I express myself and bring my fantasy world to life. Jewelry and accessory have the potential to lead many lives. One particular piece can change entirely by putting it on one body as opposed to another, or by removing it to see it as an object. In fashion, the body is the canvas and …

Day Folder, Raewyn Martyn

Theses and Dissertations

Provisional or unfinished images, forms and actions can sustain their status by continuing to change. This can resist programmed experience of their state, and shift their relationship as images within time. The sub-aesthetics of the unfinished and entropic can alter our understanding of where and how images are formed and located within time. My paintings each exist within their own emergent systems of time, structure and productive disorder. This thesis discusses these ideas in relation to DAY FOLDER and other work made during my MFA studies.

Query: How Does The Never To Be Differ From What Never Was?, Robert Scott Whipkey

Theses and Dissertations

The feeling of a narcotic cannot be put to words, just as the sensation one receives from her or his favorite artwork is impossible to record. Equally, both these delicacies of modern existence must be sought out. The user/viewer only gets a tiny taste and must therefore keep coming back for more. Utopia may be an unrealistic construction of culture, but I would posit the idea the both narcotics and art strive to give us just that – however tiny a taste. This paper addresses the intersections of visual art, drugs, anti-hero worship and contemporary representations of Romanticism throughout the …