Fine Arts Commons^™

A Hazy Bliss, Anna Joo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones. These last she had bought to tone in with the new dining-room carpet. Yes, that did sound rather far-fetched and absurd, but it was really why she had bought them. She had thought in the shop: "I must have some purple ones to bring the carpet up to the table." And it had seemed quite sense at the time.

When she had finished with them and had made two pyramids …

On Remembrance, Ashley Lee

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My works are inspired by autobiographical memories — especially those that are traumatic. However, the works rather discuss the nature of how memories are recalled, stored forgotten, remembered, manipulated, constructed, reconstructed, and destructed. Memory is a pseudo reality, that grounds on past events but is different from the objective truth. Memory is one’s own creation, which is formed by the body and mind through time, space, and experience. Then it is stored in the mind, within the infinite void of dimensional space. In my writing, I’ll explore John Sutton’s Philosophy and Memory Traces, Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida, Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed …

Interspace Suit, Moriah Okun

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My thesis work investigates the transformative possibility of mediating the space between ourselves and others, the tension between solitude and loneliness, and the disconnects between mind and body, personal and shared experience, and artist and viewer. The basis of my process is stitching and coiling — a practical and symbolic act of joining together material that serves as structure and surface. I am inspired by work that explores this middle space, like that of Archigram, Lucy Orta, Lygia Clark, and Ernesto Neto. These artists first showed me what it was possible to create when the viewer’s body becomes the site …

The Record In Question, Kari Varner

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis is an archive composed of text and image that catalogs the perpetual distance between the photograph and its subject. In my practice the fluidity of representation is examined through the frame of the photographic archive, while the notion of what constitutes a photographic archive is redefined. While seeking to describe the mutability of encounters with landscapes and past memories the materiality of the photograph is emphasized, the image and its substrate destabilized, and both experience and photograph are fleeting. In many cases water acts as the alchemical substance for transformation, leading the photographs closer to a state of …

Art And Science: Blurring The Poetic And The Analytical, Caitlin M. David

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abstract: Despite a modern conception of art and science as being fundamentally opposed, both have at their core a desire to explain the inexplicable. Their investigations and the communication of the results of these investigations can be blurred at both poetic and analytical junctions. Vivified abstract thought, or the poetic, can be thought of as instigating the ubiquitous desire to explain the inexplicable. Fruitful analysis of resulting data and representation of that data must consider the idiom of both art and science if it is to successfully cross between them, and special emphasis must be placed on the diagram as …

The Void Between Us, Hannah D. Blumer

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My interactive thesis installation, The Void Between Us, addresses the topic of human connection in relationship to the body. The human body marks a physical barrier between one’s self and others. While we exist in the same physical sphere as one another, our minds are isolated in our own self-centered versions of reality. Our bodies allow us to perceive others and be perceived—including having verbal communications—and, therefore, could be seen as helpful or restrictive in the social world. However, our bodies also allow us to engage in physical interactions with others, such as sex, which is a means to …

The Vital Ambiguity Of Surface: Culturally Determined Notions Of Metaphor And Performance In Contemporary Building Material, Christopher T. Campbell

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis investigates the systems and information decipherable within a material surface; more specifically, those ideas of value, performance, and function we may infer from the surface of contemporary building materials. When these materials are reduced to their flattened image, the cosmetic facade of a surface has the capacity to inform as well as deceive. Additionally, we may see in materials outward properties, such as color or tactility, the capacity for metaphor and the application of a symbolic personhood. This thesis seeks to comprehend the ways in which these expectations become fodder for complication and paradox, and promote a perceptual …

Interspace Encounters: Parkview Gardens, Madeline Marak

Graduate School of Art Theses

The undertaking to render an experience tangible reveals the inadequacy of the techniques and technologies of representation to transcribe the perception of ubiquitous, yet unnoticed, spaces in the urban environment. The work of Madeline Marak contemplates overlooked and forgotten spaces that are unnoticed by busy, preoccupied minds. The work advocates for slowing down… considering… and being present. This thesis refers to writer Rebecca Solnit and her anthologies on the subjects of walking, wandering, and getting lost to advocate for activities that preoccupy the mind and facilitate freethinking. The humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan is quoted in argument for a direct engagement …

Exercises On Overcoming Perfectionist Tendencies, Jake Yoo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my latest series, I investigate my neurotic perfectionist tendency through repetition of phrases that I understand to be true in my head, but have a problem with accepting it in my heart. This way, I am studying my personal biases and the way I perceive the world in order to break free from unwanted behaviors and process negative emotions. Louise Bourgeois is a historical precedence to my practice as whole, while the series functions similarly to Yayoi Kusama’s dot and net paintings—a psychological portrait achieved through continuous repetition of a few elements.

Artificiality And The New Image: The Image Body, Liza H. Butts

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This paper sets up a historical argument for how images exist in the world and how artists relate to these images. The questions of the paper are concerned with defining the “Contemporary Image” and looking at how the digitization of all the images in our world affect the art object and the experience of art in the physical world. The conclusion and answer to these questions is found in a resistance to images that oversaturate our culture. This resistance occurs by looking to the painted image to function as a body in the world; aware of its existence, responsive to …

Changing Human Relationships Through Interactive Art, Daniel Shieh

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In our current society, there is a constant endeavor to reconcile our differences while respecting our individuality. Since the 1990s, a large amount of artworks begin focusing on human relationships. In this essay, I discuss the question: how can interactive artworks create common ground between people while respecting their individual identity? Through creating a sequence of interactive artworks, I determine the three factors that are necessary for connecting people of different backgrounds—mutual vulnerability, anonymity, and the leveling of power dynamics. Mutual vulnerability entails an interaction where two people reveal themselves to each other, and connect through this reciprocal action. Anonymity …

Rewriting History: The Press As A Tool For Destruction And Preservation, Emily L. Mogavero

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This statement describes my two bodies of work, Aufheben and Artist-Hero/Squish, in which I use printmaking processes to rewrite history. In Artist-Hero/Squish I mimic canonical paintings of women by modernist male painters and run my quotations of these paintings through the press while the paint is still wet on the canvas. Through this process, I examine, confront, and change the male-dominated history of art. Aufheben currently includes one hundred drypoint prints that catalogue the personal history of my mark. This series represents a process of constant change, with individual prints suggesting stages of my process including moments of growth …

Abstraction As A Form Of Redaction, Alex P. Derosa

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abstraction as a Form of Redaction acts as an explanation of the personal and conceptual basis of my three bodies of work titled the dimension of intimacy, notations of the mind, and medical signifiers. Examining contemporary art through the lens of the self, I have created work that is present in conversations about intimacy, abstraction, self-portraiture, and feminism. Though my work does not directly address contemporary feminism, I am using this work to reclaim my body, my mind, and my space as an act of agency. The work, when looked at as a compilation, functions as an autobiography. …

On Assemblage And Erasure, Dante Migone-Ojeda

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Through textual and visual research, I assert that the root cause of the injustice that drives my work and the work of the artists within my thesis paper is erasure. I attribute this erasure in large part to the role of neoliberalism upon the world stage, and it’s pervasive global influence. While neoliberalism did not create inequality, it has codified it and through its relentless push for “progress” it has propped up a dynamic of oppressor and oppressed. This in turn leads to simple categorization and ultimately erasure. I posit that my work not only makes this erasure visible, but …

Rhetoric: The Art Of Using Language Effectively, Eric Burwell

Graduate School of Art Theses

My thesis is constructed of fifty text modules, each containing 100 words exactly. These modules express my technical interests, my personal history, and artists that influenced my writing and paintings. The module form enables me to concentrate my thoughts about how I approach personal studio methods and constrain personal limitations that direct my writing into poetry. The methods employed in the writing also correlate with my paintings. Many of the modules address methods I use in constructing my paintings; arrays of gestural marks of language and sometimes specifics words. I choose to arrange these letterforms in gestural fields of color. …

Of Ghosts And Garage Sales: The Painted Realizations Of Reflective Nostalgia, Rachel Ahava Rosenfeld

Graduate School of Art Theses

Painted from the lost snapshot photograph collections of strangers, the Testimonial paintings represent both the mythical potential of earlier times and the maddening reality that no matter what details are revealed, they can only ever be ghosts of the glories and tragedies that preceded our own. In the search for their stories, for their truths, for their absent memories, everything and everyone that we could have known lies dormant. The ghosts, the legion of “selves” arise from the questions asked of the paintings, and through the invented answers that activate the fractured past. In order to do this, I analyze …

Zeitgeist: An Artist's Present Perspective, Danielle Leventhal

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This statement is an analysis of my process in creating a zeitgeist collection of painted portraits. The pieces in this collection began with a live, in-person session with each of my subjects, all of whom are my friends: females ages 18-22 at Wash.U. An interest in the brain and mirror neurons, as well as Susan Stewart’s idea that the face is a “text” that must be read in order to exist, is what enabled these portraits to become a psychological examination of the spirit of our time. The material process of collapsing layers of time, emotions, and thoughts on the …

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream, Carla G. Steppan

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Focusing on the devaluation of monumentality identified by architects in the mid-twentieth century, this paper examines how the reduction of form throughout the history of architecture and how such reduction affects space framed by such architecture. By applying the malleability of symbolic meaning to a closed set of symbols, the nature of the set is re-made and subsequently manipulated to theoretically set the stage for a romantic narrative. A formal interest in reproduction and repetition serves a conceptual interest in allusion of forms in the creation of the illusion of narrative and romance.

Cuba A La Yuma: In, Around, And Millennial Thoughts, Zoe Kline

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The camera phone prompted a new stylistic approach that has created an outlet for inexpensive and democratized photography, seemingly giving anyone the revolutionary ability to be called an artist. It is because of this that photojournalism, as an art practice, is losing its intrinsic ambitions — to employ visual storytelling to, more effectively than written word, foster positive social and political activism. Photographs of war and marginalized people in society have become both exploitative and dehumanizing in their treatment of both photographic style and relationship to subject and have only numbed their viewers to today’s atrocities. I look to find …

Wax Bodies: Candles, Queerness, & Taking Up Space, Moya Shpuntoff

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My partner and collaborator Callaway Fox and I use queer surrealist installation, craft practices, and performance in order to address queer and disabled temporality, articulating our experiences as disabled queer femme artists through abstracted and literal exploration of femme bodies in space. In performance and installation works Hospital Performance: Part I and Hospital Performance: Part II, we responded to our experience of marginalization, medical malpractice, and emotional isolation, ultimately exploring queer and disabled temporality through queer surrealism. Hand-poured scented candles became metaphors for queer and disabled bodies, and along with other craft practices used in this work, are a …

The Lifted Shadow, Xinyi Xie

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The Chinese shadow puppet tradition is one of negotiation: where the local (folktales and traditions) meets the national (“culture”?), and the national (??) meets the international (???). It is a cultural practice in which the "masses" create "entertainment," which is then intellectualized and "refined" by social (and cultural) “elites.”

In a nation that has rejected "feudalism" in the past, the shadow puppet tradition is one of many at risk of being commercialized and exported as national commodity. It offers potential cultural “heritage,” soft power to go hand-in-hand with China's economic and industrial might. When a nation has produced everything and …

Crossing The Divide: Art As Mediation And Pilgrimage, Sophia Keskey

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Founded on my personal experiences of growing up in an interfaith household and my high school semester abroad in Israel, my artistic practice seeks to build bridges between people, connecting diverse communities across divides (cultural, religious, economic, racial, ethnic etc.). Through two process, mediation and pilgrimage to self, specifically in using myself as an active participant, I argue that the process of making can become the neutral ground in which to build relationships and begin to imagine coexistence.

Mediation is expressed by Homi Bhabha’s definition of negotiation: “The ability to articulate differences in space and time…to intervene in the forest …

A Borrowed Language, Yvonne Osei

Graduate School of Art Theses

Art has the potency of mediation: bridging human differences, questioning voids in historical trajectories, negotiating spaces of relevance, and most importantly, being signifiers that embody the absent. I speak in a borrowed language, a multilingual visual tongue, inspired by a culmination of Western and African Art modes of practices to create charged platforms for multicultural communication.

My art presents visual portals that allow for intercultural and interracial mingling as issues of colorism, present-day colonialism, gender inequality and the politics of dress are foregrounded for collective deliberation. The essence of the work is often activated and brought to its full potential …

“I Would Save You, But My Boobs Keep Getting In The Way”: An Examination Of My Art Through The Lens Of The Heroic Myth And Alternative Comics, Barrett Hollingsworth

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My artwork challenges the masculine, violent idea of the hero through utilizing the visual language of comic books, as well as autobiographical themes. In this examination of my work, I explore conceptual and visual precedents and relate them back to my own practice throughout. My essay establishes the idea of the contemporary American heroic myth by looking at Joseph Campbell, as well as more contemporary re-examinations and criticisms of his ideas, relating the modern myth to the superhero comic genre. Next, I explore the history of underground comics, specifically feminist autobiographical comics, and relate the works of artists such as …

Yung Ladies, Leah Nordman

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Yung Ladies began as an investigation into female representation and has expanded into a brand and even lifestyle. Founded as a space for female solidarity, Yung Ladies works to break down notions of what a young woman should be and simultaneously spreads our ideals and attitudes through our clothing line and social media presence. This paper spans the ideological movements, various forms of artistic media, and artist precedents that have inspired this project.Yung Ladies includes investigations into new media identities and notions fad ideological movements, consumerism and conspicuous consumption, and brand identity as a means of personal representation. These ideas …

Artificial Infinite, Brandon Daniels

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis examines the complex history of the sublime, specifically the sublime Void of the Romantics and the newer concept of the technological sublime. From there, I examine the genre of science fiction and it relationship to the sublime, the Void and the grotesque. I use specific examples such Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and a few others to better understand and apply these concepts. Beginning with these examples, I start to posit what role special effects play in how these films embody these philosophical concepts.

Building on this foundation of research, I go on to …

Contemporary Family Portrait: The Hidden Uncomfortable Truth Of Family Dynamics, Ji Won Park

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

This thesis examines the hidden aspect of family dynamic and questions the idealized convention of family portraits. Based on Erving Goffman’s theatrical theory of community, family as a relaxing intimate group in the backstage, the underlying tensions, conflicts, and power play are discussed. This thesis draws upon the familial issues and treatments of Leon J. Saul and Rhee Dong Shick to evaluate the family dynamic present in our domestic settings. As the lineage of family portraits from history changed reflecting the differing family values and uncomfortable truths, the idealized family portraits are re-evaluated and questioned to offer a truer description …

The Girl Who Didn’T Know She Wasn’T Singing, Rebecca M. Lothan

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

I am interested what is obscured by the mundane, diurnal nature of objects that surround us which uphold a comfortable rhythm that easily resists close observation. My thesis work examines states of flux, a body of work that is neither here nor there, but hovers in an in between area: in existing between painting and sculpture, in revealing transcendent qualities of the everyday, raising questions about value, and fundamental acts of seeing and considering artwork. context becomes key in framing the experience of the work, each piece is perceptually contingent on external factors; in viewership and the individual viewer experience …

1. What Is The Relationship Of The Finite Subject To The Infinite Ground? 2. How Do We Use Where We Segregate The Subject From The Ground To Construct Reality? 3. In What Ways Can We Destabilize This Constructed Reality To Highlight Its Inherent Instability?, Calvin M. Miceli-Nelson

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

This essay catalogs interests within my works and traces connections between these works and particular structuralist, post-modern, and post-structuralist themes. Artists influential to or congruent with the aims of my work are also discussed within this three-part essay around these discussions present in my work: 1. What is the relationship of the finite subject to the infinite ground? 2. How do we use where we segregate the subject from the ground to construct reality? 3. In what ways can we destabilize this constructed reality to highlight its inherent instability?

Talking To Boxes, Hugging Robots, Vita Eruhimovitz

Graduate School of Art Theses

Relationships between humans and technology are at the core of my artistic research. Human-machine communication is defined by the technological level of the machines, but even more so by the way they are perceived by humans. Concepts of artificial life and artificial intelligence gradually have become part of the everyday life of growing numbers of people, and while there is an ongoing effort to design an increasingly anthropocentric technology, our minds also adapt to the new technological reality. Through immersive installations and sculptural objects my practice explores this reality. My artwork is designed to communicate with and stimulate the viewers, …