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Full-Text Articles in Fine Arts

I Saw Life, David Clayton Williams Jan 2012

I Saw Life, David Clayton Williams

LSU Master's Theses

My thesis embodies the uncertainties and reservations that surround one’s mortality. Dealing with the loss of my father who suddenly passed away two and a half years ago has sparked an emotionally driven artistic process. The abruptness of my Dad being alive one second and with little or no warning deceased the next has impacted my work tremendously. My goal has been to evoke and share the very human emotions that occur during the erratic stages of grief. This research acknowledges the ‘black and white’ absolutes of living and dying, yet those ideas are juxtaposed with the many gray areas …


Turn-On's And Edible Friends: An Imaginal Menagerie, Matthew Ryan Henderson Jan 2012

Turn-On's And Edible Friends: An Imaginal Menagerie, Matthew Ryan Henderson

LSU Master's Theses

Turn-on’s and Edible Friends explores alternative sexual behavior. Societal standards have an overwhelming interest in imposing judgment upon sexual identity. The imagery is influenced by taboo and peculiar sexual fetishes. Animal personifications of the fetish are used as satire to detach the viewer from the action, and also as a metaphor for the reins with which the general public takes control over our private relationships. Thus the work becomes confrontational with the viewer and forces them to question their perceptions and comforts about sexual identity.


From Here To There, Dana Statton Jan 2012

From Here To There, Dana Statton

LSU Master's Theses

The photographs in the series From Here to There are not a description of a place; instead, the images are about engaging in a particular type of looking. Elements of “here” and “time” are included in the work; by photographing a moment that will never exist again, transitory objects are imbued with importance. A tree branch drifts, a puddle evaporates, and light shifts, slowly, but immediately. In the midst of this change, my photographs represent specific moments. Integral to the work is the act of finding the photograph, as is the act of framing, taking, and making the photograph. Each …


Peacocking, Margaux Hymel Jan 2012

Peacocking, Margaux Hymel

LSU Master's Theses

My work attempts to express personal experiences and external observations of the present day western female ethos. Through visual depictions of forms with mixed media, my paintings convey females exposing themselves as sexual beings yet displaced in reality, as the illusion of their character is a projection based on environment and other people. Dressed in intimate garments with different hairstyles or wigs, I reference myself and create various extensions of my persona. Through these facades I investigate aspects of womanhood dictated by a cultural paradigm. I aim to create sexually charged scenes and explore the concept of perception, the internal …


Permitted Memories And Ornamentation, Salima Mohammed Hasan Jan 2012

Permitted Memories And Ornamentation, Salima Mohammed Hasan

LSU Master's Theses

Hasan, Salima, B.F.A, University of South Alabama, 2009. Master of fine Art, spring commencement, 2012. Major: Studio Art, painting and drawing. Permitted Memories and Ornamentation. Thesis directed by professor Denyce Celentano. Pages in thesis, 18, word in abstract, 116. ABSTRACT My thesis project is a collection of paintings and drawings that juxtapose iconic Islamic ornamentation with portraits of members of my family, both living and dead. The creation of images of living beings, particularly people, has long been banned in Islam and, as a result, the faces of my loved ones have long lived only in my memory. For my …


Color Locality, Michael Frederick Secor Jan 2012

Color Locality, Michael Frederick Secor

LSU Master's Theses

Secor, Michael, B.A. Art, Centre College, 2006 Master of Fine Arts, Spring Commencement, 2012 Studio Art Color Locality Thesis directed by Professor John Malveto Pages in thesis, 10. Words in abstract, 188. ABSTRACT I go outside to make small drawings and sketches of the local landscapes. My paintings are created in my studio. I use the lines and shapes from the drawings as a guide in making a design of color and space. This practice allows me to relate my enjoyment of the outdoors to my interest in color relationships. It is very important to me to spend time outside, …


Eight Thousand Daughters Woven Into Bayou Birds, Megan Marie Singleton Jan 2012

Eight Thousand Daughters Woven Into Bayou Birds, Megan Marie Singleton

LSU Master's Theses

Over the course of the last year I have spent nearly every weekend investigating this aquatic landscape by canoe, deciphering the differences between native and invasive flora and fauna. I am interested in ways that art can address the natural world. My thesis exhibition, Eight Thousand Daughters Woven into Bayou Braids, depicts and interprets the Louisiana landscape, exploring the destructive beauty and materiality of invasive aquatic plants.


Up Like Weeds, Danielle Burns Jan 2012

Up Like Weeds, Danielle Burns

LSU Master's Theses

A child playing with matches is forgivable. Kids are curious. They want to explore adult activities through play. Does it stay innocent when that child experiments with the effects of firecrackers in frogs and gasoline on animals? What happens when they light the match? The grey area between childhood innocence and realization of wrong intrigues me and I find it fascinating how adult perspectives of such malicious deeds often vary. Up Like Weeds questions these responses using a collection of narrative prints and freestanding woodcut figures. They visually tell five tales of children in a rural environment acting out in …


Visual Translation: A New Way To Design A Chinese Typeface Based On An Existing Latin Typeface, Yifang Cao Jan 2012

Visual Translation: A New Way To Design A Chinese Typeface Based On An Existing Latin Typeface, Yifang Cao

LSU Master's Theses

The visual consistency of branding makes a significant difference when successfully introduced to another culture. My study focuses on how to facilitate a smooth visual transition in western branding from Latin letters to Chinese characters. To move beyond traditional Chinese type design, Visual Translation introduces a new method for designing Chinese typefaces using existing Latin typefaces. This web-based educational tool seeks to help Chinese graphic design students and type enthusiasts, with emphasis on designers who are working in a cross-cultural environment to maintain visual consistency for branding.


Inside And Outside, Joshua Harry George Jan 2012

Inside And Outside, Joshua Harry George

LSU Master's Theses

The boxing paintings and drawings are not about fighting as much as they are about the fighter’s existence. Many of the images show the boxer training or in an isolated environment in order to show how methodical their lives become. I see boxers as sacrificial athletes, not only because their health is at risk, but also because they must separate themselves from loved ones during training, as well as abstain from certain foods in order to maintain a certain weight. Every boxer is an underdog, in a sense. They are all at risk of losing something, whether it is their …


Mesmerized, Katherine Knoeringer Jan 2011

Mesmerized, Katherine Knoeringer

LSU Master's Theses

This body of work is about looking and contemplating. Intense concentration requires solitude, which is why the figures that appear in the work are either literally isolated or seem detached from others around them. Sometimes the events the figures witness are ordinary, but more often their environments have mysterious or whimsical qualities. The whimsy comes from two places; fictional literature and childhood fantasies. Reading connects me to things and ideas outside of myself and allows the work to vacillate between the reality of normal daily observation and the mental escape of daydreaming. I want to make a place where everything …


Wiggle Veil (Or, Love Needs Objects), Adrienne Lynch Jan 2011

Wiggle Veil (Or, Love Needs Objects), Adrienne Lynch

LSU Master's Theses

The six sculptural works that comprise my thesis exhibition emerged from a prolonged series of investigations into the intricately interconnected phenomenon of embodied experience in the world as we know it. These works explore the connections between mysteries in our inner and outer worlds, taking as inescapable fact the notion that our bodily vessels, in all their complexity and subtlety, are the vehicles through which we encounter the world. As such, this work posits embodiment as both frame and anchor for all knowledge and experience. These sculptures, made from ceramic materials and mixed media such as sugar, salt, string, and …


Designing Graphic Design History: Teaching For The 21st Century Classroom, Phillip Peter Winfield Jan 2011

Designing Graphic Design History: Teaching For The 21st Century Classroom, Phillip Peter Winfield

LSU Master's Theses

Designing Graphic Design History: Teaching for the 21st Century Classroom undertakes the development of a web-based Graphic Design History interactive timeline (GDHit), intended as a user-generated online database for potentially all graphic design enthusiasts, but specifically faculty and students within the traditional graphic design history course. GDHit seeks to continue the implementation of new media and emerging digital technologies in a traditional, lecture-oriented environment by inviting the user (or audience) to contribute the content for the timeline, while fostering new forms of course engagement for students in this digital age. In keeping with the tenets of the digital age and …


The Quiet, Shannon Kolvitz Jan 2011

The Quiet, Shannon Kolvitz

LSU Master's Theses

The Quiet is a series of photographs that focuses on nightly travels in South Louisiana and Oklahoma. The images recall my time growing up in Southwest Oklahoma through the depiction of dismal yet riveting structures. The images are based on the idea of architectural ecology― that is, the relationship of architectural structures to one another and to their surroundings. I photograph isolated vernacular structures and pair them with other photographs to create a single panoramic image. By digitally merging complementary scenes, I create an illusion that derelict structures can exist as “neighbors.” The final results are seamless panoramic representations of …


Myths And Realities, Isoko Onodera Jan 2011

Myths And Realities, Isoko Onodera

LSU Master's Theses

My work explores the manifold personalities and roles of contemporary women, through depicting different female figures from western mythology. The mythic women in my paintings each have their own personalities, stories and roles to play, which are often conflicting in nature. By having my model act as a mythological character and by replacing the scenes from mythology with a contemporary setting, my paintings emphasize the universal and timeless essence of women. Each painting also utilizes the symbolic use of color to intensify the sensory experience of the viewer. The mythic figures I rendered are Proserpine, Venus, Psyche, Penelope, Artemis, and …


Houses Move, Houses Speak, Allison Regan Jan 2011

Houses Move, Houses Speak, Allison Regan

LSU Master's Theses

This body of text speaks about an installation that deals with feelings of displacement, and isolation. This work invites and encourages the viewer to view another family with new eyes, perhaps finding similarities between this family and their own.


Unveiled Pandemonium, Christina Marie Johnson Jan 2011

Unveiled Pandemonium, Christina Marie Johnson

LSU Master's Theses

Unveiled Pandemonium is a body of work that acknowledges my struggles, as a woman, with skewed self-perception and how frayed, decayed bits of self-love affect interaction with daily life: the public sphere versus the private. Using both large-scale graphite drawings and intimately sized, full-color digital narrative sequences, I portray movement, as a state of freedom, while capturing each character in a position of physical or emotional constraint. To increase the tension each figure interacts with another visually and in narrative; a war with the self begins. Within the engagement of internal and external tensions, each character’s body becomes a battlefield …


Sensing Synesthesia, Jeffrey Harlan Johnson Jan 2011

Sensing Synesthesia, Jeffrey Harlan Johnson

LSU Master's Theses

Sensing Synesthesia is an exhibition of experiments, carried out through the medium of graphic design as an attempt to generate a synesthesiac experience by visualizing sound. Since many elements within the realms of sound and sight are relative, creating a genuine synesthesiac experience for a viewing audience proved challenging. To address this problem, I created visual elements that corresponded with personal convictions, emotions and proclamations and presented them in a way congruent to the sounds being heard. Through these experiments, I discovered the personal growth of myself: the sharpened skills as a graphic designer, initiated interest in hand-rendered type as …


Communiplaytion: Getting Our Hands Dirty Together, Brooke Tyson Cassady Jan 2011

Communiplaytion: Getting Our Hands Dirty Together, Brooke Tyson Cassady

LSU Master's Theses

CommuniPLAYtion: getting our hands dirty together is a weeklong installation of a collective ceramics studio implanted in Foster Gallery. It is a participatory and interactive exhibition that demonstrates how material play creates moments for personal reflection and contemplation, while also facilitating communication and social relations within a specific place. CommuniPLAYtion is an opportunity for an altruistic exchange among individuals in contrast to the monetary transactions that momentarily connect strangers. These engagements, similar to the “Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics” of other contemporary artists, empower individuals to develop modes of interaction that suit their interpersonal needs. The exhibition, communiPLAYtion enables the basic precursors that …


Of Reality: A Society Of Selves, Kelly C. Tate Jan 2011

Of Reality: A Society Of Selves, Kelly C. Tate

LSU Master's Theses

Of Reality: A Society of Selves is a series of photographs that challenge the viewer’s perception of reality. Through digital image manipulation, costumed, multiplicitous self-portraits merge with handcrafted miniature environments. With the goal of illustrating the complexity of existing within society, the resulting images examine the psychological process of perception as it relates to social interaction and identity.


A Matter Of Time, Rebecca Kreisler Jan 2011

A Matter Of Time, Rebecca Kreisler

LSU Master's Theses

We frame our experiences as narratives, and associate the narrative with the book. My work takes the form of an immersive installation of printed, paper polyhedrons that act for me as non-traditional book structures. The planes of the polyhedrons function as pages without prescribing a certain order of events. The focus has been to blur the linear narrative into a body of visual work that represents my particular human experience, one full of memories and dreams, contradictions and juxtapositions, chaos and calm. What began as an objective examination of concepts of time in physics, philosophy, and psychology has developed into …


Communication In Today's Network, Carter Jahncke Perrilliat Jan 2011

Communication In Today's Network, Carter Jahncke Perrilliat

LSU Master's Theses

Technology has given us many ways of communicating. The most emerging and evolving network of exchanging information today is social media. Communicating in Today’s Network is a thesis that examines and explores different trends in social media. This body of this work is a result of data collected by surveying active users of social media in society. The results are visually communicated through information graphics. It is intended to inform designers of the importance in learning and identifying ways to communicate with our new developing medium, social media.


Vessel Manifest, Jessie Marie Hornbrook Jan 2011

Vessel Manifest, Jessie Marie Hornbrook

LSU Master's Theses

Vessel Manifest explores vessel forms and their pathways through time and experience. In using semiotic definitions to define the term vessel I investigate the ways in which it has become profound in my life. In seeking comfort and in searching for an explanation for the process of life and death, I look to the ways in which a vessel can manifest itself, physically, emotionally, mentally, and metaphysically. Memories of life spent on the water and theories and tenets of Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy are sewn together through images of physical vessels and abstract vessel forms. The large-scale intaglio prints incorporate multi-media …


Trials & Tributaries: Myth And Disaster In Southern Louisiana, Hannah March Campbell Sanders Jan 2011

Trials & Tributaries: Myth And Disaster In Southern Louisiana, Hannah March Campbell Sanders

LSU Master's Theses

Trials and Tributaries examines recent disasters occurring in southern Louisiana, interpreted through the Greek myths The Twelve Labors of Herakles. Mankind’s false sense of control over Louisiana’s resources leaves us vulnerable to nature’s powerful acts of reclamation: hurricanes, floods and the ground sinking beneath our feet. While researching the details and origins of The Twelve Labors, I found a plethora of similarities with local culture, politics and natural disasters. The characters in these narrative prints include hybrid monsters drawn from Greek mythology, which I have then further augmented with various forms of local south Louisiana fauna and contemporary political figures. …


Course Over Ground, Kyle James Bauer Jan 2011

Course Over Ground, Kyle James Bauer

LSU Master's Theses

This exhibition, Course Over Ground, cohesively combines a metaphorical reference to maritime navigation with sculptural forms that convey balance, tension, and control. My mixed media sculptures are conceived with an adherence to the formalist perspective of objects. Each sculpture exists as an honest form. The work, and my intention in making it, is evidence of the process of breaking down selective images or objects into what I understand to be their purest representational forms, such as a squares, cylinders, pyramids, and rectangles. I allude to themes and the metaphor of a journey, which coupled alongside my continual quest for self-discovery, …


Enumerate / Construct, Andrew Gilliatt Jan 2011

Enumerate / Construct, Andrew Gilliatt

LSU Master's Theses

I am fascinated how we define and personalize ourselves through the objects we own and accumulate. It is my goal to make a collection of utilitarian pottery forms that through the use of color, form, and pattern, are cohesive in their variety, and are accessible as objects for daily use.


Inside Out, Kathleen Ann Pheney Jan 2011

Inside Out, Kathleen Ann Pheney

LSU Master's Theses

Because I process my external world internally, I often think of my mind as a vessel-housing my internal reality: fears, demons, curiosities, joys, sorrows, etc. My body of work is comprised of paintings and drawings that present surreal interpretations of these occupants as depicted through line, color, gesture and form and, as such, are true self-portraits in that they bring the “inside out.”


The Latent Landscape, May Ann Babcock Jan 2011

The Latent Landscape, May Ann Babcock

LSU Master's Theses

I set a task to take a new look at local Louisiana landscape and to understand this place where I live. The spaces most powerful were leftover, abandoned and forbidden industrial places, including an old lock, stretches of the levee along the Mississippi River, highway underpasses and chemical, energy and sugar cane processing plants. Working from observational sketches and using local materials such as river mud and plant fibers for papermaking, I make prints on handmade paper, books and video that bring this latent landscape into view. Images and surfaces become primitive, disorienting, psychological, dark and changing landscapes.


Island Hunting: A Field Guide, Kit French Jan 2011

Island Hunting: A Field Guide, Kit French

LSU Master's Theses

The Island Hunter Association and this field guide are elaborate constructions that assist you in looking at familiar places in a new way. Following the methods and procedures I’ve outlined in this field guide you will become an expert in tracking the many incarnations of Islands. Fact and fiction, real and psychological, Islands are all around.


Over The Rim Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Jungrim Yea Jan 2010

Over The Rim Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Jungrim Yea

LSU Master's Theses

My paintings are about the short span of human existence in comparison with the rhythms of the eternal cosmos based on Christianity. To illustrate this, I explored the icons of the moon (soul) and the iceberg (physical body). The painting technique used is the juxtaposition of passages of heavy impasto with thin glazes of earthly monochromatic colors, which represent time and age. I am seeking a depth of spiritual space. My works consists of ten large-scale oil paintings on masonite/canvas, and a series of small oil paintings on panels. In order to represent the unpredictable fate of human beings, I …