Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Fine Arts Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Theses and Dissertations

Discipline
Institution
Keyword
Publication Year

Articles 571 - 600 of 667

Full-Text Articles in Fine Arts

The Economy Of Indifference, Nicholas Irzyk Apr 2013

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 Apr 2013

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 …


Constant Motion, Daniel Rowe Apr 2013

Constant Motion, Daniel Rowe

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis contains my writings and concept development, as it relates to personal history, time and animated art. This is explored through various methodologies, including short story and Zen meditative writing. As a companion to my recent thesis exhibition, this paper looks to make logical, emotional and spiritual connections between my art practice, ritualized cultural tropes and contemporary views of mortality.


Day Folder, Raewyn Martyn Apr 2013

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 Apr 2013

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 …


Some Account Of The Art Of Photogenic Drawing, Joseph Minek Apr 2013

Some Account Of The Art Of Photogenic Drawing, Joseph Minek

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an overview of the processes and procedures used in the production of my artistic practice. In my work, I explore notions such as the ambiguity of the photographic image, what constitutes an image or object as photographic, and the unexplored possibilities of the medium through surface and mark making. In addition, I draw inspiration from artists Wolfgang Tillmans, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Marco Breuer as entrance points to my conceptual interests. For viewers, my work generates an internal dialogue about the limits of the photographic medium.


My Mechanics Of Justification, Veronika Pausova Apr 2013

My Mechanics Of Justification, Veronika Pausova

Theses and Dissertations

This document examines the theory behind the process leading to my paintings, as well as the content of the images I use. The former will invoke romanticism, infinite possibilities, and the need for having certain parameters and flexible rules. The latter will talk about sentimentality and contemporary culture. I will explain the mechanics of justifying the choice of a particular way of painting: the push and pull between the loaded content of an image versus the language of painting itself.


Forever Starts Now, Lior Modan Apr 2013

Forever Starts Now, Lior Modan

Theses and Dissertations

Moms as historical perspectives, abstraction and image making; Through stoves, swimwear and carpets. Then, one hope- That one-day history will become yours and mine.


Stalling Life, Leslie Rogers Apr 2013

Stalling Life, Leslie Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Using a diagram, glossary, anecdotes, and first-person narrative histories, I explain how I use sculptural installation, image making, and serendipity to exploit the illogical to the point of being meaningful.


Developed & Less Finished: Maintaining Life, Lauren Kaye Sukany Mar 2013

Developed & Less Finished: Maintaining Life, Lauren Kaye Sukany

Theses and Dissertations

This painting series, memory-inspired using developed compositions and less finished paint application, depicts mysterious scenes of figures in interiors maintaining life. Themes of maintenance, celebration, conversation, and leisure are emphasized using formal elements of figures in interiors, perspective, and paint application. These compositions are memories based on a collection of moments in time. Though inspired from memories, the pieces are not intended to portray real life but a shared physical and mental space of the figures creating a magical and mysterious element within the composition. While revisiting American paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, the larger implications of my work …


Whiff Of Black Ice, Alina Tenser May 2012

Whiff Of Black Ice, Alina Tenser

Theses and Dissertations

This document is a concentration of thoughts, peripheral and direct, that occurred around the making of my thesis exhibition at the Anderson Gallery, Whiff Of Black Ice. While these thoughts meekly occupy space on the following pages, I assure the reader that they are quite physical, even extending three-dimensionality to them. My awareness of their form and their containment within the inner space of the mind, which also extends to the body, becomes central to understanding their meaning and, finally, knowing them.


Reflections Of Self, Melissa Athey May 2012

Reflections Of Self, Melissa Athey

Theses and Dissertations

I vacillate between all extremes, beauty vs. ugly, internal vs. external, micro vs. macro. It is these disparate notions that inspire what I make. We cannot ever see ourselves objectively, but does that mean we shouldn’t try? This thesis is my attempt to dissect what I created in my 2 years at Virginia Commonwealth University, my exploration of the illness within and the psychological nature of how we go about hiding our insecurities.


Artist Alien Ghost Juggler: Performance Of “Troilus And Cressida” As Graduate Thesis, Vladislav Smolkin May 2012

Artist Alien Ghost Juggler: Performance Of “Troilus And Cressida” As Graduate Thesis, Vladislav Smolkin

Theses and Dissertations

Through an analysis of my adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”, I will deconstruct the artist’s studio within an institution as a paradoxical heterotopic space.


Warm Compression – Damp Gestures, Melanie Mclain May 2012

Warm Compression – Damp Gestures, Melanie Mclain

Theses and Dissertations

Thoughts on vulnerability, emotions, social interaction, self-awareness, skin, touching, bodily functions, and the combination of all these ideas into a confined space filled with heat and humidity just enough to leave you feeling damp and perhaps a bit sore.


You Can Eat Off The Counter I Wiped It Down This Morning, Jessica Kain May 2012

You Can Eat Off The Counter I Wiped It Down This Morning, Jessica Kain

Theses and Dissertations

Alternative to meeting a calculus of quality roundness and curves are everywhere. Peaches, pinks, browns, ochres, greens. Klein Blue. --------- An experiment like a party; the hows and whys of picking bedfellows yields a list of possibilities— iterations of better, advantages in flesh volume. Inventory whittled down to give us stories, aspirations, allegiances. --------- Just to see it and touch it. Build in different ways, depending. Grow, cover, carve, cast—let for flexibility. Limbs in one direction sawed off, turned round, glued back on. If it looks like two more ways of how I want it there’s more work to be …


In Tub And Wig Out, Ryan Crowley May 2012

In Tub And Wig Out, Ryan Crowley

Theses and Dissertations

Using short stories, descriptions of objects and thoughts on process, I aim to establish a few ideas about the way I see and think through making in the studio.


Auto Tune, Dana Ollestad May 2012

Auto Tune, Dana Ollestad

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an overview of the source material, methodologies, artistic influences, and conceptual decisions that inform my artwork and characterize my art practice. Utilizing participation (audience, community, viewer), I engineer experiences and encounters for the general public. Whether through directed physical interaction or implicit reaction, I create open-ended situations or environments that I may influence, but not fully control. The democratic cede of authorial control, as well as the heightened risk and unpredictably in my work, instigates a more positive, non-hierarchical social model in which every viewer is an “author,” who produces content and communication signals, and has a …


Freedom Of Interpretation, Georgi Ivanov May 2012

Freedom Of Interpretation, Georgi Ivanov

Theses and Dissertations

The photographic series Ideal Cities that I started in 2011 is inspired by the conflict between my idea of the “west” and my evolving experience in the United States. What struck me was the popularity of what I see as model experience – a spatial experience controlled by the Spectacle. In the terms of the Situationist International and its most prominent figure Guy Debord, the Spectacle is the collapse of reality into the streams of images, products and activities sanctioned by centralized monopolist business or state bureaucracy. Thus, personal experience is replaced with preconceived notions, which control the way people …


White Sands, Laura Vitale May 2012

White Sands, Laura Vitale

Theses and Dissertations

I’ve constructed a narrative thread that connects experiences, events, and artworks made during my time in graduate school. This narrative, which has the perspective of time, betrays the firsthand experience of wayfaring through the projects and places I describe. The narrative loosens as it approaches the present moment. Rather than to arrive at any conclusions, my goal for creating this narrative is to understand a tension between expectations: of systematic rationality and subjective knowledge, of play and display. I understand that my work productively fails to r-r-resolve contradictions about the way things are.


Display, Baldwin Amanda May 2012

Display, Baldwin Amanda

Theses and Dissertations

I will discuss six art works that have a range of characteristics, but can all be unified through the notion of surface, both physically and conceptually. I will investigate how ideas of taste, assumption, collage, façade, figure/ground, display and value can all be seen through this lens. Much significance and symbolism is imbued in such a thin layer and I am actively aware of this as I work. The way I construct and render my subjects and the space in which they reside determines how they are viewed, perceived, considered, and judged by others.


Reflections On Sexuality, Sensuality, And Painting, Loie Hollowell May 2012

Reflections On Sexuality, Sensuality, And Painting, Loie Hollowell

Theses and Dissertations

The written component of my thesis will take the form of an extended artist statement in which I discuss all six paintings included in my thesis exhibition. A major theme of my work is sexuality, specifically female sexuality. This thesis will begin by looking at the three miniature paintings that spearheaded the investigation of this theme. I will examine the generalized and personal feminist symbolism that these paintings contain. The two works that followed the miniatures are depictions of sexual interactions between my husband and myself. I will explain the significance of my depictions and relate them to the work …


Reckless Hope, Jesse Potts May 2012

Reckless Hope, Jesse Potts

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an approximation of several years spent in the studio. It represents an equitable exercise of memory and speculation.


The Dragons In Your Dreams, Jacquelyn Walther May 2012

The Dragons In Your Dreams, Jacquelyn Walther

Theses and Dissertations

What if every craving that you ever felt stayed with you forever? Suppose facades couldn’t exist, and what should only be the deepest, densest core of a desire was formed into a mass, a body. Its will matching yours in its physical presence. I make creatures that are embodiments of emotions. In this study I mainly focus on desires and inhibitions surrounding romance. I explore anatomical structures and how material make-up can directly reflect emotional character. In this exploration, the materiality of clay allows for a thorough manipulation of the composition of the creatures. In this I am also able …


The Three Principles (For -2012), Nikolai Noel May 2012

The Three Principles (For -2012), Nikolai Noel

Theses and Dissertations

Utilizing alchemy as an allegory for the political, social, cultural history and present of the Caribbean, I discuss critical themes, approaches, methodologies their development, application and evidence in my thinking and art practice.


But From This Moment On We Know Nothing, Jacob Vincent Apr 2012

But From This Moment On We Know Nothing, Jacob Vincent

Theses and Dissertations

As a student enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Craft/Material Studies' Master of Fine Arts Graduate Degree program, Jacob A. Vincent's sole obligation to the world for the time period beginning in September of 2010 and continuing through April of 2012 was to dwell on things, and to eventually produce something tangible as a result. Having charged himself with the burden of indulging in the task of re-contextualizing all of existence, and ensuring that his peers and professors knew how vitally important that is, this thesis outlines select aspects of his research methodologies and provides a glimpse into the …


Score For The Big Bang: The Universe As Voice, Ander Mikalson Apr 2012

Score For The Big Bang: The Universe As Voice, Ander Mikalson

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis is a multimedia document, including a documentary video and audio recordings, that catalogues and unpacks the cross-disciplinary project Score for the Big Bang. On April 13, 2012, thirty-six vocalists sang the sound of the Big Bang in a historic church in downtown Richmond. For this project I worked with an astronomer, composer, choral director and organist to translate the primordial sound into musical notation. This is the universe as voice, through humans, recreating what we have come to understand was present at its birth.


Between Nothingness And Spectacle, Mayme Donsker Apr 2012

Between Nothingness And Spectacle, Mayme Donsker

Theses and Dissertations

Looking closely at anonymous subjects in found photographs to jog collective memories and point at gestures, bodily traces of complexity, connectedness or just a quiet moment where nothing monumental is really happening; a pause for distance, a pause for discernment, there is no real difference between nothingness and spectacle.


Teller Machine, Reid Ramirez Apr 2012

Teller Machine, Reid Ramirez

Theses and Dissertations

This document examines the work in my MFA thesis exhibition. The objects in that installation address specific socio-aesthetic sites of class and power. The personal and cultural narratives examined here further explain the objects’ symbolic potential.


Bad Infinity (Or) Some Examples Of Displacement, Andrew Meerow Apr 2012

Bad Infinity (Or) Some Examples Of Displacement, Andrew Meerow

Theses and Dissertations

The following thesis is comprised of an edited interview between Andrew Meerow and an undisclosed questioner in which the two discuss Meerow’s visual thesis, a body of paintings titled “Some Examples of Displacement.” The interview addresses the production of art and value as Meerow's primary subject, a reflexive position that absorbs qualitative interpretation in either direction. In keeping with the intentions of the artwork, the interview is re-organized, censored, and collaged such that the discussion itself is addressed not as a procedure of truth, but as a performative gesture toward that pursuit.


Dismemory: On History, The Southern Imaginary, And Abusing The Visual Record, Matthew Pendleton Shelton Apr 2012

Dismemory: On History, The Southern Imaginary, And Abusing The Visual Record, Matthew Pendleton Shelton

Theses and Dissertations

Using the literary device of a fictional interview between the artist and a sympathetic intellectual, I explore concepts relating to subjectivity, pedagogy, memory, “Southernness,” whiteness, the deceptive nature of images, social justice, and 20th century art as they relate to a contemporary artistic practice.