Fine Arts Commons^™

Prime, Perform, Recover, Patrick Harkin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the formal and conceptual framework of my artistic practice as it culminated in the installation of my thesis exhibition, Prime, Perform, Recover. My exhibition seeks to operate as an analysis and critique of the separation inherent in media presentation and rhetoric surrounding natural disasters.

I utilize the aesthetics and vocabulary of disaster capitalism and prepping culture in order to pose direct questions about ecological and social change. I examine the role of images within mass media image production as an all encompassing Now-Time. In this paper I describe frameworks that my practice proposes as potential solutions to …

Trauma And Recovery: A Confessional Process, Mia Siracusa

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper is about a confessional painting series, which appropriates Abstract Expressionist techniques, and is on geometric canvas reliefs. The main focus through out the series is the process of my recovery from a traumatic event and the process of the creation of a language through abstraction.

Elements, Stephen Anthony Geffre

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This thesis consisted of a gallery exhibition titled “Elements” featuring sculpture created by Stephen Geffre for his Master of Arts in Sculpture from University of Minnesota-Mankato, located in Mankato Minnesota. The exhibition ran from October 16, 2017 to October 31, 2017. The artwork explored sacredness---sacredness rooted in the natural, sacredness rooted within the minds of human kind, sacredness in the form of the classical elements Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

All the work was created in part with material that was going to be thrown away or sold at a fraction of its cost because of its imperfection.

Taking In: A Juried Selection Of Undergraduate Photography 2017, Lucad Students

Taking In

Taking In is a juried annual student-run publication that showcases the best of LUCAD undergraduate photography and video. The project focuses on the business of promoting art and culminates each year with a juried exhibition, publication, and website all designed to promote selected works of AIB artists. The selected pieces were chosen anonymously by a jury of distinguished members of the Boston art community. The book in your hand is the end result of a collective effort by those in the class.

Lights And Shadows - 2017, University Of North Alabama

Lights and Shadows

Art and Literature Magazine

One Two One, Brianna Morgan Ozanne

LSU Master's Theses

These things, they speak in whispers. Come close, lean in, listen up. Whisper back. Tell me everything. I know you’ve been here, too. I know you’ll understand. I know you have a shoebox full of memories just like these hidden deep inside your closet. I know.

Below The Neck, Above The Knees, Desiree Dawn Kapler

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis explores the act of violation in the context of trauma and healing through the use of personal narratives and experimental film. My research allows personal storytelling to transform into a larger and more universal theme of generational trauma and dysfunction. Through a feminist lens, I challenge social norms of body autonomy for the sick and abused, capitalism’s social effects on the poor, and passed down maternal lessons from the women who are doing the best that they can with the lives and opportunities that they have been given.

This work is created in spite of the labels my …

Re-Exploring My Identity As A Japanese Woman, Fumi Amano

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on my motivations and the personal decisions made in the realization of selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition "Voice". The following text shares the many and varied connections between my life and art-making. My issues in my personal relationships with others has spilled out from my heart and turned into these works. I'm continuously expressing the unsuccessful attempts we make at developing true bonds that bridge the gaps between people.

North Of The Heart East Of Victory, Joel Hansen

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Just as music can be described as colorful and text can provide texture, art has a voice. That voice can scream, whisper or babble incoherently. It can also sing. Making art sing is the overarching goal of all my work. There are no formulas or templates, of which I am aware, on how to accomplish this but if I think of individual pieces as songs, a series as an album and exhibits as concerts art can become sonorous. Shadows and highlights act as rhythm. Color and composition behave as melodies and arrangements. If I've done my job correctly the art …

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 …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

Art Beyond The Object? Art Beyond Grad School? (A Kickstarter Fundraiser): Help Me Complete My Mfa And Kickstart My Life As An Artist., Hsini D. Leary

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this paper and Kickstarter project is to enable the production of my last semester’s work and thesis exhibition, and also to aid in the post-graduation transition to a sustainable art practice that does not rely on the current gallery structure.

Gary Brewer - Dark Matter Series, Gary Brewer

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

In the Dark Matter series of paintings I am abstracting images from NASA’s efforts to map dark matter using the Hubble Space Telescope. From these abstractions I create diaphanous veils of blue that convey a sense of movement; the movement suggests primal forces: wind, water air and fire.

The figure in the foreground is one of the elements: gold, copper, silver, which develop into a variety of fantastic shapes. The ‘elements’ which are the foundation of life on earth, are born in the heart of a star and explode out into the universe upon its death and collapse. The force …

Leaf Miner's Leaves, Susan Hoenig

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

For many years I have been collecting leaves and discovered a phenomena that I find truly fascinating on specific leaves called "leaf miner's leaves". The leaves are the dwellings of animals, various insects' architectural habitat. Leaf miner's leaves are a phenomena in nature in the plant kingdom where the larvae of various insects tunnel their way through a leaf eating its living tissue. The leaf miners create distinctive patterns on each leaf. The snake-like serpentine tunnels protect them from predators and plant defenses.

Cold Hard Facts, Paul Kelley

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

COLD HARD FACTS is an ephemeral installation composed of a projector, digital images and ice. The work continues my interest in having the viewer slow down to have a more thoughtful and absorptive experience with the work and surrounding space. With a short-lived duration, the piece considers the transitory nature of things and how truths can be misconstrued as facts, whereas truths are malleable and facts are not. They are cold, hard and indifferent.

Hints Of Wholeness, Dylan Yvonne Welch

Theses and Dissertations

The fertile tension between what we know and don’t know about ourselves is the mystery that invigorates existence. In this essay, I posit that beauty is found in a knot of knowability and unknowability bound together in wholeness. This work contemplates our unique receptivity to that underlying but invisible wholeness which makes its presence known as beauty in nature immediately around us and on a cosmic scale.

The Excitement Of Life, Jacob D. Soukup

Celebration of Learning

These recent paintings explore the presence of excitement, energy and adrenaline rush one can capture in a moment. Oil paints have a quality that can make a painting come to life. This lifelike quality is exactly what I strive to capture in a way that allows the viewers to put themselves inside the painting. The inspiration for these paintings came from my own experiences of adventure and risk-taking. The use of foreshortening and distortion helps give the figures a sense of energy and create movement throughout the composition. By portraying the various situations through a warped lens, I believe that …

Lili Zhong Artist Statement, Lili Zhong

CGU MFA Theses

Appreciating beauty, the universe’s natural essence, is an innate and indispensable human ability that helps us learn about the world. Everyone has their own definition, even on the degree to which beauty represents something abstract or realistic. It could mean elegance or romance, be from an audio or visual source, pertain to religious wisdom or even human value. Regardless, art always address beauty.

Identity Withheld 4, Dylan Bannister

The Anthology

Artwork

No Feet, Kwan Fuller

The Anthology

Artwork

On The Floor: Of The Earth, Nicole Davenport

The Anthology

Artwork

Ceramic Apprenticeship With Professor Eddie Dominguez, Victoria E. Norton

UCARE: Research Products

The purpose of this research is to explore specific techniques and processes as employed by Eddie Dominguez through an apprenticeship in ceramic art in which I will be intimately involved in both the critical thinking and process of Professor Dominguez’ work. Topics of focus include building upon my skills of testing glazes and clays in order to discover which glaze and clay combinations cater best to the work. I also plan to investigate idea generation and art concept, an element of Eddie Dominguez’s work that is very important.

Many other vital studio practices were implemented during the apprenticeship. Skills such …

Stories Of Otherness, Lee Ann Harrison

Graduate Theses

The thesis exhibition Stories of Otherness is an interactive installation created using dance, music, photography, video, ceramic figurative sculptures, and armatures of found objects to create a voyeuristic and physically participatory experience of situational art. Many artists from various art and literary genres influence my research and art, including Petah Coyne, Mona Hatoum, Pina Bausch, Mia Michaels, and Jeanette Winterson. The multi-faceted combination of art mediums and artists inspires me to create a mixed media, multi-dimensional installation for an immersive participant’s experience as a source for awareness, empathy, reflection, and ultimately as a “call to action” evoking change.

This thesis …

'Stillwater' : An Exhibition That Explores Touch And The Everyday Through Ceramic Objects And Photography, Lily Fein

Art - All Scholarship

The exhibition, stillwater, is a Capstone Project that showcases ceramic-based installations in addition to photographs by Ian Sherlock. Both Ian and myself use material and process in its raw form. The work that Sherlock exhibits in stillwater is a series of pinhole camera exposures of the sun passing. He sees this simple yet profound passing of time as an opportunity to gain tacit knowledge of the sun. In my work, I gain parallel knowledge in the medium of clay, as I am physically invested in every mark that I make. There is no smoothing over or correcting; every moment is …

Taking In: A Juried Selection Of Undergraduate Photography 2016, Lucad Students

Taking In

Taking In is a juried annual student-run publication that showcases the best of LUCAD undergraduate photography and video. The project focuses on the business of promoting art and culminates each year with a juried exhibition, publication, and website all designed to promote selected works of AIB artists. The selected pieces were chosen anonymously by a jury of distinguished members of the Boston art community. The book in your hand is the end result of a collective effort by those in the class.

Land/People, Amanda R. Breitbach

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Through my project, Land/People, I investigate the decline of family farming and the emotional and spiritual issues that underly the human relationship to land. The exhibition combines aerial and large-scale panoramic photographs of my family’s farmland in eastern Montana with more intimate images of family members and domestic spaces. Through the use of multiple images, visual grids, and a repeated motif of windows, I tell a complicated story about history and land use, as well as the changing face of American agriculture. The installation is meant to be immersive, inviting viewers to experience this landscape for themselves and to …

A Portrait Of The Artist As Sisyphus, Jared N. Crane

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis statement, contemporary artist Jared Nathan Crane uses the French philosopher Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus as a framework for discussing meaningfulness in art and life, and reflects on how his own experimental creative process evolved during his graduate studies.

Slough: Revealing The Animal, Clay Dunklin

Honors Undergraduate Theses

When making my work I constantly reflect on past mythologies, images, and objects. These served people as a way to make sense of and understand the dynamics of the world around them. As we continue to alter and shape the world into one designed for exclusively human benefit, we need new models that reveal the dynamics of our relationship to the world around us. This is what artists have been doing for centuries, and I specifically look to those using animals and animal imagery in their work to further mythologize our contemporary understanding of the human-other animal relationship. My body …

The Space Of Art In The Digital Age, Ellie Isaacs

MA Projects

This journal article looks at the space of art in the digital age in order to establish whether virtual art practices will eventually render the physicality of art as obsolete. The article draws focus on the construction of virtual spaces to investigate the possibility of a consequential collapse in real space. Two key aspects that I have concentrated on are the social experience of these modes of artistic practice and the inversion of public and private spheres.

A Crow And A Hanger, Kelsey Ann-Morgan Livingston

LSU Master's Theses

A Crow and A Hanger is a body of work that explores and illustrates the nature of life and death through the use of mixed-media drawing and printmaking techniques. My intention for this work, and this thesis paper, is to explain my thought process and how the imagery came to be. For me it is not at all important for every viewer to fully understand each image and the thoughts that went into the body as a whole. I let the images and their titles lead the viewer in a general direction and allow for their personal history and biases …