Fine Arts Commons^™

Hello Again يا اهلا A Study Of Grief, Diana Abouchacra

LSU Master's Theses

Grief is an unwanted visitor who we all come to know throughout our lifetime. Although every person reacts differently to bereavement of a loved one, almost always the lost other becomes etched into our being for the remainder of our lives (McClocklin & Lengelle, 2017). In today’s society, we are encouraged to say “Good-bye”, but what if instead, we allow ourselves to keep those who have passed on close to our hearts and say hello again? Hello Again يا اهلا is a body of work that explores my experience with grief. The artworks made for this exhibition investigate my process …

Weather Permitting, Acadia Kandora

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Weather Permitting is an exhibition of objects and printed matter, primarily in the form of publicationsthat examine my relationship to nature and the idea of nature as both sanctuary and armor. At a young age, my parents would take my on a hike every Sunday instead of going to church. The hikes acted as a weekly pilgrimage deep into the woods and a ritual instilling the idea of nature being a place of spiritual refuge and retreat. A sanctuary - of course, weather permitting.

As I grew up and experienced hardship, my first instinct has always been to go hide …

Turning Tides, Lauren Whitmore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Synthesizing personal narrative, sociological phenomenon, and art historical analysis, Turning Tides examines the relationship between power dynamics and sexual assault. Inequities and injustices with regard to the handling of sexual assault, and the norms that allow this issue to be pervasive, are woven throughout the cultural fabric of the United States. Feminists and feminist activist artists in the 1970s brought the matters women, and other marginalized groups, were facing to the forefront of political and social dialogue. The resulting work left an indelible mark on public perceptions and allowed for other activists and artists to build upon the foundations; creating …

Do You Want To Be Tender?, Leah Grant

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, you will find a body of writings and artworks that reflect Leah Grant’s art practice and research. Throughout the paper, you will see Leah alternate back and forth between her artwork and writings. Leah Grant addresses her personal experience as a Black woman and what it means it explore vulnerability through understanding how the relationships around her affects the relationship she has with herself. Leah has created a collection of poems, prints, and video and audio collages that assist her with revealing and concealing.

Chaos And Control, Hilary E. Dugas

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My anxiety, compulsions, and drive to control my surroundings inspires my work and at times hinders my process. I want to control every aspect of life, and the system of marks are symbolic of this. Printmaking permits me to express the area between control and lack of control, as the processes can be revised from beginning to end. My prints are composed of symbolic marks, which I create from objects that represent my compulsions and spiraling thoughts. The repetition of this indirect medium mimics my compulsive behaviors.

I convey repetitive motion, obsessive thoughts, and actions within my prints by overlapping …

Love Labor: Literal Symbols And True Abstractions., Karen Weeks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

If the home can be a metaphor for our own interiors, then the things that collect there can be similarly thought of, performing as punctuated moments within that interior, giving it shape, creating contours. Within the domestic setting, macro social forces such as global capitalism as well as the more immediate experience of meeting our children’s demands can push and pull us, equally informing the experience of being in the home. Love Labor: Literal Symbols and True Abstractions is comprised of images sourced from common ephemera of the home meant to represent the everyday: notes, discarded letters, open envelopes, unfinished …

Artist Spotlight, Ben Schoenburg

Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas

No abstract provided.

The Museum Of Queer Curiosities, Reba "Feliks" Kay Pyron

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This paper documents the research, personal motivations, and processes that make The Museum of Queer Curiosities (TMOQC). The installation, exhibited in the Paul Mesaros Gallery, uses the manipulation of traditional techniques in printmaking, sculpture, and craft, to create a space in which authority, labels, confusion, and compassion are discussed. Through the synthesis of familiar visual art installation techniques and museum display, the work attempts to provide a foothold for the viewer to navigate queerness and ephemeral identity. The body of work that occupies TMOQC creates the surreal simulation of a scientific museum, transforming the art gallery into a stage where …

A Cup Of Breast Milk And A Warm Chair, Carlie A. Salomons

LSU Master's Theses

The work in the exhibition A Cup Of Breast Milk and A Warm Chair is a physical and ephemeral connection between mothers and daughters. It explores my personal connection to my maternal lineage. This connection is looked through the lens of common generational roles of women, ancestral inheritance and my childhood memories. I consider what it means to inherit and to be remembered outside of the standard androcentric genealogical structure. My inheritance from my maternal lineage comes in the form of women’s work, or handcrafts such as: crochet, knitting and sewing. In creating this body of work, I blend the …

Skin, Bones + Bags: Investigating The Death Of Marine Ecosystems, Rylie Walter

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Plastic has become ubiquitous in the oceans. Although a convenient and cheap way to distribute goods around the world, plastic is also a leading cause for the death of many marine ecosystems. Walter explores her personal connection to the ocean, researches the relationship between plastic pollution and the ocean, and examines art as a means for inciting social change to protect and restore ocean environments. By using plastic as her main material for making art, Walter transforms the material from one that harms into one that can be calming and peaceful, while still representing the destruction it causes.

Arts And Craft: Pattern As A Verb, Evan A. Bellantone

Theses and Dissertations

As an honorific term, mastery does not enjoy the same fixity in a fine arts context as it does in the context of arts and crafts. My paintings are a blend of fine art and craft traditions that yield insight into certain ways value is inferred from both.

Waiting Room., Helen Payne

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Waiting Room is an installation of drawings and monotypes that re-envision everyday printed materials common in medical offices. The brochures, poster, bulletin board and children’s ABC book in this Waiting Room offer guidance suggest invasive and dysfunctional policy. A door opens onto a further room, where a hundred ultrasound images cascade onto the floor. This work, called Transducer Phosphene is the product of a fictional character’s encounter with a cruel (and not fictive) abortion policy. Waiting Room is the fruit of an inquiry that spanned my three years of study at the Hite Art Institute, a probing into the politics …

Bodies Of Empathy, Eunyoung Rosa Jang

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Trauma is defined as the emotional and or psychological response to a deeply disturbing event. When looking at domestic, familial and generational trauma, however, it is not a singular event but a thread through a lifetime or even generations. When it accumulates and goes beyond one person or body, that trauma can embed itself deeply and go neglected and unaddressed. Despite this, trauma is not invisible, and it is not silent. It festers in the mind and surfaces on the body. In Bodies of Empathy, I discuss my body of work which attempts to come to terms with my …

Roses & Thorns, Stephanie Alaniz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This written thesis has been created alongside the thesis exhibition shown in the Laura Mesaros Gallery at West Virginia University (displayed March 18th to March 22nd). The work presented consisted of drawings, bookmaking, and various forms of printmaking and collage. This body of work is meant to create an analysis of insecurities and body positivity we associate with our physical selves. This work is a collective experience that has been a collaboration with over 80 participants. The number of participants help to create a larger overall collective voice. By creating this collective voice, we can experience these feelings together and …

Graphic Content Warning; Personal And Political Traumas, Emily K. Wardell

Theses and Dissertations

The written portion of this thesis work is meant to address and further investigate the visual work created using mediums of print and found video. This artistic research has been interested in examining varying associations with truth, recollection, and evidence. This includes the recollection of public histories and news-media narratives as well as my own history and trauma. Through this work my aim was to create a deconstruction and revolt against how associations are formed, and how to understand imagery as information. This thesis first discusses my relationship to appropriated imagery, then connects and examines it through the addition of …

A Caprine Carnival: Goats At The Vālaikkāl Vāyil, Madhini Nirmal

Theses and Dissertations

Madhini Nirmal uses Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnival to imagine a goat-led subversion of political and social dogma in the context of the South Indian city of Chennai. She uses the mediums of monotype, painting and collage to create these artworks where the undoing of hierarchies is a result of the natural and bodily.

In The Margins, Savannah Bustillo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A margin is defined relative to something else. A ruled line. A body of text on a page. The margins are the excess, outside of the value we can qualify or quantify. Our understandings of the habitability of the margins are too often framed as fundamental differences between those that inhabit value and the rest that do not. What would happen if we reframed the margins beyond a simple dichotomy? What could we gain if the margins were a habitable space around and between the things we prioritize in defining? By analyzing a body of my own art, I …

Been An Empire, Olaf Tollefsen

Senior Theses

This paper summaries the content and form of the 2018 Printmaking BFA and Honors Thesis exhibition “Been and Empire”. It discuses influences, processes and the individual pieces found within the exhibition.

Leonard Baskin: Imaginary Artists, Kathya M. Lopez, Erica M. Schaumberg

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) was an American sculptor, illustrator, and printmaker. He is perhaps best known as a figurative sculptor and a creator of monumental woodcuts. The Gehenna Press, Baskin’s private press, operated for over 50 years (1942-2000) and produced more than 100 volumes of fine art books. His most prominent public commissions include sculpture for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and the Woodrow Wilson Memorial, both in Washington D.C., and the Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, MI. Baskin received numerous honors, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Gold Medal of the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Jewish …

Looking Through The Glass: An Album Of Original Music And Accompanying Artist Book, Sam Genualdi

Lawrence University Honors Projects

“Looking Through the Glass” is a 12 track, 38-minute long album of original songs accompanied by a hand-bound artist book. The book houses the CD as a well as an accordion-structure text block of original prints. The content and form of the work draw upon the experiences of the author to create a unique and personal take on memory as a human experience. Sam Genualdi composed and produced all of the music as well as created all of the art.

Rose Gilderson-Duwe Senior Art Portfolio, Elizabeth Gilderson-Duwe

Senior Art Portfolios

No abstract provided.

Damon Hill, Elizabeth Welch

LSU Master's Theses

“Damon Hill” acts as a physical record of the family folklore of a group of people formed by landscape and kinship. As a member of this group, I have translated my family’s stories into a visual narrative as a way to process my own identity in relation to our shared identity. The focus of “Damon Hill” rests primarily on the lives of my female predecessors, as a way for me to contribute their unique voice to the overarching feminine narrative. I incorporate the visual representation of traditionally feminine handicrafts in order to relay their stories through the primary means of …

After;Life, Morgan Lynn Anderson

LSU Master's Theses

After;life is an exploration of the time and space between life and death. The installation, created from dozens of woodcut prints, creates this imaginary place, and encompasses viewers through sight, smell, sound, and touch. All elements of this installation are heavily influenced by Southern Louisiana culture and wildlife, and are meant to be familiar enough to provoke personal memory and experience. A set of rituals in the form of three poems, corresponding to three different spirit guides: The Black Dog, The Alligator, and The Opossum, lead the reader through the space from life, through liminal, into death.

Collecting And Selecting, Masy Hebert

LSU Master's Theses

In Collecting and Selecting, I am exploring the way others adorn their lives and how these elements add up to emblematize the keeper of the treasures. With linoleum relief prints and drawings, I compose a unique type of portraiture that reveals the parallel identity between the way we dress ourselves and our living spaces. Within my process, I capture moments with photographs, draw, carve, print, and cut out the elements that hold a presence of the owner. Utilizing a heightened sense of contrast with black and white images, the textures and details of these objects come alive. Each gallery wall …

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 …

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.

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 …

Shaurya Kumar Interview, Tejas Patel

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: A native of Delhi, India where he studied printmaking and painting at the College of Art; Shaurya Kumar graduated with his MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2007. Since 2001, Kumar has been involved in numerous prestigious research projects, like “The Paintings of India” (a series of 26 documentary films on the painting tradition of India); "Handmade in India" (an encyclopedia on the handicraft traditions of India); and digital restorations of 6th century Buddhist mural paintings from the caves of Ajanta. Kumar’s research is focused on creating works which appreciate and appropriate new media while highlighting the …

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 …

This Is Only Temporary, Melanie Robyn Wall

LSU Master's Theses

This is only Temporary examines my personal history of homes as reimagined spaces. The series of prints in the exhibition depicts reconstructed memories of houses. These visual narratives give context to the installation constructed from handmade paper and raw materials. The framework is reminiscent of housing plans that converge into a labyrinth. Participants actively engage the space, navigating the confined structure. A playful nature runs throughout the prints and installation reflecting upon reinterpreted memories within transitional spaces.