Fine Arts Commons^™

With A Twist, Heather Marie Beckwith

Theses and Dissertations

My functional ceramic art takes into account the user, its intended function, and the spaces in which it should be used. The utilitarian object is important to our daily ritual. If successfully designed it can enhance the user’s experience. My exploration in sculptural clay work has carried over into the functional pieces I created. Careful attention is paid when designing the form, leaving a soft blank canvas for inlayed line work and deeply carved surfaces that will mesh well with the spontaneity of the firing process. I draw inspiration from the people and places that have graced my life. By …

Intermediate Realities, Brady Forrester

Theses and Dissertations

I experiment with constructions of light, glass, paint, and everyday materials to create photographs which are intended to stir within the viewer a meditative uncertainty. When these translucent collages are back-lit and photographed, the resulting images appear spatially ambiguous, and resemble superimposed realities. The images in this series were inspired by ideas concerning the elusive and vulnerable nature of our emotional and creative wellsprings. I arrive at these stages through processes that subvert my preconceived ideas and allow the materials to suggest evolving compositions. The scenes are transitory, therefore the photograph serves as their point of inscription.

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 …

Out Of The Picture, Erin E. Bell

Criticism

Martha Rosler: The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems by Steve Edwards. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Pp. 122, 32 color illustrations. $35.00 cloth, $16.00 paper.

Directing And Choreography In The Academy And The Profession: A Forum, Anne Fliotsos, Ann M. Shanahan

Department of Fine & Performing Arts: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this issue of SDC Journal, SDC is proud to introduce a new peer-reviewed section, featuring academic articles and book reviews on the crafts of directing and choreography. With editorial support by directors, choreographers, and scholars representing the range of institutions of higher education across the country, SDC Journal will publish one academic essay and one book review per issue.

Digital Space Art (History?), France Languérand

Artl@s Bulletin

Invited by ARTL@S Bulletin as visual artist, France Languérand opted for a first-person text introducing her artworks—which develop into the digital sphere, questionning their own sustainability— and recounting the evolution of her relationship the digital space. This walkthrough is guided by her current thoughts about numbers and coding system as creative tools. Languérand’s pieces are only partially visible in the physical world but exist entirely in the digital space.

Bar Rat, Macky Bliss

Art Journal

My main influences are usually the people who surround me, and the experiences that I face because of those people. Working as a bartender has directly impacted my art. Faces, expressions, emotions and behaviors intrigue me. Bartending allows me to be a participant in and observer of many unique human interactions and social codes that I use as material for my work. I often photograph the people I interact with, especially while bartending, to use as source material.

For a while I was focusing on extreme emotions such as grief, but I have become more interested in the nuances of …

Speaking My Language: Color And Geometry, Janelle Dunham

Art Journal

The first step in developing a geometric language that combines physical and digital processes: sketching with a mechanical pencil. With every sketch I consider the erasure markings, the horizontal or vertical composition, the intensity of each shape or line, the simplicity or complexity of each design, and the symmetry each design may or may not have. My designs reflect the influence of abstract artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich in addition to Bauhaus artists such as Josef Albers and Paul Klee.

The second step is to bring these sketches into Adobe Illustrator software, because it allows for the …

Endogenous, Rachele Romano

Art Journal

In my work I explore the exterior parts and interior sensations of the body, using both recognizable and imaginative abstract elements. Through this work I address issues affecting the body, specifically physical, sexual and verbal abuse. I’m interested in moments of trauma and their effects on the body. In my paintings I raise the questions: what goes on in the body? What could go on inside the body? What happens in the mind of person during a time of fear, and how does the body react to that? What would this look like on a canvas? My work explores the …

Drift, Liliandra Vivolo

Art Journal

Living on an island, I am fortunate to be immersed in nature and surrounded by many different bodies of water. The ocean, rivers, and bays of Long Island are a huge part of its beauty. This environment influences the content of my work and inspires the process I use to create it.

After years of visiting and photographing my favorite beaches on Long Island, I have collected numerous images of this unique environment during many different times of the day and seasons of the year. Before creating the digital drawings in Photoshop, I look through all of my photographs and …

Art Journal 2015 - Vantage

Art Journal

No abstract provided.

The Body As Border: El Cuerpo Como Frontera, Mayte Escobar

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Being First generation born Mexican American I am looking into the blend of the two cultures and the disparity between them. The border is the core of my investigation; by traveling across the border I have become conscious of the differences among both sides and duality within myself. My identity has developed from a synthesis of these two cultures, and my wok explores these two factions that cannot be one without the other. fusion is apparent in my self-portraits where I dress up with the colors from both sides of the border. But I also take a personal look into …

Light Sensitive, Andrew Thompson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I am an excremental artist. I do not mean an artist who works with feces or is interested in manure but one whose artwork is expelled through the results of process. As a photographer, I am not as interested in indexing a location, a person or a moment as I am dissolving the structure of photography through the manipulation of photographic materials. I typically photograph landscapes that catch my attention for a myriad of reasons. The commonality between these images is anonymity of place. Hints of location are always present but never accentuated, instead their purpose is akin to a …

: : Poof : :, Caleb Nelson

Graduate Masters Theses

Storytellers have an interdependent relationship with their narratives. If you have ever told a lie, you understand. Stories take on a life of their own, as you consider the potential ramifications of each contingent piece. Definite sets of things happen as results of specific other things. If you throw an ax at me, only a few things can immediately happen, and our relationship will be forever changed. Events evolve. When we create or discover a narrative, we live by its logic. Upon consideration, a moment compels a series of moments modulated by a voice, a single perspective, a personal narrative, …

Transmutation: One Thing Becoming Another, Price Hall

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My art emerges from decades of the experience of building myself, sensitively aware of accumulated experience and the weight of accrued memory. Responding to this life I so deeply appreciate the longer I live, as sculptor, painter and poet, I merge these individual aesthetic observations into a layered work of many reads. Offering poetic observation as a visual sensation beyond the ears’ hearing carried on a field of color connects at some interior emotional level which is absent or very different in the uniformity of type. Time is present in my current work. “Corrugations”, not only in the poetic images …

Reference Frames And Movement, Michael S. Russell

CGU MFA Theses

The subjects I investigate are often symptomatic of society’s nervousness and its shortage of self-criticality. I search for phenomena that at one time felt strange and new, but have since been accepted and reduced to being commonplace and unchallenged. My drawings take a position of political ambiguity and exemplify the condition of cultural fatigue that arises out of our instant media climate. By not passing judgment on issues that may be present, such as violence, race, our faith in technology, or even the art world, my drawings point to conversations greater than themselves. This level of detachment allows for the …

Tiktak, Fang Li

CGU MFA Theses

TikTak

My works present the inherent nature of space and light. A chemical process is approached in a way, which has similarly quality to a natural process. I’m interested in how the material can change itself and how I can manipulate that change. Transparency, reflection, pattern, harmony, and movement are engaged.

I use a wide range of materials as much as to match my ideas and the form. They are presented in simple, unified or repeating forms. There is a physical, innermost satisfaction in the activity of working with simple materials. I materialize them and allow them to be both …

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 …

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?

The Final Frontier: Navigating From Material To Virtual, Alexandra Neuman

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Humankind’s continual creation of and progression into virtual space is a hugely significant event on our evolutionary timeline, one that signifies a sort of imminent and already in-process departure. While the more popular notion of our species’ eventual exodus is linked to outer space and planetary exploration, our existing conceptualization of cyberspace connotes an identical unknowable vastness and sense of discovery, with its depiction relying on nearly identical imagery. The projection of a virtually based human future is thereby left with an already carved out spot in the collective imagination. The lone floating astronaut locked into a suit unable to …

Landmarks For Sleepwalkers, Isaac S. Howell

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Abstract:

In my recent work I have been interested in thinking about notions of instability. In order explore these notions, in this paper I will like to explore the relevance of postmodern literary theory and the color black in my work, as well as think about the importance of the grid as a tool for organization and ontological delineation.

I will be examining writing by Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as art work by Mark Manders, Giorgio de Chirico, Kay Sage, and Ad Reinhardt.

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 …

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, …

It Begins With You And Me, Sea A Joung

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis conceptualizes the conditions of the Korean division, including the realization of the political and cultural gap between North and South Korea, lack of education about the Korean division and the role of media. The Korean War, also known as the “Forgotten War,” is erased from the consciousness of contemporary societies. This thesis describes a history about how the artificial division created during the Korean War continuously affects the lives of modern Koreans. For more than sixty years, North and South Korea did not have any form of communication except through government negotiations and regulated media. As a result, …

The Disinheritance Of Power, Jared Stein

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Patriarchy as a system of cultural organization is entering a new period of existence where the notion of masculine predominance is challenged and the power of maleness is redressed. This shift is extremely slow and just begun, but felt nonetheless by men. Masculine identity has long been dependent on patriarchy for definition. Modern masculinity, shaped by the tenants of patriarchy, emphasizes the power of the masculine over the feminine and perpetuates the supposedly inherent entitlement of the male condition. As cultural power is rebalanced the inherited power of masculinity will diminish. The inheritance of power that has allowed men to …

Bodies In Space, Nancy Congrove

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Looking to ritual, costuming, and drag, while still using traditional craft processes, my practice reflects imagery from my own narrative with inspiration from history and counterculture movements. I am interested in creating environments and costumes that reference the function and architecture of the body, especially when thinking about interior spaces.

Inner Sound: Contemporary Abstract Photography In The Wet-Plate Collodion Process, Brian Barger

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

My work is Neo-Romantic in nature. This description implies a rejection of all that is tedious, mundane, and ugly in the modern world, in favor of looking to history, nostalgia, and mystery for inspiration. I intend for the work to be dreamlike and evocative of fantasy, to be poetic rather than prosaic, and to be beautiful rather than purposeful.

To this end, I am investigating abstraction in photography through the use of the wet-plate collodion process. The work is intended to reference spirituality and the subconscious, through the use of the abstraction of nature and natural forms, using the inherent …

The Misconception Of Knowing, The Invention Of Time; Curiosities & Introspections Of Vernacular Photography, Patricia D. Drummond

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The Misconception of Knowing, the Invention of Time; Curiosities & Introspections of Vernacular Photography is a body of work that combines photography, artist books, and alternative processes in a series of pieces that explore the synergy between the act of creating vernacular or common photography, the photograph in its many forms, and the interaction with the photographic image at all the stages of its existence. It also exists in conjunction with this written monograph, which supports and gives insight into the work. Through the use of poems, sketchbook musings, the history of photography, critical theory and social norms within photography, …

Immersion, Jennifer M. Tremblay

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The focus of this paper is on a body of work created between 2014 and 2015. This series, titled Immersion, deals with the pollution of a local body of water, Blacks Run, and with my own bodily illnesses that occurred during this time period. Using large-scale cyanotypes, video, and large format photography I explore the attitudes that lead to environmental pollution and reference my own struggle with depression and anxiety.

My work examines traditional gendered views of the landscape and female figure, and the intersections and interactions between these two ‘bodies’. By using my illness as a way to …

Marshall University Music Department Presents A Piano Ensemble Class, Spring 2015, Final Performance, Henning Vauth, Johan Botes

All Performances

No abstract provided.