Modern Art and Architecture Commons^™

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Public Art And Military Technology At The Mexico-U.S. Border: Disrupting Boundaries On Battlegrounds, Anna Luise Kaunert

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how contemporary artists Rubén Ortiz Torres, Chico MacMurtrie, rafa esparza, and Cassils transformed military technologies into powerful artworks that interrogate the Mexico-U.S. border as a battlefield. Together, their works illuminate militarization and surveillance technologies at the border and the violent enforcement of U.S. immigration policy.

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

The Creative Front, Aleksandr O. Barrett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss my thesis exhibition, The Creative Front, focusing on my materials, content, and context as they relate to each piece or body of work. This exhibition is the culmination of my work, which centers on my experience with the Russo-Ukrainian war. My work can be interpreted metaphorically, poetically, and directly through sculpture, installation, sound, and film. I am portraying very human stories and experiences from a full-scale war raging in Europe. My work is immersive, placing the viewer in an atmosphere of war, and conveying a sense of urgency and compassion for those who …

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Developing Mexico: History, Architecture, Photography, And Esther Born’S The New Architecture In Mexico, Tyler Considine

Theses and Dissertations

Esther Born’s The New Architecture in Mexico (1937) presents the first survey of Mexican modern architecture and documents early works by Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, among other Mexican modernists. This thesis examines Born’s architectural photography alongside that of Lola Álvarez Bravo, Guillermo Kahlo, and other photographers and within discourses of modernity, history, and representation.

Cultural Predicaments: Neorealism In The Netherlands, 1927–1945, Stephanie Huber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes as its subject Dutch Magic Realism, also known as “Neorealism,” an unsettling style of figurative painting developed by Dutch painters Pyke Koch, Carel Willink, Charley Toorop, Raoul Hynckes, Dick Ket, and Wim Schuhmacher during a moment of rising totalitarian regimes in neighboring countries and the Nazi Occupation of The Netherlands. Like their European counterparts, these Dutch Magic Realists conveyed the experience of modern alienation by perversely appropriating stylistic characteristics and iconographic motifs of revered national schools of painting – in their case, Early Netherlandish and Northern Renaissance traditions.

The fortunes of Neorealism exemplify the pressures brought to …

Hudson Yards: Hybrid Capital's New Home, Massimo D. Scoditti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis focuses on the material and metaphysical aspects of the Hudson Yards, the largest private development in US History. With its roots in the administration of Michael Bloomberg, the site is representative of neoliberal ideology. It is also one in which cultural production is central. This is in terms of the rationalization and mythos of the building of the space itself and the dreamworlds created to obscure the mechanisms of extraction and accumulation that make such a complex possible. The Hudson Yards is particularly interesting because, as Cindi Katz might suggest, topography lines connect it to transnational capital. And …

The Uncanny Desire In American Animation And Film., Kristen Hankins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although surrealism was short lived, the impact on popular culture is ongoing. Analyzing this impact is quite interesting because it set a standard for American animation and film. In this thesis, Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis and the uncanny are investigated through the lens of the camera in American cinema and animation. This thesis looks at cartoons and films that were made after Breton’s surrealist manifestos were published. This thesis aims to show the viewer the lasting impact that Breton had on American popular culture. This thesis is divided into three chapters with an introduction and conclusion. Chapter one discusses Fleischer …

James Mahony (C.1816-1859): The Illustrated London News, Niamh Ann Kelly

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Europ: Expanded Cinema, Projection And The Film Co-Op In Western Europe, 1966–1979, Drew E. Bucilla

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reconstructs “Europ”—an informal network of artists interconnected through the film cooperative movement who propagated expanded cinema throughout Western Europe in a series of artist-organized screenings, festivals and exhibitions in the late 1960s and 1970s. While Europ was never actually realized as a project, I deploy the name as a retrospective device for bringing together experimental filmmakers from Austria, Germany and the U.K. Expanded cinema was an experimental art form that stretched the definition of film by incorporating diverse media, including multiple screens and projectors, live performance, and installation. It thus resisted the confines of traditional cinemas, as it …

Structures Of Time: Expressions Of Subjectivity And Social Politics In Works By Silvia Gruner, 1986–2014, Silvia Sampaio De Alencar

Theses and Dissertations

The works of Silvia Gruner (born 1959) illustrate the use of time registers as strategies to express contemporary subjectivity’s experiences with globalized environments between 1986-2014. Through this approach, the artist connects her production to the social politics of Mexico to critique the effects of globalization on Mexican society and culture.

Understanding Spaces Of Abandonment Through Virtual Frameworks In Landscape Architecture, Aus Perez

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

In recent years, design professionals have implemented many contemporary landscape architecture projects across the United States. With a primary goal of returning nature to urban environments, contemporary landscape architects and other transdisciplinary partners work diligently to sculpt physical spaces that reflect the human-living experience. However, a leap into the world of video game design could allow landscape architects and urban planners to more freely create virtual social environments to address rising issues of abandonment in today’s urban and rural spaces. Video game mechanics and methodologies can be used extensively in the disciplines of design that value participatory processes, like landscape …

The Modes Of Intervention In Alvin Lucier’S I Am Sitting In A Room, Daniel Fox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969) is an icon of experimental music and sound art. The sizable literature addressing the aesthetic and philosophical implications of this piece rarely discusses the performance practice beyond what is indicated in the score itself. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) The meaning that is derived from the piece often hinges not just on what sounds are obtained, but on how they are obtained. 2) Over the past 50 years, changes in the performance practice have altered what constitutes the work: magnetic tape was used until 2000 when it was replaced …

Concrete Poetry, Sara Ghazi Asadollahi

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text addresses my work as an artist and defines it in the context of the following subjects: The concept of ruins, which highlights the relationship between architecture and landscape; the formal and metaphorical dialectic between absence and presence in abandoned places; and the idea of dystopia, which emerges from that in-between space where the real dissolves into the imaginary. At the same time, my work is inspired by the visual culture of cinema and literature, principally within the science-fiction genre, and draws upon my observation of abandoned buildings in Tehran, my native city. These urban ruins are products of …

Mechanical Kingdoms: Sound Technologies And The Avant-Garde, 1928–1933, Lauren Rosati

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Against accepted histories of the historical avant-garde, which have elevated artistic production in traditional media while suppressing sonic practices, this dissertation argues that artist-engineers working across Europe and the United States independently, if simultaneously, turned their attention to emerging sound technologies as new media for creative experimentation by the early 1930s. This spectrum of activity demonstrates the significance of sound in avant-garde practice, and indicates a wide-ranging artistic engagement with technological devices intended for mass audiences. While the common understanding of the relation between art and technology in this period amounts to one of mere enthusiasm for the novel formal …

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …

Framing The City: Photography And The Construction Of São Paulo, 1930–1955, Danielle J. Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1930 and 1955 São Paulo, Brazil experienced a period of accelerated growth as the population nearly quadrupled from 550,000 to two million. In response, the municipal government undertook an aggressive public works program and commercial building boomed. Photographic representations of the cityscape were essential in directing modern São Paulo’s physical evolution because they reflected both the real—a chaotically growing megacity—and the ideal—a literally new, modernized space. This dissertation centers on four case studies of artists practicing different photographic modalities in order to analyze the symbiotic relationship between São Paulo's urban development and its photographic representation.

Construction sites, scaffolding, and …

Reworking The White-Masculine Ideal, Steven H. Gonzalez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This text functions as an exploration of self through artistic practice, a designated space for reflection on contemporary Queer experience. In looking specifically at the permeation of the idealized-white-masculine figure as found within Western visual culture, social media and gay pornography become isolated as sites where these figures are commonly found. This line of inquiry defines how the ideal is reified through these differing digital platforms and the social implications the homogenized male form has on raced individuals. In addition to determining the image of the perfect masculine physique through research, this text expands on how its' imaged representation becomes …

Strange Woods, Song Park

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am interested in searching for images of women that have not been adequately represented in visual art. As a visual artist, I am directed by my sense of sight to investigate and know something. I like to challenge myself to visualize things that do not already have a visual representation. It has been frustrating for me to create images of women, and I have experienced a deep ambivalence in response to the different images of women I have encountered. The socially and culturally constructed images of women that I have internalized and those that have developed from my own …

In-Between: The Spaces Of Modernity, Elisa Fabris Valenti

LSU Master's Theses

During the past three years as a graduate student, I have experienced loneliness. Having recently emigrated from Italy, I have often asked myself why I am experiencing such hard times adjusting to a different country. My thesis explores this question. Referring to Marc Augé’s idea of non-place, I have chosen a geographical and spatial starting point to approach my work. Italian cities are built around the central piazza where social, political, and economic life revolves. In my thesis, I depict American spaces that lack specific location and create solitude within the urban corridors. Private feelings, such as loneliness, are paradoxes …

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Heavy Ink: A Documentary On The Comicbook Revolution, Renzo Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heavy Ink is a documentary short focusing on the comic anthology magazine, Heavy Metal, examining its history as both a standout comic magazine, and how it fits into the larger tradition of comic books. What started off in 1977 as a sci-fi offshoot of National Lampoon ushered in a new era of comics by bridging the gap between American and European comic sensibilities with a talent pool from all over the world.

Heavy Metal would go on to have reverberations beyond comics into music, movies, and the global entertainment landscape of today. Heavy Metal introduced the world to artists such …

Material Poetics, Ellen G. Reid

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

quench: /kwen(t)SH/

a : put out, extinguish

b : to put out the light or fire

c : to cool suddenly by immersion

d : to cause to lose heat or warmth

e : to bring to an end typically by satisfying, damping, cooling, or

decreasing

f : to relieve or satisfy with liquid

This is often how projects begin, a haunting idea, word, or experience inundates my consciousness and sub-consciousness. How could the body directly relate to an experience of quenching? This provoked the idea of the extreme sport: freediving. To adequately depict the definition of quenching, any …

Open Works: Between The Programmed And The Free, Art In Italy 1962 To 1972, Lindsay A. Caplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation historicizes and theorizes a group of Italian artists who were among the first to use computers and cybernetics to make artworks, developing the genre of Arte Programmata, or Programmed Art. It argues that the artists of Arte Programmata (Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and collectives Gruppo T and Gruppo N) turned to the generative, interactive, and probabilistic aspects of early computers not simply as new media for making art but as platforms for radically altering what it means to be a participant in an increasingly mediated and networked world. This is apparent in how each of their works deploys …

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.

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 …