Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Enmesh: The Art Of Trauma And Recovery, Joanna Pottle

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Liminal Space is an artistic installation within the ongoing, interdisciplinary creative/research project "Enmesh: The Art of Trauma and Recovery.” Utilizing a combination of research methods, creative processes, and cultural inspirations, this project asks the following questions: how can the artistic process (this project serving as a preliminary case study) parallel various modes of recovery and healing? How can this objective be visually communicated through a mixed media approach of drawing, painting, and printmaking and how can this approach be an effective tool of communication? What can we conclude from both modes of work (solitarily or collectively)? How do they accomplish …

Liable To Change, Jody Travis Thompson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Liable to Change is a body of paintings in which I explore diverse approaches to the representation of visual space. Depictions of space and movement change throughout the pictures by combining various artistic conventions, such as trompe l’oeil realism and non-objective, geometric abstraction. Oil paint, resin, beeswax, and other materials create built-up surfaces which contain the history of their making. Interaction between various finishes and light on these surfaces changes based on the viewers' proximity to the painting. Images of monkey bars, lattice, golden ratio and flower of life patterns provide a structure through which line, form, and space are …

Between And Beyond, Noah F. Heil

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Between and Beyond is a series of handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic objects which explore intimate queer relationships through the human figure. I assemble slabs of clay to create openings and negative spaces within the sculptures, implying the ways in which the human form also acts as a vessel. The sculptures as well as the figures themselves remain open and vulnerable, literally and metaphorically. The body is depicted through fragmented sections, alluding to the ways in which society and culture break up gender and sexuality into limiting binaries. These intimate, private moments are meant to conjure an imagined future free of …

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 …

Thesis/Thesis Document 2, Jessamyn Plotts

Art Theses and Dissertations

Thesis/thesis document 2 explores the subversive power of the painted image, made by a physical performative act. Such acts are not confined to the production of the art object, but expand across the landscape, involving the minds, bodies, and things of culture adjacent to the making process. Following the thinking of Maurice-Merleau Ponty, Thesis/thesis document 2 understands painting not as the container of a finite, legible message, but as a physical platform for the conveyance of perceptual, personal, and experiential ambiguity. Made in this way, painted images offer a powerful alternative to the proliferation of propaganda and advertisement …

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray

Theses and Dissertations

The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

Four Sights Of The Patient (Ophelia), Cecily Ann Fergeson

Graduate School of Art Theses

I make work in a variety of media, largely dealing with the imagery and material of the human body. My current work attempts to reckon with the following subjects: a reclamation of the notion of the so-called medical gaze and its historical record in photography; the idea that receiving the medical gaze transforms patients’ bodies; the idea of illness as an uncanny and intimate experience; and, finally, the act of metaphorically retracing the body’s material journey through the medical institution as it exists today. In this text, I discuss my practice in the context of critical theory, a recent observation …

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 …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.

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.

Invisible Invisibility, Eugina Song

Theses and Dissertations

White America assumes its culture is the default, and Asian culture as foreign and irrelevant. I address Asian invisibility by using canvas structure as a Western framing device of painting, and make this cultural barrier visible by breaking out of the frame. Deriving from Dansaekhwa, I challenge the Western painting structure with materiality.

Why Munch?, Robert Jensen

Art and Visual Studies Presentations

Why Munch? was a keynote lecture for the conference "Marketing the North," sponsored by the society Munch, Markets and Modernism, in November 2017. In asking the question, the paper explores Munch's canonical status, especially vis-a-vis other Scandinavian artists of his time. In particular, the essay addresses the evolving nature of artistic professionalism at the end of the 19th century, and how Munch's personal and artistic behavior evoked a new definition of bohemianism that resonated deeply with the rise of European modernism and the post-1900 avant-gardes.

Beginner's Mind, Martin L. Benson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

My art distills my relationship to spirituality, digital culture, and the practices and side-effects therein, into a simplified visual language. The work manifests in the form of paintings, drawings, and light sculptures. Meditation and mindfulness training are a large part of my influence and interests. I often wonder how mindfulness practice can be mirrored in my artwork, not only in my process for creating the work, but also with what the resulting imagery does for the viewer. My intention is to provide an art form that invites one to look and experience one’s own capacity to observe, without the need …

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

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 …

It Could Have Been Great: An Examination Of Kandinsky's Bauhaus Paintings And The Great Synthesis Of The Arts, Deanna Brooks

Institute for the Humanities Theses

When Nazism descended upon the German art world in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, artists were treated as an expendable group of "political undesirables." Among them was Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who experienced firsthand the political pressure placed on his career, as he attempted to visualize a weltanschauung or "world view," that involved the marriage of different types of art, media, and practices. For Kandinsky the "Great Synthesis of the Arts" revealed the collective historical narrative, to which all artists contributed, and he strove to actualize this lifelong goal over the course of his teaching career at …

"Processing The Scape", Sim And Hvítahús Artist Residencies, Iceland, Yvonne Petkus

Grant Reports

International Activities Grant – Final Report

"Processing the Scape", SIM and Hvítahús Artist Residencies, Iceland was a sabbatical related research activity that included two artist residencies in Iceland: SIM Residency Program in Reykjavík (February 2016) and Hvítahús Artist Residency near Hellisandur (March 2016).

‘Fuchsia Lipstick’: The Domestication Of Lee Krasner In Post-War Criticism, Aleisha E. Barton

Richard A. Harrison Symposium

After the Second World War, the art world shifted from Europe to New York and a new form of painting that defined itself as distinctly American demanded attention from the public. This style, abstract expressionism, created an inability to survey clear subject matter allowed critics to imply gendered metaphorical resonances within works, as meanings were fluid and inconclusive to the viewer. Coupled with instability in the social sphere, artistic abstraction served as motivation for critics to seek out gendered aspects within an artwork, identifying and constructing difference to preserve order and control in a society that had dramatically changed from …

Duchampian Authenticity And The Readymade Consumer, Terra D' An Rudisill

Institute for the Humanities Theses

The goal of this work is to define the term Duchampian authenticity. I focus primarily on the artist Marcel Duchamp's works and philosophies in relation not only to traditional philosophies regarding authenticity but also in relation to his effect on authenticity's metamorphosis in popular culture and the mass market. I propose that the monumental paradigm shifts produced by Duchamp's conceptual and aesthetic experiments within the realm of visual art spread into our cultural bedrock, ultimately defining the consumer's ability to attain authenticity and identity through inauthentic and ephemeral commodities. Marcel Duchamp challenged traditional notions of the authentic experience and translated …

'How It Works': Stroke, Music, And Minimalism In Robert Ryman's Early Paintings, Vittorio Colaizzi

Art Faculty Publications

Robert Ryman's white paintings have, not surprisingly, been associated with minimalism, but the sensuality of his work and his disassociation from minimalism's critical discourse have also been emphasized. Art historian James Meyer's concept of the “minimal field,” or terrain of difference, allows us to forgo a debate about whether Ryman is or is not a minimalist, and instead to closely examine this painter's motivations and achievements. While Ryman shares the rigid anti‐illusionism of many artists of his generation, his work also has important connections with the jazz music that brought him to New York in the first place and with …

Spatiality In Ulysses And Cubism, Lingchei Chen

English Theses & Dissertations

The paper is a study of James Joyce's Ulysses and Cubism in modern art. Both forms, as the paper presents, use similar techniques to establish multidimensionality in the work of art. In a spatial novel like Ulysses, because of its techniques, the reader is allowed to experience exactly what the characters experience as Joyce presents every aspect of the Dublin life simultaneously. A Cubist painting does the same. As the Cubist painter captures every side of the object and simultaneously presents these different views on the canvas, the spectator is therefore able to apprehend the object from every possible angle, …

The Photograph And Superrealism, Christopher Stokes

Masters Theses

In 1968 an exhibition entitled "Realism Now" was held at Vassar College under the direction of Linda Nochlin, a noted art historian and professor at the school. The exhibition sought to present a cross-view of recent American painting in the realistic mode. Included in the catalog were twenty-five artists including Jack Beal, Robert Bechtle, Richard Estes, Alex Katz, Alfred Leslie, Malcom Morely and Philip Pearlstein, as well as many other artists who, at the time, were relatively unknown. The exhibition generated a great deal of attention, not only because of its recognition of contemporary representational painting as an influential movement, …

"The Tide Of The Unconscious" Jung, Bosch And The Archetypes Of The Garden Of Earthly Delights, Andrea R. Peck

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Many scholars have discussed the meaning of Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights concluding that Bosch's works were of a conscious nature relating to the real world. By contrast, this study, using the theories of Carl Jung, fragments Bosch's work and sees the milieu of his art through the eyes of the collective unconscious. Accordingly, a number of explanations of Jungian ideas are presented with the view to better understanding Bosch: Jung's theory of the archetypes, his view of Christianity, his analysis of medieval alchemy, as well as matrix archetypes and symbolic forms relating to The Garden. Through this …

Bruegel: His Influences And Consequences, Regina Cheng Jafree

All Master's Theses

Pieter Bruegel the elder, whose work is as modern today as centuries ago, and whose reputation as a major genius in the realm of visual, spiritual and sociological reality is lately emerging in a fashion which seems to do greater justice at a scale eminently deserved. I feel that in times to come, men like Bruegel and Caravaggio will possibly emerge as the most significant philosophers of visual arts. The fact that Bruegel is now being increasingly appreciated on a wider scale testifies to his greatness as a prophet and as a man who looked into the future, deeply and …

The Relation Of French Poetry And Painting To The Development Of French Impressionistic Music, Phyllis Elaine Threlfall

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

As far as the writer could find in her reading no one has ever written a finished study of this phase of Music, Art, and Literature. Of course, there are hints of it here and there in many books, but in no one in particular was a detailed study given. Paul Landormy’s book, A History of Music, seemed to carry the heart of the subject, however, in an extremely miniature style.

When we think of French music, our minds are generally centered in Paris, for it is here that the greatest organizations have been sponsored, and the important musical ideas …