Studio Art Masters Theses Collection

You or Your Memory

Baker, Katherine L. — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 06:21:13 PDT

You or Your Memory is written as a parallel text to the body of work completed during my time at graduate school, specifically the works on paper made during my final year. This thesis discusses personal narrative, process, and materials as they relate to the works shown in Herter Gallery in April 2012 under the name You or Your Memory. Specific topics include time, relics, and personal memory.

I Don't Share Spirit Animals

Cullen, Courtney J. — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 06:21:12 PDT

I Don't Share Spirit Animals is presented in conjunction with a visual art exhibition that is made up of mixed material sculpture and painting. Primary ideas explored within the body of work are the uncanny, personal mythology and material transformation.

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Seelig, Chad T. — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 06:20:45 PDT

if (){then ();} else {();} uses eight microphones to record sounds from the room for the entire duration of the exhibition. All sounds are archived and then called upon in seemingly random intervals and played from twenty-four speakers set up in the room. The recordings are then layered allowing the past and present to exist simultaneously, creating an interaction with the passage of time. Using analogue methods, mathematics, electronics, and coding languages I am interested in creating interactive sound environments inviting participants to help create the work. Playing with aural phenomena, I focus on basic methods of producing and processing sound to stimulate human interaction and play.

The End of Histories

Field, Joshua — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 06:19:47 PDT

This M.F.A. thesis paper and exhibition explore the ephemerality of relationships as they are redefined by contiguity and recontextualization. My work derives from an investigation of alternative interpretive structures while retaining an overarching sense of narrative. This approach to painting relies on the human propensity to create organization in order to contend with chaos or overwhelming amounts of information. Traced back to curiosity cabinets or wunderkammers and forward through museums and encyclopedias, the organization of knowledge in both its diachronic and synchronic forms serves to collapse time and space. Geography and chronology become obsolete as relationships between images and objects gain new contexts. This recontextualization is not momentary but continual, as objects and images move through time and are replicated, appropriated and assimilated. Particularly in this digital age, that distance from the original is expanded in such a way as to make relationships truly ephemeral. A painting that derives from a print-out of a JPEG, which was beamed across the globe after being digitized from a photograph of an object already taken out of time and geography by those who placed it in a museum is extraordinarily distant from its original context. The ensuing abstraction changes the image irrevocable; it is a new thing entirely and only an echo of the former context remains. These paintings are filled with echoes but the true narrative is that of the ephemeral relationships that are fixed on the page for a just a moment and then disappear into the continuously shifting stream of context.

M.F.A. Thesis Quest, or, I Went into the Wilderness and I Found Alec Baldwin

Snell, Steven — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:31:54 PDT

I went into the wilderness and I found Alec Baldwin. This is not a lie. It is also a title for a video installation and this thesis. In it, I investigate three separate adventure-performances, providing a theoretical context for their existence, meaning, and relationship as a form of artistic practice. I call this practice ‘adventure-art’, using the term to describe a performance-based action in which the artist publically explores his or her reality through some type of physical adventure, search, quest, or challenge. It is an attempt to engage oneself and others at both at the physical and mediated levels, reconciling, confusing, and merging the real with the simulated. In this thesis, I explore the confluence of consumption, creativity, the real, and the simulated within American popular culture from the perspective of a middle-class, suburban, white-male, art student – me, Steve Snell.

Beyond My Abode

Shin, Jieun — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:04:40 PDT

My watercolor paintings on paper is a surrogate portrait of a migrant, both estranged by and familiar with the hybrid cultural predicament symbolized by IKEA and my own distant “ethnic” culture. My intention is to explore my individual identity as a female Korean artist in relation to the complex (visual) histories of different worlds.

Yes, Probably

Richards, Hannah E B — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:03:13 PDT

This M.F.A. thesis paper and drawing installation deal with the physical relationship of the body to itself, and with the neurological wiring connecting the parts to each other and to the whole. In my drawing 10 Months/ 9 x 20 Feet, I work on a scale several times that of my own body. Issues explored include contingency, relationships, accumulation, parameters, play, record, time, duration, proprioception, metonymy, fragmentation, space, scale, sight, process, and drawing. Over ten months, I produced a single drawing measuring twenty feet across and nine feet tall. My body’s repetitive contorting in order to trace itself, in order to literally circumnavigate a moving form, can be seen as a means of familiarizing myself in a tactile sense with the physical relationship of myself to myself.

Pale In Comparison

MacDonald, Ryan A. — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:00:04 PDT

People maintain histories through memory filtered through language to create fictions. My work involves the recording and incorporation of stories into audio and sculptural and installation, to reveal the structures that make up the fictions we exist within. For this exhibition, it is through a combination of disparate objects: fingers, furniture, potatoes and peach pits, stripped of their colors and humming with life that I am investigating my own fictions and their undeniable relations with others.

Phil's Hill

Lauriat, Michele J. — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:59:52 PDT

Phil’s Hill is a thesis paper presented in conjunction with a visual art show of large drawings. The primary concepts explored in this work are, uncertainty of place, instability of perception, and the value of indulging in your own point of view.

Letters to Anyone

Dickson, Michelle L. — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:53:48 PDT

Letters to Anyone is written as a parallel text to the body of work I’ve created during my time in graduate school, culminating in the installation almost‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐release.

This thesis deals with my personal narrative as a way to understand the ideas and concepts that my work is derived from. Specific topics include memory, the body, time, process, space, and change.