Studio Art Masters Theses Collection

Permanent URI for this collection

Browse

Recent Submissions

  • Publication
    Withdrawn
    (2024-05) Willig, Daniel R.
    In my thesis, I first aim to investigate the correlation between trauma and loneliness, examining how traumatic experiences often contribute to feelings of isolation. Following this, I will delve into how contemporary society fosters conditions that predispose individuals to loneliness. I will then analyze how my artwork reflects and addresses these interconnected themes and how my art practice provides relief and awareness, countering the effects of contemporary society. Finally, I will explore the ways in which other artists express similar concepts within their own creative endeavors, providing a broader context for understanding the relationship between trauma, loneliness, and contemporary society in the realm of art.
  • Publication
    You or Your Memory
    (2012-05) Baker, Katherine L
    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.
  • Publication
    I Don't Share Spirit Animals
    (2012-05) Cullen, Courtney J
    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.
  • Publication
    if (){then ();} else {();}
    (2012-05) Seelig, Chad T
    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.
  • Publication
    The End of Histories
    (2012-05) Field, Joshua
    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.
  • Publication
    M.F.A. Thesis Quest, or, I Went into the Wilderness and I Found Alec Baldwin
    (2011-05) Snell, Steven
    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.
  • Publication
    Beyond My Abode
    (2011-05) Shin, Jieun
    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.
  • Publication
    Yes, Probably
    (2011-05) Richards, Hannah E B
    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.
  • Publication
    Pale In Comparison
    (2011-05) Macdonald, Ryan A
    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.
  • Publication
    Phil's Hill
    (2011-05) Lauriat, Michele J.
    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.
  • Publication
    Letters to Anyone
    (2011-05) Dickson, Michelle L
    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.
  • Publication
    for you, of course
    (2010-05) Lin, Chun-tso
    For You, Of Course is a thesis paper and it functions as a thesis paper for you and for me. Therefore, for whatever reason you are reading this, I am here asking you to please keep a few things in mind when you are destined to continue reading this thesis. First, this is a thesis paper that I created for you with the intention of making this written form as a vehicle to communicate with you, because I need you to make “art.” Second, I have to write this thesis to fulfill the requirement for my MFA – Studio Art degree. Third, I am selecting my sources to support my point of view. (In this way, it makes me sound more legitimate). Therefore, my point of view is a personal point of view, and it is a fair subject to be questioned and challenged. Fourth, there is not much to learn but to know, so please try to experience this paper rather than reading it. Fifth, information and knowledge are elements/material for my practice. Sixth, the truth is I do not know what art or an artist is or is not, and I can only understand it the way I understand it. Seventh, the main body of this thesis is nine projects that examine the fact of one individual, myself, making “art” in art academia. I question and also challenge the definition of the art, the role of the artist, and the relationship between the art, artist, gallery / space / location, time, institutions and viewer in an academic environment. Eighth, art is like a carefully designed experiment, but I am not a scientist. Ninth, what I am doing in this thesis is constructing “experiments” to collect “data” and observations, making them into a clearer picture that we then translate into my work to communicate my findings. After “art” is done, it soon becomes data, and it is here for you to use. Ten, I am not a scientist; I am a self-clamed artist who loves to do “nothing.” Finally, you should contact me rather than reading this. We can talk, and maybe make some or no “art” together! My email is yunzuolin@hotmail.com , Email me!
  • Publication
    Into Another
    (2010-05) Purnell, Sarah N
    Through a series of paintings, drawings, videos, and large-scale sculptures/installation, I intend to create an environment that explores relationships between the safe and the unsafe place, the sweet and the grotesque, the dream and the reality, and the remembered and the forgotten. I am investigating landscape and how it relates to the body, human relationships, memory, and status of being.
  • Publication
    Zero Syllable
    (2010-05) Molestina, Camila
    The word, the corporeal word, the forgotten piece of word, the pause, the breath, the silence_Having said, heard, not at all. Through text, video, sound and installation, this thesis investigates the materiality of language, translation and memory in relationship to words as an attempt to reconfigure a certain inner space. This thesis is a research on the theoretical context and cultural reference of the M.F.A. work. The play between the spoken words (multiple voices within one voice) and the image (body) echoes the geography of survival: moments translated to words, speech translated to body, to image, to void.
  • Publication
    Different Ways To Record Light
    (2010-05) Feeney, Ryan P
    Different Ways to Record Light is a series of photographs, videos and objects that explore the affect that popular culture has on how I perceive, and make sense of the world around me. By using light as a thematic and metaphoric subject this work opens up a discourse about the role that images and technology play in our perceptual lives. This thesis paper will give a theoretical, contextual and historical framework for the concepts explored in my studio practice.
  • Publication
    The Unfixedness of It
    (2010-05) O'grady, Kerry
    My drawings contemplate the unfixed nature of my experience. I draw from a state of uncertainty about the relationship between self and space, between a moment of experience and the one that follows it. My process involves intuitive mark-making in which instances of perception are indeterminate and discontinuous. I draw from the experience of unhinged moments, from silence and stillness, and from the indefinable, inarticulable, interstitial moments of perception between those that can be concretely described. The immediacy of drawing, the direct engagement with the mark on the surface, is central to my work. Intuitive mark-making is a way of engaging as directly as possible with the indeterminate nature of my experience. As the drawn marks allude to a once-fleeting present, the layers of marks interact to remind me of the non-linear nature of time and the unfixed nature of experience. The making of the mark punctuates a fragment of experience, dividing it into before and after the mark. The esoteric nature of drawing, the variety of marks engaging on and within the surface, the ethereal traces, the engagement with the space implied by the panel, the discontinuities revealed between adjacent drawings on panel, and the implied experience compressed in the seams between the panels address multiple and unresolveable ways of experiencing a moment in a space.
  • Publication
    Vision and Contemplation: An Exploration Within the Medium
    (2009-05) Pillemer, Mica Y
    This thesis is an exploration of various issues concerning composition in painting. In it I take a step by step approach to advancing the compositional thought process. Within that exploration the central issues of painting are confronted and expanded upon.
  • Publication
    Bang!
    (2009-05) Hennessy, Kimberly c
    BANG! is a thesis paper presented in conjunction with a visual art show that is made up of paintings, sculptures, and site specific installations. Primary ideas explored with the body of work are those of growth and expansion, energy, contradiction, excess, collection, play, drama, and nostalgia, specifically relating to color relationships and physical material.
  • Publication
    Regalia and Repetition
    (2009-05) Karpman, Deborah I
    My thesis investigates some of the conceptual ideas related to my studio work, both in terms of theory and contemporary practice. This thesis focuses how the visual images formally operate, as well as the larger framework of discourse that surrounds my practice. In my work, the habitual, incessant process of cutting and extraction and the subsequent meticulous reconfiguring use the strategies of repetition and labor. These sustained, ongoing acts have the possibility to be generative or transformative rather than simply repetitive. This thesis also explores the found object, complicating the classification and knowledge systems of the source image with odd juxtapositions and reconfigurements. This body of work presents and develops several contradictions: the gimmick or lure of the initial appearance versus the underlying reality; the paradox between the promise of beauty or pleasure, and the sense of antagonism or disruption embedded in these images.
  • Publication
    Run Stitch Remembrance
    (2009-05) Baldwin, Lyndsey N
    In an effort to process my grief associated with the death of my grandmother, I created a series of drawings, documenting my daily life in Massachusetts. This body of work constitutes my thesis. In total, I made one thousand and sixty one drawings, each undergoing a series of identical, repeated processes, which represent the number of days lived there. The simplicity, detail and sheer volume of drawings in the installation chronicles a relatable story through complex means. Creating the drawings was a methodical act of remembrance, the practice allowing quiet reflection on each day and its respective history. This body of work inhabits and portrays a space between experience and memory. It was a cathartic, private practice, which permits viewers only to witness the outcome, the installation; the legacy of time spent. Creating the work was a meditative, tactile way of both marking and processing time; time spent mourning the loss of my grandmother, accessing memories, and healing.