Art Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2745

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Start date: 1980Subject: search.filters.subject.Fine arts

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 26
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    Book Ends
    (2024) Hilker, Kenneth; Keener, Cy; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis marks a pivotal transition in my artistic journey, detailing the creation of Book Ends, a large wood sculpture that emerged as a culmination of my experiences and reflections during the MFA program at the University of Maryland. Moving away from my previous focus on painting, this work embraces sculpture to explore themes of memory, loss, and rebirth. Book Ends is crafted from repurposed wood, each piece with its own history and emotional weight, collected from dismantled homes and reshaped into a new form. This sculpture not only represents a physical assembly of materials but also embodies my personal and artistic transformations, reflecting on the interconnectedness of life's continuous cycles and the impermanent nature of existence. Through Book Ends, I aim to connect viewers with the deeper narratives embedded in the materials I use, inviting them to contemplate the layers of history and transformation inherent in the wood.
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    MY TRANS.PARENT WOMB: QUANTUM PLAY, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND ASEXUAL REGENERATION FROM WITHIN THE US WAR MACHINE
    (2024) Leizman, Danielle; Collis, Shannon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    "FROM BENEATH" is a multimedia art installation which offers an immersive experience through three distinct works that act as “wombs.” The work aims to redefine conventional ideas of reproduction and futurity by transforming the gallery space into a realm of sensory exploration and non-linear time. Utilizing devices such as optical illusion, tactile sound, AI generation, and re-animation of archival media, the work advocates for embodiment as a catalyst for a queer navigational strategy which the artist defines as “quantum play.”
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    The Home We Can Never Leave
    (2023) Richardson-Deppe, Charlotte R; Keener, Cy; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Growing up, I performed aerial arts in a circus. In the circus, a web of interdependence keeps you off the ground—the tightness of your grip, the strength of your friend holding you up, the trust in an apparatus to hold your weight. In my own body now, I feel the residual stretch, tension, and ache the circus left in me—remnants of bodies pushing through pain, defying gravity to hold one another up. Via soft sculpture and performance, I negotiate the body as a site of both liberating autonomy and confining oppression.
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    EVERY PLACE WE’VE BEEN
    (2023) Qiu, Elaine; Craig, Patrick; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Combining printmaking and painting, hovering between abstraction and representation, "Every Place We’ve Been" documents the disorienting experiences of the last years on both a collective and personal level. Using images culled from various archival sources, as well as personal snapshots, the installation examines how history becomes a collective embodied memory and draws attention to the boundaries between the personal and the public.
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    Embrace the Wave
    (2023) Shahramipoor, Hosna; Strom, Justin; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Everything in the universe is made up of waves. "Embrace the Wave" is a journey of self-discovery, in which our own inner waves can resonate with and influence the world around us, dissipate, magnify, and transform.
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    I HOLD YOU CLOSE
    (2023) Mercedes/Greene, Stephanie; Collis, Shannon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    I Hold You Close articulates the precarious emotions of being queer in a society riddled by violence. Using steel, melted weapons, sound, and motors, this installation reflects on my own experience of queerness and queer love. Rather than framing vulnerability as a weakness, these works invite the viewer to consider vulnerability as a weapon.
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    Separately Together
    (2022) Katt, Elizabeth C; Strom, Justin D; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This body of work explores aspects of our Covid-19 experience for the past two plus years. The unknown quality of the virus in its beginning, people going alone to the hospital with no loved one by their side, unpredictable outcomes from infection, and preventable deaths enabled by incompetent leadership has become the subject matter I explore in my creative practice. Public health officials and healthcare professionals knew what to do but the effort was fragmented, confusing, and poorly led in the United States. The lack of coordinated response, the marginalization of public health officials, the inconsistent messaging, incorrect information, and the use of a public health crisis as a political tool were exasperating and disorienting. The exploitation, willful ignorance, or disregard that impacts people with less power and means make me want to scream.
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    POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH
    (2022) Imes, Alyssa Maria; Collis, Shannon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Title of Thesis: POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH Alyssa Imes, Master of Fine Arts 2022 Thesis directed by: Associate Professor Shannon Collis, Department of Art POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH “Trauma ebbs and flows It is unstable and unknown A terrain of progress While you weep, Lean on your willows The only way to stabilize, ……is to lean” (Alyssa Imes)
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    Decorative Specter
    (2021) McWilliams, Noah Leonard; Keener, Cy; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This exhibition reflects a tragic and anticlimactic future. The ultimate outcome of human exploration of the universe will no doubt shed light on the dismal nature of our interpersonal relationships and grand aspirations.Decorative Specter is an exhibition of sculpture and video that depicts a distant future inhabited by decorative artifacts of long extinct human civilizations. The works in this exhibition are speculative portraits of alien, but eerily familiar puppets. They represent moments within an implied overarching narrative, frozen for study and contemplation. My use of commonly overlooked aesthetics is intended to remind us that other intelligent life will likely spring from an unexpected place and with unexpected results. In the following text I will explain the formal qualities and concepts behind the work.
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    Attend
    (2019) Isenberg, Monroe Joseph; Keener, Cy; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Is there a space between the animate and inanimate? Where is consciousness held? Exploration of these questions guides my practice and research. Art-making drives my effort to explore the intangible, mysterious place where matter and consciousness collide. My thesis work is an attempt to translate the inexplicable mystery encountered in this unseen space between— the moments that Martin Buber describes as the “I and Thou”— into elemental forms and installations. By investigating the invisible, I endeavor to make the unnoticed—visible and excavate the overwhelming connectedness that is present in this world. This Thesis is a reflection of the philosophy I have learned and artwork I have created to contemplate our connected reality.