Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item SHOULDER DEEP(2021) Zenisek, Heidi; Collis, Shannon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This body of work reexamining my relationship to home-past, present, and future- involves seeing beyond the untarnished façade of memory to the unflattering reality, whose rough edges have been smoothed. With the realization that home no longer feels like home and carrying with me the guilt of abandoning my family heritage, I’ve embarked on a search for a new place to dwell. To help with this, I’m creating an obscure pseudoscience to extract information from the land. Coaxing out those indescribable, nearly incomprehensible elements of a place, tapping into what we don’t know and can’t see to guide me towards home, wherever that may be.Item The Sloth of the Author: In Defense of a Call to Inaction(2020) Brady, Laura Michiko; Mansbach, Steven; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mladen Stilinović’s (1947-2016) text “In Praise of Laziness” (1993) makes seemingly absurd claims about the relationship between art and laziness which are most often interpreted as political commentary in his typically cynical brand of humor. While this humor is indeed a consistent and essential element of his work, such readings fail to critically assess the depth of his notion of “laziness.” I conduct a thorough unpacking of his definition in order to reveal “laziness” as a form of constructive passivity with a potentially pacifist dimension. With particular focus on his artist books and works dealing with themes of time and pain, I demonstrate the myriad ways in which Stilinović’s notion of “laziness” manifests throughout his oeuvre. Contextualization of “In Praise of Laziness” has been dominated by oversimplified narratives of a global “East/West” divide while Stilinović’s particular geopolitical circumstances as a member of the last Yugoslav generation have been overlooked. Following a careful recontextualization of “In Praise of Laziness,” I suggest that this work may be considered a critical response to the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.Item OPERATOR ADVANCES INTO BRUSH AT FULL THROTTLE(2020) Kunkel, Jeremy Thomas; Sham, Foon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I am compelled by the underlying conflicts that feed conditions into the contemporary landscape. Conflicts stemming absurdities such as abuse and neglect by fostering a false sense of disconnect into the sedentary individual. Structures of power, progression and control are hegemony framed as ideology that demands a mass and momentum; Like sedatives, dulling cognizant intuition, codified rhetoric is seductively buried into objects, digital feeds, and other means. This pulls the individual away from the reality of the world, creating a false landscape and redesigning individual habitus to align with a given narrative, or purpose, outside of the self. As these conflicts evolve in broad strokes through society into conditions, I am compelled to look beneath the surface, distilling the foundational corruption that I perceive. My work collides with and disrupts this momentary intersection, where objects and other processes, imbued with the language of society, are apprehended by individual intuition.Item Wake Up, We're Not Asleep(2020) Robertson, Matthew Hunt; Richardson, William C; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Title of Thesis: WAKE UP, WE’RE NOT ASLEEP Matthew Hunt Robertson, Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art, 2020 Thesis Directed By: Department Chair W.C. Richardson, Department of Art Wake Up, We’re Not Asleep is an exhibition of painted images and installations that explore the nature of memory. The following is an explanation of the inspiration and creative process that produced the work, as well as a description of the pieces themselves.Item Mingling Echoes(2020) Koch, Lauren Grace; Craig, Patrick; Strom, Justin; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mingling Echoes is an exhibition comprised of written word, alchemic reactions, found and repurposed objects, as well as sculptural forms of my own creation. All are abstractions from my subconscious, and they are blended with influential objects from my past in an intuitive manner. The following abstract gives a glimpse into my inspirations and personal experiences that have led to how I perceive memories are connected, intertwined, and ultimately, triggered. Additionally, I included two contemporary artists in whose work I find correlations with my own. The found and repurposed objects come from my personal collection that I have amassed over the past three decades from myriad places including my grand-parents’ property, gifts, flea markets, junk yards, antique/vintage shops, and roadsides.Item Entropic Construction(2020) Thron, Michael Richard; Shasn, Foon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ENTROPIC CONSTRUCTION Michael Richard Thron Master of Fine Arts 2020 Professor of Sculpture, Foon Sham, Department of Fine Art ABSTRACT “Entropic Construction,” is an exhibition of an installation at The University of Maryland College Park. In this written component to my Thesis, I address the combination of the theory of my creative practice, material research, object ontology, personal history, and inspirations for the exhibited work.Item A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal(2020) Storti, Anna; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops the concept of racial hosting to conceptualize mixed-raceness as an embodied palimpsest of past, present, and future. A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal argues for the importance of uncovering the disavowed, residual, and violent conditions of racial mixture. The project situates queer theories of temporality and feminist theories of situated knowledge in relation to Asian Americanist critiques of memory. I contend that the Asian/white subject is both an index to track the colonial condition across time, and a host that harbors the colonial desires we have come to name as hybridity, multiracialism, and post-racism. Each chapter builds towards a methodology of memory to, on the one hand, track the sensorial life of mixed-raceness, and on the other hand, document how the discourse of multiracialism obscures mass violence and the colonial ideology of racial purity. Chapter one advances the framework of white residue through an examination of the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Japanese/white police officer serving 263 years in prison for assaulting 13 Black women. I then narrate the life of Elliot Rodger, the Chinese/white mass shooter and involuntary celibate. Opening the study in this way dispels the notion that racial mixture renders racism’s past obsolete. I then shift to mixed race artists whose performances of desire, memory, and time include a fervent belief in queer and feminist possibility. Chapter two illuminates how a femme aesthetic of retribution surfaces as a response to racial fetish. This chapter spotlights performances by Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Maya Mackrandilal. Chapter three forwards the concept of muscle memory to study how the accumulation of history is deposited into the body and enacted through movement. Here, I contemplate the queer and trans dance of Zavé Martohardjono. Chapter four de-idealizes hybridity through the oeuvre of contemporary artist Saya Woolfalk. To end, I refer to the photography of Gina Osterloh to force a reckoning with the pressures to remember and claim ancestry. Mixed race subjection, I conclude, is an embodied phenomenon with reverberating implications for the structure of racial form writ large.Item A Well Within A Sinking Ship(2018) Bryant, Hugh Condrey; Collis, Shannon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A Well Within A Sinking Ship is an exhibition of sculptures in The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland. It comprises four sculptural works exploring formal and structural possibilities within the context of destruction, reclamation, and salvage. In the following, I explain the basis of my creative practice and subject matter referenced and then provide descriptions and reasoning behind the sculptures presented in the exhibition.Item VOICES TO BE HEARD(2017) Benson, Zachariah Chyanne; Sham, Foon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My work serves a purpose. I have a desire to build things, as most of my pieces show, to lift people up, to redeem people and to redeem materials. My work captures the aspects of life that I feel need to be highlighted, whether those be hardships, turmoils, conflicts, boldness or civility. Pieces have explored the Syrian refugee crisis, the US/Iraq war, persecution of religious groups, US elections, and faith-based ideas such as Holy Communion and the Ten Commandments. I want my work to inject emotion and possibly even change in my viewer. I have toiled over these aspects of life and society that are concerning, meaningful, or just overwhelming and I want the viewer to have the opportunity to grapple with these ideas as well.Item The Space Between(2016) Wyszomirska, Jowita; Collis, Shannon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I approach my practice through the truth that art is inseparable from reality. Reducing art to a single idea is an unnatural limitation because the creative process and its manifestations result from many parallel ideas, instincts, emotions and reflections. In the following, I trace the central sources of the inspiration for work and attempt to bridge the experiential and intuitive processes that concurrently fuel my creative process.