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 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.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 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.Item Plastic Fantastic: American Sculpture in the Age of Synthetics(2018) O'Steen, Danielle; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation considers the role of plastics as a sculptural medium in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. At this time, artists were turning to synthetics in large numbers and with great enthusiasm, in spite of wavering public opinion on plastics in the U.S. I argue for the significance of this “plastics moment” for the arts by looking closely at the work of four artists: Donald Judd (1928–1994), Eva Hesse (1936–1970), De Wain Valentine (b. 1936), and Frederick Eversley (b. 1941). I position their sculptures in the social context of synthetics in twentieth-century America. In their distinctive practices, Judd, Hesse, Valentine, and Eversley each used plastics with a pioneer’s zeal: working with local industries, creating new means of production, and even developing formulas for the materials. Plastic Fantastic is an interdisciplinary text, engaging scientific and cultural histories in conversation with American art scholarship. I focus on the production accounts of the objects to understand how these four artists took on the challenge of synthetics, and consider the diversity of substances used, looking at sculptures in Plexiglas, Fiberglas, and polyester resin. Using a technical approach to art history, I expand the literature on artworks from this period, which often omits material details and overlooks plastics’ place at this crux of sculpture in the U.S. My dissertation illuminates the important innovations of Judd, Hesse, Valentine, and Eversley to understand this juncture in the 1960s and 1970s, when American art found plastics.Item Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016(2018) Isto, Raino Eetu; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on monumentality and the ways it has developed in the sociopolitical conditions of late socialist and postsocialist Southeastern Europe. It examines monumental production in this region between the 1960s and 80s, and the artistic practices that constitute responses to socialist monumentality undertaken in the postsocialist period in the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania. It considers the relationship between ways of remembering the Second World War and the monumentalization of what is often referred to as ‘actually existing socialism.’ Additionally, it explores how legacies of socialist monumentality have affected contemporary artists working in relation to socialist heritage and to more recent traumatic experiences, such as the wars coincident with and following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Southeastern Europe’s modernity has been a particularly conflicted one, both geopolitically and culturally. Home to an overwhelming number of (frequently overlapping and amorphous) ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, the region is notable for the hybrid and disparate ways political and cultural actors—from dictators to democratically elected officials—have attempted to cultivate a collective historical consciousness. Monuments serve as particularly rich examples of the ways politicians, artists, and publics navigate collective values and contest both projected pasts and futures. The transition from late socialism to postsocialism provides diverse examples of how public monuments in countries such as Macedonia, Croatia, and Albania relate to debates on ethnicity, gender, political economy, and class-consciousness in the context of continued redefinitions of Europe’s borders and culture as a whole. Furthermore, ongoing attempts to preserve, restore, relocate, or destroy socialist-era monuments offer a rich and complicated body of evidence for the ways that histories are repurposed, especially the histories of the Partisans’ transnational antifascist struggle during the Second World War. This dissertation argues that many contemporary artists from Southeastern Europe have focused precisely on the ambiguous and conflicted meanings of socialist monuments, and have avoided treating monuments as monolithic forms associated with official ideological forces, in need of demythologization. Instead, these artists have turned to monuments in order to address the disparate histories of struggle that have given rise to Europe’s current sociopolitical situation.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 Regarding the nature of things(2017) Hird, Kevin; Ruppert, John; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The works discussed and shown herein are an investigation into the properties and possibilities of materials. Prompted by a sense of playfulness and exploration, these works build upon and combine the fields of Dadaism and Minimalism in a manner that explores the conceptual properties of material. This exploration takes places through destructive processes, exposing the interior of solid matter to a thoughtful consideration of its development, underlying structure, and the effect of forces being applied to the materials, both internally and externally.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 Rural Decay Almanac(2016) Winkler, Dane; Sham, Foon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Rural Decay Almanac is an exhibition comprised of sculptural objects and video/sound documentation. The following is an explanation of inspiration and personal history, a proposed schematic/manual for the objects in the gallery, and other contemporary artists I frame myself within. The front half of The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland as well as the atrium space directly outside the gallery hosts the work: four large scale Site-Responsive sculptural objects, and one video/sound loop projection. The library of materials comes from a farm site in Ijamsville, MD which has been re-purposed into the structures. As a sister work, the process of dismantling documentation is shown alongside the objects in a sound/video installation. The gallery space is transformed into a meticulously controlled environment via hard objects, sound, light, and video.
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