College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item 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.Item 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.Item 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.Item The Crown: Paradise Reclaimed(2018) Basch, Rebecca; Keener, Cy; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The story of my life and the story of my art are intrinsically connected. Through a personally authored story, that I identified as possessing the universal framework of the monomyth (as identified by Joseph Campbell), I became interested in the universal tendencies of humankind. My work synthesizes disparate topics into a new narrative space where parallels are drawn between the personal, extrapersonal, and the universal. In the project The Crown: Paradise Reclaimed, the quest for the ultimate boon, is examined through the stories of myself and others and centers around three locations: Baltimore, Utah, and Iceland.Item REBORN IN ULTRAMARINE(2017) Wohrer, Dominique Andree; Sham, Foon V; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Because of my personal history, I express myself through color, the language of the non-verbal. Ultramarine means beyond the sea, a reference to the foreign origin of lapis lazuli……….The thesis discusses the idea of color in sculpture, and its impact on the brain………….Item SIMULTANEITY: On Urges and Origins(2014) Evans, Lauren Frances; Collis, Shannon; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)All creative acts can be seen as intermediary attempts to bridge the gap between the known and the unknowable. In this thesis, I discuss a number of material and immaterial interfaces (e.g., the body, holes, desire, mankind, sacred sites) - all of which concern humanity and the divided nature of our existence in space, time, and matter. Prompted by urges and the allure of origins, my creative work addresses the body as a site of irresistible paradox. Inverting the boundaries between what is and what is not, it continually draws attention to the void of longing.Item Divination Method(2012) Glidden, Felicia Rose; Gavin, Dawn; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis involves turning over internal images and narration of the mind. The work expands the gap between the seen and unseen and engages intuition through an immersion of the senses. This nonlinear approach with no beginning and no end parallels the experience of memory and creates sensorial connectivity.Item Potential Disasters(2010) Watson, Jennifer Lynn Stewart; Ruppert, John; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The common conceptual thread woven through my work is a fascination with the point at which two things meet, thereby creating a third entirely new event. This ongoing theme of two forces and their point of contact speaks of weakness and controlled failure. Whether it is with feather filled, upholstery fabric forms pinned to the wall by bowed steel armatures, or tense steel rods sprung between wall and floor, my interest lies in exploring how the slow, kinetic action of one, affects the other. I construct three-dimensional drawings with steel rods that rely upon relationships with their surroundings. The starting and ending points of the rods are ambiguous, rather, they are a series of marks that link one point to another. Developed through self-created codes and natural genetic patterning from my personal history, each rod represents a relationship. These installations and three-dimensional drawings are part of the series entitled Potential Disasters. The work has potential for slip, change or collapse. I guide, direct, and balance elements, but once the installation is established, the resulting event is out of my control.Item Potential Disasters(2010) Watson, Jennifer Lynn Stewart; Ruppert, John; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The common conceptual thread woven through my work is a fascination with the point at which two things meet, thereby creating a third entirely new event. This ongoing theme of two forces and their point of contact speaks of weakness and controlled failure. Whether it is with feather filled, upholstery fabric forms pinned to the wall by bowed steel armatures, or tense steel rods sprung between wall and floor, my interest lies in exploring how the slow, kinetic action of one, affects the other. I construct three-dimensional drawings with steel rods that rely upon relationships with their surroundings. The starting and ending points of the rods are ambiguous, rather, they are a series of marks that link one point to another. Developed through self-created codes and natural genetic patterning from my personal history, each rod represents a relationship. These installations and three-dimensional drawings are part of the series entitled Potential Disasters. The work has potential for slip, change or collapse. I guide, direct, and balance elements, but once the installation is established, the resulting event is out of my control.Item The Phenomenal Lives of Movable Christ Sculptures(2006-06-05) Jung, Tanya Ann; Gill, Meredith; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation deals with a fascinating and understudied group of free-standing Christ sculptures that were moved in imitation of Christ during the dramatic observances of late medieval Holy Week. They adhere to general iconographic formulas, but stand apart from other depictions of Christ in one important respect--they were elaborately kinetic. Congregations animated these images in a variety of ways, from basic manual operation in processions and elevations to the manipulation of fitted joints, wheels, hand cranks, and elevation apparatuses. Scholars who study movable Christ sculptures use them as evidence for liturgical and para-liturgical observances recorded in written texts, they approach them as aesthetic objects or as objects of folk tradition, and they discuss their place in the development of medieval sculpture and architectural space. I argue, however, that these images have more meanings to offer. Accordingly, these meanings are available when we consider not only their material and symbolic forms and their performative functions, but also their shifting cultural locations in medieval and modern Europe. Movable Christ sculptures were edifying and sacred images, disconcerting idols, homely folk objects, and works of art. My aim in this dissertation is to write a cultural biography of the lives of these images--in other words, a history that can account for the varied connotations of movable Christ sculptures in different instances of practice, reception, and response. It is my contention that these images, because of their performative function, experiential qualities, mimetic form, relatively anonymity, and "thingness," present an ideal opportunity to exercise cultural biography from an art historical perspective. Such an exercise elucidates the history of movable Christ sculptures after the moment of production and artistic intent has passed. It describes how these images have remained fixed in human imagination and in life regardless of changing cultural, social and political circumstances, yet it also accounts for the ways in their meanings have changed over time. In short, it provides a more complete account of the lives of these unique and understudied objects and reveals the ways in which movable Christ sculptures create transcendental moments and social realities.