Sascha Schneider was an artist that was incredibly popular, but only for a short time during his life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth- century. This thesis will discuss the life and work of Schneider, with special attention on the significance of the interpersonal relationships he developed, and the importance of these relationships to his artistic career. By tracing his early life in St. Petersburg, Russia and his transition to an established life in Dresden, Germany, one can obtain a sense of his early influences. In Dresden he received an Education from the Dresden Art Academy, and it was there that he made on of his most important friendships with artist Max Klinger. Klinger helped Schneider establish himself as a Symbolist painter, and introduced him to other artists who proved to be paramount to his success later in life. Schneider eventually teamed up with novelist Karl May, and was commissioned to created the covers for over twenty-five of Mays adventure stories. Through his work is May, Schneiders art was placed in the hands of many young Germans. Later in life, Schneider created a school for boys, Kraft-Kunst, with friends Richard Müller and Hans Unger. This school focused on physical fitness and the creation of the perfect male form, while fostering the artistic talents of the young students.

Placed Residue is a series of eight works that highlight nature and its transformative quality. The video, photos, and sculptural objects, contained in the show, call attention to different materials and how they undergo growth and decay. Using various resources ranging from Kinect to video projection I incorporate the unnatural in order to depict a natural narrative involving the viewer. In order to emulate these natural processes, a cause and effect system had been developed where nature completes the final object. These systems activate the material providing for behaviors to be visible through their tactile qualities and allowing for their properties and behaviors to relate with the viewer. With this Thesis exhibition I hope to show people that the world is alive around us and that we are a part of a bigger system, which we can see through a closer attention to matter.

For Louisiana artist Charles Henry Reinike II, environment acted as a stimulating force and stirred his artistic emotion. Although he began his career in New Orleans during the shock of the Great Depression, Reinike managed to thrive and was a leader in the arts community from the early 1930s until his death in 1983. Although most widely regarded for his watercolors rendered in the plein-air tradition, Reinike worked in an impressively varied range of mediums and excelled in many of them. As a poetic artist, Reinike held great passion for Louisiana, and his lyrical paintings read like odes to the beauty of the state. Reinike did not merely paint direct, physical images of the moss-draped trees or bayou vistas that occupied his mind, though. Instead, he tried to grasp their essence, working back from pure abstraction towards half-dreamed images of the places he loved. Reinike was a colorist, and his palette ranged from vibrant to muted tones depending upon his mood. Reinike gave strength to the stunning qualities of his surroundings, attempting to capture the spirit of Louisianas landscapes and people. His works are private and personal statements, while being universally understood. Reinikes contribution to the Southern art scene lies in the deeply personal statements about lifestyles in Louisiana that still hang on hundreds of walls of individual homes throughout the country. Beyond his skills at watercolor painting, Charles H. Reinike worked in a variety of other artistic media, throughout which he maintained his distinctive style throughout his career. Over the course of his lifetime, Reinike successfully revealed cultural truths about a momentous time in American history, transcended artistic racial barriers towards African Americans at a time when their depiction in art was minimal, and encapsulated the deep contrasts between the traditional Southern landscape and the modern one that emerged during his career.

The interrelationships between vision, desire, and language are the elements that drive my artistic practice. What is seeing? How is seeing related to desire? These questions are at the base of my interests. I recognize optics as a subset of perception, yet I strive to reform them into interchangeable components. My interest in optics is based on doubt. Im not interested in optics correctness, clinical orientation, or current sophistication, but rather in undermining its limitations. Our culture still struggles to absorb the notion of the sentient being, one example is our acuity of vision being standardized to 20/20. Within my research, the perceptual engagement between the work and the viewer is an initial tool to stress the importance of the act of seeing as a language rooted and dynamic human capability. The present work forms a non-linear, non- descriptive assimilation and response to these issues and how they can provide the possibility of a meaningful aesthetic experience for the contemporary viewer. The exhibit includes installations and paintings in diverse media, which were manipulated considering the implication of conceptual juxtapositions as well as the effect they created as sensual surfaces.

At the core of my artwork lie two essential goals, to make objects that convey my understanding of beauty, and while doing this, to preserve the objects functional qualities. The materials that I select to build with, primarily wood and porcelain, are renown for their durability and longevity, resulting in objects that become a permanent fixture in the life of the user. Through utility, the things that I create infiltrate the lives of those around me and provide an entry point for a conversation between myself and the user via the object. Newly developed technological methods are an integral component of my process for 3-Dimensional visualization and fabrication. The act of making objects has become a means of self-understanding. Looking back at the collection of objects that I have produced provides me with a record of my journey as a maker and affords me vision of the road to come.

I am interested in painting that begins in observation and manifests itself as a meeting ground of the subject and myself. My paintings explore color and spatial relationships as well as a surface that is manipulated over time. I often paint from nature on site as well as from small sketches and drawings that are later brought back to the studio and painted on a larger scale.

The installation stillNoticing contains ceramic still lifes and drawings that illustrate and bring permanence to ephemeral and fleeting moments. The work is an attempt to share my experience of being captivated by the phenomenon of light affecting the perception of objects and spaces. These moments are often found in familiar spaces, with familiar objects. Each work addresses a particular type of looking: one in which the act of noticing an object transforming from one moment to the next becomes a silent, almost meditative experience.

My thesis exhibition is an installation of works including sculpture, video, paintings, a hand made book, sound, and drawings that emanated from a series of two-dimensional collages: self-contained forms that evoke the surreal, (un)familiar, and/or grotesque. Infused with a sort of mysterious being-hood and intended to inspire curiosity (at the least), they are unfamiliar in relation to a particular biological thing, but (mostly) recognizable in the autonomous bits and pieces. I seek to question where our physicality ends and the next form of biological life begins, and our responses to that physicality. With childlike inquisitiveness and wonder, and a healthy dose of humor, what emerges is the imaginings of these strange groupings and the desire to perhaps arouse that sense of wonder and inquisition within the viewer. These works were installed in a 5,000 square foot warehouse loft to create an embodiment of the ideas described in this paper. My intention is to create a reflexive experience for the viewer with gaps, or pauses for thought and contemplation, throughout the space. I see this body of work, as most bodies of work, as a practice, and defining that practice will continue to happen through the course of my artistic career. By working in the warehouse space, I was able to reveal layers and correlations between content and process. For me, it is an (un)familiar practice because of the intuitive, layered, and complex habits. This document serves as a reflection on this collaged installation that became a practice in and of itself. For my purposes, I have defined the collaged practice as layered exercises with various processes and materials coming from the same series of cut-paper collages. A large part of the vision for my thesis work is comprised of the human element, the interaction of persons within the transformed warehouse space, with the individual parts of the installation, and the collaborations therein.

Color Journal consists of a collection of works, which depict landscapes and cityscapes with an underlining consciousness of the interrelationship between humans and their environment. Over the ages, the relationship changes through the history of human civilization. In the current age, nature seems to suffer a losing battle. Therefore, there is a personal nostalgic sentiment to emphasize the beauty of our natural environment and the importance of the balance of the relationship. The image of houses is chosen to represent human activities because of the inherent symbols embedded in houses. All the paintings in the collection rely heavily on memory and imagination. Memory filters our perception of the world and brings out images in our deepest psyche. Imagination enhances and provides structure to the painting.

America at mid-20th century was experiencing unprecedented growth and a flourishing economy. After surviving the devastating events of the Great Depression as well as World War II, the United States had emerged a superpower. But the US was not alone in this new role as the Soviet Union also experienced tremendous growth. From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union entered into the darkest days of the Cold War. The threat of Communism worked citizen and politician alike into a frenzy of fear while Joseph McCarthy became an infamous figure whose name is still synonymous with red-baiting. By the late 1950s, however, there seemed to be a thaw in US-Soviet relations and an attempt to repair the damage between the two countries commenced. In the summer of 1959, the American National Exhibition took place in Sokolniki Park in Moscow. During a six week period, over 2,700,000 Soviets were introduced to American manufacturing and culture. The exhibition was also an example of the dominant architectural style preferred by the US during the 1950s, that of Modernism. George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames, Jack Masey, and Buckminster Fuller all participated in the overall design and look of the exhibition. While the exhibitions architecture proudly displayed American design and manufacturing, the individual side shows were much more universal in their intent. The film by Charles and Ray Eames, Glimpses of the USA, and Edward Steichens famous photography exhibition, The Family of Man, were both used to help portray America to a Soviet audience. Since Cold War rhetoric often relied upon domestic imagery to justify foreign policies, the American family was key to US-Soviet understanding. The universal idea that man is essentially the same the world over was a message US government agencies promoted and should be studied in relation to the Civil Rights era that preceded it.