The White Album Restaurant occupies the old WRVA Radio Station in Church Hill. The building site provides exclusive views across downtown Richmond. The restaurant's interior design is a response to the obviously attractive exterior views of the site. Through the placement of paneled walls, views of the interior space are choreographed to create an engaging environment from any seat in the restaurant.

I will discuss six art works that have a range of characteristics, but can all be unified through the notion of surface, both physically and conceptually. I will investigate how ideas of taste, assumption, collage, façade, figure/ground, display and value can all be seen through this lens. Much significance and symbolism is imbued in such a thin layer and I am actively aware of this as I work. The way I construct and render my subjects and the space in which they reside determines how they are viewed, perceived, considered, and judged by others.

FOUR SEASONS By Morgan Pearse, MFA. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Art in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014. Major Director: Matt King, Assistant professor, Sculpture + Extended Media. Fantasy functions in a mental space. Cyberspace is a fantasy world. Cyberspace is a mental space mediated by the individual, but also through/into itself. What does an internal thought mean when it is directed towards strangers via online avatar? The Internet exists. Your body exists. There is something in between. There is no singular meaning or defined content. Instead, there are multiple meanings and content(s). “It all depends how you look at it.” Mystery is important, but it’s better to be entertaining at the same time. There is no narrative. I’m not a doctor. “This isn’t rocket science.” The body of this text is comprised of both found and original content.

Coworking spaces have proliferated in the last several years. They reflect a change in how we work, how we learn and how we connect. Coworking is a story of change. There is a large spectrum of types of coworking spaces. Some are minimal offering only an open room with desks and chairs, while others function as mini-cities. Regardless of the size or scope of a coworking facility, what drives the success is the community. This is an exploration on how design creates community. Through my research, I discovered the importance of the 3rd place in supporting the success of a community. The places where we linger, where we reflect, where an introduction is made. It is the informal meeting areas, the coffee shops and water coolers19. It is where we look away from a screen and let our minds wander. As a designer, it is important to design a space which operates efficiently AND create spaces for impromptu conversations to occur. Base upon my research, case studies and design explorations, I designed BUILD, a coworking space where people can gather together to work and learn from each other. Providing the city of Richmond with a creative and entrepreneurial hub. Where an architect sits next to a programmer, next to a journalist and graphic designer. A space of progress and education. In a sense, a new type of university. It is about building brands, building businesses and building networks. BUILD RVA.

Located in downtown Fredericksburg, VA on the cusp of the residential and commercial zones, Kenmore is a completely restored historic plantation built in the 1770’s. The site consists of three separate buildings located thirty feet apart from each other in a linear arrangement. The architectural details are fully restored and are important aspects to the buildings and Fredericksburg’s architecture community. Kenmore Plantation will be transformed from a historic residence to a therapeutic and wellness center for women of the Fredericksburg community. The existing buildings and gardens served as a metaphor for the design concept and strategies. They are objects on a field that provide destinations and delineate pathways. The goal of this thesis project is to examine the natural setting of the site and transform it into a modern language to use to organize the design decisions.

Great Britain’s passage of the Transportation Act of 1718 was intended to relieve Great Britain of an unwanted criminal element while at the same time providing much needed labor for her North American colonies. This thesis argues that the legislative body of Virginia initially responded by passing legislation intended to limit the dangers presented by the introduction of convict servants into the colony. However, the significant demand for labor in Virginia resulted in the colony receiving a substantial share of those convicts transported to North America. Contemporaries argued that the importation of convict servants led to an increase in crime. This study employs the court records of eighteen counties in Colonial Virginia. The author contends that the evidence reveals that theft was the most common criminal activity of convict servants in Virginia. However, despite claims to the contrary, convict servants did not commit crimes in excess of their percentage of the tithable population. Moreover, over the course of the eighteenth-century justices county justices increasingly relied on providing lighter sentences than that prescribed by the law. This enabled planters to punish the criminal while maintaining control over their labor. The last chapter moves away from the legal system of Virginia and examines the opportunities the American Revolution provided to convict servants.

The Bare Units is a transmission from a queer body/brain navigating an After-Hours Members-Only Club, a site of graymarket sexuality and commerce. Alive to the fizz and froth of visceral sensation- be it the damp texture of a limp dollar bill or the soft meaty slap of an ass- yet awkwardly vigilant to the unstated but specific social exchanges in a semi-regulated space, the role of the Newcomer collapses into the persona of the Participant, awash and implicated in the complexity of each moment. Collecting details from a personalized capitalism enmeshed in mutated systems of value and power, The Bare Units fantasizes a nebulous architecture built from a self-conscious fictional narrative of self, and all the provisional and mutually-beneficial transactions that might be possible within.

The best kind of poem, I think, is that which delights readers by drawing them toward another world, whether that world is located closer to the real or closer to the fantastic. Perhaps delight at being drawn toward another world is the criterion of excellence for all creative work, not specifically poems. Nevertheless, this criterion has become, through my writing of the present poems, my guiding principle as a poet. My poems, if they succeed, are windows to other worlds. Because these worlds are not, and cannot be, wholly developed in individual poems, readers see in each poem only a part of a vastly larger realm and what is not seen is unknown, a mystery. Here, the ordinary is decontextualized and strange, and the bizarre, too, is decontextualized and has a weight like that of the ordinary. The field of possibility is leveled; anything could happen. This is frightening. Looking through the windows of the poems, the reader may predict that terrible things are about to happen in these other worlds, but they are helpless to intervene. Fascination is perhaps the only option. I would be pleased to have my readers say that they felt compelled by my poems and that their being compelled left them wondering what caused people, in reading, not only to imagine things that did not exist but to care about them.

The following novel manuscript, Someone Else’s Story, investigates what we can’t explain—inspiration and art, attraction and love, charisma and celebrity, intuition and fear. Pulled between all of these is Madelyn, who at the opening of the novel is having a very bad week. After a childhood spent moving every few years, Madelyn has structured her life around stability, but in one week everything comes crashing down. A bad break-up, a family secret and a chance meeting at hotel in Mexico, will spin Madelyn’s future in a direction she never could have imagined for herself—one that includes a handsome movie star and a chance to reinvent an abandoned writing career—if only she can face the truth about her past. Ultimately, Madelyn will be forced to make the same decision three generations of women have faced before her: How much sacrifice is too much when it comes to love?

Adult Daughters explores the complexities of the human experience through short and long-form fiction.