The goal of my thesis is to provide the reader with a better understanding of how to create an environmentally sustainable costume shop. I chose to focus on certain elements of the costume shop that are imperative to the function of the shop, but desperately need to change for the sake of the environment. The elements I focused on were fabric, energy, and chemicals. Armed with a better understanding of why and what needs to be changed, the reader will be able to take this knowledge and apply it to their costume shop and life. We need to change how we interact with the environment and I hope this information will help bring about this action.

I subscribe to the notion that art is the process of capturing a moment in life, by way of projection on to an artist's senses, and a subsequent filtering through his mind, and ultimately a materialization through his hands and instruments. However, that is just the beginning. To take a life of its own, the work of art should further find its way into the minds of its viewers or listeners again through a series of projections and filtering. The excitement of the moment that impinges upon the senses of the artist can be very powerful at times, so powerful that the artist can be blinded by its sheer power, in which case the intervention of critique can play a vital role.A discussion of how a piece of my own artwork comes into existence is in order: the relationship between me and the material world plays a pivotal role in my creations. This relationship is one of sharing the same space, and in doing so, impacting character, essence and meaning to materials. This process entails a change of meaning, importance and use. In the stage of design, I see the work first fledgling, and then taking flight - spontaneously, without forcing my imagination. The constructed form usually just dawns upon me when I am not contemplating.

Most of my works are figurative and depend on my memory when I was modeling. I’d like to attempt to clarify the memories through process of modeling. When I model a human, it might not be a perfect imitation of body because it’s a representation of memories, and it’s affected by memories. It is not important to imitate the human form, but I’m interested in gathering memories and giving a form to them. I’m interested in life force and transience of life, so I was looking for a material which can represent these qualities. When I am engaged glass, I am interested in movement of melted glass and transparency of it. When it is melting, it seems to have a life, but when it is still, it seems to be dead. I am fascinated with qualities of material which have transience. It is an existence of life for me. In fountain series, I attempt to use liquid as a material. Unlike solid material, water, oil, and foam don’t have a stable form. However, I consider that water flow and its liquidity are available as a type of kinetic sculpture. The liquid is supposed to be a material for sculpture. Like melted glass, liquid flowing seems have a life. I recognized that there is a possibility to use liquid as a material throughout the series. Their subtle motion can represent transient vital force.

Mikhail Bakhtin's Appropriation in the West and a Needed Return to Primary Texts: A Review of Criticism and a Return to the Idyllic Chronotope in Jude the Obscure

This thesis explores the evolution of my practice as it developed over my two years of graduate school. I entered school interested in the built environment and how structures helped create subjectivity and provided sites for material and phenomenological transformations. Early in graduate school, I developed a photography series that investigated these issues. However, an awareness of a conversation occurring in the larger art world that questioned the efficacy of photography drove me to consider ways to extend my practice into sculpture and installation. Over the next two semesters, I developed my ideas of light, form and structure into video and sculpture installations that extended these ideas out into the space of the viewer. Ultimately, an interest in light and surface led me back to photography and to the realization that a studio practice that focused on photography about photography opened up avenues that allowed a photographic practice not to become stagnant but rather to grow and expand.

This is an overview of the source material, methodologies, artistic influences, and conceptual decisions that inform the sculptural and the photographic means of production that characterize my art practice. Research topics include model-making, the indexical relationship of the photograph and object, and a brief phenomenology of accidents, alchemy, and ambivalence in relation to specific artworks.

This is a written defense to accompany the MFA Thesis Exhibition You’re Gonna Be Ok, an installation encompassing video, and other sensory components. This defense provides background for the artist’s motivation to make this work, along with a theoretical framework used to construct the installation. Accompanying photos, video, and PowerPoint are also included to give reference and documentation of the installation event.

This thesis is an exploration into an alternate ground for discourse. It is an exploration of the edges of the possibilities of words, the centers of margins, and the question of the lives of objects in this time of abundant cast-offs. The truths and limits of an emerging globalized multi-polarity of culture, are put in play. The secret lives of things are brought into the same room as words. The potential for radical landscape is considered.

Using Eduard Manet and Alex Katz as an entry point into my work, I will discuss seven of my paintings in detail. I will examine formal structures within the work such as color and space and how they relate to the content. I will discuss ideas of voyeurism and notions of the gaze while examining film as a presence. Artifice, art history, desire, personal memory, nostalgia and everyday life are starting points for formal explorations within the work.

By merging the ancient associations that clay has with the human form and prosthetic science I question the relevancy and role of the human body in the future. As prosthetics heighten the awareness of the body through absence these additive limbs further this relevancy by presence. With greater advances in genetic engineering and plastic surgery biology will no longer dominate and these ridged clay extensions could become flesh.