This project analyzes a database of 118 ceramic sherds that were excavated from the Late Intermediate Period site of Yanaorco, located in the Cajamarca region of the north highlands in present-day Peru, for vessel form, style, and imagery. Through the placement of these sherds within the context of inter-community feasting events that took place at Yanaorco, fineware ceramic vessels are interpreted as prestige items that were utilized by the elite to further differentiate themselves from other community citizens. By examining key examples of representational and non-representational imagery depicted on the sherds, an understanding of the social agency of the vessel and the esoteric knowledge that the imagery communicated to feasting participants is explored. The use of fineware ceramic vessels during feasting events at the site of Yanaorco served to ideologically reinforce or manipulate social, political, and economic stratification.

During the Spring 2006 semester, Virginia Commonwealth University students enrolled in the graduate Museum Studies course on exhibition development collaboratively curated an exhibition entitled From the Seat of Authority, which opened at the Anderson Gallery in June 2006. This thesis project documents the exhibition and offers an account of the deliberative and creative development process in which student-curators engaged. It is different from other case studies that focus on the technical aspects of curating an exhibition.Major components of the development process include articulating a theme, selecting artworks, writing interpretive text, and designing display techniques. This thesis project aims to characterize the development of these components in relationship to the overall creative processes. It is important to note that the previously mentioned four components were not developed independently of one another, as the exhibit development process was non-linear and organic.

An eighteenth century Mexican folding screen or biombo is located at Virginia House in Richmond, Virginia. A similar three-paneled screen is also located at this site. Upon seeing the similarities between each screen I concluded that the seven panels were at one point a part of one folding screen. The top sections of these folding screens show emblems that depict images of virtues and vices. The source of the emblems on the Virtue Screen is Otto Van Veen's Homtii Emblemata. The text on the screen is taken from a Spanish translation of the Horatii Emblemata entitled the Theatro Moral de toda la Philosophia de los Antiguos y Modernos. This thesis will examine each emblem in a panel-by-panel discussion as well as the iconography found throughout the screen. It will also provide a brief history of the folding screen with its origins in Asia and a comparison of similar screens that have been discovered in the Western Hemisphere.

This dissertation examines Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s knowledge and interpretation of the Italian Renaissance during the 1860s. I argue that there is a relationship between Rossetti’s Aestheticism and his understanding of the Italian Renaissance and that this relationship is visibly manifested in his images of women from the period. In Victorian England, Aestheticism and the philosophy of beauty for its own sake became increasingly popular throughout the 1860s. I challenge the idea that Aestheticism and an interest in Renaissance art are mutually exclusive aspects of the artist’s work. Rossetti’s images of women expressed both his understanding of Renaissance art and the central place of beauty in painting. Based upon Rossetti’s interpretation of Renaissance art and poetry, his criticism, and the criticism of his peers, this dissertation argues that the beauty of women in Rossetti’s paintings came to stand for the beauty of art. Rossetti’s paintings promoted sensual Aesthetic experience in their conflation of formal and female beauty. Using the historically idealized conventions of female portraiture, Rossetti created images of women that privileged Aesthetic beauty over narrative or moral meaning. His use of vibrant, rich color, a quality he and his peers inexorably associated with Venetian Renaissance painting, revealed the connection between Renaissance art and his Aestheticism. Color helped to define his paintings of women as examples of beautiful, sensuous painting. For Rossetti, the representation of alluring, beautiful women was the most powerful way to express the experience of Aesthetic beauty as intoxicating, sensual, and even morally ambiguous.

Seeing one’s self in another requires empathy and compassion. A person must be willing to look beyond their immediate self and feel what is not readily perceptible. Difference is merely an edifice constructed by our faith in perception. By transfiguring what is familiar an alternative now is made available to the mind and reveals an underlying essence common in all people and things. We realize physical separation is an illusion of the material world and that everything exists from one sacred source.

This Thesis is my effort to understand what subjects I find interesting and why. In the processes of writing and making sculpture, I discovered that my underlying fascination is in history. I am interested in places and objects for their individual qualities, but I also want to know how they relate to the world. If I am drawn to an ancient place or object, I want to examine how it fits into the contemporary world, and visa versa. The complexity of these relationships is increased by the vast number of histories (or stories) that are intertwined in the world. Over the course of the thesis I write about my various influences, and the development of my work from undergraduate to graduate school. This progression has been from observation of natural world to a more complex questioning of how the world came to be what it is. I conclude by defining the direction in which I want my work to continue: directly along the border between myth and reality.

Corporate Housing & Training is a hybrid project that promotes the future use of living-and-working environments in the same site offering the amenities of a hotel, apartment and an office in one. The challenge of approaching this type of project is the way the program works and how it flows together with different users and different needs without even getting out of the building at the same time. This project helps the actual local and global needs because it would be a big impact for the traveling executives and companies by promoting business, exchange of ideas, and socializing; due to a wider span of options for them and have time after work to do other activities with the community all involved in one place. In order to complete this project nine case studies where explored from a view of similar sites, programs and processes by Architects and Interior Designers who approached the solution to the problem in different ways.

Using short stories, descriptions of objects and thoughts on process, I aim to establish a few ideas about the way I see and think through making in the studio.

Essay to accompany MFA thesis exhibition for the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media.

This paper offers a contextualization of my art practice, within particular trends in contemporary art and its discourse. It traces an expressed interest in networked objects, and the indeterminacy of meaning in art; from researched examples and texts, through specific expressions of these ideas in my thesis art exhibition. The paper then outlines key areas of practical interest to the experimental viability of my art practice. The paper goes on to explore the relationships between indeterminacy, experimentation, and creativity in the arts; within the context of an original thought experiment that draws an analogy between topics in physics and the human mind. Non-rational art ideas are lauded for their uniquely explorative potential within this conjectural model. Optimism, and a will to think experimentally, are offered as the abiding principles of my art practice; as well as being universal tools that all human beings can depend upon.