The artist discusses the work in DollHouse, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition on display at Tipton Gallery, Johnson City, Tennessee from January 25 to February 5, 2016. The exhibition was an installation consisting of five sets, each containing furniture - both 2D and 3D - and a mask with instructions relating to a room found within a dollhouse. The sets and supporting thesis explore the ideas of social norms, feminism, and identity, and how submission to ideologies can create emptiness, while engagement can prompt social change. Topics include the process and evolution of the work and the artists who influenced it, ideas of identity and society, and the impacts of social norms on young women’s lives. Included is a catalogue of the exhibition.

Quotations like the Sharpest Claws describes a multimedia installation composed of paintings and sound that explores the theory of cognitive dissonance, a controversial psychological model that attempts to explain how we deal with inconsistency in incompatible beliefs. Imagination is given primacy as a source for truth-seeking and world-building. The uncanny and surreal are used as entry points into this topic. The title is derived from a description of Eileen Myles’ poetry I once read in an anonymous review. Their writing was described as beyond poetry in a way that it could only be described as such when surrounded by “quotations like the sharpest claws.” This phrase has since stuck with me as a way to describe my own work, dealing with “truth,” “metaphor,” and “cognition”, although in my case these claws are indicative of doubt surrounding the aforementioned subjects.

Humor has long been an effective way to engage difficult sociopolitical topics in a way that avoids polemical confrontation and provides opportunity for pleasure, catharsis and self-knowledge. In the context of today’s polarized politics and protest, creative satirical performance that deploys “symbolic tinkering” can provide a “comic frame of reference” that, according to Kenneth Burke, more effectively conveys its message while providing reflexive insight. The satirical Church of the SubGenius naturally practices this rhetorical frame in their multimedia creations. Using the lens of Burke’s Attitudes Toward History, this essay is an analysis of SubGenius rhetoric with a focus on their Hour of Slack live radio program and the book Revelation X to provide an informative example of Burke’s comic frame applied, and clarify the nature of its utility by exploring the rhetorical impact of the Church of the SubGenius and the relevance of its “comic corrective.” Politically cynical, SubGenii are nevertheless keen cultural critics whose sophisticated use of a complex comic rhetoric warrants more serious attention.

Children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) are often secluded from society, as the condition is perceived to be a defect. These children constantly fidget, move, lose track of time, and forget to complete tasks, leading them to struggle within existing social environments. Additionally, in Qatar there is a need to educate society about ADHD. This research explores wearable solutions that alter behaviors through physical interactions and sensory engagements. In response to the challenges faced by ADHD, Qatari traditional attire has been customized to support children with time management, and communication between child, parent, and society. Additionally, these wearables challenge Qatari perspectives surrounding existing health conditions in Qatar. Design outcomes consists of clothing elements, driven and shaped by the experiences of ADHD children, their physical behavior, their senses like touch, smell and sight. It addresses the daily conduct of the ADHD child, and the relationship of the child and parent. By challenging existing norms and analyzing the Qatari traditional clothing (the Thobe, the Abaya and the Prayer Bead), design outcomes have been realized by experimenting and playing with materials, prototyping and 3D printing on fabric. Existing functions of zippers, pockets, beads, cuffs and technical construction of the outfit have been redesigned and reconstructed.

Mass production and assembly lines are yesterday’s manufacturing methods. They have exhausted Earth’s resources and limited the possibilities of design in terms of both form and material, prompting designers to search for new processes. A new generation of making includes biomimicry-inspired technologies such as 3D printing and parametric simulation, which have transformed the production paradigm. Utilizing nature as industry, this thesis explores the possibility of “growing” designed objects by employing nature’s own processes and resources. It integrates bio materials, generative design and additive manufacturing to produce objects for a post-industrial world. The project outcomes employ natural minerals, crystallization and 3D printing to develop new forms of making, proposing a new suite of tools for designers.

This article is the first of a series exploring domination culture through the ways narrative has been indoctrinated as reality and weaponized as a holding cell for captives. Within this exploration, the narrative of domination is placed in relation to higher dimensional realms of the unknown; this being the before and after of domination culture. This positioning will allow for the reality of a simultaneous existence within the labyrinth of domination and a higher dimensional unknown to be framed. Within this series of articles, I question the roll of the rogue characters shamanistic agents of resisting domination, the fear of dark matter as a sub-narrative of domination, the power of submitting to the limits of human perception and the way perceived darkness can help unveil the structure of the narrative of domination. This article will begin to define this narrative and introduce the poetic freedom, of what lies beyond human perception.

The Holocaust is a subject that seems to defy artistic representation by way of its sheer scale of tragedy and subsequent trauma. As I will demonstrate in this paper, it is hard to restore visibility – pictorial links between past and present realities – to crimes that have been deliberately submerged by its perpetrators. I will examine some of the common strategies used in representation of the victims of the Holocaust since the end of the Second World War, in the mediums of film and photography. As my main method of enquiry, I will examine three films from different eras, and of very different approaches in terms of their processing of the proposed original evidence, as examples to illustrate my arguments. In the second chapter Alain Resnais's documentary film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) is analyzed as a birthplace of the so-called iconography of the Holocaust. Chapter three examines workings of memory through the aesthetic form that was soon to follow; the role and testimony of the survivors is considered through Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. In the fourth chapter a new player is introduced: the second generation witness of postmemory, works of transmitted but unexperienced realities. In this chapter I will closer examine the workings of art in the game of reprocessing the evidence of the Holocaust, and through Dariusz Jablonski's film Fotoamator I aim to critique how the previously discussed approaches serve to further lock the Holocaust in an inaccessible canon. Moreover, the generalization implied – a drive toward universalization of the Holocaust as an idiom or even a metaphor for the dark sides of human history/character – derives from problems of representation; mainly that of anonymity in face of the proposed beauty of the spectacle, of tragedy and suffering in mass-media. A key problem is that any historical document, however we define one, is considered transparent and unmediated, whereas art is clearly something where a degree of mediation is necessarily recognized. In the face of this dichotomy it seems that all the collected "proof" of the Holocaust – witness accounts" photographs" films" material remains – achieves, is to stregthen the prevailing version of history.

In the statement Mayor Parker is referring to a complexity of issues that involves a plethora of hard-scientific and statistical information. The diversity of opinions regarding the scheme’s benefits and potential negative implications also create misunderstanding for the general public. This prompts the hypothesis of this design thesis, which suggests that statistical data when visually mapped and in the context of its physical environment can provide significant cognitive and ecological awareness for the viewer to understand the economic and environmental implications of the proposed irrigation scheme. Both the areas of cartographic mapping and the dairy industry contain controlled vocabularies, which present opportunity for graphic modeling and explanation through visible phenomena. The Canterbury Plains has a well-established historical and agricultural narrative. However, due to the recent dramatic and substantial transition of the region’s dairy industry between the periods 1995 – 2008, subsequent demand for freshwater now represents the real prospect of uncharted future environmental instability. The development of a visual language system capable of the interpretation and construction of the irrigation scheme’s benefits and potential negative implications, provide this thesis through graphic modeling the possibility to compare the proposed CPW scheme’s issues. While some industry groups consider public participation as arbitrary and unnecessary, recent surveys indicate water quality and fertiliser management as the most significant areas for environmental concern. The debate should not exclude the public, but rather include communication systems capable of reaching all communities.

No abstract available

The objective of this research is to demonstrate that co-creative sketching as a part of the participatory process has the potential to support the developmental nature of a visual communication tool used to promote the exchange of experience. The tool is intended to create an informative hub that influences a travellers experience of a location. Ethnographic research as reflective sketching was conducted in the Tongariro National Park. Within this setting reflective sketching located the kitchen and common area of traveller specific accommodation as an ideal collaborative environment to conduct participatory design research. In this collaborative environment snowboarders and skiers who are aged between 20-30 years are identified as the target audience. This specific audience participated in co-creative sessions throughout the design process, resulting in the participatory design of the tool. The design aim of the visual communication tool was to promote the exchange of experience between snowboarders and skiers about a specific location. This was achieved by adapting generative tools made up of a visual language which supported the word of mouth exchange and individual expression. The exchange of experiences was facilitated by co-creative sketching with the visual language during a state of play. Playful co-creative sketching supported word of mouth dialogue between the snowboarders and skiers in a way that co-created an informative visual representation of the dialogue or contextmap. The resulting contextmap represented an image for experience which was beyond an individuals conception and made individuals tacit-knowledge accessible to audiences within and outside the moment of exchange, creating an informative hub which influenced the specific audiences view of experience for a location. An action research methodology is used during the course of this research, informed by the approaches of co-creation, context-mapping and generative tools. These approaches constructed a theoretical framework for the participatory development and co-creative sketching of the communication tool. This supportive thesis discusses the context, the theoretical concepts and provides an in depth account on the research through design process; the week-by-week participatory process undertaken to develop the visual communication tool.