Scientific evidence that the ocean plastic crisis is larger in scale and more sinister than previously thought continues to mount, but the rate of plastic production is only rising. What will it take to decisively turn the tide against plastic? We need scientists, politicians, and industry changemakers to continue producing knowledge and positive change in the industry, but we need to go further still. This thesis explores art as an alternative visual communication strategy with the capacity to encourage curiosity, empathy, and positive engagement with the issue of ocean plastics. The series of work explores bacterial bioluminescence as an artistic medium in juxtaposition with objects of found ocean plastic. The photographs in the series build on the concepts of mutualism, illumination, critical densities, and interspecies communication to reimagine how we might further the discourse around ocean plastic.

The artist discusses her Master of Fine Arts exhibition Momentary Lapses, held at Tipton Gallery, February 25-March 8, 2019. The mixed media works and video examine the intersections between digital, somatic and societal decay through the mediation of the digital image by physical anthropogenic efforts. Themes in the work include glitch art and theory, entropy, memory, decay, and loss. Contemporary American society’s desensitization associated with the oversaturation of digital imagery is discussed, as well as Guy Debord’s theory of the Spectacle, and the artistic practices of Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg.

This written thesis, transit, accompanies an exhibition by the same name and serves to contextualize the exhibit. The written portion begins with an inquiry into the nature of the contextualization itself, questioning the nature of the relationship between the written thesis, the exhibit, and the University which explicitly requires and connects the two, especially the ways that the written word as granted authority through an institution of higher education might undermine the exhibit’s intent to provoke thought into other forms of knowledge and other avenues of legitimacy than those presented by this institution. The thesis discusses the philosophic question sometimes called “the problem of reference” (how a word comes to refer to something in the world) as well as to the mystery of knowledge (how a human comes to know something). I discuss my own development of the artistic and poetic methods and concepts used in transit. I also inquire into the relationship between the conflicts in the cultures of the region, particularly during the time of the arrival of written language and capitalistic practices from Europe, and my struggle to understand and represent the ways that colonial concepts continue to dominate and frame our culture, even exhibits of art, such as transit, that work to cause thought, emotion, and reflection on other understandings of words, concepts, and knowledge through a physical de-stabilization of text and words.

As I encounter life during a global pandemic, caused by a virus that has us all homebound, I continue my own struggle with a different virus that keeps me not only homebound, but bed bound as well. In this thesis project, I make my way around and through the questions of chronic illness, self-worth, productivity and a changing relationship to time that arise in this dual viral experience - situating the personal within a larger social/political context.

In this dissertation, I examine the temporal and material connections between component parts of hybrid artworks, specifically between live events / acts of performance and the long-lasting sculptural elements that those events / performances produce. I propose a re-orientation of the temporal gaze of performance art history, from one oriented to the past to one focused on the continually unfolding present. Such a re-orientation requires a nonlinear approach to art making that complicates set boundaries of past and present, liveness and record, and presence and absence, and disrupts in potentially corrective ways our historically normative systems of looking, categorizing, and archiving art. Through a transfeminist analysis that prioritizes multiplicity rather than categorization, I consider elements of liveness in relation to subjectivity and agency, paying attention to their effect on the works’ ongoing reception and classification in archiving systems. I examine three elements of liveness as maintained through indexicality: action, endurance, and presence. Each of these elements has been historically associated with live art but not with static objects; each has been considered only in the past tense after the initial performance has ended. Using definitions of indexicality, nonlinearity, and agency as starting points, I examine how performance-based artworks connect the performance and subjectivity of the artist across time. This project loosely takes the form of three case studies of hybrid art practices by contemporary artists: Kate Gilmore, Mary Coble, and Cassils.

The artist discusses his Master of Fine Arts exhibit, titled DUNIDEDCUDIGUNADIE. The exhibit is to be held at the Tipton Gallery in downtown Johnson City, TN, from April 2nd to April 10th, 2020. A live reception will be held the evening of April 3rd, featuring a performance with the work, titled Look at You! The following thesis explores the artist’s formative years – investigating how childhood experiences combine with artistic and theoretical influences to inform his art-making process.

This thesis paper explores some of the cultural phenomena that influence my conceptual framework and describes the logic behind the formal decision-making that defines my work. Beginning with a description of the nature of the materials and environments I appropriate, this thesis aims to deconstruct the layered system of binaries that build the logic behind my work. The concerns in my work circulate around domestic consumption and the objects detritus, a term coined in the paper, that are produced as a result. However, rather than allow the objects detritus to remain cast-aways of a culture of excess, my work reincorporates these objects as materials in conglomerate sculptures. This thesis depicts the complex of ideas that help delegate how these conglomerate works come into being.

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Mikayla Reid to explore how color choice and application within designs can help create storybook characters off the page and onto the stage. This concept is explored through the costume designs for the opera The Cunning Little Vixen, a production theoretically staged at the Alice Busch Opera Theater for the Glimmerglass Festival in New York. The paper discusses Reid’s attempt to create designs that still feel like watercolor illustrations, even when realized in physical garments. It follows her process as she tests different dye techniques in search for what produces the most effective color application. This paper also breaks down each step taken while constructing the main character, the Vixen, through the build, fittings, and color application.

The artist discusses his Master of Fine Arts exhibition titled, In a State of Becoming. The exhibition was on view at the Tipton Gallery in downtown Johnson City, TN from February 26 March 8, 2024. In a State of Becoming showcased three large scale paintings, five multimedia prints, two sculptural installations, and a video projection installation. Conley's thesis research and current artistic practice revolve around the interfaces, connections, and relationships of humans and animals. Conley explicitly uses language like "animal" to describe "non-human animals" in his work's context. The exhibited works focused primarily on how the artist and/or the viewer can enter the animal domain or even become the animal. Alongside these concepts, Conley utilizes various forms of media both 2D and 3D, to investigate human-animal experiences through the lens of animal objects, animal domains, and the embodied relationships between various beings in a shared location. In a State of Becoming, reframes the focus on human embodiment as empathetic connection with other animals. The shared embodied experience between both beings is heightened through animal dwellings, habitats, and remnants. Conley seeks to rediscover the hidden but present animality within humans.

The artist discusses the artwork of her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Groundswell, held at Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, March 11 – 22, 2024. The exhibition includes wall pieces, sculpture, plaster, and ceramic objects that explore the traditional parameters of painting and its presentation. Ideas discussed include the philosophy of history, and the origin of European art tropes such as odalisques, flowers, and birds. Framing devices, deconstructed paintings, fiber arts, ceramics, 18th Century decorative art, plaster, the studio practice, Walter Benjamin, David Lowenthal, Gustave Courbet, Jean Honoré Fragonard, Titus Kaphar, Valerie Hegarty, and maximalism are also surveyed.