Landscape art reinvents itself throughout history, along with changes in relationships between humans and nature. During unprecedented processes of urbanization, industrialization, and globalization, the past two hundred years witnessed shifts in global landscapes. The idea of using art to cope with a sense of loss becomes the departure point for my art project. To contextualize my work, I will discuss art scenes in urbanizing Europe and contemporary China and explore the powerlessness of individuals under the formidable trend of development reflected in landscape art.

My thesis aims to map the art historical, religious and cultural influences in Chiho Aoshima’s work, particularly in her 2015 solo show Rebirth of the World at Seattle Asian Art Museum. I will start with an outline of the artist’s overall oeuvre, focusing specifically on her aesthetic development. This will set up an introduction of the main elements I see in her work (Shinto beliefs, yōkai/ukiyo-e aesthetic references, and references to A Cyborg Manifesto). The thesis will essentially be a case study of Rebirth of the World, using specific mediums as evidence for the presence of these influences in her work. My thesis is essentially Chiho Aoshima’s work is a seamless blend of the history and culture of Japan, while still grounding her practice in critical, contemporary theories of subversion. Her work is a gripping nod to the past but it is very much contemporary and critical, and it is easy to overlook all the threads woven into the fabric of her oeuvre.

This interdisciplinary research bridging geography and fine art (‘geo-aesthetics’) follows contemporary artwork journeys from the studio into the public domain to discover how notions of value shift as the artwork travels. It seeks transfigurative nodes and their catalysts to explore how art matters: firstly how it becomes matter in the studio, and then how it comes to matter beyond the studio door. Two case studies at key moments of revaluation, a buy-out and a buy-in, both reveal responses to uncertainty that stress different kinds of collectivity. The first case study follows artistic practice and process in four studios in a Johannesburg atelier to investigate intrinsic value and finds ‘artistic thinking’. The second case study follows the assemblage of a private art collection managed from Cape Town, initially as an art fund, to investigate extrinsic valuation and finds ‘structural thinking’. These different modalities in the production and consumption circuitry of the artworld have unexpected correlations including shared artists and three linking concepts, namely, uncertainty, mobility, and the web. These in turn inform three observations: nested capacity, derivative value, and art as a public good. Two key findings emerge: contemporary art is itself a vector of value that performs meaning as it moves; and public interest is a central characteristic from which other valuations flow. The research uses repeat interviews, site visits and visual methods, which are triangulated with artwork trajectories to surface linkages between space and imagination. It offers a performative theory of value that speaks to an expanded new materialism. Applying an ecological framework allows a final transfiguration for an artworld ecosystem that (re)values contemporary art as part of an undercommons.

This dissertation explores contemporary Argentine art that has responded to local environmental issues and global ecological crises. This text focuses on diverse works produced between the 1960s and the present by artists based in La Plata and Buenos Aires. The projects analyzed in this study reveal the complexity of the concepts of nature, earth, land, environment and ecological crisis in contemporary society. They expose a series of interrelated issues and layers through which these concepts are defined. In order to designate the major approaches to ecological crises adopted by these artists, this study is divided into three sections, which denote distinct artistic methods and values: raising awareness: fighting against urban degradation; recuperation; and exploration. An analysis of individual works in relation to their central methods and contexts reveals a series of convergences and divergences. I argue that my selection of artists’ works contended with the conflict caused by industrial development and neoliberal economic policies and/or reconsidered the concept of nature and individuals’ relationship to it, shifting the dialogue about the environment to questions of place, engagement and adaptability. Collectively these artists’ works present a multifaceted image of the environment and its relationship to people, which is shaped by both the nuances of a particular location and each site’s or artist’s connection to a broader international context. / acase@tulane.edu

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The purpose of this dissertation is to provide vocal teachers and singers with a reference handbook of twenty-first century art songs for solo voice and piano accompaniment, written in English by composers from the United States. This handbook presents songs composed between the years of 2000-2015 by level of difficulty, from songs appropriate for high school students through collegiate students, and including professional singers. This handbook will familiarize teachers with over two hundred solo songs of seventeen composers, furthering the study and performance of contemporary art songs.

As members of extended families and genealogical lines we collect and view photographs to remember. By situating the present investigation within the context of archival family photographic collections, this research seeks to understand the assumptions surrounding the interplay between the practice of viewing photographs and notions of remembering. Historically, photography has been connected to concepts of stability and truth with photographic images acting as a metaphor for ‘real lived experiences’. When a photograph is viewed, whatever was present before the camera is verified. In his seminal text Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), French theorist Roland Barthes describes this as ‘a truth to presence’ (Barthes 1980: 84). Barthes links this position to Poststructuralist theory, by determining that photographic signifiers, denotative data, are stable where as the signified, the idea or meaning, is contingent on what a viewer brings to that particular ‘text’. Therefore the viewer relies on denotative data to process meaning. This research explores the ways photographers play with photographic processes to disrupt ideas of stability of meaning surrounding this medium. The visual component of this research explores the expectations that socio-cultural groups, specifically extended families, have when viewing photographs. The subsequent work will endeavour to lay bare the interplay between such expectations and the supposed reliability of the photograph in respect to both meaning and perception. Using an archive of my own extended family’s collection of photographs, this thesis seeks to disrupt the story-telling qualities of photographs. This interruption strategy points to poststructuralist discourses surrounding the stability of the photographic image and the context in which photography is grounded. The work will challenge viewers to re-assess what the photograph can or cannot do. The final work will be comprised of 80% practice and 20% exegesis.

Master of Visual Arts / Digital/video games1 have entertained for 40 years and are a medium with the ability to reach a vast audience. In an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald, Charles Purcell reports that; “Globally, Halo 2 has sold more than 7 million copies. Both in the US and Australia it broke the film box-office record for the most earnings in the first 24 hours of release. The worldwide Halo 2 community on X-box Live has about 400,000 players… at the World Cyber Games in Seoul. Last year, gold medallist Matthew Leto won $US20,000 ($AUS27,0000) after his second consecutive Halo title.” 2. Game consoles have become a part of many lounge rooms just as the television did before them. Games are even commonplace in many coat pockets and carrying bags. This dissertation is concerned with the medium of digital/video games in relation to its effect on Game Art. It is also concerned with the concept of my studio work that deals with “evil” and the “uncanny” which are discussed in chapter four. My research looks at games and how they have developed and the relationship to contemporary art. A history of this development is explored in chapter two. My research will help me in developing an interactive piece. Throughout my current research the thoughts of author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit Sherry Turkle resonate: “…not what will the computer be like in the future, but instead, what will we be like? What kind of people are we becoming?” 3 It is interesting to consider the video/digital games as experiments of who we are or who we would like to be, little fantasies of empowerment. In a game we are able to live out our frustrations or fantasies in a closed and predictable experience.

The dating of ancient jewellery is given by the archaeological context. Technology applied by the ancient goldsmith is traceable through archaeometallurgy. The aim of this research is to analyse historical jewellery and to construct copies based on the known technology of the era. Resultant laboratory constructions with their historical correctness and the new knowledge of jewellery structures will then be available for reworking to convey a contemporary visual relevance and a statement of history. The results of these analyses and reconstructions will form the basis of metalwork objects in which contemporary aesthetics are informed by historical practice. Jewellery offers a view into history, of cultural descriptions of stylistic, chemical and methodological correctness. For diagnostic purposes there is the expectation of an archaeological correctness within the fabric and manufacture of the jewellery object. From the vantage point of a contemporary goldsmith, t his has provided me with an arena for artistic interpretation-for 'play'. Historical jewellery becomes contemporary jewellery forms and the 'play' functions as a stumbling block and an upheaval within orthodox classification of authenticity. There is in this disturbance an intervention with coontemporary ephemeral materials into the jewellery artefact in which I manufacture a semblance of an identified 'correctness'. Jewellery remains in a better state of preservation when hidden or concealed-not exposed. The jewellery object once surfaced, discovered, excavated or plundered or even worn becomes part of our time for reworking. Knowledge and applications of technology become the vehicle for scrutinizing these objects. We live in an era where the ancient and the recent, the authentic and the bogus, have begun to mingle and interbreed in the corridors of hyperspace. Television stages Xena the Warrior Princess encountering the young Buddha in the entourage of King Arthur. Fakes with historical associations can s ometimes be considered authentic as a shroud of 'history' can encompass the object to the satisfaction of the naive connoisseur who wants to believe, wants to believe, wants to believe, wants to believe ... . Jewellery as document is available for interpretation-for'play'. There is potential to return to an imaginary history where ffictional detail has been confused with historic fact and this can be both intentional and unintentional. Jewellery of the past therefore exists in the present and the jewellery artefact becomes available for evaluation and for 'play'. In the analysing and categorizing of type, jewellery as vehicle conveying the past can become a mixture of one's own inventions and cultural inheritance. From the vantage point of a goldsmith, I am considering how formulated heritage is available for reference, questioning and modification. The option to copy, to replicate, or to modify the historic document jewellery is a possibility and new input can verify authenticity or engender falsehood throu gh the artistic reinterpretation.

This arts-based study discusses using the horror film and monsters as a means of exploring the personification of fear in contemporary society. The paper incorporates the viewing and dissection of horror films into an artistic process to explore fears in order to further artistic expression. It additionally shows how this process can be used in an art classroom within the context of contemporary art to empower students and facilitate art criticism discussions.