Outside Inside Out is a study of how the visual perspective of an installation design can be used to create interaction, animation, and multiple messages. Traditionally, graphic designers have tended to present their messages either as flat printed materials, such as newspapers and billboards, or as videos/animations on television and the Internet. While both of these mediums provide an adequate means to convey a message, they fall short in presenting information to the audience in a non-obtrusive, interactive form. By using a technique I developed called Passive Interactivity, designers can use a viewers visual perspective to create interaction, animation, and multiple messages based upon a viewers physical relationship to the printed material. By utilizing this form of communication, designers are able to engage viewers visually and intellectually by making them active participant in the design. Using the technique of Passive Interactivity to discuss the subject of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), I will be exploring the emotional struggles faced in social encounters by those with SAD. With this installation, the subject matter and the dichotomy of perspective will bring the audience into the mind of one with SAD.

Mothers Grimm and Other House Held Tales is a body of work that uses fairy tale archetypes and narrative traditions to comment upon tensions and conflicts in sexual self-understanding. This is achieved through a reflection on attitudes that women adopt regarding their own sexuality. Such a reflection is instigated through a presentation of prominent cultural archetypes that exist, no longer as received ideas, but as a bold and entertaining expression of how sex can change our attitude towards those ideas that we often take for granted. Through an assemblage of objects and video, this body of work evokes a domestic setting through the re-creation of the household environment. The viewer is drawn in by fun looking characterizations that, upon first glance, arouses a sense of archetypal nostalgia. However, a closer investigation reveals sardonic humor and associative metaphors that refer to sexual themes, some situated in dark places.

Business Week recently launched an innovation and design quarterly entitled In, as well as a Website section specifically dedicated to design and innovation. Fast Company, with its Third Annual Masters of Design issue, and Fortune have also added significant design content to their publications. The business world appears to have discovered design as a vital strategic tool and economic force. Globalization and the Internet knowledge explosion have changed our world in unprecedented ways. Design thinking, which was previously relegated to dealing with issues such as form and function, has become the twenty-first century methodology for the development of new business models. Unfortunately, the hierarchical nature of higher education has prevented design and business curriculums from keeping pace, though the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) has recently added a dual degree, the MDes/MBA. I have two main goals with this thesis. First, I intend to propose a new design curriculum that will educate design students as to the inner workings of the business world in order to position them as strategic partners with a seat at the board room table, rather than as vendors at the end of the line. It will teach them to be strategic content creators and authors rather than passive choosers of fonts and colors. I have accomplished this by immersing students in business research, professional practice, and the development of a precollege program. Students were also involved in the development of new materials (questionnaire, white papers, etc.) specifically created for the business audience. Secondly, many business types equate the creative process with drawing and art (a soft discipline), when we know it is problem solving at its most fundamental level. In order to inject art into commerce and elevate it from a business service to a cultural force, as designer Tibor Kalman suggested, it is necessary to demystify the process and put design in terms the scientist and business person can understand. Thus, the question, Can one objectify the creative process in a left-brained, planned and organized way? Designers make maps for places that dont yet exist, said Rowena Reed Kostellow, educator. Since those in the business world see things in black and white on a spread sheet, graph or chart the bottom line so to speakI have developed new materials that recontextualize design principles, process and practice for those in the business world.

I leave a good portion of my art up to chance or my unconscious self, this shows me how closely my prints and drawings relate to the dream world. In dreams most of the physical laws are abandoned, reason and mind are not the dictators of the dream. Dreams have their own logic and are a perfect place to explore a narrative that leaves itself open for the viewer to put any number of meanings into.

In early October of 1347, ships from Caffa docked at the port of Messina in Sicily. The traders brought with them a fierce plague that swept through Europe from 1348 to 1352. This pandemic, which killed approximately half of Europe's population, came to be known as the Black Death. The fear propagated by the spread of the plague and its cyclical recurrence greatly affected the art created in Europe over the next 150 years. Accounts of victims of the plague and other contemporary documents, such as medical treatises, give modern readers a glimpse into the psyche of medieval people. These insights aid in understanding the symbols and subject matter of art that was created in the wake of outbreaks of the plague. Images of the physical manifestations of disease and images of death, such as the jolly skeletons in scenes of the dance of death, preserve medieval peoples' preoccupation with and fear of death. Psychosocial responses are recorded in images of hysterical actions, such as the burning of Jewish people. The succor that was sought through adoration of religious images, such as saints and the Madonna, confirms that medieval people retained hope despite their fear. Both the resilient nature of humans and the fear initiated by widespread, sudden, gruesome death have been preserved in these images. Through this art, we discover that medieval people were not entirely unlike ourselves.

This essay performs a comprehensive investigation of the thematic possibilities for Georges de La Tour's Flea-Catcher (1630s-1640s) based on related artworks, religion, and emblematic, literary, and pseudo-scientific texts that may have had a bearing on it. The results of my research are grouped into two categories that embrace the range of interpretations for the work: religion and sexuality. While religious iconography characterizes most of La Tour's extant creations, the hypothetically religious content of his Flea-Catcher is difficult to discern. However, it is possible to analyze the iconography, as well as some of the ancillary motifs found in La Tour's painting, in relation to the various strains of Catholicism, including Jansenism, Franciscanism, Quietism, and the cult of Mary Magdalen, that ran through Lorraine in the early seventeenth century. The work seems to reflect the general tone of spiritual thought-one of passivity and bodily transcendence-prominent in La Tour's Lorraine. An examination of the popular understanding of fleas during La Tour's lifetime is particularly enlightening in the investigation of the iconography of the Flea-Catcher. The parasites made numerous appearances in contemporary poetry of an erotic nature. Moreover, the linguistic similarity between the French words for "flea" and "virginity," as well as the dominance of archaic natural science, which declared the pest to be a lustful beast, may have inspired the insect's amatory connotations. Read in conjunction with the presence of the sexually charged flea, the emblematic meaning of the flea-catcher's burned-down candle and her wretched and swollen form might indicate the demoralizing consequences of prostitution or of illegitimate pregnancy. La Tour's Flea-Catcher reveals a thematic density that is not necessarily characteristic of the rest of his works, which prove to be more straightforward in content. There is no reason to commit to only one interpretation of the painting, as the suggestions proposed by this essay are not mutually exclusive. Thus, the themes interweave in the painting, endowing it with multiple layers of possible meanings.

ABSTRACT To me the phrase building a better mousetrap implies that a needless change has been made to something that already sufficiently serves its purpose. These words identify my thoughts about how over the past three years I have begun to replace trusted means of communication with newer technologies. My thesis work examines my relationship to these new modes of communication and how, as I see others around me making them useful parts of their lives, I am continually snared by the promise of their convenience. Ultimately, however, they distract and frustrate me with the countless hours I allow them to consume, as I am conscious that I often end up at the same place that their antiquated predecessors would have gotten me. This body of work presents quasi-architectural/ mechanical objects that take on the appearance of traps built in an archaic fashion. These contain representational elements that act as analogies for the modern-day conveniences I have reluctantly made a part of my life. In addition to thoughts of my growing reliance on technology, the works that I am presenting demonstrate my appreciation for craft and it is my hope that their carefully considered construction will serve as a reminder that everything cannot be done by machines.

"Hallowed Halls: Abandoned Schools of Louisiana" is an exploration of the remnants found in vacant educational institutions around the state. With the use of color and black and white images, I deal with my own memories of grade school by recreating the vibrancy and color I remember with the poignancy of those things and places that remain. These objects and spaces speak of an interaction with society and emit a history of the complex relationship between people, and the places and things that were once a part of their lives. The images are meant to suggest a contrast between what were once bustling hallways and cafeterias and the now eerily and empty spaces that are coated with sickening layers of dust and mildew. The black and white and color images are not meant to juxtapose each other, but to coexist, fill in where the other cannot. The color images remind the viewer of the vibrancy these schools once had; bright colored lunch trays, orange desk chairs, green chalkboards and the roll down maps where each continent is defined by its own bold hue. The black and white images suggest the more desolate side of abandonment. The monochromatic palette depicts the more institutional feel of each environment and the images become less nostalgic but more disturbing. They remind the viewer that though these were once lively places for children to grow and learn, they now contain only remnants of their past.

I want to know you I want to understand you is a new media work that uses the World Wide Web to discuss the issues of traditional and new methods of communication, as well as exploring the concepts of collaborative and interactive art.

"New Orleans: About Face" investigates the typography found in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. The areas of St. Charles Avenue, Bourbon Street, the Warehouse District, Oak Street, the Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview, Magazine Street, and Canal Street have very distinctly different styles of typography found on signage, store, windows, etc. Each area's function dictates what the letterforms found in that vicinity look like. A unique kind of beauty is found in these fonts, hand-drawn letters, and three-dimensional signage. This investigation showcases a graphic designer's perspective of New Orleans in compliment to the emotional attachments and memories other New Orleanians have of the city.