Inspire: The Confluence of Art & Design seeks to untangle the inextricable link between graphic design and art. Graphic design has always been seen simply as an informational or sales tool; rarely is it seen as art. The work presented in this show illustrates that works created with typography can, in fact, be one and the same.

Fantasy art is often described as being connected to the imagination. My work defines fantasy themes in combination with modern culture and real life experiences. During the creative process I have overcome a struggle with composition development and color relationships. Paintings mimic a puzzle strategy. I come up with a basic idea by inserting and taking away imagery in order for the whole image to be cohesive. Subject matter includes women of different cultures in dress, animals, pattern, sweets, and childhood experiences from the 80s. My characters are a personification of myself as I often dream of being dressed up in a distant place. All paintings are large, stretching from floor to ceiling. Color concept was based on the theme initially written before the drawing was started. I work in layers, first with a written idea, then proceeding with a drawing and several layers of painting. All 3-D forms are based off the paintings that include cut paper, T-shirt wrapped pillows, collections of fantasy figures and toys from the 80s that Ive been collecting since I was a child.

Pensively, uses toys and solar powered drawing machines to present elements of movement, time, and scale. Each of the works in this exhibition invites or implies action through automation or viewer interaction. The works in this exhibit creates an environment of wonder and excitement that triggers memories of childhood and the pleasure of learning. The works investigate and discuss the responsibilities attained through maturation that keep us from recovering the sense of accomplishment we achieved with play.

This thesis is about my journey through lifememories of the past, experiences of the present and premonitions of the futureand how that journey, through its changing landscapes and human characters, generates images that I call inscapes. My subjects arise from very personal experiences and get fermented in my imagination to project an inner vision. I create deep intimate spaces, transitional moments of conscious and unconscious thoughts using both natural and personal imageries. In this endeavor, dark, solid and earthly colors and robust textures play a big role. I employ printmaking (woodcut), painting (oil on canvas) and poetry to express my mental state. Growing up in India, I feel like an outsider in this country; at the same time, being a part of the university community, I also feel like an insider. The landscape of Baton Rouge offers me plenty of similarities with my home town, Santiniketan, but it also provides profound contrasts in culture, language and people. From the very beginning my relationship with this place has been marked with a tension and contradictory emotionsa push of alienation and a pull of deep intimacy. In my inscapes I articulate all these different emotional tensions for the viewers.

I have always been interested in stories, and parts of every story I have heard has shaped who I am as an adult. If Im not telling others an anecdote of a moment turned into an adventure, I am inventing adventures to tell myself. Three characters developed from the mixture of the stories I heard from true life, books and television, and what I made up for myself. Originally I simply intended these characters of a little girl, a rabbit, and a few raccoons to interact with one another and show moments of individual storieslike illustrations in an anthology that involves the same characters. But as I worked with them and dug deeper I saw that these three beings represent much more. Carl Jung would declare them to be the Divine Child, the Trickster, and the Shadow (little girl, rabbit, and raccoons respectively). The rabbit, Twitch, is the need and desire to do what one wishes. A warrior and an adventurer, she is impulsive and will act upon any idea that comes to mind. Most of the time her ideas are not the best, but she always manages to extract herself from trouble in the end. The raccoons are nameless, as both the internal conscious and the mores of society that has decided what is right and what is wrong. They are always at hand to chide and scold or provide doubt to any situation. Twitch hates the raccoons for she loathes being reprimanded by them, but the raccoons never stop. It is in their nature to always say what they think is best. The little girl, Imme, is the deciding factor; the one that blends the two sides into a cohesive whole. She rules over both the rabbit and the raccoons, although she clearly favors Twitch more. But, conversely, there are always more raccoons . . .

This Doorknob is on the Ceiling is a thesis exhibition of sculptural works that explore the fusion of various domestic, industrial and commonplace objects. Some are new, but most of them are used and outdated. I explore and take advantage of the baggage that comes along with them, their history, their functions and what they suggest. My intention with these items is to both exploit and subvert the contextual boundaries which define them. I manipulate these objects in opposition to the way they are normally presented, encountered and understood, while leaving them recognizable. I am interested in obstructing function and creating unexpected associations between ordinary things. These works investigate dynamic spatial arrangements and codependent evocative relationships between objects that typically need human interaction to become activated or purposeful. I force them to depend on one another for physical support by intersecting and embedding them, creating animated arrangements motivated by indiscernible forces and circumstances.

The Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence, Italy, was constructed during the years 1419-1428 and is considered one of the most influential buildings of the early Italian Renaissance. Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy, in its original design, was pristine and void of the architectural ornamentation that had come to characterize so many buildings that preceded it and which would come to be associated with the sacristy itself on account of later alterations. Indeed, the original sacristy was characterized by a purely articulated space free of additional ornamentation to the architecture. However, shortly after the termination of construction, the Old Sacristy became a battleground for new and evolving notions concerning the ornamentation of sacred spaces. A veritable who's who of early Quattrocento Florence including the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, the sculptor Donatello, and the wealthy and increasingly powerful Medici family took a stand. Although, the initial lack of ornamentation has been researched, scholarship thus far neglected to fully explain the decision to profoundly alter the ornamentation of the original space. This thesis interprets and evaluates the research that has been done on the Old Sacristy and, in turn, offers an explanation for the current arrangement of architectural ornamentation in light of both aesthetic considerations and patronage.

Site Unseen is a large-scale installation of seventy-three brightly screen-printed and painted house forms. The houses stack and interlock with one another, creating clusters of towers and archways. The forms appear to grow into one another, physically connecting the homes. Each house is printed with images of materials in various states: raw, processed and waste. These materials represent the cycle of communitys rise and fall. Beyond examining the construction of community, Site Unseen explores a moment when trust or foundation is lost in a community. In the center of the community is a gaping, spherical void. This void represents the absence or loss of a cornerstone of a community. Site Unseen explores the relationship between a group of individuals and a man-made force that exists outside of them.

Simple repetitive actions such as rocking or jumping paired with garments that contain, heighten, or limit the movements of such actions are the focus of my thesis work. Through the pieces in the show, I track these actions and plot them over a course of a lifespan, looking at the ways they define moments, change in meaning, and sometimes come to contradict themselves.

I want to create my own Utopia that is, as a system, not an ideal community but fun in appearance, like castles in the movie Alice in Wonderland, the land of Rivendell from Lord of the Rings, or the Archigrams architectural drawings. Even though those scenes are fictional, viewers can picture themselves into that visualized description. Once my Utopia is visualized with its detail, it is the human imagination that makes the Utopia come alive. The one who gives function to unfamiliar things are viewers not creators. Playground In-Between was my first active attempt to construct my Utopia, which was composed of unique buildings and unfamiliar views. In the process of creating, I focused on the shapes shapes of individual buildings and shapes of the finished composition rather than thinking of function. My main task was breaking my stereotype of architectural form so that I could come up with a unique design. I could fulfill my task using unintentionally shaped building blocks made by others scraps of wood. I combined those negative parts of wood together to form architecture. The process of assembling was as fun as if I played on the ground. This is why my work was titled, Playground In-Between.