My mixed media paintings explore the concept of home. I showcase topics regarding what a home is and how it connects to one’s identity. My desire to find home, emotionally and literally, has always preoccupied my mind. I have never been able to set deep roots, and that is a very unsettling feeling. My obsession with homes focuses on abandoned houses. These dwellings that people once took so much pride in are now left to rot and decay. The dilapidated state makes me see them as symbolic lost souls. I find similarities between houses and the human experience; houses have a history in the same way that people do. My process begins by taking photographs of these homes and creating image transfers that I apply to old wooden planks. The wooden planks are salvaged from the home because they have a physical connection to the space. I layer my transfers onto the planks with paint, objects, dirt, and wallpaper from the homes. I seal the paintings with encaustic wax or resin to preserve the objects, as a tribute to the things that once held value. By using multiple media and objects, I create textured surfaces that help tell a story about the house. By telling a story, I want to create a second life for these places.

My work addresses notions of the American landscape through image, memory, and experience. Using found images, video, and a variety of materials to make objects I investigate the intersection of external representations of landscape in American culture and internalized desires of landscapes.

My artwork is about the impact of the digital revolution on every aspect of life, such as relationships, war, and self image. I explore this in the creation of sculptures that represent abstracted globes or video game worlds, digital animations concerning the virtual and simulated, and prints as allegories for embodied post-human experience. The visual themes of my work are bitmapped patterns, early computer graphics, and twenty-sided dice.

Naga is an animated short about a lively dragon that roams about the lands embracing it’s surroundings dearly. It discovered a barren land while out exploring and was saddened by the sight. After pondering for a while, it then realized it could revive the land with it’s ability to summon rain using it's dragon ball. The short blends traditional animation and computer animation, where the look is similar to 2D animation but the character and a few environment elements are done in 3D. Software utilized to complete the short were Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Premiere Pro. The short showcases a stylized Chinese traditional ink painting style, key frame animation, and particle effects.

Over the years, gaming has developed rapidly from simple pixel-based experiences to fully blown three-dimensional worlds. As developing technologies improve, so does the complexity and flexibility of what can be created. Encounters, along with all aspects of any gaming experience, have evolved along with the technologies that create them. These intense combat instances, often times referred to as “bosses”, represent a chance for the developer to challenge player skill, cooperation, and coordination. In addition to being major challenges, encounters also allow players to feel a sense of progression as they learn and adapt to mechanics incorporated within an encounter’s design. Eventually these mechanics are mastered, and surmounted to a lasting sense of accomplishment and success. This project details a personal process of encounter design from initial conception to eventual player testing, along with design choices, outside influences, and development methods. These were ultimately utilized in an attempt to create an engaging and successful boss encounter.

Exploring the creative and technical process of rendering realistic images for integration into live action footage.

My senior thesis deals with contemporary depictions of sexualized violence against women in fashion photography. Images of bloodied, bruised, and dead-looking models have proliferated in fashion magazine editorials and advertisements since the 1970s and I want to explore why sexualized violence is seen as sexy and compelling advertising, in light of the fact that domestic violence is the greatest cause of injury to women in America. I produced my own fashion photographs in locations of actual female homicides in Los Angeles County, particularly those nearest to Claremont, with the use of The Los Angeles Times online homicide database, which pinpoints every homicide reported in L.A. County since 2007. We live in a world plagued by violence and by creating my own violent, fashion photographs in actual homicide locations, I hoped to jar the viewer out of neutrality and expose violent advertisements and editorials for what they are: objectifying, exploitative, and perverse expressions of hostility against women. The images abuse and demean commercial speech privileges and glamorize and trivialize horrific, actual experiences of violence suffered by countless women.

Collaboration and communication between conventionally diverse fields can allow for deeper understanding and clearer analysis of the concepts within each. Two fields traditionally seen as dichotomous are those of art and science. Historically they approach problems in opposite ways. However, I would argue that they in fact investigate very similar questions, hoping to discover the ways that the world works. It makes sense, then, that historically these fields have sometimes been able to interact. Artists have engaged with science by creating work through scientific processes including crossbreeding flowers, genetically modifying organisms, and sequencing nucleotides. Others have referenced scientific ideas, like those of order or sustainability, through more traditional methods. My thesis project, Adenine Uracil Guanine, is a sculptural installation portraying the phylogenetic tree of all life in a three-dimensional form. Borrowing from the aesthetic of mobiles, the sculpture takes a recognizably itinerant form, referencing the fluidity and malleability of evolution. The structure’s white base, alluding to the sterility and cleanliness of a phylogenetic tree’s aim to diagrammatize change, is overlayed by a system of colored bands. These bands reference the nucleotide sequences upon which phylogenetic trees are based. By using an artistic lens to view the scientific process of evolution and its elucidation and representation, I hope to continue to encourage a dialogue between the two fields.

Since a young age, I have been interested in bicycling as a form of fun and fanciful recreation, but it wasn’t until the summer of 2011 that a serious shift occurred in my understanding of the bike as more than a mere machine. A spontaneous 700-mile journey redefined my relationship with travel, transcended my notions of transportation, and enabled me to better mediate myself within my environment. In writing about these experiences, I hope to offer some insight into how American culture currently frames transportation and how I hope the construction of a bike positive culture can instill social, environmental, and political change. Concurrently, I created a pin-up style bicycle calendar featuring enthusiasts from the Claremont Colleges to foster a sense of community around bicycling and inspire riders and non-riders alike to further explore their ‘bicyxuality’. Intermingling this nonfiction piece with a thoughtful reflection on the BIKEurious calendar project, this paper serves to explain my creative undertakings and, ultimately, call into question the hierarchy of transportation in America today.

Because of my distrust for self-expression through verbal language, my pursuit thus far in art has been to discover a satisfactory means of self-expression. In study of the work I’ve created across all mediums, through poetry, music and visual art, this desire for a satisfactory outlet of self-expression has resulted in a drive to create meaning through combining mediums. Throughout this semester, my interest in mixed mediums has resulted largely in experimentation with the combination of music and visual art, as well as exploring the standalone merit of each. This also entails a study of their overlaps, cooperative influence, and the effectiveness in establishing comprehensible and replicable patterns with which artists can make themselves understood. The installation Hyper Vigilant leverages the three-wall space provided, the graffiti-like, cartoonish imagery, and the soundscape (which combines chatter and music) to create an environment in which the feelings I experience in an episode of panic, or in a bout of anxiety are fully represented. This paper will discuss the use of a combination of sound, visual art and space in an installation, through an exploration of the art theory, and a discussion of precedents. It will ultimately culminate in an examination of the installation at hand.