My work is a continuously evolving self portrait formulated by a combination of past experiences and influences. The Immaculate Condemnation body of work is a cathartic reaction that confronts Catholic Sin and rebels against gender conformity. As both a confirmed Catholic and transgender woman, I speak from an authentic voice that seeks open conversation regarding these topics. I also hope to demystify the transsexual body for the non-transgendered viewer. Additionally, I use allegoric imagery to communicate my interpretation of beauty, power, horror, and sex. I combine performance, photography, sculpture, video, audio, and graphic design to execute my installations. I intentionally develop environments that both attract and repulse the viewer in order to mimic the relationship I have with Catholicism and Gender Issues.

We often think of architecture as distinct buildings, yet as we move through the city we continuously pass through a built environment that is a collage of buildings. These spaces between buildings are underestimated as influences on our experience of everyday life in the city. Considering architecture as linked existential experiences through spaces rather than confined to individual buildings is more in line with our experience of the city as a series of interconnected spaces and places. Rather than describing a single, static architecture through words, how can we express this linked experience of spaces dynamically through narratives? Can writing reveal subtle experiences of interconnected atmospheres within the city? If so, how could this understanding inform the way architects consider the relationship between built-forms and the greater urban context? This thesis investigates and interprets the atmospheres of pathways and in-between spaces to understand their influence on the experience of moving through the city. Although in-between spaces are where much of the human experience of the city occurs, they are rarely discussed and, in many ways, this keeps them out of the realm of design consideration. Atmospheres (discussed by Peter Zumthor, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez) arise from our multi-sensory perception of space. The thesis investigates the literature surrounding the phenomenological study and design of atmospheres as well as the connection between atmospheres and narratives—how they develop and are essential in creating meaningful spaces for embodied-experience. Assuming the identity of the flâneur—city-wanderer, documentarian, and observer—as an entry point into investigating the city through movement, the project aims at documenting and rendering atmospheres in the city through photography and writing. Through the intersection of architecture, atmosphere and narrative, the thesis presents a multi-media study of atmospheres of in-between spaces in Montreal focusing on writing as a tool for generating new narratives that inform design. This research project develops a new methodology that reorients design-thinking towards a sequence of experiences through atmospheres in the city. Ultimately, this research sets the conditions, methodology and context for the architectural intervention of attuned public spaces for events along an extension of Parc linéaire du Réseau-Vert (the Greenline).

The artist, Delaney Shae Rogers, discusses her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Endo / Exo, held at the Tipton Gallery in downtown Johnson City, TN. The exhibition dates are from March 25th through April 5th, 2024, with a public reception held April 5th, 2024. The author provides insight into the concept behind the work in the exhibition and shares how the making process and specific materials impact the work. This body of work explores coping with grief, anxiety, and the state of the world through the process of making and communicating otherwise difficult topics through visually digestible symbolic language.

As the world becomes increasingly aware of the need to better care for the environment, innovative business models are helping to counter the damage of the fast fashion system - a phenomenon in the fashion industry whereby production processes are expedited in order to get new trends to the market as quickly and cheaply as possible. Designing products with a focus on their renewability can shift the product-consumer relationship. The closed loop concept of a “circular economy” is emerging as a viable and promising solution to the current linear business model. This study explores the possibilities of a more mindful approach to systems of production and consumption through material explorations using plastic from water bottles, paper from old newspaper and magazines, and fabric leftovers from pattern making within a circular economy. It considers the generative and renewable approaches in redefining how fashion engages with the components and raw materials of the industry. The research demonstrates a circular approach to the production of hospitality accessories in an effort to develop new intersections between products, materials, and consumers. The accessories are designed using discarded, reformulated denim–an abundant and underutilized byproduct of the fashion industry­–to reduce waste that currently occurs every time hotel chains and airlines produce disposable giveaway products from new materials.

Categorization is a process that simplifies thoughts into manageable pieces by grouping related entities. This reductive analysis can lead to internal harm in individuals’ overarching identities, or Ganzheiten, which is the focus of this thesis. Given that categorization is necessary to our conceptual management of the world, is there a way to counteract the internal harms it can cause? Because acts of self-affirmation can have healing effects, I argue that one manifestation of permanent self-affirmation—custom tattooing—can be an effective repudiation of the divisiveness and reduction categories cause. Custom tattooing’s permanence, individualization, and personal significance make it a great choice as a method of healing internal damage caused by external categorization. Though tattoos might not be the answer for every person experiencing internalized categorization, I have shown that it should be considered as a valid source for the self-affirmation needed to heal from or counteract such internalized harms.

“Between Floors: The Ups and Downs of Mediated Narrative” and the accompanying creative remediation project, “Between Floors: Love and Other Blood Related Diseases,” meld theory and practice of print with electronic literature and installation art. I argue that as the medium changes, the narrative is transformed. The narrative can be reconstructed and pieced together as the reader or viewer becomes increasingly involved, even embodied within the work. This embodiment is what Nathaniel Stern calls “Moving and thinking and feeling” (1) and can result in a more direct emotional experience. The form, structure, and medium (sjužet) rely on authorial intention, yet as a narrative becomes more interactive and experiential the feedback loop shifts, placing meaning, message, and construction of narrative (fabula) between media and reader/viewer. This necessarily complicates the notion of authorship, yet within an embodied space, such as the installations included in this analysis, there is a potential for greater emotional understanding between author/artist and reader/viewer. In the print story “Between Floors: Love and Other Blood Related Diseases,” the protagonist, June, visits her father in a hospital after a tragedy and ends up spending the rest of her life there. The metaphor of an elevator throughout the print, electronic, and installation versions furthers the trapped, claustrophobic feeling of the narrative as well as the ups and downs of relationships and grief. Pieces of the narrative remain recognizable through the electronic literature and installation, yet as the reader/viewer is increasingly immersed in the narrative, it becomes his or her own—a more subjective and overwhelming emotional experience. The elevator metaphor extends through the analysis—an emblem of traditional linear narratives and the narrative arc and technological immersion. The analysis explores theories of language, medium, authorship, nonlinearity, interactivity, and embodiment through existing narrative, new media, and installation theorists such as Peter Brooks, Marshall McLuhan, and Nathaniel Stern. This dissertation and to an extent, experiment, uses theory and practice to illuminate narrative using a recombination of existing theory and an original remediation in three distinct forms, to further the understanding of the nature of narratives, media, authors, and readers, while blurring boundaries between disciplines.

This dissertation examines intersections of the development of maps from the Native American-European encounter to the establishment of the New Republic and transatlantic British and American narratives of women’s travel of the long eighteenth century. Early European and American maps that depict the Americas analyzed as parallel “texts” to canonical and lesser-known women’s narratives ranging from 1688 to 1801 reveal further insights into both maps and these narratives otherwise not apparent. I argue that as mapping of the New World developed, this mapping influenced representations of women’s geographic and social mobility and emergent “American” identity in transatlantic narratives. These narratives, like maps of the New World, reveal disjunctures in representation that disseminate deceptive portrayals of the New World. Such discrepancies open a rhetorical gap, or a thirdspace, of inquiry to analyze the gaze at work within these cartographic and women’s narratives. The representations of women’s geographic and social mobility remain constricted within the selected narratives of women’s travel. While the heroines do travel, in most cases they travel as captives or in some form of escape. These narratives include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767), Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794), and Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), among others. However, these narratives do highlight similarities of an emergent “American” identity as Native American, hybrid, and fluid as represented in contemporaneous maps. Literary Landscapes also addresses the narrativity of maps as auto/biographical and even satirical expressions as related to the women’s narratives analyzed in this study. For, J. B. Harley discusses how a map conveys his own life and contains his memories in his essay “The Map as Biography,” while Roland Barthes argues that mapping is a sensorial experience in his brief essay “No Address.” Furthermore, allegorical maps like Jean de Gourmont’s The Fool’s Cap Map of the World (ca. 1590) and Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte de tendre (1678) reflect aspects of the human condition such as folly and friendship.

In Sudan, 110 babies are abandoned in the streets of Khartoum every month. The majority of abandoned children are born out of wedlock. Young women with illegitimate pregnancies are often ostracized by their families and society, and the lack of emotional, financial and legal support has led many to take desperate measures, including the abandonment of their children. Relinquishing mothers exist like ghosts in Sudanese society. The only evidence of the mother’s experience is her anonymous, abandoned child. In order to understand and examine this phenomenon, I used ethnographic performance art informed by design research practice (Performative Research Design). I performed various acts of abandonment to examine the mechanism and psychology of the act of abandonment. I endeavored through concrete, lived experiences to better empathize with the relinquishing mother and create awareness of the wider psychological and social complexities of child abandonment.

Containing portraiture and biography as well as protest text and affirmative text, African- American Illustrated biographical dictionaries made from 1876 to 1917 present Social Gospel ideology and are examples of Afro-Protestantism. They are similar to the first American illustrated biographical dictionaries of the 1810s in that they formed social identity after national conflict while contesting concepts of social inferiority. The production of these books occurred during the early years of Jim Crow, a period of momentous change to the legal and social fabric of the United States, and because of momentous changes in modern American print industries. While portraits within the books simultaneously form, blur, and stabilize identity, biographies convey themes of perseverance, social equity, and social struggle. More specifically, text formed an imagined community in the African-American middle class imaginary. It worked together with image to help create a proto-Civil Rights social movement identity during the beginning of racial apartheid.

This dissertation, G.A.M.E., refashions James McNeill Whistler’s book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, into a hypermediated facsimile text and archive. By remediating the text, the socio-historical context of the Victorian time period in which Whistler lived is reestablished, making his book more accessible to twenty-first century audiences. The era studied in this dissertation includes the expansion of the idea of celebrity, the power of the press, and the concept of art for art’s sake from 1863 through 1892. In order to showcase these concepts, archival materials, such as personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, and published pamphlets, from this period were collected, digitized, and organized into a digital archive and edition. In 1890, Whistler, an American-born, British-based artist known for his arguments with the critics of his day, published The Gentle Art, a collection of previously printed letters and pamphlets. Throughout the book, Whistler refers to people, publications, and events relevant to himself and his work. Persons unfamiliar with those references may find themselves frustrated while reading due to the lost social and historical context referred to on the pages, because those references remain difficult to access. G.A.M.E., makes Whistler’s The Gentle Art more accessible by realizing the proto- hypertextual nature of his book. Like many modern-day websites, The Gentle Art contains numerous references to references – a virtual daisy chain of associations Whistler made to and with his work encircling his artistic philosophy, art for art’s sake. From 1890, when the book was published, until now, Whistler’s “links” have remained dormant on the page. G.A.M.E. activates those links and reanimates The Gentle Art via a hypermediated facsimile text for twenty-first century readers. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies is a window into the late Victorian art world. G.A.M.E. houses and archives this contextual material in order to resurrect The Gentle Art and reconcile it with the man who created it.