Throughout my work I have always sought/ wished to talk about a love between people with no actual connection. Emmanuel Levinas' description of the face-to-face echoes throughout my work: "Face, as I have always described it, is nakedness, helplessness, perhaps an exposure to death."(Levinas, "Intention, Event, and the Other"). Indeed, the face then is not the literal face but a vulnerability that we can feel and almost touch. For me, Levinas' description of the face applies not only to portraits but also to the things and marks the other makes with a secret sort-of-love, a private ritual when no one watches. I observe their marks on surface as gratuitous flourish. These marks can be anything: tire grease, metrics of hair, ad hoc assemblage. This inadvertent history the makers cast on objects allows me to project thoughts about them, recreate a fiction of who they are and conjecture why they made a mark that is just a mark. With the people un-pictured I hope the objects become stand-ins, projections of the people and their labor, functioning as flocculent afterthoughts of their human reality. I think objects may possess their own agency such as in Heidegger's The Thing, "The Potter forms the clay. No--he shapes the void." This paper will trace my attempts and line of questioning with regard to knowing. My mapping of objects and people meet at the cross-section of agency and failure. Despite the disparate subject matter I photograph, I want to convey a sense of unwavering empathy with my work. / text

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EXPLORING IDENTITY THROUGH SELF-PORTRAITURE by ROSE M BARRON Under the Direction of Dr Melody Milbrandt ABSTRACT 1) Statement of the problem: How can art education help students deconstruct stereotypical imagery and develop meaningful artwork? How can art lessons help students construct positive identity imagery and develop meaningful artwork? 2) Procedures: I field-tested a unit of three lessons based on identity through self-portraiture to help students investigate the topic of identity in relation to personal and cultural sense of self. Student’s artworks, reflections and responses were analyzed. 3) Conclusions: Art lessons can help students construct positive identity and develop positive imagery. Art lessons can help students deconstruct negative stereotypical imagery and develop meaningful imagery. INDEX WORDS: Identity, Portrait, Self-Portrait, Race, Gender, Class, Ethnicity, Contemporary Art Education

The work presented in this thesis explores the idea of embracing, interpreting, and utilizing preexisting art work as source material for new investigations that address the changing relevance of appropriation and self-portraiture in today's culture. By recreating these paintings with photography, 'mistakes' in the form of conflicting perspectives, multiple viewpoints, and impossible lighting situations were discovered and addressed. In addition, RGB levels and color channels for both the original image and the recreated photograph were analyzed to compare overall brightness and bright spots. The photographs in this series provide new insights into the emotional content of paintings throughout the vast range of art history by placing one's self into the metaphorical shoes of 'the girl in the painting.'

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The thesis emerged from two streams. First, from an interest in portraiture. Both the portrait as an art object and portraiture as a social process are mediated by power relations, yet, despite this, it is a genre that has been relatively underexplored by sociology. Second, as a response to calls within the sociology of art for approaches that, rather than maintaining a distance, seek to take the artwork “seriously” as a source of “social knowledge that is of its own worth” (Harrington, 2004, p.3). Explorations of the ‘affordances’ that material objects provoke in socially situated subjects reflect this interest in capturing the ‘in-itself-ness’ of the art object in ways which are “congruent with social constructionism” (De la Fuente, 2007). These two streams inform the thesis’ three aims, addressed through three case studies of five 20th Century portraits. First, to present portraiture and its relations of power to the sociological gaze. Second, to develop an empirical approach, characterised as ‘taking a line for a walk’, that seeks to keep in play: the material properties of the image and what these may afford to a situated viewer; to explore how these affordances operate to constitute the subjectivities of the individuals portrayed and the artists; and to consider how these processes play out in and through the processes of consecration of the object and artist within the cultural field. Third, to make a contribution to understanding how to capture sociologically the ‘in-itself-ness’ of the art object. The thesis suggests the value of an approach that keeps in focus the art object and the context of its circulation, helping to deepen understanding of the operation of the field. Second, it reveals portraiture as an exercise of power, including in the constitution of the subjectivities represented in and through the portrait. Third, it suggests the continued difficulties of empirically capturing the ‘in-itself-ness’ of the art object.

EXPLORING IDENTITY THROUGH SELF-PORTRAITURE by ROSE M BARRON Under the Direction of Dr Melody Milbrandt ABSTRACT 1) Statement of the problem: How can art education help students deconstruct stereotypical imagery and develop meaningful artwork? How can art lessons help students construct positive identity imagery and develop meaningful artwork? 2) Procedures: I field-tested a unit of three lessons based on identity through self-portraiture to help students investigate the topic of identity in relation to personal and cultural sense of self. Student’s artworks, reflections and responses were analyzed. 3) Conclusions: Art lessons can help students construct positive identity and develop positive imagery. Art lessons can help students deconstruct negative stereotypical imagery and develop meaningful imagery. INDEX WORDS: Identity, Portrait, Self-Portrait, Race, Gender, Class, Ethnicity, Contemporary Art Education

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This paper was an exploration of the history of portraiture and how that history related to the Senior Thesis show of studio art major Rachel Dahl. The focus of the paper is on the nostalgic and commemorative tendencies of portrait art throughout its history--namely the Italian Uomino Famosi of the fifteenth century, paintings commissioned of favorite horses and dogs, the portraits of recently deceased people, and the miniature eye portrait fad in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--and how these historic examples of portraiture influenced her work.

My paintings contain both abstract and figurative elements that share an underlying theme: spiritual symbolism that conveys positive principles to live by. The symbolism that underscores my content carries over to my choice of palette; for example, red or yellow implies the vitality of life while purple stands for royalty.With my drawings, I concentrate on highly realistic graphite portraits of individuals I know. I present them in the environments in which they live to help highlight their unique personalities. With both painting and drawing, my goal is to illustrate spiritual philosophies on macro and micro levels respectively.