The visual culture of Victorian Protestant missionaries is an under-researched area, despite the current interest in art and religion, and the implications of missionary imagery’s legacy in a post-colonial world. Looking specifically at British missionaries to southern Africa, this thesis proposes that visual culture, comprised of art, image, and their corollaries in personal and collective imagination, be recognised as an appropriate framework through which to re-examine a group predominantly associated with the Word. In particular, it argues that visual resources were not only communicated with originating missionary societies and home supporters, but were utilised as tools for evangelism and education, and the development of self-identity for men and women operating far from home. Beginning with a theoretical defence of visual culture as an appropriate and meaningful lens through which to investigate mission, the thesis goes on to consider the formative visual culture of prospective missionaries, identifying how and why evangelical Protestants accessed images. Key themes of landscape and portraiture are identified, and the varied media through which these were encountered investigated, including printed publications, gallery art, domestic ephemera, and ecclesial decorations. A detailed examination of the popular religious periodical The Sunday at Home brings together the exploration of these diverse themes. The second half of the thesis transitions from visual influences on prospective missionaries at home, to the visual culture of foreign missionary practitioners, pivoting on the activity of missionary training. An exploration of training reveals a disconnect between the importance of art and image in popular religious life, and a failure to address adequately their evangelistic applications. Moving into the final sections of the project, art and image re-emerge as significant, though the lack of guidance on their use is shown to have limited their co-ordination and effectiveness. Nevertheless, archive research in the UK, and field research in Malawi and South Africa, yielded sufficient material to demonstrate the particular importance of the landscape genre, and of the magic lantern as a crucial visual medium. Although visual materials were significant in the construction of missionary identity, and were heavily utilised in mission contexts, there was a widespread lack of engagement with, and distrust of, the visual, creating the complex and ambiguous interactions with which this thesis is ultimately concerned.

This paper explores artistic interpretation of a script's theme to its visual, estetic representation and meaning. The purpose is to reflect on the topic, and to enhance our understanding of how an interpretation from written intention to visual representation can form. The aritstic production used in this artistic research is an animated feature film for children 10+ and the character design of its lead female character.

This exegesis details the development of four interactive artworks that enable audiences to observe and reflect on aspects of their own psychophysiology, using the technologies of biofeedback interaction as a way of situating the participant’s subjectivity and bodily experiences within each other as reciprocal phenomena. The central theme addressed through these works concerns the representation and experience of subjectivity as a physiologically embodied phenomenon. Although contemporary theories of psychophysiology and phenomenology have overturned the idea of mind-body separation, many forms of cultural practice continue to represent subjectivity as a fundamentally disembodied phenomenon. The artworks documented in this exegesis extend this process of re-examination through the use of interacting bio-sensing technologies and audience participation. Each of the works create a space where participants and observers alike can become present to aspects of body-mind process. / Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA)

Not until the 60¡¦s did art galleries start to exist in Taiwan. However, they were mostly sporadic, short-lived and weak in operation. It is only in the 80¡¦s when the art gallery industry in Taiwan started to take shape. Different from galleries back in the 60¡¦s and before the lift of Martial Law, galleries mushroomed in the late 80¡¦s and the 90¡¦s. In addition to the growing number of galleries, all the other factors, such as the return of a generation of young artists from Europe and the U.S. back to Taiwan, rising importance of museum establishment, fast expansion of media after the lift of Martial Law and newspaper restrictions as well as rapid changes in the economic and social environments, also helped bring about the unprecedented prosperity of the arts development in Kaohsiung. This prosperity was extremely valuable for Kaohsiung which had been wrongly ridiculed as a ¡§Cultural Desert¡¨ back then. This research focuses on the development and transition of the art galleries in the 90¡¦s with a view to keeping a record of the golden period of the art market in Kaohsiung. There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter 1 is the introduction to the motivation, goal, scope, limitations, research methods and process of this study. Chapter 2 discusses the interactions and relationships among artists, collectors, art media and museums. Chapter 3 attempts to provide a historical review of art galleries in Kaohsiung and discuss their operations by dividing the history of art galleries in Kaohsiung into five stages: the ¡§Foundation Period¡¨ before the 70¡¦s, the ¡§Taking-off Period¡¨ from the 80¡¦s to the lift of Martial Law, the ¡§Prime Period¡¨ after the lift of Marital Law and before the inauguration of the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA), the ¡§Waning Period¡¨ after the inauguration of the KMFA to the outbreak of SARS, and the ¡§Stagnation Period¡¨ after the SARS outbreak up to now. Chapter 4 focuses on the ¡§Prime Period¡¨ of Kaohsiung¡¦s art gallery industry in the 90¡¦s and its impacts on the art market in Kaohsiung. Chapter 5 is the conclusion. The research methods adopted in this study are literature review, in-depth interview and observation. Through data collection, comparison, review and cross-analysis, this study helps reconstruct the history of Kaohsiung¡¦s art galleries and provides an observation of the changes and impacts of the industry in the 90¡¦s as well as its current development so as to help predict the future of art galleries in Kaohsiung. Even though Taiwan is not a large island, the two largest cities in its north and south are actually quite different in their population compositions and city characteristics. The purpose of this study is to break the stereotypical belief in the visual arts industry that ¡§Taipei is the only representative city of Taiwan.¡¨ and to explore from a local viewpoint the history and operations of the art galleries in Kaohsiung and their impacts on the art market in southern Taiwan. Hopefully, this study can provide references for working and future art gallery managers in their operations as well as for related governmental departments in helping healthy development of local art galleries.

Framing the Sacred revisits the significance of ekphrasis, the verbal rendering of a visual representation, in modern and contemporary American poetics. Although a seemingly marginal strain of lyric poetry, ekphrasis is a literary crucible in which the problems of representation converge, catalyzing a unique process of enchantment and disenchantment. Through an examination of a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems, I argue that this enchantment has bearing on how we envision the import of religion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America and its literature. On account of its liminal status--a text that is "betwixt and between" the verbal and visual--ekphrasis does not need to meditate explicitly on spiritual, sacred, or religious objects to undermine and destabilize our definitions of such terms. Each chapter in Framing the Sacred examines the manifestation of a single trope of containment--the figure of the frame, the genre of still life, the genre of the self-portrait, and the acts of collection and curation--and discovers the various ways the ekphrastic work of William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Wright, A.E. Stallings, and Jorie Graham constructs and deconstructs such tropes. The pattern that emerges from a number of dramatically different ekphrases reveals the generative value of loosening the frames through which we consider the sacred in the study of literature and the visual arts.

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Inclusive education practices call for the diverse and individual needs of all students to be met satisfactorily. The needs and experiences of artistically talented students in Australian visual art classrooms are currently unknown. This study addresses this gap in research through an inquiry into the experiences of artistically talented students and their teachers in visual art classrooms, by examining the accounts of a group of students and teachers at one high school in South East Queensland. This study is significant as it provides teachers, parents and others involved in the education of artistically talented students with additional means to plan and cater for the educational needs of artistically talented students. Teacher and student accounts of the visual art classroom in this study indicated that identification processes for artistically talented students are unclear and contradictory. Furthermore, teacher and student accounts of their experiences presented a wide variety of conceptions of the visual art classroom and point towards an individualised approach to learning for artistically talented students. This study also discovered a mismatch between assessment practices in the subject visual art and assessment of art in the ‘real world’. Specifically, this study proposes a renewal of programs for artistically talented students, and recommends a revision of current procedures for the identification of artistically talented students in visual art classrooms.

The research is developed through sculptural artworks that seek to raise the question of their being. They do this through their indeterminate presence, which often awakens people to ask ‘What is it?’ I ask how sculpture can encourage people to wonder about what things are, and how the relationship/s we form with art can then lead us to reflect upon our other more worldly relationships. I also pursue the questions of what is sculpture, and what is contemporary art, in order to map out an understanding of the domain of my practice, and the issues at stake regarding the making and display of sculpture. Through a reading of the ideas of Martin Heidegger and other Continental philosophers, I have focused upon the way our (Modern Western) relationship with things in the world is problematic, and how art can help us to address some of these problems. It is through art’s poetic ambiguities that our usual determined and closed relationship with the world can be opened up to other readings. An investigation into contemporary art practices reveals several issues that put the artwork into context and shed light upon difficulties facing contemporary artists particularly in terms of: what am I to do, why should I do it and how should I proceed? My artworks are aimed at raising questions for the viewer about being, sculpture and contemporary art. I have developed the coopering technique of wooden construction to make unusually shaped wooden container-like sculptures. I have also investigated other semi-industrial working methods to construct sculptural objects that oscillate between various possibilities for the viewer. These artworks operate in the field between the familiar/unfamiliar, functional/non-functional and the known/unknown. They resist the viewer’s efforts at stilling the oscillation between possible readings and evade some of the common roles of contemporary art such as being a site for social and political dialogue or being a reflection of contemporary/pop/consumer culture. This project contributes to the dialogue already in play between several Post-Minimal sculptors whose work touches upon constructed and or manufactured ambiguous forms. It further develops the language of how to discuss these issues through my philosophical readings. It extends the coopering technique beyond the simple cask form to discover the technical possibilities for this method of construction. It brings to the gallery visitor an actual experience of what Heidegger writes about art, particularly in terms of his ideas about ‘the truth of being as revealing/concealing’. The research also develops our understanding of the nature of contemporary art through questioning several aspects of it and through adopting outmoded and laborious methods of making that are at odds with our digital age. The artworks are the result of working toward a position of indeterminacy that is alluring, by partially resisting the viewer’s efforts to know them.

This research seeks to establish visual principles present in modern media and compare their usefulness. The visual principles will be explained and presented. Then they will be analyzed within two game trailers of commercial games. A correlation will then be extrapolated and then presented if the results create the presented and expected outcome.

No description available.