This photographic project, Dislocation, seeks to document the current state and decline of Cortana Mall in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The mall was built in 1976 during the height of shopping mall construction and was one of the largest shopping centers in the country with five anchor stores and 139 retail spaces. Now, just 48 stores and two anchor stores remain open. This high vacancy rate and deterioration of the mall is due to suburban flight, the building of new shopping centers in southern Baton Rouge, and changing consumer trends, which has led to malls closing across the country. My photographs represent the transitional nature of Cortana Mall. I am using this specific location to also acknowledge a trend of economic decline that is happening nationally.

After;life is an exploration of the time and space between life and death. The installation, created from dozens of woodcut prints, creates this imaginary place, and encompasses viewers through sight, smell, sound, and touch. All elements of this installation are heavily influenced by Southern Louisiana culture and wildlife, and are meant to be familiar enough to provoke personal memory and experience. A set of rituals in the form of three poems, corresponding to three different spirit guides: The Black Dog, The Alligator, and The Opossum, lead the reader through the space from life, through liminal, into death.

The ability to imagine is essential to shaping who we are, and is an important part of our humanity. Children have the ability to use aspects of their environment as their playthings, becoming the characters in their world through their sense of imagination. We lose this ability as we grow, leaving us with only memories and sentimentality. I have come to realize that my art is an expression of the longing and search to regain that ability to become fused with my imagination and my environment. I allow myself to become lost in a world of fantasy once more, and through this transcendence of time and place, speak to others and their experiences. As a child I developed a love/hate relationship with the sense of fear and a curiosity and interest with horror and science fiction films. Even though I experienced nightmares frequently, I continued to develop an obsession of that primal and animalistic instinct. I was attracted to it in a unique way. It fueled my vivid imagination and became a coping mechanism, even in adulthood. I am interested in how humans cope with fear during early childhood and how it develops into coping with fear as adults. Gotta Catch Em All, an exhibition of two narrative installations of ceramic and mixed media sculptures, represents and examines the differences between my childhood perception of our world and the world seen through the eyes of a child growing up in this new digital age. Surrounded by technology, imagination and a relationship with the environment seems to be fading away or morphing into something far different than what I experienced in my youth. I am curious as to how this may potentially affect their ability in confronting fears and coping with them as they age. My work is a testament to discovering these differences and the cornerstone of what fuels my artistic practice.

This study explores the qualities that characterize art teaching in selected elementary schools containing multi-age models of instruction. Multi-age learning environments are defined as the purposive grouping of students from two or more grade levels in order to form a classroom community of learners. During past decades, multi-age education has been examined in literature in many contexts. In the subject area of art, however, little literature can be found that addresses multi-age instruction. This study begins to rectify that situation through the use of qualitative research methods. Surveys were used to collect broad information on the practices and perceptions of multi-age art teachers. Observations and interviews were also conducted with a uniquely selected multi-age art educator. The data from all sources was structurally corroborated before findings were presented in the form of descriptive statistics and qualitative narratives. The results showed that the multi-age art teachers did not play a large role in the organizational structure of their multi-age art classes. Most of the surveyed art teachers had not received multi-age training and almost none of them had been given a choice as to their willingness to participate in nongraded structures. In spite of these factors, the majority of the surveyed art teachers supported the use of multi-age groupings in art classrooms. The use of thematic instruction and scaffolding techniques resonated equally well in the art room as in other multi-age situations. The most frequently expressed disadvantage of multi-age art instruction related to the presence of widely ranging developmental spans. The most frequently expressed advantage related to the use of scaffolding techniques. The findings were used to develop nine recommendations for fostering multi-age art education in interested elementary schools. The research project concluded that multi-age art education does not have to operate that differently from traditional models of art instruction on a functional level. On a conceptual level, however, multi-age art education can be quite different. The study proposed a continuum of development for multi-age art educators. The continuum presented options that ranged from functional possibilities to a fully formed conceptual model of multi-age art education. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2006. / September 1, 2006. / Art Education, Cooperative Learning, Visual Arts, Continuous Progress, Nongraded Classrooms, Multi-Age Education / Includes bibliographical references. / Tom Anderson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jeff Milligan, Outside Committee Member; Pat Villeneuve, Committee Member; Debbie Floyd, Committee Member.

This study is a quasi-experimental study designed primarily to investigate whether a student self-regulated learning strategy would positively affect the student art performance of 50 students from two intact eighth-grade classes in a Georgia Public School System. The treatment for the experimental group was instruction and practice in reflecting personal artwork through planning, monitoring, and evaluation on their artwork through written assessment. Implementing a self-regulated learning strategy using art portfolios allowed students to plan, sequence, and monitor their learning. The aim for this study was to strengthen the metacognitive and reflective skills of students to assist them in adopting strategies and reflective processes that enable them to define, plan, and self-monitor their thinking through problem solving. Students in the experimental group and the control group both completed pretest and posttest portfolios of artwork. Students in the experimental group also completed a self-reflective writing pretest and posttest. Results from the experimental group indicated an increase in the scores of the written reflections that led the researcher to conclude that instructional strategies that teach students to practice self-regulated learning skills while learning course content improves both the learners' process of self-evaluation and their self-assessment strategies providing metacognitive knowledge. However, the art performance scores for students in the experimental group and the control group were about the same for the posttest, identifying the results of the treatment did not show a significant increase for art performance. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art Education in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2005. / September 24, 2004. / Art Performance, Art Assessment / Includes bibliographical references. / Charles Dorn, Professor Directing Dissertation; Gary Peterson, Outside Committee Member; Tom Anderson, Committee Member; Marcia Rosal, Committee Member.

This research had two aims; to clarify the history of the New Group, and to examine the way in which this history has been constructed and distorted. The first section of the dissertation presented a history of the New Group. Chapter One discussed general aspects of the Group's history such as their activities and administration, and Chapter Two focused on the reasons for the New Group's formation and its dissolution. It was indicated in these chapters that the Group formed in order to provide production and retail structures which would enable artists to earn a living from their work, and that once these had been established the Group disintegrated. Chapter Three considered the issue of nationalism and proposed that most art writers during the New Group's existence were primarily concerned with the development of a national South African art. Furthermore, that many of these writers considered modern European art movements after Post-Impressionism and African art, undesirable influences in the development of a South African art. chapter described the way in which these writers' concern for the development of a national art caused the history of the New Group to be linked to the history and institution of Post-Impressionist art movements in South Africa. Later writers, using earlier writings on the Group as source material, were led to believe that the New Group formed in order to promote art influenced by modern European movements such as Expressionism. The Group's existence was explained by these authors as resulting from a desire to institute art influenced by European, modern, Post-Impressionist art styles as an accepted art form. Part of this understanding of the Group included the belief that the New Group was as a whole a group of modern artists who had to battle for recognition and acceptance from the critics. Chapter One indicated this not to be true. Chapter Six found that the use of early writings as source material caused a further distortion in the history of the New Group. The first chapter indicated that African art was an important influence on the work of the New Group artists but, because this was not recognised in the earlier writings on the Group, this influence was not acknowledged in the later writings. The researcher concluded by indicating that a new approach to the history of the New Group was necessary. That is, that the New Group be seen in relation to the construction and extension of accessible production and retail structures in art, rather than in relation to the institution of European modern art in South Africa.

This thesis comprises two parts. Part One is a biography of the life of Charles Davidson Bell (1813-1882), who was the Surveyor General at the Cape from 1848 to 1872. Part Two consists of an illustrated catalogue and critical study of the the pictures by Charles Davidson Bell in the Bell Heritage Trust Collection at U.C.T. The Biography of Charles Davidson Bell has been researched from unpublished sources and from secondary published sources. The chronology of his life is placed in relationship with his versatile accomplishments as an artist and his achievements in other diverse fields. In the Catalogue, the history, formation and restoration of the Bell Heritage Trust collection is reviewed. The criteria used in cataloguing and attribution of pictures is discussed. The cataloguing terminology that has been employed, is defined. The various collections of sketchbooks are introduced and discussed in terms of the ordering and arrangement of the pictures. The pictures are catalogued and placed in their historical context. The inter-relationship between pictures in the Bell Heritage Trust and in other collections is considered.

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The challenge presented by this paper is two fold; the first is to show that theories of perception ride a seesaw which is unsatisfactory, the second is to present a way to dismount the seesaw that these theories ride. The proposed dismount is suggested in the form of nonconceptual content of perceptual experiential states. In part A of the paper the seesaw metaphor is set up by showing that theories of perception concern themselves mainly with two questions. One of these questions is the epistemic question, which inquiries into the justificatory role played by perceptual experiential states. Such inquires conclude that the content of perceptual experiential states is conceptual. The other question is the descriptive question, which inquiries into the nature of perceptual experiential states. Such inquires conclude that the perceptual experiential states are not conceptual. The seesaw effect comes to play because theories of perception deal with the epistemic and the descriptive questions in isolation of each other. Part B of the paper shows how the theories of perception ride the seesaw. On the one side of the seesaw there are theories of perception that claim that perceptual experiential states are contentless. Bertrand Russell's account of sense-data is used to illustrate such theories. It is shown that while these theories are phenomenologically plausible they are incapable of accounting for the justificatory role perceptual experiential states need to play. On the other side of the seesaw there are theories of perception that claim that perceptual experiential states have content. The account of conceptualism by John McDowell is used to illustrate the position of such theories. These theories are inadequate in accounting for the phenomenological aspect of perceptual experiential states while they are able to account for the epistemological role played by perceptual states. This is what I call riding the seesaw. Riding the seesaw does not allow any room for progress for a theory of perception. Part C of this paper suggests a way of dismounting the seesaw by considering the notion of nonconceptual content of perceptual experiential states. The paper acknowledges that work is still necessary to sharpen the notion of nonconceptual content of perceptual states. However, nonconceptual content of perceptual experiential states is put forward as a better alternative in the light of the discussions in parts A andB.

The work presented in this thesis explores the creation and curation of fictional artifacts. The goal was to simultaneously explore and create a wholly fictitious civilization as a means of self-actualization and a grasp at the ineffable. The "Artifacts of the Kree" is a real-time interactive rendering of digitally fabricated objects belonging to a civilization that inhabited a planet far beyond the reaches of humanity. These objects were curated second hand by an unknown sentient species and cataloged in the system presented here. / Master of Fine Arts