Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-62).

I have an interest in transposing elements of sound, time, and motion into other forms. The thesis exhibition, small Trinity, presents my efforts to capture the essence of an explosion as a sculpture. The resulting objects provide viewers with the chance to examine an explosion in a stilled state, but also to consider the enormous powers we humans wield. Comprising the exhibition are three series: Exploded Vases (2014-15), Cast Explosions (2015) and small Trinity (2016). In each, an experimental methodology is applied to tracing, capturing and then casting the shape of small explosions in a manner that is raw and un-manipulated. For the title series, small Trinity (2016), I set a goal of casting an explosion 1/1,000,000th of the power of the first atomic bomb, Trinity (1945). Through a series of successively larger explosions and casts, the goal was achieved and presented as a series of aluminium, concrete and resin sculptures.

This study concerns the deliberate subordination in painting of thirteen art elements and principles, the primary pictorial features, and examination of the intervals between pictorial events, the pictorial interface. A written record was kept of the artist's observations and impressions during the making of ten nonobjective paintings and their later study. The artist selected five paintings as more successfully subordinating the primary pictorial features and three paintings as most successfully exhibiting the three characteristics determined for the pictorial inter face: (1) conceptual resonance, (2) ambiguity, and (3) unbiasedness. The three paintings selected as most successfully exhibiting the characteristics of the pictorial interface coincided with three of the five paintings selected as more successfully subordinating the primary pictorial features.

Buy Nathan Sharratt: A Requirement of the Masters of Fine Arts degree of Georgia State University, is a multidiscipline and multiplatform exhibition of post-institutional critique that uses my lived experience of being an academic artist pursuing a terminal art degree at a public university as its point of departure. It evaluates how societal expectations influence the formation of individual and group identity in mediated culture. Buy Nathan Sharratt challenges the hierarchy of economic and social value systems by simulating an institutional museum retrospective of super-famous and super-commoditized artist “Nathan Sharratt.” The exhibition is divided into a gallery space, a project space, a gift shop, and a virtual space. It includes art objects and performances to pose that the art experience has been compressed into a simulation, in which art serves as the trigger for social networking and virtual experiences, rather than critical assessment.

PRADŽIA - tai instaliacija apie kūrybą, mano kūrybos pradžią. Nuo didžiojo sprogimo atsiradus mūsų visatai joje yra terpė egzistuoti mums, o toje kosiminėje erdvėje yra vieta ir kūrėjui, tapytojui (ne tik asmeniui). Mąstymai apie didžiąsias visatos paslaptis, apie mūsų vietą pasaulyje, apie kūrėjo, menininko poziciją, apie kūrinį, inspiraciją, - tai laukas, kuriame radosi šie darbai, kiekvienas iš jų nešantis informaciją apie tam tikrą kūrybos etapą, tam tikras kūrybos pradžios ištakas. Studijų metu siekiau konceptualaus temos pagrindimo: savo teoriniame darbe „Instaliacija konceptualiojo meno kontekste“ domėjausi konceptualizmo ištakomis it instaliacinais elementais. Konceptualūs ir technologiniai ieškojimai suformavo mano magistrantūros studijų temos turinį. Kūrybinio proceso pradedamoji stadija – pradžia – man yra gruntuojama drobė, šiuo atveju popierius, eskizavimas, meditatyvus buvimas studijoje su kūriniais ir darbo priemonėmis, eksperimentavimas: vinys paliekantys Kristaus kontūrus studijos sienoje, sapno įvaizdinimas ir pan. Temos turinį stengiausi perteikti ne tik vizualinėmis priemonėmis, bet ir ekspozicjos galimybėmis: kiekvieną naują erdvę apmąsčiusi darbus taikiau pagal diktuojamas erdvės technines ir emocines sąlygas. Nors ir tokios pačios tematikos, skirtingose erdvėse taikomi darbai perteikė ir papildomą informaciją, kaip, pavyzdžiui, Homo Ludens menų forume rodyta instaliacija „Pradžia. Tikėjimas“ buvo apie tikėjimo pradžią, jo pobūdį kiekvienam... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / It‘s an installation about creation, about my own ouvre. Ever since the Big Bang our universe is place where we egsist, and in this space we also have place for a crator, painter (not only as a person). Thoughts about the big wonders of the universe, about our position in the world, about creator‘s, artist‘s position, thinking about inspiration and creation, - this is the field in with these works were created, each of them bearing specific information about specific part of creation. Conceptual and technological research helped to form my master studies‘ concept. The beginning to me is new canvas, in this case paper, skeching, maditation in my studio space, being with my works and matterials, constant experimenting: nails that leave a trace of Jesus‘s figure on the wall, visualisation of a dream, etc. To express the content of my concept, I‘ve not only used visual measures, but also different expositions: thinking through every exposition space, I decided on individual expositions that expressed slightly different concept each time. Intuition, spontaneity, visual vaguesness, skechiness, etc. are very important in my work process. I try to avoid using very direct pictures, to me it‘s important to match visual and emotional perceptions.

AbstractPAINT MEDIATIONS Theresa Faye Pfarr, Master of Fine ArtA thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.Virginia Commonwealth University, 2004Major Director: Ruth Bolduan Associate Professor, Painting and Printmaking DepartmentMy paintings are contentions. I work in response, answer, and reaction to the media world. I carry a collection of incongruent images in my mind, bits and parts of the images I deal with everyday. The images stuff my mailbox, clutter my space and get in my head. I am questioning, though praising, the exploits of advertising and its mode of symbolic function. Whether their exploits are ethical is really of no concern to me in comparison to our cultural belief systems, which allow them. Advertising doesn't exploit children more than they are exploited already. In my paint investigations I forge and draw parallels to relocate meaning, as does the media. Through painting figure into space and space into figure things begin to dissolve or evolve, making the paintings both figure and of figure. The children in my paintings claim their spaces and close out the adult world.

This paper is a discussion of certain philosophical issues that have informed the progression of my work to date.

Do you know that feeling? That feeling when the music you are listening to a concert or a new record and it just seems right? When you think, that’s it! That’s what music should sound like! When the music seems to touch your soul or mirror it, or…. something. And when you feel that, nothing else seems to exist and you are purely experiencing the music. My thesis work explores the way in which we try to capture this ephemeral moment of pure experience in order to keep it with us to revisit at our leisure. This, however, is a futile endeavor. No matter how many photos you take, records you collect, or days of music on your iPod, that initial feeling, that visceral experience, cannot be replicated. In this work I use both materials that evoke this idea of the ephemeral (transparent plastic and glass) and materials are ephemeral themselves (water and wax) to convey the inability to capture music and the feelings it evokes in us. I have also chosen to add elements to the space, such as a wooden floor, stage lights, and fabric panels, to suggest a performance stage or sound studio and to further this connection to the music which the work was inspired by.

This dissertation presents the early work of Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula and Fred Lonidier as an attempt to intertwine political and aesthetic practice that was fundamentally distinct from the dominant, contemporaneous models of politicized avant-garde art. Throughout the first half of the 1970s these artists were in constant, close dialogue with one another, and, for the first time, this dissertation attempts to read their work during this period as a shared project. Considering the initial few years of their careers, it is an effort to understand how their practice emerged, and how it set itself apart from predominant forms of Conceptual art, post-Minimalism and institutional critique. In particular, it will explore how these three artists conceived of a relationship between political and aesthetic practice that was not dependent upon a self-reflexive investigation of their own art work's conditions of possibility. Drawing on realist and documentary traditions from the first half of the 20th century, Sekula, Rosler and Lonidier sought to create art that was always related to something beyond itself, developed in relation to the social world in which it existed. These artists neither assumed dependence on a given institutional, discursive formation, nor held out for an absolute escape from the institutions of the art world. Instead, they moved strategically between various locations, various publics and various discourses in a continual attempt to speak intelligibly within those sites most relevant to the political struggles they addressed. In order to understand this strategic movement, it is necessary to read these artists’ works as utterances within momentary, contested discursive fields. As a result, this dissertation will provide close readings of several works through a detailed consideration of the particular situations in which they were created, displayed and received. Whether as flyers handed out at protests or self-consciously gallery friendly photo-text works, every piece will be read as a precise intervention within a specific location. Following this approach, each chapter focuses on a small number of works and reads them within the social and political events they both instigate and enter into, whether those are, as in the first chapter, a public dispute over the nature of art between two academic departments, or, as in the second chapter, the protests against the Vietnam War. Through each of these analyses this dissertation outlines these artists' shared attempt to produce art that only emerges through the discourses into which it enters, but is never entirely home wherever it might find itself. By describing this fundamental premise of Rosler, Sekula and Lonidier's work, this dissertation both seeks to provide a more adequate accounting of this group’s shared project, and an alternative model for conceiving of the relation between political engagement and the post-war avant-garde.

Visually, Baldessari’s art mirrors the schoolroom chart, the cinematic storyboard, the Surrealist collage, the sensationalist graphics of the tabloid, and the grid format of the textbook. Black and white photography, performance, collage, bright prints, film, drawing, and painting: Baldessari has done it all. The artist has consistently demonstrated an inventiveness and sense of play in his work, and it is unlikely that he would stick to any one mode of artmaking for an extended period of time. It is probable that the explicit critique of contemporary Conceptualists of the text paintings mellowed because Baldessari had moved on to new questions. While he continues to examine the trope of the artistic outsider despite his commercial success, it is always with a wink. As Baldessari’s use of his own image in Portrait (Self) demonstrates, he has encouraged his audience to interrogate any artistic self-representation as a purposeful construct. Unlike the majority of his fellow Conceptualists, Baldessari’s serious goals are couched in a selfmocking attitude and in the colorful, playful style he has made his own.