Beyond the Lens is a portrait series combining visual images with audiotaped recordings of eight Scripps seniors’ narration of their personal, academic and interpersonal process during the course of their college career. This capstone project seeks to uncover the dynamic nature of the Scripps College community by highlighting the unique evolution of these eight individuals. With this project, I hope to convey that while there is no one specific mold for a Scripps student, there are common threads in the development of key characteristics which propel these participants toward their next steps, among them courage to pursue leadership roles, compassion for underrepresented groups both locally and globally, confidence to make positive changes in their fields of interest and a profound engagement and commitment to their immediate and extended communities. Beyond the Lens not only guides the viewer into the makings of each of these student’s individual profiles but also helps the viewer understand better how the Scripps community shapes their personal ambitions, creating fertile ground for lasting impact. Through the interview process, I examine the enduring imprint of an historically all-women’s college environment, exploring disparate and common threads within each student's experiences, including the effects of in-depth exploration and articulation of multiple perspectives and theoretical positions within academic and non-academic exchanges. Moreover, in these conversations, I ask each student to consider both positive and negative elements of their community and to reflect on their holistic experience at the College in and outside of the classroom. While this capstone is a minute representation of the Scripps community as a whole, it nonetheless provides a glimpse into the influences and processes at play within Scripps College. I aim to demonstrate that being a Scripps student means that we, as a community, are pressed to delve beyond the limited representations so pervasive in our current media soaked lives toward a more complex understanding of ever-evolving forces that occur within ourselves, other members of our community and society at large.

Portraits of the Marquise de Maintenon by Louis Ferdinand Elle II and Pierre Mignard are frequently reproduced in the various factual and fictional biographies of Maintenon, but have only been significantly mentioned by art historians in broader studies of the period or in comparison to other portraits. In this thesis, these portraits will be significantly and singularly addressed in a larger study of Maintenon as patron. Both portraits have connections to events occurring in the life of Maintenon at the time of their creation and can be clearly understood as representations of her intended public identity. In addition, each seems to have an interesting relationship to both negative contemporary criticism of Maintenon and to her subsequent legacy. The chapters are ordered chronologically and each involves a discussion of the meaningful visual elements in each portrait. As the earliest portrait that can be firmly considered part of Maintenon's constructed public identity, Louis Elle's Marquise de Maintenon and her Niece is the focus of the first chapter. An analysis of the many possible layers of meaning within this portrait is discussed in relation to Maintenon's complicated legacy. The second chapter centers upon revealing the original function of Mignard's Marquise de Maintenon as St. Frances of Rome and its relationship to the controversy involving Quietism with which Maintenon was involved at the time of the portrait's creation. In the final chapter, the way in which these portraits influence Maintenon's legacy is analyzed. Finally, in the conclusion, the obstacles involved in the study of representations of Maintenon are discussed and suggestions are made of issues requiring further study.

This qualitative study explored influences on three Canadian authors who present characters with disabilities in childrens fiction. Portraits of these authors are framed by a discussion of contemporary Canadian childrens novels, offering curriculum ideas within the framework of critical literacy. The research questions were: What patterns in the depictions of characters with disabilities appear in the context of Canadian novels, published since 1995, for children and young adults? What motivates and informs selected contemporary childrens authors construction of fictional characters with disabilities? Portraiture was used as a variation on case study research. Methods for data collection and analysis included semi-structured interviews, personal narratives, and content analysis regarding three author portraits, including a self-portrait; content analysis was also applied to fifty childrens novels. Bakhtins conceptualization of the literary chronotope was utilized as a lens to explore aspects of time and space internal and external to these texts, and further delineated by aspects of time, social context, and placethree categories borrowed from the field of narrative inquiry. Research on classic fiction illuminates particular patterns and trends regarding authors portrayals of characters with disabilities. This dissertation has identified and explored contemporary trends. While disability figured in all of the childrens novels in the study sample, ethnicity was strikingly absent, as were books for junior readers ages eight to eleven. The inquiry utilized Dresangs Radical Change theory to identify the landscape on which books about characters with disabilities reside, supporting the metaphorical conceptualization of the radical changes in childrens literature as a rhizome. The resonance of what has informed authors, in addition to the exploration of the childrens books in this study, offers perspectives that impact critical literacy classroom approaches delineated within Lewison, Flint, and Van Sluys four dimensions framework: disrupting the commonplace, interrogating multiple viewpoints, focusing on socio-political issues, and taking action and promoting social justice. The latter dimension, while not accomplished through reading the texts themselves, may be approached through attention to author influences. The implications of the study relate to curriculum development as well as promote further research in Education, English Literature, and Disability Studies. An annotated bibliography is included.

The poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch presents as self-writing nestled in the wide embrace of non-linear écriture féminine. Each poem offers a glimpse of the persona: body and soul, the music of her voice and the perspective of her spirit. Together the poems comprise verbal self-portraits of a lovelorn soul, torn between impulses to fully remember and deliberately forget. Through years of love, life, disappointment, bouts of depression and renewed promise, Dahlia Ravikovitch continued to compose. Through the crystals of poetry the speaker examines, from varying angles and in multiple refractions of light, those figures of alterity who are her self. For Ravikovitch poetry was the only neutral space in which her self could comfortably exist and, even so, not always. The poet-persona experiences love in unsuitable proportions. She receives too little; she goes ‘overboard’ and ‘out of bounds’ in giving too much. She experiences love, even when accessible, as an affliction. She suffers love. She laments love. The persona performs her malaise through contrasting physical sensations, idiosyncrasies and profound cravings. Her personal thermostat is erratic. She exhibits pronounced wardrobe-predilections. Her throat reacts to a flow of eros and creative vitality or lack thereof. She yearns for pure memory and thirsts for pure essence. The speaker’s gallery displays an elaborate montage of a golden apple endowed with gifts of wisdom, eros, poetry and passion, alongside portraits of a royal chanteuse and a skilled scribe. Crucial brushstrokes illuminate lovers and sinners, souls in flames, shipwrecks, lyric-expressive throats in various states of constriction and release, as well as voices of collective responsibility. Ravikovitch encrypts her poetry with rich resources of biblical, rabbinic, medieval and early modern Hebrew literature. She forwards the linguistic and literary resonance of these layers. She innovates upon their motifs through feats in the dimensions of feminine writing, intertextual engagements and postmodern poetics.

SELF/PORTRAIT is an exploration of the creative process. Based in the genre of portraiture, this collection of work seeks to reveal the ways in which the artist's relationships and circumstances have factored into the creation of the resulting exhibition. This exploration involves the assessment of abandoned projects with the aim of gaining a greater understanding of their qualities that have served to motivate the creation of his art, and those that have hindered his artistic process. This thesis exhibition and support paper use an autobiographical approach to seek the elements of the artist's perception of art which have influenced the production of the work displayed, and how these are effected by the task of creating a Master's thesis exhibition. It explores the qualities of both Portraiture and Painting which have inspired and directed his endeavour. SELF/PORTRAIT seeks to display the artist's work as a process rather than a product.

Laura Aguilar, John Coplans, and Carla Williams explore, through photographic self-portraiture, the representation of unconventional bodies. Even though the images produced by these artists are quite different in style, they all reflect an interest in a representation of the nude human body that challenges the traditional concepts of beauty so prevalent in a Western society obsessed with physical perfection. Even though the three artists produced their photographic self-portraits at roughly the same time, using the traditional gelatin silver process and responding to standards of classical beauty, their divergent life experiences, education, and social backgrounds have led them to question an almost universal vision of the perfect body from a broad spectrum of perspectives.

The poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch presents as self-writing nestled in the wide embrace of non-linear écriture féminine. Each poem offers a glimpse of the persona: body and soul, the music of her voice and the perspective of her spirit. Together the poems comprise verbal self-portraits of a lovelorn soul, torn between impulses to fully remember and deliberately forget. Through years of love, life, disappointment, bouts of depression and renewed promise, Dahlia Ravikovitch continued to compose. Through the crystals of poetry the speaker examines, from varying angles and in multiple refractions of light, those figures of alterity who are her self. For Ravikovitch poetry was the only neutral space in which her self could comfortably exist and, even so, not always. The poet-persona experiences love in unsuitable proportions. She receives too little; she goes ‘overboard’ and ‘out of bounds’ in giving too much. She experiences love, even when accessible, as an affliction. She suffers love. She laments love. The persona performs her malaise through contrasting physical sensations, idiosyncrasies and profound cravings. Her personal thermostat is erratic. She exhibits pronounced wardrobe-predilections. Her throat reacts to a flow of eros and creative vitality or lack thereof. She yearns for pure memory and thirsts for pure essence. The speaker’s gallery displays an elaborate montage of a golden apple endowed with gifts of wisdom, eros, poetry and passion, alongside portraits of a royal chanteuse and a skilled scribe. Crucial brushstrokes illuminate lovers and sinners, souls in flames, shipwrecks, lyric-expressive throats in various states of constriction and release, as well as voices of collective responsibility. Ravikovitch encrypts her poetry with rich resources of biblical, rabbinic, medieval and early modern Hebrew literature. She forwards the linguistic and literary resonance of these layers. She innovates upon their motifs through feats in the dimensions of feminine writing, intertextual engagements and postmodern poetics.

My painted self-portraiture explores identity as changing social performance or masquerade and examines bodily flesh as the vital interface for reciprocal encounter on life’s stage. The larger-than-life sized images demand viewer attention and compel intersubjective engagement. The works also affirm artistic agency and subjective presence through gestural brushwork and the vivifying power of oil paint. Hybridity and ambiguity in the images suggest the dynamic and reflexive nature of identity. A theatrical colour palette further reinforces the notion of identity as social performance or masquerade. Conceptually the works are rooted in both post-modern feminism and phenomenology. Artistically they draw inspiration from contemporary figurative painters and portraitists who use this medium and genre to navigate the boundaries of self and society.

My painted self-portraiture explores identity as changing social performance or masquerade and examines bodily flesh as the vital interface for reciprocal encounter on life’s stage. The larger-than-life sized images demand viewer attention and compel intersubjective engagement. The works also affirm artistic agency and subjective presence through gestural brushwork and the vivifying power of oil paint. Hybridity and ambiguity in the images suggest the dynamic and reflexive nature of identity. A theatrical colour palette further reinforces the notion of identity as social performance or masquerade. Conceptually the works are rooted in both post-modern feminism and phenomenology. Artistically they draw inspiration from contemporary figurative painters and portraitists who use this medium and genre to navigate the boundaries of self and society.

SELF/PORTRAIT is an exploration of the creative process. Based in the genre of portraiture, this collection of work seeks to reveal the ways in which the artist's relationships and circumstances have factored into the creation of the resulting exhibition. This exploration involves the assessment of abandoned projects with the aim of gaining a greater understanding of their qualities that have served to motivate the creation of his art, and those that have hindered his artistic process. This thesis exhibition and support paper use an autobiographical approach to seek the elements of the artist's perception of art which have influenced the production of the work displayed, and how these are effected by the task of creating a Master's thesis exhibition. It explores the qualities of both Portraiture and Painting which have inspired and directed his endeavour. SELF/PORTRAIT seeks to display the artist's work as a process rather than a product.