The Gesture and the Drip investigates our increasing reliance on digital media as a means to encounter and view art works online as photographic documentation. This body of work attempts to place significance on the human gesture in relation to the loss of the human presence that often accompanies digital documentation. The gesture is a reoccurring element that can be traced throughout my thesis body of work. Occasionally, gestures are tactile marks made by my hand and in other cases they are the result of photographic reproduction, silk-screened onto the surface. A paradox is formed between the real and illusion that are interchangeable on the canvas. My paintings encompass authentic and mediated gestures to challenge the visual experience and disrupt a logical reading.

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.

Though an installation, the exhibition Four Corners Gateway, examines how history and memory construct us as individuals and construct our national and personal identities and worldviews. All such constructions are ultimately fragmented and fictional. This body of work points at how ideologically formed, subjective narratives are made into ‘truths’. Connecting the personal with the public is my way of playing with history and its paradoxes. The resulting landscapes that I construct can be read as archives of fragments.

Though an installation, the exhibition Four Corners Gateway, examines how history and memory construct us as individuals and construct our national and personal identities and worldviews. All such constructions are ultimately fragmented and fictional. This body of work points at how ideologically formed, subjective narratives are made into ‘truths’. Connecting the personal with the public is my way of playing with history and its paradoxes. The resulting landscapes that I construct can be read as archives of fragments.

This thesis explores the design of a space for opioid addicts in recovery that combines an art therapy studio with a gallery space. It would provide a new type of therapy available to the area, engage and educate the Richmond community and spread awareness of the disease of opiate addiction. It will also enable addicts to express themselves in a non-verbal, creative format that allows for them to create a legacy and leave an imprint on the community.

The picture book is an artistic medium is part of literature, especially of children’s literature. This discussion of the picture book extends to the dynamic between author and illustrator, and interactions between the verbal and the visual, as described by contemporary researchers, such as Maria Nikolajeva, Lawrence R. Sipe, and Carole Scott. Most of them were not picture book creators, so the voice of the picture book’s creator is easily overlooked. To fill the gap between the researcher and the creator, this project explores the creative process of the picture book by studio-art research. This project is concerned with the creation process of a picture book, presenting a coherent overview of an approach to creating an artist’s picture book, especially in the idea of development through both visual and narrative by two methods: research and practice. This thesis demonstrates my framework of creating an artistic picture book, Little Mouse. Chapter one discusses the methodology of the studio-art research, compares practical-led research and practical-based research, and identifies my multicultural background, to set the foundation of this project. In Chapter two, I applied a part of practical-led methodology to adapt and transfer a range of sources from history, theory, literature and popular culture to build up and enhance the depth of my concept of Little Mouse, which encompasses and analyses my core interest - a life-changing journey. Chapter three discusses how I applied practical-based methodology to reflect the progress of the practical work of making Little Mouse, particularly focusing on how framed a fiction story, and discussing step by step my approach to illustration practice. In the last chapter, I tested my potential readers to review whether my work succeeded in communicating and delivering my visual research in the form of my finished book. This project hybridizes multicultural sources to form a contemporary picture book which blurs the boundaries between illustrator/writer and reality/fiction. This also provides a case study of the picture book for bridging research and picture book’s creator and demonstrates a process of understanding and interpreting creative activities.

William Christensen DWELLER What does it mean to become someone else? What does that mean for the identity of the person before they became this character? These questions have become a focal point for my work. I have been employing the self-portrait as a means of transforming myself into a different character. For this body of work I have written a short story, which is the basis for my artwork. This story is about the main character's grasp on reality slipping away from him and his shift from sanity to insanity. The different papers and styles come together as one amalgam of a scene in the process of transforming before the viewers' eyes. These drawings contain two different sets of drawings within each piece of artwork. The drawing, with ink on the white stonehenge .Paper, is a scene taken from the story and the graphite drawing on the brown stonehenge paper is a self-portrait. The graphite drawings on the brown paper consists of a series of pictures taken of me turning my head and changing my facial expressions in order to .imitate my perception of a person who is losing their mind. I then proceed to crumble up the drawings, and glue them on top of one another. From the inked drawing that lies on top, I begin to tear away the paper in order to let the under drawing show through. With the crinkled and the roughness of the papers it accomplishes the venture of showing the frailty and fickleness of the character. The blending of the two papers into each other gives the work a dreamlike sense that is hopefully open to interpretation from the viewer. One could come to the conclusion that this is a non-threatening dream, or a nightmare.

Artist statement Nao Yamamoto The environment I grew up in allowed me to cultivate an appreciation for both contemporary art and traditional craft, and I still respect the Japanese culture. However, experiencing contemporary art based on a different society and environment changed my perspective and I felt like it took me beyond the narrow culture of Japan. Since I recognized my art as a way to represent myself, or even to have conversations with tnyself, I became devoted to a contemporary art practice. It has been so exciting to see my thoughts made visual and how I've been changed by creating my art. I have long created my pieces based on the simple beauty of glass. I was looking fof a way to emphasize what I see in it. During the glassblowing process, I would . sometimes see the molten glass as a creature that has a consciousness that tries to challenge my skill or mastery. This idea helped me to create a different body of work which represented my experience or relationship with glass sculpture rather than the materiality of glass. Now glass has become not only a material, but also my fickle friend which. reflects my inspiration and concentration. I believe that there is nothing that compares with the beauty of nature. For me it is overwhelming because any life form doesn't think about the meaning of life, but only thinks about surviving. When I am at a beach, in a forest, or in the middle of a desert, the simple, pure, clean force of life in nature inspires me to just live, strongly but simply. I believe we have lost that n~tion in complicated contemporary lives. What I atn trying to do is to reinterpret elements from nature to celebrate the power of life, both in its significance and in its insignificance.

The paintings in Based on a True Story are at once illogical and concrete – implying both failure and the hope of figurative and architectural construction. Developed as a kind of psychological landscape, they suggest a depiction of contemporary societal / political, and environmental instability. Neither true nor false: the paintings are spaces in which one may become dislocated, anxious, and unsettled. Inclusion of architectural fenestration suggests one’s fractured location and continually shifting ground. Furthermore, literary and cinematic fiction plays an important role to the work in that they both suggest landscapes that may never exist literally. Fiction is also indicative of the close relationship between the utopia and dystopia as environments for escape. This sense of balance or lack thereof, becomes important to the development of the theatrically absurd, so that an audience may be implicated as the tragic and comic active participant. While investigating the work of Peter Doig, Stephen Bush, and Dana Schutz, for example, I suggest that the trail of the painter’s hand becomes a necessary mode of entrance into the work, offering a closer relationship to the act of painting as another form of escape. This gestural mark-making runs counter to current pushes toward technology, and suggests the re-emergence of painting as a primary approach in which to investigate the development of personal space and experience.

The paintings in Based on a True Story are at once illogical and concrete – implying both failure and the hope of figurative and architectural construction. Developed as a kind of psychological landscape, they suggest a depiction of contemporary societal / political, and environmental instability. Neither true nor false: the paintings are spaces in which one may become dislocated, anxious, and unsettled. Inclusion of architectural fenestration suggests one’s fractured location and continually shifting ground. Furthermore, literary and cinematic fiction plays an important role to the work in that they both suggest landscapes that may never exist literally. Fiction is also indicative of the close relationship between the utopia and dystopia as environments for escape. This sense of balance or lack thereof, becomes important to the development of the theatrically absurd, so that an audience may be implicated as the tragic and comic active participant. While investigating the work of Peter Doig, Stephen Bush, and Dana Schutz, for example, I suggest that the trail of the painter’s hand becomes a necessary mode of entrance into the work, offering a closer relationship to the act of painting as another form of escape. This gestural mark-making runs counter to current pushes toward technology, and suggests the re-emergence of painting as a primary approach in which to investigate the development of personal space and experience.