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This creative project interpreted and applied the buffalo in Native American culture - its symbolism, significance and virtues - to woodcarvings for the lives of people today. The carvings explored a range of styles, media and symbols but all use buffalo imagery and each piece represents how I have applied the buffalo to my life. Some pieces are based on historical events while others explore personal emotions. Wood surfaces differ from natural or bleached to painted. No style unifies the body of work. In each piece realism and abstraction, positive and negative space is handled differently. Buffalo facts and myths were interpreted to convey what white people can learn from the buffalo. It was a spiritual link and messenger from Native Americans to the Great Spirit. The buffalo was revered and respected as a vital in the life cycle. White man destroyed the buffalo during the nineteenth century through the acts of greed, disrespect and ignorance. It seems to have returned with a message for people of all races. This message is one that must be found within each individual. / Department of Art

The ambition of this creative project was to portray the communication between individuals of our time, which is being made shabby by the effect of technological life. As an artist, I am dealing with the issue of our sense of respect for each other and how much we are aware of each other.This study includes the art works of artists Robert Motherwell and Joan Mitchell by whom I have been inspired. I have learned a lot from their art works and from their philosophies. I will describe my art works one by one in terms of the techniques that I have used, and the feelings behind them. / Department of Art

The thematic unit formed by the five versions of The Adoration of the Magi painted by Sandro Botticelli provide a special opportunity for studying his artistic development. An investigation of these five paintings shows that Botticelli aimed toward a goal of perfecting compositional techniques. He systematically made alterations to these works in order to create special point of view effects. / This thesis outlines the general trends in art with respect to the Adoration theme and then concentrates on a demonstration of Botticelli's attempts at correlating compositional devices and the unique features developed with respect to spectator involvement. This selected study allows for a careful examination which spans the artistic career of Sandro Botticelli. As a result, it can be shown that it was perhaps Botticelli, rather than Leonardo da Vinci, who was primarily responsible for the development of a compositional format which became a foundation stone of High Renaissance compositions.

This thesis examines how making extends artists' thoughts beyond their conceptions. Central to this is consideration of how an artist's statements and their work relate: this thesis argues that the relationship is neither of identity nor contradiction, but of a productive tension from which emerges a richer understanding of thought. A similar approach underscores this doctorate's relationship of studio and written components, both of which desire self-sufficiency. The studio work consists of discrete yet mutually informing series, all engaged with the specificity of a moment of exposure, whether here and now or recording a past moment. The notion of 'documentation' underscores these works, which include large chemical photographs, high-definition video, cyanotypes and extensive exploration of casting to reveal latent images. The written component is a thorough study of the various instances of Medardo Rosso's sculpture Ecce Puer, offering art-historical and theoretical grounding of hands-on making as a way pressing cultural issues inhere in a work at a more fundamental level than understood by its contemporaries or maker. The first chapter locates Rosso in his historical milieu. Chapter 2 assesses the elements constituting Ecce Puer; it argues that no definitions of a 'work' adequately encompass these, and coins the term 'complex work' to designate artworks indivisibly singular and plural, concrete and abstract. Chapter 3 offers phenomenological interpretation of Rosso's confused writings, illuminating them through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy but understanding Rosso's thought as inadequate to the complexity of his work. Chapter 4 examines Rosso's photography, specifically his photography of photographs, connecting what this achieves to his phenomenology. Chapter 5 introduces a key notion of 'friendship' to understand how the connections between instances of Ecce Puer became 'meaningful'. Having offered a fundamentally new interpretation of Rosso's project, chapter 6 extends Michael Fried's history of French painting to relocate Rosso within early twentieth-century art.

The development of this thesis is akin to that of a painting. It is subject to various influences that have evoked ideas and each idea has stimulated other ideas, thus the continuity could have gone beyond the bounds of this work. It is not so much an amalgamation of similar ideas but a development of diverse ideas which have, once composed, a common factor - the Multiple Image. Image refers to some paintings that have been made or part of them, a photograph, a film, a subject visualized in the mind or a complex reforms which is suggestive. Multiple refers to anything that relatively repeats itself, has facsimilies of itself, triptychs, polyptychs or is a conglomeration of ideas in a work of art. Intro., p. 1.

In the worlds of virtual reality, whole objects and bodies are created in an immaterial manner from lines, ratios and light pixels. When objects are created in this form they can easily be manipulated, edited, multiplied and deleted. In addition, technological advances in virtual reality development result in an increased merging of physical and virtual elements, creating spaces of mixed reality. This leads to interesting consequences where the physical environment and body, in a similar vein to the virtual, also becomes increasingly easier to manipulate, distort and change. Mixed realities thus enhance possibilities of a world of constantly changing landscapes and adjustable, interchangeable bodies. The notions of virtual and real coincide within this thesis, reflecting on a new version of reality that is overlapped and ever-present in its mixing of virtual and physical. These concepts are explored within my exhibition Immaterial - a creation of simulated nature encompassing a mix of natural and artificial, tangible and intangible. Within the exhibition space, I have created a scene of mixed reality, by merging elements of both a virtual and physical forest. This generates a magical space of new experiences that comes to life through the manipulated, edited, morphed and re-awakened bodies of trees.

My exhibition draws on Andreas Huyssen's notion of memory sculpture to articulate my own sense of loss and trauma, due to the divorce of my parents. Within my work I explore the effects that divorce had on me and how it has disturbed my normative understanding of home and family. I have created scenarios alluding to the family home that I have manipulated in order to convey a sense of nostalgia and loss. By growing salt crystals over found objects and/or cladding them in salt, I attempt to suggest the dual motifs of preservation (a nostalgic clinging to the past) and destruction (due to the salt’s corrosive properties). In this way, the salt-crusted objects serve as a metaphor for a memory that has become stagnant, and is both destructive and regressive. The objects encapsulate the mind’s coping methods to loss. In my mini thesis, I discuss characteristics of memory sculpture as a response to trauma, drawing on Sigmund Freud's differentiation between mourning and melancholia. I also unpack how objects and traces (such as photographs) may act as nostalgic triggers, inducing a state of melancholic attachment to an idealised past. I address these concerns in relation to selected works by Doris Salcedo and Bridget Baker, and also situate them in relation to my own art practice.

This dissertation contributes to the ongoing analysis of art during the anni di piombo (1969-1983) by revisiting and challenging the well-established charge that artists failed to create meaningful reflections on terrorism during the years of lead. I analyze a select number of literary and filmic fictional representations of terrorists and their victims produced in Italy during the first half of the anni di piombo, up to Aldo Moro’s death. Reading these narratives in a comparative perspective, I argue that their symbolic reflection on terrorism becomes particularly evident in the representation of the body of the terrorist. Through my analysis I find that—despite the differences in medium, genre, intended audience, and kinds of political terrorism these narratives respectively explore—a similar fundamental criticism of terrorism as an essentially anti-political practice emerges. In this way, I show, these narratives can be read as contributions to the democratic debate on violence and the principle of civility in politics produced already during that period of great socio-political crisis.