Browsing by Subject "Visual art"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Directing The difficulty of crossing a field : a symbolic and corporeal approach
(2010-05) Leonard, Luke Landric; Douglas, Lucien; Dietz, Steven; Kanoff, Scott; Sawyer, Margo; Smith, Michael
This thesis examines an approach to directing Mac Wellman and David Lang’s opera, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field; in addition, the paper reflects on my artistic development as a Master of Fine Arts in Directing student in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. As a director I seek a balance between form and content. Similar to Installation Art, I consider the relationship between space/architecture (the stage/theatre) and sculpture, i.e., anything that can be used to create shape: performers, props, scenery, wardrobe, makeup, light, sound, music, language, etc. As a deviser, not a dictator, the success of my work depends greatly on interdisciplinary collaboration and strategies that promote understanding and appreciation among both artists and audiences. My aim is to create structures for formal elements that when arranged uniquely and sophisticatedly have the ability to provoke emotion, thought, and memory in vivid and compelling ways. This paper explores selected stages of directing The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, the strategies that I employed, and concludes with an artistic statement.
Giving ground : a personal account of voice, movement and femininity in Texas
(2018-10-08) Nussbaum, Rosa Barbara; Williams, Jeff, M.F.A.
My work springs from the place where my body touches Texas. In my thesis report I attempt to lay out my embodied experience of living here and how this intersects with phenomenology and Butler’s theory of the displaced feminine, whilst describing some of the work I have made in response to these experiences. I will talk about, body, voice, ground, femininity, movement and animation, excavating the common threads and desires that run through my work.
Looking and listening in the work of Jennie C. Jones
(2021-05-11) Lee, Elizabeth Gordon; Reynolds, Ann Morris
I explore in this thesis the “acoustic panel paintings” and sound compositions of sonic and visual artist Jennie C. Jones. Both paintings and compositions address the core concerns of the artist—histories and surrounding discourses of modernism and the avant-garde that have either erased or siloed modern Black cultural production. Jones’s work, in a formally pared down and minimalist visual language and abstract sound compositions, engages specifically with the place of Black music, in particularly experimental jazz, and the ways in which the movement is meaningfully neglected in dominant histories of the avant-garde. Much of the writing on Jones’s work thus far often reproduces the very silences that her work destabilizes and reduces her practice into a project of revisionism. In this thesis, I work through and present an alternative sort of analysis—one that is not trapped within discursive debates that only engage with the racial significations present in her work—but instead grounded in an exploration of how actually engaging with these subtly complicated and functional objects and in turn leads to a more nuanced investigation of Jones’s intent. Relying on a close assessment of my own interactions with the works, I argue that Jones’s paintings in their quiet unsettling and attunement of the viewer to examine their own approach, meaningfully addresses our own practices of looking and listening within exhibition spaces—one that offers a freedom of interpretation and holds great political potential for the present.
Mutable terrorism : Gerhard Richter, Hans-Peter Feldmann, and the cultural memory of Germany’s Red Army Faction
(2012-08) Williamson, Jason Kirk; Bos, Pascale R.; Hake, Sabine; Arens, Katherine; Crew, David; Streeck, Jürgen
This project explores the intersection of postwar German history, visual art, and left-wing terrorism. More than thirty years have now passed since the German Red Army Faction’s (1970-1998) most spectacular violent campaign—the so-called “German Autumn” of 1977—and yet the organization continues to elicit a variety of cultural responses from many artists. Interestingly, many films, texts, and visual artworks featuring the Red Army Faction (RAF) as their subject focus heavily on the group’s charismatic founders and on the German state’s vigorous efforts to suppress them and their successors, and yet these works pay comparatively scant attention to the individuals whom the RAF murdered. In light of this observation, I argue that the German Left’s cultural memory of the RAF was and still is marked not only by a significant ambivalence concerning the RAF (especially the founders) and the German state, but also the victims. As a means of elucidating this ambivalence, I offer close “readings” of two works of visual art that debuted at different moments in the years following the German Autumn. Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 (1988) is a photorealist series that invites viewers to consider the lives and especially the deaths of the RAF’s principal members, while Hans-Peter Feldmann’s photo compilation The Dead 1967-1993 (1998) presents a sobering chronology of individuals killed either directly or indirectly as a result of the German leftist counterculture, including terrorist violence, without making an immediate distinction between perpetrators and victims. Within the framework of the larger RAF cultural memory, the works of Richter and Feldmann thus help clarify some of the causes and effects of the German Left’s suspended resolution regarding RAF terrorism.
Off center : moments of collision
(2018-06-25) Laguardia, Marisa Sophia; Awai, Nicole; Stoney, Jack; Yancey, John; Canright, Sarah
There is something in the way the light breaks through clouds still dark with remnants of a storm. There is something in the way the wind moves through the trees. Bright light peeks through backlit cracks in a closed door, a moment missed if residing on the other side. What does it mean to try and look beyond something that blocks our sight? Our proximity dictates our viewing experience: it guides our perception, we shift in response. I am a permeable sieve that is trying to understand the nature of its vessel. My work does not include any images of the human form, yet it is entirely about navigating the world as a curious human being. I map the fluctuation between perceptual and psychological dips and crests along the way. The images I ingest reflect these reactions. On Earth, our mark is everywhere. I am constantly searching for connections that exist between external things nearby, or something much more distant. To reach out for something is to long to bring it closer to you, but you will never know how far you need to travel if you cannot see clearly. I want to understand the structure of space by confronting its absence as I work my way through dimensions.
Small town, incredible hell : visual arts, advertising, and mass media in the early democratic transition in Chile (1988-1994)
(2016-01-22) Vidal Valenzuela, Sebastian Andre; Flaherty, George F., 1978-; Giunta, Andrea; Shiff, Richard; Julia Guernsey; Carcamo-Huechante, Luis
Images and strategies from the world of advertising and the mass media had been deployed to critique the country’s socio-economic situation in the art of the 1960s and during the dictatorship (1973-1990). During the transition, however, those images and strategies began to acquire more complex and hybrid forms, and their respective boundaries became increasingly blurred. The cross-pollination between the artistic and mass media realms partly originated in the political and economic transformation from a socialist model to the neoliberal one consolidated by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In this scenario, a significant number of artists, particularly those linked to neo-avant-garde practices, found in the alliance between art and advertising a central motif to criticize the dictatorial regime’s economic policies (privatization, reduction of trade barriers, deregulation, etc.). I argue that, when democracy returned, that group of artists continued performing art actions that connected these areas, but they now did so in order to criticize the continuation and solidification of neoliberal policies in the transition. “Small Town, Incredible Hell” sets out to make visible the mechanisms through which commercial systems and languages are revisited, re-imagined and critically appropriated by the visual arts in the democratic transition. With this objective, I analyze three paradigmatic cases that enable me to reflect on the complex dynamics between art, advertising and the mass media at this crucial moment in the cultural history of Chile: "La Franja del NO / The NO TV Campaign" (1988), the Chilean Pavilion at the Universal Exposition in Seville in 1992, and “La Escuela de Santiago / The School of Santiago.” I propose that these three cases point towards a chronology of events that suggests three initial stages of the early transition, each of which operates on the basis of the proliferation of commercial images in society. The first moment (La Franja de NO) focused its visual and publicity strategies on the affective notions of "enthusiasm" and "happiness," giving way to a period in which technological experiments of video art were harmoniously combined with the political desires of democratic and cultural restoration. The second moment (Chile Expo 92) centered on the notions of "appearance" and "spectacle" of the newly democratic country’s international image. In this period, the political ambition to insert Chile into the global market was paramount. Finally, I identify a third moment of the early transition (La Escuela de Santiago) that can be defined through the concepts of "revelation" and "denunciation." At that time, the conservatism and authoritarianism prevalent during the transition were questioned by a mail art project that revealed the fractures and incoherencies of political and cultural institutions still subordinated to the dictatorship’s legacy.