Master of Fine Arts Terminal Project Reports

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/13161

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SCENES! FROM THE PHENOMENOMICON!
(University of Oregon, 2024) Alvarado, Christian
This paper is divided into two sections, each composed of three parts. Section one discusses five artworks that feature in the terminal exhibition titled SCENES! FROM THE PHENOMENOMICON!. This research writing, titled in ALL CAPS to reflect the overarching voice throughout this practice, will note concepts, intentions, and symbols present in the visual artwork, and will draw connections to its formal decisions and references. Section two is composed of an introduction and three short creative writing vignettes – stories developed while working on the visual artwork which serve as open ended lore. The creative writing, written and titled in lowercase to reflect a contemplative subjectivity, plays speculatively with the themes presented in the visual artwork: colonial contact, migration, and mutation.
Open Access
When I Dream I See Real Things
(University of Oregon, 2024-06) Lee, Sydney
My terminal project, When I Dream I See Real Things, focuses on large-scale quilts installed on the wall as a reference to painting. These quilts are fully functional as domestic objects but are rendered non-functional through installation methods. I am questioning the divide between craft and fine art by looking at both traditional textile craftswomen and minimalist painters from the 20th century. The functional quilted works are shown in tandem with large, arch-shaped textile collages set into handmade wooden frames that mimic the shape of the composition. The arch-shaped diptych negates the wall quilts' functionality by utilizing the same basic materials but acting as a purely visual object rather than a utilitarian domestic tool. The inclusion of both functional and non-functional painterly objects ties to my desire to blur the lines between craft and fine art by using both languages of painting and quilting.
Open Access
Shapeshifter: A Transcendence from Woman to Slug
(University of Oregon, 2024) O'Shea, Ellen
This text serves as a companion to my terminal creative project, Shapeshifter, which documents the transformation from woman to slug and elaborates on the sociopolitical and cultural contexts that inform my artistic practice. This writing is a cultivation of the three-year journey of research and production that has culminated in this body of work, drawing connections between my visual art and the realms of feminist studies, consumer theory, and contemporary art. My work investigates the intricate trappings of societal influences that shape identities, particularly through the lens of female consumerism. In a world inundated with messages designed to manipulate desires, I survey the pervasive phenomenon of being brainwashed by the allure of paraphernalia. As a female artist, I have an acute awareness of how corporations capitalize on women, feeding them a constant stream of superficial ideals and materialistic desires. I am in a unique position as both an outside observer and an inside participant, critically examining the dynamics of the beauty advertisement industry. With the rising popularity of ‘slugging’—a routine involving excessive layers of moisturizer applied to the face—I find myself drawn to this trend while simultaneously questioning its underlying impulse.
Open Access
The Overlook
(University of Oregon, 2024) Gordon, Conner; Jude, Ron
The photographs in The Overlook are made in the scenic viewpoints that dot the Oregon Coast, which attempt to flatten the land into a definitive vista. Within these spaces, I depict overlook infrastructure with a large format camera and photograph the landscape through a pair of binoculars, in an attempt to bring the sublime into clear view. These same processes compromise the images from their outset. The overlook photographs never reveal the views their subjects are meant to frame, while the binocular images collapse into peripheral abstractions where optical aberrations, pixelation, and fragments of landscape intermingle. In doing so, I work to undermine the essentializing logic of the definitive view and reimagine the sublime not as a fixed element of the terrain, but as an elusive resonance of the camera’s making.
Open Access
Machines of Loving Grace
(University of Oregon, 2024) Taylor, Noa
This terminal creative project report is the written accompaniment to the art exhibition Machines of Loving Grace, originally installed at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon in May 2024. As such, it examines the contexts and implications behind the work and the media it contains. At its core, Machines of Loving Grace recreates and reexamines Crash, a 1996 David Cronenberg film based on the 1973 novel by J.G. Ballard. The goal of this introduction is therefore threefold. Firstly, to give the reader a basic understanding of Crash, in terms of plot line and thematics. Secondly, to outline how Crash has been integrated into broader visual culture, focusing on its popular, artistic, and theoretical seepage. Finally, to answer the question of why Crash deserves revisitation, especially within a queer context, given that it has already been rehashed several times in the fifty years since its publication.
Open Access
Everything's Trash. Everything's Treasure.
(University of Oregon, 2024) Campbell, Ashley
My artistic practice is rooted in process-based research, manifesting as a type of pastiche—an interdisciplinary collage of video, sculpture, and sound performance. I'm interested in how seemingly disparate things come together and form meaning. There are overarching themes, but I am not attempting to provide a straightforward answer within the work. Instead, I strive for it to be skewed, off, strange, otherworldly. I rely on spontaneity and experimentation, beginning my work in a predominantly formal manner—responding and reacting rather than planning and organizing. By remaining open to circumstance, instinct, and impulse, I find that ideas coalesce and form around objects and materials. I’m always observing. I look for my own “glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick” moments out in the world and in the studio. I collect these things through photographing, 3-D scanning, recording video, etc. Gathering and arranging becomes an almost streamof- consciousness-like endeavor, bringing a piece into being. This approach allows me to engage critically and conceptually along the way. Processes and ideas form an interwoven structure, each relying on the other to expand the possibilities and potential meaning of the work. Everything is trash, and everything is treasure. There are no horizon lines, and hierarchies disappear, oozing, bleeding, blending, shimmering, sparkling. This is the ethos of my terminal creative project and encompasses my work as a whole. The forms in this project take shape via video and sculpture. My work is an ever-evolving continuum. Each piece opens the door for the next, and they are an interconnected train of thought.
Open Access
Meeting the Tower
(University of Oregon, 2023) Evans, Mary
The wheel of change spins, creating cylindrical space like a slow-moving tornado in which we reside in the center. It collapses in on itself. Memory creates the shape of a spiral thrust forward into the future, mimicking the travels of the solar system. On birthdays, TV reruns, and with whiffs of familiar smells, we return to what is stored in the body. What feels like apparitions of the past are alive and well, moving through our DNA. The ending of things leaves occupation for something else, A growing thing.
Open Access
RICE, a queer yellow fantasy
(University of Oregon, 2023-06) Zeng, William; Farsi, Tannaz
This text is an accompaniment towards a terminal creative project, RICE, a queer yellow fantasy, and describes the sociopolitical and cultural histories that my artistic practice is engaged in. This paper traces the three years of research and production that has led up to this body of work, and connects my visual work to the fields of Asian American studies, queer theory, and contemporary art.
Open Access
Memory of Returns
(University of Oregon, 2023-06) Gutnik, Anastasiya; Farsi, Tannaz
I always wanted to carry my mother’s family name Vodonos, which translates to water bearer in Russian. Harkening back to generations that came before me, the name traces the labor of walking which provided this essential life-force, water, for loved ones. My thesis work, Memory of Returns is a migration story integrating human and nonhuman journeys. It is a meandering three-channel video installation, exploring embodied ways of coming to know place through layered imagery and non-linear narrative and the question, what if it were possible to tap into latent bodily memories, previous vocations?
Open Access
Permeable Boundaries
(University of Oregon, 2023-06) Peña, David; Scott, Stacy Jo
Permeable boundaries is an intimate reflection of the past to understand the present — a contemplation of embedded histories, family, memory, grief, and borders. Coming from a geographical borderland between the westernmost frontera of Mexico and the United States, Peña distinguishes the differences between borders and fences. In imagining a different future for borderlands, permeable boundaries are in-between spaces to move through, leading to territories of love, empathy, and care, requiring a continual state of attentiveness and vulnerability. The text looks to authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and adrienne maree brown, to ask questions — What would it be to begin communally healing wounds while shifting and reconfiguring our boundaries into new formations? how do we make any place we go a space of love that allows for openings to understand one another and mending to begin?
Open Access
How Do the Visible Hide? A Report on Marginal Identity
(University of Oregon, 2023-06) Brennan, Lily Wai; Lionni, Sylan
How does one hide from the world when you walk through it observed like an animal in a zoo? Meandering through a childhood sited in a rural, conservative, white community, I was continuously faced with nonconsensual moments that highlighted my body as speculative; otherworldly, exotic, an exhibition. I learned very quickly what it meant to be marginalized. When you are displaced in an environment of whiteness, you feel how visible you are in the world. It becomes quickly apparent that you are an outsider. Nothing is thicker than the otherness that reeks out of your apparently abnormal flesh. In How Do the Visible Hide? A Report on Marginal Identity, posthuman feminism, queer internet culture, adolescence, and immersive illusion collide together to serve as tools for investigating the marginal experience within a predominantly white, American ecosystem.
Open Access
Good Humor
(University of Oregon, 2020) Walot, Doran
Open Access
Pseudo-well: A Dilemmatic Aura of Modernity in the west and the non-west
(University of Oregon, 2020) Zhang, Junwei
My project Pseudo-well is an extension of my previous work A Well. Back then I only had a vague plan to address the disconnectedness of individual and our globalized space by using the round shape of a tire and the depth of it to mimic the limited tiny world as a well, but it wasn’t everything I hope for, and it lacked the interaction and sense of aesthetic immersion. Pseudo-well is an installation consisting of junk tires. It looks like an abandoned playground under this pandemic. By standing on the platform, viewers can have the access to look inside the round well, at the same time they will be overwhelmed by the smell of junk tires. A Kinect interactive camera captures the body shape of the viewer and projects on what they see at the bottom of the well — the moving sky, the sky may come from the window view of a space station. When we look up, we look at the sky even if you are standing in a well, but when we look down, we look into a well, our world seems to be separated by a narrow window. With available and limited access we have under this pandemic, we somehow become frogs living in the well. Like many stranded airplanes, cars, even low price oil, these tires become junk. Thus, our presence of self is replaced by the absence of the self.
Open Access
I’m not here; this isn’t happening.
(University of Oregon, 2020) Talaei, Elnaz
Open Access
Latent Interiors: Memory, Environment, and the Body
(University of Oregon, 2021) Molloy, Ian Sherlock
Open Access
The Center for Investigation of Land Mass Agency (CILMA):ON CARE + ENTANGLEMENT: BECOMING THE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATION OF LAND MASS AGENCY
(University of Oregon, 2021) EVANS, EDEN VITA
The Center for Investigation of Land Mass Agency (CILMA), is a field study project that activates the natural landscape to investigate care, thing-power and land use. Through site-specific experimentation and ritual action, CILMA acts as a catalyst for engaging grief, healing, interconnection and object agency to deepen our environmental awareness. CILMA employs a variety of disciplines including sculpture, installation, performance, video and fiber practices in conjunction with interdisciplinary research to explore care and ritual as methodologies for the construction of speculative futures within the context of a global climate crisis.
Open Access
There’s A Dog In My House And Some Dogs In My Head
(University of Oregon, 2021) Bodenhamer, Devon
I create installations that use humor and the visual language of the domestic space to disarm and analyze emotional discomfort in order to create a more whole sense of self. The work invites those who choose to participate to consider themselves in a similar manner and to empathise with the forms that populate the installation. I’ve included dogs, the home, and mothers as subjects. Not meant to be a form of therapy, the work also connects to the social politics of the domestic space, gender roles, and our partnership with animal companions. My practice draws comparisons between domestic space and mental space, as they are both iterations of where and how people live. I’m particularly interested in how both require upkeep and maintenance, in order to be comfortably habitable. This is portrayed through the idea of the carpet, a material that requires constant vacuuming but still retains bits and pieces of all that have lived on top of it: it serves as body, record-keeper, and comfort object. There are other comfort objects in my work, such as pillows and dog imagery, that are meant to disarm emotional discomfort. Dogs are particularly important to this, as petting dogs has been shown to reduce stress levels. They also serve as witnesses to all that happens within the home. Imagery that is suggestive of a mother figure relates back to maintenance, as the mother fills the role of caretaker, housekeeper, and child rearer in a society that revolves around a patriarchal power structure. The beige color palette refers to domestic spaces, as well as a neutral “non-color” that is impartial to that which populates the home. I relate this to the desire to simply analyze, rather than extinguish, emotional discomfort in my work. I am hopeful that my work can instill a sense of kindness and understanding in those that choose to participate with it. I want folks to know that they are not alone in feeling discomfort, especially during the time of a global pandemic, civil unrest, and a contentious upcoming presidential election. The use of domestic objects, like carpet and pillows, is very purposeful and meant to make participants feel welcome upon entering the installation. This is especially important in a gallery setting, as I (and many others) find them to be sterile, uncomfortable, and intimidating. I also employ a sense of humor through crude drawings, using materials that were excreted from my dog, and making stuffed forms with floppy limbs. Humor is incredibly important to my work, as it is a defense mechanism and a tool used to disarm, making discomfort more approachable and easier to analyze.
Open Access
flesh pixels, post perfect
(University of Oregon, 2021) Anderson, Claire
Open Access
Hinterland
(University of Oregon, 2021) Turner, Caroline
Hinterland is a proposition; a speculative state of being - a conspiracy. It is an arch, a gate, and a portal; congealing time and collapsing itself into the present. A hinterland is typically thought of as the less developed land next to a port, city, or coast; but it can also be understood as the limitations of knowledge, that which is unexplored and ill-defined. In the hinterland lies opportunity: to reimagine, to reorient, to build something new.
Open Access
hyperclap shibboleth queer tool
(University of Oregon, 2021-06) Reckling, Tannon