MFA, Kent State University, 2024, College of the Arts / School of Art

“Soft Machines: Abject Bodies, Queer Sexual Expression, and the Deterritorialized Transfeminine Figure” explores the relationship between the abjection associated with the feminine figure and queer discourses surrounding sexual expression and gender dynamics. Julia Kristeva, in her 1980 work “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection”, examines the social and cultural disruptions caused by objects/subjects on the boundaries of “The Symbolic Order”. Kristeva's work, along with the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, lend themselves to the development of a perspective on queer bodies that allow them to revel in the abjection imposed on them. The transfeminine figure is regarded as a taboo, an infringement on the boundaries of both social order and biological determinism. It is in this that “Soft Machines” weaponizes abjection to illustrate expressions of queer love and desire that align themselves with femme perspectives, an act of resistance against the centering of masculine accounts of queer sexual expression. “Soft Machines” situates itself as a feminist body of work exploring the boundaries of printmaking, painting, and sculpture using watercolor silkscreen monotype on canvas and installation. “Soft Machines” explores a corporeal color palette reminiscent of skin and the bodily interior. The “figures” printed on the canvas works are ambiguously internal and external, twisting and folding over each other across the print/paintings. My research into the relationship between painting and printmaking inform these aesthetic and formal decisions, “queering” the traditional formats of both by producing works that could be read by viewers in either context. The main painting device throughout this work is specifically watercolor, chosen for its historical relationship to women in the arts as well as its ability to stain textiles with minimal material disruption. The balancing of softness and the visceral is central to this work and is reflective of my research inte (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Taryn McMahon (Advisor); Shawn Powell (Committee Chair); John Paul Morabito (Committee Chair); Eli Kessler (Committee Chair) Subjects: Fine Arts

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2018, College-Conservatory of Music: Piano

When discussing Alexander Scriabin's music, it is impossible not to mention his expressionism, for it takes center stage. Especially, the piano sonata by Alexander Scriabin is an important genre that shows the development in his expressionism. Among his ten piano sonatas, the Fifth Sonata Op. 53 (1907) is unequivocally significant in that the work indicates Scriabin's transition to his expressionist music. In his later piano sonatas, Scriabin explored and built more complex and highly individual styles, which are characterized by expressionism; however, according to the prevailing opinion among critics, it is difficult to say that the Fifth Sonata represents Scriabin's matured expressionism. They claim that Scriabin's expressionist phase begins with the Sixth Sonata, and the Fifth Sonata lacks the expressionist qualities found in Scriabin's late sonatas. This dissertation will respond to this existing suggestion by comparing it with the following five late piano sonatas that has widely been considered as the expressionist music. Also, in order to show how expressionism comes to play itself in musical language of the sonatas, it will look at Scriabin's four early sonatas prior to the Fifth Sonata that show the beginnings of expressionist languages. In the end, it will take into account the development of Scriabin's expressionism focusing on the Fifth Sonata that is filled with the features of expressionism and it will assert that Scriabin's expressionism already began in his Fifth Sonata.

Committee: Christopher Segall Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Samuel Ng Ph.D. (Committee Member); James Tocco (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, English (Arts and Sciences)

During the past twenty years video games have increased in notability in the discipline at large and within computers and composition discourse, leading to the occasional examination of games in composition curricula both as an object of study and as a means of further promoting student multimodal literacy. And although they are not widespread within composition courses, video games, like competing text-types literature and film, are a serious subject deserving of academic treatment, exploration, inquiry, and discussion (Bogost; Alexander; Vie; Colby and Colby). Yet little research so far has utilized video games in teaching composition courses to focus on student attitudes and responses through reflection. Throughout this dissertation, utilizing the work of Gee in the educational potential of video games, I have maintained that video games as procedural rhetoric (Bogost) provide a useful reflective medium for composition (Yancey), especially within first-year composition (FYC) curricula. And building on the work of Gradin, I coin the term network expressionism as a pedagogical position that synthesizes the digital subject position taken by players of video games with a complex network understanding of composition. I argue that knowledge of non-human actants affects the rhetorical awareness of human actants by making students aware of the greater complexities of the situation and providing a rhetorical savviness to students. To further explore network expressionism, I coin the concept algorithmic suture as a means through network expressionism to explain and explore how video game algorithms rhetorically make meaning through cooperation with players. I am here setting up the personal writing subject as the frame of the discussion of algorithms and reflection, specifically via experience and heuristics, while engaging a post-humanist network discussion. I review and discuss selections from the available relevant scholarship for conceiving network expressionism, (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sherrie Gradin Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Albert Rouzie Ph.D. (Committee Member); Ryan Shepherd Ph.D. (Committee Member); Edmond Chang Ph.D. (Committee Member); Ofer Eliaz Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Mass Media; Pedagogy; Rhetoric; Teaching; Technology

MFA, Kent State University, 2018, College of the Arts / School of Art

My artwork functions as a personal expression of repressed emotions. I convey various negative emotions through the use of formal elements in my paintings and monoprints. My paintings and monoprints contain anxious and chaotic scenes that function as non-linear narratives from traumatic experiences in my life. The creatures operate as alter egos of myself representing my repressed emotions, or physical characteristics of my appearance. Creating my art allows me to work out personal issues through the use of forms and materials. My art pieces contain various applications of paint, jagged and gestural marks to form the figures, along childlike graphic imagery such as bulging eyes and crooked teeth. The paintings and monoprints contain energetic reds, acidic yellows, and vibrant purples which add to the energy in the work. The ultimate goal of my work is to spark an emotional response within the viewer. Ideally, I would like the overload of hectic information to evoke within the viewer a constant anxious feeling; the same feeling I experience as a result of my battle with anxiety. I am consistently told by others around me to just relax. Through the work the viewer will experience the anxiety that I constantly feel and am unable to escape. If I were able to relax, I would. The overwhelming sensation of anxiety is always with me.

Committee: Martin Ball Mr. (Advisor); Gianna Commito Ms. (Committee Member); Arron Foster Mr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Art/Art History

The works, doctrine, and persona of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) have all heavily influenced successive generations of artists from both the modern and contemporary eras. Scholars frequently examine Cezanne's impact on the artistic movements of Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism. While these connections have been widely discussed, Cezanne's relation to and impact upon the iconic French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the American Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still (1904-1980), and the British street artist Banksy (b.1974) has not been given sufficient analytical attention. Duchamp coined the expression "cult of Cezanne" when he discussed other artists (including himself) who spent time referencing, studying, and following the paintings and career of Cezanne. In this thesis, I am appropriating the phrase "cult of Cezanne," and loosely defining it to incorporate a group of modern artists (including Duchamp, Clyfford Still, and Banksy) who were/are leading figures of their own respective movements while being notoriously autonomous vis-a-vis the other "members" as well as the artists and art officials working contemporarily. A careful analysis of Cezanne's letters and selected primary sources from the late nineteenth century provides evidence for ways in which Cezanne's reclusive persona, and his search for a truly autonomous painting style, connect him to these three disciples. The commonalities between Cezanne and his "cult members" exemplify ways in which these three artists refused to become an extension of the "Modernist institution" of Cezanne. By rejecting the formal style of their master, they instead followed in his footsteps by emulating his reclusive lifestyle and single-minded approach to artmaking. Without previously studying, referencing, and/or following Cezanne at some point in their career, they might not have been provided with this kind of exemplar. I believe that shadowing Cezanne's lifestyle, his interaction with the art world, and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrew Hershberger PhD (Committee Chair); Rebecca Skinner Green PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art History; Fine Arts; History; Museum Studies; Museums

Bachelor of Science of Media Arts and Studies (BSC), Ohio University, 2017, Media Arts and Studies

MOLOCH is a game about internal struggles between passive content consent and critical views in systems where digging deeper can lead to darker truths. A top-down 3D game with simple directional movement puzzles, MOLOCH places us behind a desk as a shift manager in a dystopian company. Throughout the game, the player will be confronted with the binary of efficiency vs morality. The game encourages us to increasingly hurry our managed workers, but is the company's goal and corporate approval worth the amoral work we force? Are we ok with the system's tactics aimed at keeping us complacent? MOLOCH takes inspiration from Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis and from the German Expressionism art movement at-large. Increasing anxiety over the networked world's discordant relationships between humanity and the physical world and the rise of social inauthenticity and near endemic individual alienation highlight the intentions of MOLOCH (Klaas, 2016). Adapting a rich history of prior art is critical to the tonal and thematic success of MOLOCH. David Freeman, designer and writer, states that one of the keys to creating a rich world is through adding history (Freeman, 2003). Adding backstory to MOLOCH through ancillary materials, and injecting the sentiments of Metropolis facilitates a rich history. The precise adaptation necessary for analytical success spans visual and audial assets as well; without proper signifiers the tone of the game will be lost due to a lack of thematic cohesion. This aspect will be accomplished through continual examination and inspiration of prior art.

Committee: Novak Beth (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Film Studies

MFA, Kent State University, 2016, College of the Arts / School of Art

“The Formless Self” is my M.F.A thesis exhibition that I presented the contradictions that arise while negotiating the encounters between Japanese artistic techniques and forms of expression, which are rooted in its traditions and American artistic techniques and forms of expression, which are more liberal and free from traditions. Using metal, clay, drawing and mixed media, I will seek to create connections between figurative and abstract forms of expression. I intend to make objects out of combining figurative and abstract forms and clay faces that represent the hidden conflict that arises from the multiple intersection(s) of American and Japanese ways of expression in art. The everyday-struggle of comparing definitions of expressions from my home country and from being in a foreign country has inspired me to create a merging point of the negative and the positive. I am driven to connect the language of diverse materials in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms to metaphorically and poetically speak to the ambiguity of definitions in expression.

Committee: Isabel Farnsworth (Advisor); John-Michael Warner (Committee Member); Gianna Commito (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian American Studies; Fine Arts; Foreign Language; Social Psychology

Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Contemporary Music

The late compositions (ca. 1980-1987) by Morton Feldman are noted for slow tempos, a quiet dynamic, but most of all, for their length. The String Quartet No. 2 (1983), at approximately six hours, and For Philip Guston (1984), at approximately four hours, are the most extreme examples of his late style. Inevitably, someone listening to these works must come to grips with this duration; traditional modes of listening in terms of form and memory are thwarted. Christian eschatology, the theology of the future, meditates on the differences between human time and the eternal time of God. Considering Feldman, length, manner of composition, and perception of time can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of an eternal sense of time. I will combine psychological and philosophical approaches towards time to suggest that experiential time is essentially subjective. By using musical analysis, and eschatology, I will apply this way of thinking about time to devise a theory of interpreting the experience of For Philip Guston. It is my conclusion that the piece represents the state of the eschaton—the spiritual place where divine eternity and human temporality meet—by making use of nonlinear music (representing the divine) but featuring a structurally important linear motive (representing the human).

Committee: Thomas Rosenkranz (Advisor); Michael Ellison (Committee Member); Elizabeth Menard (Committee Member); Christopher Dietz (Committee Member) Subjects: Music; Theology

MFA, Kent State University, 2013, College of the Arts / School of Art

The focus of my thesis is the use of a head-like form as a visual expression of personal struggles with existence. I use the head (which I believe to be the most basic visual signifier of the human person and sentient life) in two ways––it acts as a framework within which to explore and express fundamental concerns of pointed self-awareness, and it serves as a sign to allude to such concerns, and a resultant anxiety, for the viewer. My method involves working automatically, initially through the first several layers and in frequent bursts thereafter. The employment of chance and automatist techniques reflects the arbitrary nature of thought, and allows the chaotic chatter of consciousness an outlet into the physical world. My practice is expressive in nature. Pulling out and shaping these head-like forms imposes a degree of order on the chaos, but an order I intend to be unstable and uncertain. I seek to create a visual manifestation of the sense of interiority I experience. My work displays the labor and struggle of creation as a reflection of the daily struggle inherent in existence itself.

Committee: Martin Ball (Advisor); Darice Polo (Committee Member); Gianna Commito (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Art History

Foremost Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is best known for his poured paintings. This thesis project considers the importance of Pollock's 1942 figurative paintings, Stenographic Figure, MoonWoman, and Male and Female, and the influence of Jungian psychology and of hermaphroditic figures in these works. Pollock painted the Jungian symbol, the hermaphrodite, in all three works in his attempt to unify his self, and as his psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Henderson (1903- ) encouraged the artist, to defeat a Jungian condition known as the Terrible Mother Complex. Pollock suffered from this condition due to the domination of his mother, Stella Mae McClure Pollock (1875-1958) and his fragile psyche. Many critics and art historians do not realize the extent to which these works are Jungian and this thesis reexamines this problem in the literature on Pollock.

Committee: Kim Paice (Advisor) Subjects: Psychology, Cognitive

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Art History

The work of John Chamberlain (b. 1927) was a unique manifestation of sculpture that occurred during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Seen in a continuum beginning with Abstract Expressionist Painting, building to Chamberlain's assemblages, and ending with Happenings, the artists of this period were striving to make an art of the everyday, and Chamberlain's work was representative as such. The idea of the everyday is that it is in constant change and that objects we encounter on a daily basis deliver signs of their placement in the social hierarchy, according to sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Chamberlain's assemblages are constructed from automobile detritus, and therefore have associations with the automobile and everything that automobiles represent. Along with an in-depth discussion of the social, political, and economic conditions of possibility surrounding the creation of Chamberlain's work, this thesis will also offer the first comprehensive assessment of critical response to Chamberlain's early work.

Committee: Kimberly Paice (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2010, Art History (Fine Arts)

Within current scholarship Cy Twombly is examined in terms of the American abstract expressionist movement he derives from, and not within the European context under which his most groundbreaking works were created. This thesis situates Twombly within the fragmented Europe he experienced upon moving to Rome in 1957, and the Post World War II problem-set he was forced to confront. In 1961 Twombly created his most pivotal series of paintings entitled Ferragosto. Based on the transformed Pagan to Roman Catholic holiday, Twombly dismantles the history of painting within this five-part series. Twombly attacks the conception of 'time' and therefore embeds the Ferragosto series within history, the evolutionary quality of these canvases acts as evidence of this attack. Often equated to Jackson Pollock vis-a-vis his gesture, Twombly confronts the monochrome and the dichotomy between absence and excess that surfaces in the paintings of his European contemporaries Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana.

Committee: Jaleh Mansoor PhD (Committee Chair); Marion Lee PhD (Committee Member); Matthew Friday M.F.A (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2006, Comparative Arts (Fine Arts)

This study, utilizing Michel Foucault's theory from which to interpret visual abnormality in art, analyzes the reasons why the Nazis believed visual dysfunction and mental illness were the operative forces behind modern art. In Munich, Germany in 1937 the National Socialist party, fearing that German culture was slowly degenerating into madness, sponsored two art events largely for the purposes of contrast. At the largely monolithic Great German Art Exhibition the Nazis hastened to forward their own aesthetic vision by displaying art works representing human forms in the language of classicism. The Degenerate Art Exhibition (held a day later) showcased early twentieth-century German avant-garde paintings, which, the Nazis claimed, were the products of abnormal vision and mental illness. The importance of visual perception in art is first detected in the period Foucault identifies as the Classical episteme, a period that regards man's capacity for representation as the primary tool for ordering knowledge about the world. The roots of this way of thinking about representation go back to the fifteenth-century theorist Leonbattista Alberti, who established rules in art for the normal and healthy perception of nature. Such rules, including linear perspective and an emphasis on line, continued to be supported after the advent of what Foucault calls the Modern episteme, which began roughly around the late eighteenth century. The Modern episteme still regarded man's knowledge of the world as fundamentally representational, but, in addition, saw man's representational capacities as an object of knowledge. This line of thought contributed to Immanuel Kant's theory of knowledge, in particular his view on how the subjective awareness of beauty opens up for the subjects solidarity with others in judging beauty, that is, a judgment of taste's claim to universality. Kant's aesthetics thus becomes a space where a consensus about the visual perception of art is now possible. This ty (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Charles Buchanan (Advisor) Subjects:

MA, Kent State University, 2012, College of the Arts / School of Art

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Germany expanded its boundaries to Africa though colonization. Although short-lived, lasting only until World War I, colonization led to new ideas in German Expressionist art. Members of groups Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter copied objects of African origin in their work, including statuary and masks. Most artists were exposed to African culture and imagery when they visited numerous German ethnographic museums and performances. To the Brucke, native peoples represented the immediacy, authenticity, and direct closeness to the natural world that the artists hoped to achieve. Germans of the early twentieth century were presented with reminders of colonization through picture postcards and advertisements. This imagery often featured racist caricatures and exaggerated depictions of African culture. Nevertheless, Die Brucke members were less scathing in their depictions of Africans. While most were silent on the issues of colonization, Emil Nolde was vocal in opposing it. When colonization ended, groups such as Die Brucke were part of Germany's art historical past, but works featuring blacks were not. Hannah Hoch's Dadaist photomontages satirized the ongoing fears of white women engaging in relationships with black men. The dissolution of the colonies led to other changes: tribal works were no longer novelties, ethnographic shows disappeared, and many German Expressionist works were seized or destroyed by the Nazis. The surviving imagery, however, is a lasting testimony to Germany's cultural exchange with Africa as the twentieth century began.

Committee: Carol Salus (Advisor) Subjects: Art History; History

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2011, Art History and Museum Studies

In 1905 four architecture students in Dresden formed an artists' communal group known as Die Brucke, or the Bridge. These progressive-minded artists were united by a vision of fusing their German artistic heritage with contemporary visual trends. The six members principally associated with the Brucke—Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Hermann Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller, and Emil Nolde—demonstrated a preference for expressive compositions, technical innovations within the mediums of painting, sculpture, and printmaking, and the desire to unify art and life. In time, the Brucke's prolific graphic contributions became the hallmark on which their artistic renown was built in Germany. Brucke members actively sought recognition abroad with the help of art dealers, museum professionals, and private collectors. Their American reception, however, was stymied by historical circumstances, including two World Wars, Adolf Hitler's denouncement of the artists as “degenerate,” American partiality for French art, and strained U.S. socio-political relations with Germany. Despite these challenges, significant institutional collections of the Brucke artists' graphic work dating from both their time as a cohesive artist group to their subsequent individual careers after the dissolution of the group in 1913, were formed in the United States. This study examines the formation of three of the most important of these at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. These museums were selected not only for their notable collections of Brucke prints, but also due to their significant locations, interesting demographics, and history of patronage. The Museum of Modern Art amassed most of their Brucke prints through the wealthy patronage of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and choices of curator Alfred H. Barr, Jr., both of whom relied on the expertise of a number of Jewish emigre dealers living in New (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ellen G. Landau PhD (Advisor); Anne L. Helmreich PhD (Committee Member); Jane Glaubinger PhD (Committee Member); Kenneth F. Ledford PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History

MFA, Kent State University, 2013, College of the Arts / School of Art

In the act of painting, the external experience becomes internalized and then translated through action into an art object. I make paintings as an act of translating my experiences. The colors, shapes, and marking all come into being in order to express what I cannot in any other way communicate. My moment-to-moment existence is informed by the layers of experience leading up to what I perceive as the present. I feel the past as memory and emotion. The accumulated information contained within each of the works, the compositional tension and the suggested activity and image, assist in a transference of meaning to the viewer. Through the practice of an intuitive process, with the interaction of material, touch, and gesture, and an allowance for spontaneity, an image is brought into being. Within that image is an inherent tension and it is through that tension that meaning may be expressed. Through painting I am translating the layers of emotional experience that are contained within the imaginary vessel I think of as my self. Painting is thinking, thinking through action: thought with the hand.

Committee: Gianna Commito (Advisor) Subjects: Fine Arts