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

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

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