Herron School of Art and Design

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/226
Herron School of Art and Design's mission is to provide professional education in the visual and music arts for degree-seeking students and offer opportunities for creative exploration for the broader community.

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Browsing Herron School of Art and Design by Subject "Abstract"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    An Architectural Imaginary
    (2014-05-20) Shopoff, Marna; Horvath, Robert
    My work is a vehicle to investigate the perceptual intimacy I find within public spaces. Blending contemporary with classical approaches to art and spatial relationships, I use the idea of perception as a function of human experience, place and personal memory. I explore compositional, personal and experiential connections while creating an invitation for the viewer to do the same. A paradox exists within the material realm. I identify with who I am through the spaces I inhabit and feel as if my body can extend its presence into the built environment. My artwork becomes a lens that reveals the temporality of my experiences. Using architecture and abstraction as a philosophical approach in my paintings, architecture becomes both a visual bridge between inside and out, and a passageway of self-reflection. Abstraction is a way to move through a space. My work explores how art can become a space by its interaction with the environment and how the space can become the artwork. I conceptualize ideas relating to place identity and my lived experiences within the built environment. I view the world in a particular way because of the context in which I have experienced it: the architecture, spatial politics, personal relationships, public and private intimate spaces. I am interested in the interpretation of and the interactions with the spaces that surround me: what memories or feelings do these spaces spark and what sort of energy do they project? Likewise, I am interested in the roles that art plays in culture, architecture, and the site-specificity of spatial relationships that are formed by these interactions. My work explores whether, through art, we can share our individual perceptions, whether someone can access and experience a new view of the world through my artwork and how I can create a new space via my art.
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    Arsenal
    (2018) Carroll, Brenna; Jefferson, Corey; Baker, Lesley; Robertson, Jean
    Traumatic experience inspires the human drive for expression. Survivors carry the memory of trauma with them throughout their lives while they struggle to comprehend its impact. They maintain a fragile stability as their capacity to more forward is challenged and their perception of the world around them is altered. The force of memory compels those who have survived a traumatic event to build a defensive arsenal and to search for and to convey an understanding of their experience. My minimalist abstract ceramic sculpture examines the incidence of trauma and explores the transference of concepts and emotions associated with its effects.
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    Breaking Naming: The Multi-Valency of Being Human
    (2017) Eicher, Stefan; McDaniel, Craig
    Violence, whether physical or psychological, is sustained by the act of 'naming' -- placing people into categories of 'the other' based on a singular difference in socio-economic, ethnic, cultural, or religious identity. Art by its very nature works best when it succeeds in breaking the categories of certainty inherent in naming, disabling the mastery of language and optical assumptions the viewer brings with them to the work. My work seeks to break the 'violence of naming' -- transforming depictions and objects of violence by undermining the ability to fit them easily into pre-existing visual categories. Through the creation of dislocating juxtapositions, visual layering, and the deployment of surrealism my work seeks to change the meaning and substance of oppositional relationships and objects of violence, and in the process explores the multi-valency of human identity and connections between people. At a secondary level, within the context of war, and specifically Western interventions in the Middle-East and Central Asia, my work is also a critique of imperialism and power. "Breaking Naming: The Multi-Valency of Being Human" consists of three large-scale oil & acrylic paintings and two smaller sculptural/interactive installations which collectively serve as my Thesis Exhibition. In the course of this thesis paper I explore my strategies for 'breaking naming' by using specific descriptions of the works as launching points for formal, thematic, and conceptual discussions of the works. In the process I also draw on examples from my research and close with an exploration of the theoretical and metaphysical framework for the pieces.
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    Unattached
    (2015) Connelly, Carly; Hull, Greg
    I am anxiously aware of human vulnerability; the brevity of living and the impermanence of the present. There is a prism of experience in the complexity of life and death through which my work is influenced. Nothing is a direct reproduction of reality but rather, a reformed, reshaped and restored version of its past. My work imitates subconscious fears, passions, and relationships with a world that provides both destruction and renewal; the dichotomy of pain and pleasure in life in many ways informs the understanding of self and identity - but it does not define it. The work blurs between reality and fantasy, exposure and repression, surface and structure, eternity and the ephemeral. I transform materials and blend processes to create mixed media sculptures and installations that respond to space, form, and compositional relationships that re-examine my own existence and serves as a self-portrait.