Scholarship & Research
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/1
Browse
9 results
Search Results
Item Alone in the West with a portrait of art history(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Krause, Nicholas O'Brien; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Rollin BeamishHow do we find our place in the historical narrative of art on the vast continuum of human creativity? Art is a reflection and director of culture that embodies historic movements and fundamental principles that enable us to see a continuity and a relationship to humanity over the centuries. To understand our place in the historical canon we must reflect on the past to evaluate our current situation. We draw from the past to inform our understanding of art and culture to take responsibility for the direction of art in the future. To do this we must find a relationship to the aesthetics of historical, cultural movements and investigate the ideas and processes of different ages, to see how we can relate to them, and figure out how to represent the expanding collection of culture and art going forward.Item Chathamesque: Russell Chatham's Montana vernacular(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Bishop, Storrs Myron, IV; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa RagainPainter and lithographer Russell Chatham introduced a Tonalist aesthetic to Montana's art scene in the 1970s, making way for a new aesthetic relationship between humans and nature. His work is recognizable by its gray-and-brown palette, horizontally structured compositions, and his signature envelope of atmospheric haze. When Chatham depicted a scene with fog, snowfall or rain obscuring parts of the landscape, he evoked a quiet mood conducive to introspection. People familiar with his work, especially those living in rural Park County, Montana, might look out their window and call the view, "Chathamesque." This term--along with other commonplace statements like, "It's a Russell Chatham kind of day"--became tightly bound to his artistic style and public identity. In contrast to the romanticized mythology of C.M. Russell's Old West, or the sublime grandeur of Thomas Moran's panoramic landscapes, Chatham offered a depiction of the intermountain West as a place for private, transcendental intimacy with nature. This thesis will analyze two series of Chatham's works he created in the 1980s: The Seasons, a series of twelve paintings commissioned by the Museum of the Rockies (MOR) in 1990, and The Missouri Headwaters Suite, twelve lithographs he made between 1985 and 1987. Through three stages of comparative analysis of his paintings and lithographs, this paper will trace Chatham's aesthetic development from conventional California Tonalism toward his transcendental Montana landscapes. The first stage connects Chatham's style to the nineteenth century's California Tonalist movement and its Transcendentalist relationship with nature. The second stage traces his struggle and resolution with interpreting Montana's mountainous landscape. The third stage ties his development as a lithographer to the establishment of his aesthetic vernacular. Each of these stages was another step toward a distinctive style which came to be uniquely identified with Russell Chatham. By the early 1990s, his local audiences had internalized his approach to landscape, and the term "Chathamesque" became a vernacular way of expressing their relationship with Montana's changeable appearance.Item Mary Cassatt (1844-1926): advising against convention(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2022) Hanger, Paige McCarthy; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa RagainAmerican artist, Mary Cassatt became an advisor when she joined the Impressionists and by the 1890s, she as a celebrated advisor, who worked with elite Gilded Age collectors like the Havemeyer's of New York, the Palmers of Chicago, the Sears of Boston, and others. Anchored in market-based and epistolary research, this thesis will examine Cassatt's advising career and her graphic work. Cassatt taught her clients to value artworks that included both stylistic elements comfortable to American taste and unfamiliar modernist tropes. As an advisor, Cassatt educated her clients to acquire works which were hybrid in nature and borrowed stylistic qualities from accepted artwork and from modernist esthetics. The addition of these in-between works to American collections primed American taste to incrementally accept modernism, realism, and the avant-garde into Gilded Age collections. Cassatt's impact on her clients' collections shaped American collecting habits and the collections of American national museums.Item Strength in fragility(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2023) Ahn, Myung; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jeremy HatchCeramic vessels often have humanlike aspects to them. People are drawn to these anthropomorphic qualities because they live in a human body. Clay contains both a strength and a fragility that correlates to the physical and psychological experiences people have as human beings. Physically, bodies came from the earth/clay, and if thoughts and emotions emerged out of matter, the clay form and the human form share both origin and experience. Psychologically, people redefine what is considered failure, and turn a perceived broken experience into a great gift. My ceramic work is mostly made out of paper clay that appears to be fragile, but is very resilient. The idea of success and failure as a visual art is explored in this paper. Collapses, warpages, accidents, and fusions that occur in the kiln are rearranged and reevaluated by the artist to challenge the audience's preconceived notion of beauty and success. These expected and unexpected changes in the process of making directly reflect what we face in life that is full of surprises. Accepting 'what is' in life and the outcome in the kiln helps me to be present and develop skills to see things from various angles and find beauty in it.Item Common ground: finding an American aesthetic in ceramics through the history of wilderness and ceramic art in America(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2021) Botelho Alvarez, Alejandro Manuel; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Josh DeWeeseMy quest to find a unifying principle that constitutes 'American ceramics' has led me to survey the histories of studio ceramics in America and Wilderness and Nature in America. I've discovered resounding similarities between the two: both were responses to a flagging sense of identity and a hope to (nostalgically) confirm and promote certain values and worldviews (over others). Both our relationships with nature and American studio ceramics are monolithic in their founding ideals and have persisted into the 21st century; both have been fundamental in my upbringing and have codified my own worldview. However, I've become sensitive to the fact these particular values are rooted in privilege, are fundamentally exclusionary, and are ripe for a reexamination. In this paper I propose that we revisit the bearing of the values that wilderness and the aesthetic judgements of ceramics in the early 20th century have on society today. It does not mean that these traditions should be totally abandoned. Instead, I am convinced that a more pluralistic and inclusive approach to both is a more holistic way forward. By appraising the histories of wilderness and ceramics in America I hope to uncover some of the unrecognized people and cultures that have been deliberately redacted from the history. In so doing, I expect to find similarities and trends within the existing canon that are commonly celebrated and introduce the forgotten traditions back into the fold, such that it might lead to a new vision for American ceramics. In conclusion, I hope that this rediscovered American aesthetic might be the framework in which I create my own body of work, with a particular appeal towards process rather than form, as a criterion of excellence. With an understanding that American studio pottery has many different traditions to pull from that are still being 'digested', but that these diverse inspirations is not a weakness, but a strength.Item Neither here nor there(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2020) Marian Albin, Cristina Simona; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Sara MastTraditional rites of passage are losing value today or are forced to take new forms, sometimes at a rapid pace. Inevitable events instantly and actively change our personal, societal and global life. Neither Here Nor There examines mental and physical liminal spaces. My aim is to define the concept, etymology and history of liminality, while exploring its relevance in our modern world. Included as part of this paper, images from my current body of work chronicle different transitional environments, both aesthetically and emotionally. The original concept of liminality, as described by earlier theorists, no longer holds the same meaning. Transitory experiences become perpetual, some occurring at the same time, some repeating. A liminal space can sometimes metamorphose into a home. In this thesis I am addressing several questions of liminality: What are the attributes of liminality and how does it reshape our identity? How do we navigate unsettling unknowns when the ground under our feet seems to constantly shift? During the writing of this paper, the novel virus COVID-19 hit the world, resulting in fear, stress, anxiety, chaos, and changes. However, the crisis also brought with it flexibility, creativity, collaboration, and resilience. New forms of ritual are being born every second.Item In pursuit of value(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2020) Gathje, Samuel Gehring; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jim ZimpelWhat follows is an exploration of the bounds of Material Intelligence in contemporary forms of making. While the physical work is autobiographical, and this research is broken up by anecdotal vignettes of my lived experience, the questions presented here are urgent and present. What is craft and where can it be most useful today? What objects hold stories, and how can we become more connected to these objects? In a world filled with the mass produced, I aim in this writing to showcase a different way of approaching material and making. A regard for old ways of seeing, and for a mindfulness when it comes to objects, stories, and spaces. This writing is my journey in pursuit of value. Through my own life, through various mentors, teachers, and lessons, I have learned to look to an object's origin to understand its value. Folk art (art of the people), the handmade, and traditional craft all ground us to place, time, experience or culture. I am not arguing that things must be done one way because it is tradition. Instead, I look at what these traditions provide beyond the object, which is often a communal experience of growth, appreciation, and learning. Craft can connect people across distance and time. To borrow a phrase from Glenn Adamson, I hope through this research to uncover a world of 'Fewer, Better Things'.Item Coping with the landscape: an aesthetic analysis of the intermediate zone(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2018) Parker, Ryan Keith; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jim ZimpelNumerous studies have been conducted into the aesthetics of landscape, both through objects (sculptures and installations) and through pictorial devices (painting, printmaking, photography, etc.). The fact being that, as long as the horizon line is interrupted these studies by artists will continue in hope of understanding and changing their own reality. Aligning with the history of the photographic land survey, the emphasis of this work is to direct the reading of landscapes towards an aesthetic analysis of the modern mobile landscape. Considering the accumulation of capital as the driving force of the aesthetic change in the landscape, this analysis will focus on the geography of the highest concentration of visible indicators, the intermediate zone. Within this transitional space, as is similarly true with ecological systems, the highest concentration for diversity has the ability to manifest at the edges of converging zones, due to the overlapping of multiple systems in one geographic locality. Accumulation of indicators, both those failing in the system and those entering the system will be present. Recognizing that this survey considers the use and misuse of utilitarian objects and architecture as a method of evaluating time, purpose, and relative availably to the general population, it will present an argument for the intentional denial of the legibility for this landscape, leading to a further lack of understanding within the general population. This result will further lead to the alienation of the population from its landscape.Item Untitled(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 1983) Wagner, Kurt Frederick; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: John E. BurkeThe same things are done by us, over and over, with terrible predictability. One may be forgiven, in view of this, for wishing at least to associate with beauty.' (Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow). My wish is to attempt to rub elbows with my perception of beauty. The work that you see before you is an example of how I perceive the things of this world. Beauty lies within our perception. It Is something that we bring to this world. Since I began graduate school I have tried to set up sculptural situations within an enclosed format. These situations were designed to stimulate our senses in a general way. During my thesis work I discovered that through the drawing of these situations I was able to be more specific about how I see them. This made the perception of what I made an important part of the work. Observation is the threshold of perception. It is through observation that perception is revealed. This is not observation with perfection of duplication as the final solution. It is the 'mistakes' or rather how we deviate from the reality of observation which releases the personality of our perception. In a sense I am drawing things that are not physically there. This is where the beauty lies. The work you see before you in this show is four separate pieces. Each piece consists of three parts: the viewfinder, the still life, and the drawing of the still life through use of the viewfinder as a window for my perception. I see each part as being dependent on the other parts in order for the piece to be complete. It would be impossible to grasp the full intention of these pieces without all parts being present. I believe that sculpture has the potential to encompass whatever it takes to bring an idea to life. What I am doing is to combine two dimensional, three dimensional, and perceptional levels in order to reach this potential. Over and over, I orchestrate these differing levels in an attempt to at least rub elbows with beauty.