Scholarship & Research
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Item Prairie gothic(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2024) Hedge, Kristen Marie; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jeremy HatchPrairie Gothic is my understanding of how I have been shaped by experiences of grief and mourning, informed by aesthetics of the Midwest and Western landscape. My research is based on mourning adornment and dress from the Victorian period (approx. 1820-1914), and its impact on Midwest and Western American culture from the perspective of the working class. As the customs surrounding mourning were extravagant in every way, the typical working-class person could not afford to express their love and mourn with gold, diamonds and silk. The objects I have come across in my research express a kind of sentimentality that allows people to express and contain their grief in these objects as a form of art. Everyday materials that are typically overlooked can become reliquaries containing memories and information about the deceased. It is these materials that I used in my work to highlight the importance of family and love.Item Twist and mess(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 1994) Filloux, Marianne IsabelleIn these paintings I have found it essential to create a two dimensional space which depicts the forest in a life-like scale. Landscape imagery which presents nature as miniaturized often depicts the natural world as diminutive and merely picturesque. I want to convey action within the forest These paintings are the product of my "re"action to the forests’ intimate and yet potentially dangerous interior. This reaction is dependent on my observation of nature as a force which easts in spite of my presence. The undercurrent of fear often felt in nature may have as much to do with feeling we are in a domain that ultimately falls out of our control, as it does with the undeniable physical dangers which occur in this territory.Item Paintings and monoprints(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 1991) Laing-Malcolmson, BonnieBetween the subject and the final painting lies a middle ground, a place of memory, response, process, and risk. My intent is that my paintings grow from this middle ground. My paintings are born of temporal things, a protracted drive through our wide western landscape may lull me into a state where a cloudburst slamming into a mountainside evokes a sharp flash of memory. Transformed, I relive a vivid moment of my life; the glimpsed landscape becomes a visual equivalent for the evoked memory. By reliving a moment of life I am more alive, simultaneously inhabiting present and past. William Carlos Williams wrote in his poem The Descent: "and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness.” The mind released from the present is an intense world. I aim to capture that intensity in paint.Item Sculpture(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 1984) Parsons, Elizabeth Ann; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: John E. BurkeMy sculpture is a record of my experience and it proposes an experience for the viewer. I am seeking a balance which is both engaging and enigmatic. My experience is the process of making the sculpture. I work in an intuitive way, never knowing the exact outcome; the materials and forms show me how they will work together. I want the parts to became a whole and to tell a story, though not necessarily a literal one. I contrast geometric forms with a way of working which is a repetitive and gradual building, similar to the way things grow. The sense of movement I imply in my sculpture relates to movement in nature. I am interested in the way things get caught and built up by wind, rain, snow, etc. My work and processes derive more from my subconscious understanding of nature and my relationship to it, and its rhythms and layerings, than the actual appearance of the natural world. Sone of my forms make references to boats and houses which are both simple geometric, archetypal shapes. The use of the boat form mirrors a movement or journey through life. Boats and houses become our smaller environments and set parameters from which we view the world. These environments are in constant motion and vulnerable to change. Because nature is ever present and dominant, the parameters we define are essentially false, as is our sense of control and stability. Still, it is human nature to look for and attach ourselves to those things. In my newer work, I use paper for its apparitional arid ephemeral qualities which allow the forms to fade in and out. I have stopped using natural materials such as sticks and rocks because their reality does not allow for that experience of a vision which I am interested in. I also do not want to rely on their inherent beauty. I want my sculpture to have a unique and less obvious beauty. My sculptures are both a realization and a completion. They are a manifestation of materials, ideas and processes which have a self-contained, mysterious meaning and function.Item Romantic daydreams : visions of a new relationship with the natural world(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 1986) Faude, Richard PaulThe paintings in my thesis exhibition are based on memories, stories I have heard, and daydreams about the lake I grew up beside, and other bodies of water I have lived near. There are two sides to the paintings: their personal meaning to me and their meaning to other people who see them. This thesis addresses both sides of the paintings in four parts: a discussion of the psychology of the paintings, my relationship to the natural world, the socio-political relevance of the paintings, and the specific symbolism of the images in the paintings. The slides of the paintings in my thesis exhibition illustrate the final form and development of my art at Montana State University, that embodies the principles outlined in this thesis.Item Paintings(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 1986) Isaksen, EvaI grew up in an environment where the winters are without daylight and the summers are without darkness. My paintings reflect the contrast between light and dark, which I still associate with the changing of the seasons in Northern Norway. My color choices are influenced by this change and its effect on my state of mind. The darker colors , which I use more frequently during winter, have a heaviness relieved by bright hues, while paintings utilizing overall higher values, balance playfull darker tones. The world I am painting is one based on an imaginative interpretation of nature being transformed into a world caught between dreams and reality. I collect information about nature by painting outdoors. This information shares significance with memories of real and dreamed landscapes. Nature acts as a source on two levels; providing direct images described in the paintings and providing influence from natural phenomena like seasonal changes and cycles of death and rebirth. The paintings become a personal expression of my experiences of these pehnomena. Ultimately the work is not about nature in a literal or descriptive sense, but a metaphorical or spiritual way. Nature images described as themselves can be seen in a literal way. Yet because they have been used historically, they also are a universal symbolic language. This allows for the possibility of a visual statement which transcends the obvious literal meaning. The leaves, plants, stars, moon and sun which make up the iconography of my work are important to me, because of their everlasting cycle of death and rebirth, and because of their importance through the history of symbols. In Chinese symbolism, for example, a single leaf is an allegory of happiness, while several leaves appearing together represent people, and plants are an image of life and spirituality. Although I am aware of the symbolic language of the iconography I use, I choose these images because of their personal importance to me.Item Close enough : paintings and ceramics(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 1973) Sigerson, SageI came to Montana because I felt it would be a place where I could concentrate on ray personal attitude toward art and the world, I can't feel open, sharing, or delighted in the city, I'm concerned with making art that is based in what I am, not from what green is or form or plastic. This doesn't mean I ignore what green, does. I'm concerned with color, shape and surface, but my main concern is that a spirit or mood or attitude comes through. The most, important quality in art, to me, is the strength of the artist's personal imagery or viewpoint.Item Easy Answers(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2004) Spain, Alison Lovejoy; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Harold SchlotzhauerI choose imagery based on the way my body reacts to visual stimulus. I cannot articulate the discomfort I feel at times, so I ask how that discomfort would manifest visually. I often notice patterns, forms and signs in the outside world that seem to capture some unutterable feeling. It might be the way a branch bends to the weight of snow, against a sky electrified by neon. In this fleeting moment exists both the aspiration to be divine and the burden of being human. These are the bittersweet and tender spaces that move me. I want viewers to feel unsettled and explore the painting’s meaning for themselves on an intuitive level.Item Paintings(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 1995) Wiesenfeld, Alexandra IngridMy paintings are inspired by the interiors of abandoned houses I discovered in remote areas of Montana. In these spaces I find a strange combination of intimacy and history. Personal items, like a coffee cup with hearts or a red high heeled shoe, are left behind. Nature slowly reclaims territory: the wind rips at the wall paper, revealing layers of color and time; the light pours in, singling out details and creating a satisfying order within the apparent chaos. I see the objects around me, whether familiar or decayed beyond recognition, as if for the first time. Each seems imbued with a hidden symbolism and a mysterious meaning. Rummaging through the traces of the people living there before, I feel like a voyeur intruding upon a space secret and ominous. Simultaneously there is the surreal sensation of my being on a stage, observed in the same secretive way. My intent is not to imitate in paint an actual likeness of the buildings but rather to express the emotion they evoke in me. This emotional impact prompts my choice of imagery as well as the formal elements of my paintings. It is the mood of these abandoned spaces that stirs me to set up juxtapositions, which create psychological and emotional content. In my compositions I contrast various objects, both found and imagined, which creates a dialogue between them. I look for formal and psychological contrasts, in shape, texture, color and connotation: the closed versus the. open, the soft versus the hard, the light versus the dark, the safe versus the dangerous... The figure personifies my own feelings of displacement. When the naked woman is part of the composition, the objects become her props and the space her stage. I omit her features, as I am not interested in her as a specific person. Rather she serves as a tool, an "object", to set up a potent pairing with the space and the other objects. I want her to be young, sexy.. transitory. She is what she is, unself-conscious and without shame. Her pin-up-girl quality and her sexually evocative outfits are in contrast to her gestures, which are introspective and private. Even though the viewer might construe her open sensuality as an invitation to be violated, it is important to me that she does not appear as a victim. She is full of contradictions: she is paradoxical to her surroundings and therefore absurd. The naked woman and the objects around her create another, inner dialogue, one of which she is fully aware and which ultimately mocks her with her own existence. The imagery provides me with a basic structure, a vantage point. I am not interested, however, in mere illustration. I aim to re-construct the object with paint, to build it physically by surrounding it and penetrating it with brush strokes. The canvas becomes like a puzzle in which all elements are connected and interdependent. I play these elements against each other, contrasting flatness of surface and depth of space, line and color, representation and abstraction. In this process I am searching for ways to break through boundaries, which are often present when painting a representational image.Item Functional forms(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 1986) Katz, Louis HowardDuring the development of this body of work, I have begun to clarify my concept of Beauty, and its relationship to Nature. Nature as I see it is beautiful, and I believe my esteem is due to comprehension of natural order. Nature does not exhibit total control. Nature only sets the parameters within which random variation will occur. Nature does not determine where the wind will carry a leaf, only the means of its transport and the limits on its final location. I feel myself a part of this order. As Nature's pawn, I set some of the parameters. I am as much a part of my work as it is a part of me. I have chosen terracotta clay and salt firing for most of this body of work. This combination of material and process most vividly shows variation in color and surface caused by the random effects of fire. If the distribution of color, from light to dark, in "Alike Jugs" were plotted on a graph, the data would assume a bell shaped curve. This form is common to many graphed natural phenomena. In "Sigma," the distribution of colors reminds one of rocks in a streambed. Other variables in my work such as glaze thickness, size, and shape, similarly graphed, also exhibit this distribution. When I was a child, a common thought of my peers was that the solar system was just an atom on a broader scale, its nucleus and electrons like the sun and the planets. Much of my interest in packing and stacking pots, both in and out of kilns, comes from my elementary knowledge of crystalline structure and its relation to efficient use of space. "Sigma" can be thought of as having a structure composed of multiples of a variation of an octahedron, a form coincidentalIy similar to that of many ceramic oxides. Likewise, the layering in "Out of Kiln" is similar to that in kaolinite, the mineralogical building block of clay. An extension of my concept of Beauty in natural order and the subjectiveness of truth is my feeling that there is beauty in all things. Natural order, and therefore Beauty, manifests itself in everything, and all artifacts of man illustrate the nature of their maker.