Art Department

Art as a tool for escape is the predominant motive for my own art practice. In reflecting on my desires to escape and the methods I use to do so I have created this Escapism manifesto to guide future artists in their quest to escape their own reality in favor of a curator utopia of playing and creation. In studying many other artists, we can see this sentiment is already prevalent and utilized among artists. Culminating from this research and practice comes my installation, Yaya’s Friends.

This thesis weaves together personal influence and knowledge sharing by exploring the impact my grandmother has made on my life and art practice. I discuss our shared interests such as knitting, cooking, and sharing stories while documenting her life story and the life she built for our family in her home. Through this lens, I abstract and amplify the ways in which we as individuals are impacted and influenced by craft, culture, and place-making as a way of creating collective memory. The final artwork, titled All That is Left of Me is You, explores how these types of exchanges shape who we are as individuals through the sharing and embracing of knowledge and personal practice.I use Janet Donohoe’s argument from her book Remembering Places: A Phenomenological Study of the Relationship Between Memory and Place and Jada- Amina Harvey, Noa Hines, and Sebastien Pierre in their writing “Grandmother’s House: The Black Radical Tradition of Collecting” to frame my understanding of the impact of place and personhood on ourselves and those around us throughout our lives. Personal influence is used to establish the final medium of the finished work, a knitted fiber-arts installation, as well as the larger concept that the artwork conveys: the idea of interconnectedness and the creation of networks through exchange. I support the method of the finished artwork All That is Left of Me is You through the writing of David Rosand in his book Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation and his understanding of drawing as a way to recognize agency and identity through mark-making and surface design. My creative work All That is Left of Me is You utilizes the medium of knitting as an extension of this large concept, using form, color and display to further support the idea of interconnectedness.Knowledge is shared across relationships and through generations, shaping the ways in which we navigate the world with the skills and awareness that we grow over time through strengthening relationships. All That is Left of Me is You emphasizes the ways in which we are impacted by and impact those around us.

In this thesis, I look at to dyke world-making as an endless, creative process of living. My forms of study follow the everyday practices through which these worlds are constituted. I take writing, making, and being with others as vital forms of play and study. In the first chapter, I discuss transient social encounters, such as glances. I look at these as both historical and contemporary forms of dyke sociality that adapt and find joy in the face of political, social, and cultural currents that seek control through processes of identification. I provide some local context about how this shows up in Portland and trace a brief history of the word “dyke”. In chapter two, I look at dyke domestic spaces and how they develop when the only popular models of homes and families follow a normative, heterosexual script. Turning to works of Sharon Hayes and Catherine Opie in which they used road trips as sites for making art I think through Fred Moten and Stephano Harney’s concept of homelessness. I discuss how homelessness relates to practices of sharing and opening homes, challenging the notion of the home as an impermeable or private space. The third chapter centers on relating with as well as creating selves and worlds with other beings and things. I argue that dyke bodies and worlds find new shape in conversation with objects, looking at stories from friends and photos by Tessa Boffin. I end describing my process of making art with others for this thesis.

My name is Sidney Fong. I am a third generation Chinese American woman trying to better define my cultural identity and explore my relationship with my cultural heritage living in the United States. I explore my cultural identity by first looking to Chinese and American cuisines that resonate with me. These cuisines are rooted in my family’s home cooking, and the different restaurants and grocery stores that define the social landscape of Sacramento, California, where I was born and raised. I used clay hand building methods to create lidded bowls and cups that were not only physically imbued with my identity through my finger impressions, but also all my thoughts and energy as I listened to Cheuk Kwan’s book Have You Eaten Yet?: Stories from Chinese Restaurants Around the World. He shares his exploration of Chinese restaurants located outside of China and the United States, which opened my eyes to the resiliency of these small restaurant owners who are ethnically Chinese but also proudly associate themselves with the country they live in. I used the medium of Da Bin Lou (hot pot) to engage my hand-built ceramic plate ware in an interactive installation with my friends. Da Bin Lou is a food medium that is rooted in my family gatherings at home during winter, but I have realized the ingredients and the soup base is dependent on each household’s preferences. The Da Bin Lou dinner and ceramic ware reflect on my family’s traditions and authentic Chinese influences, but most importantly represent my approach to further understanding my cultural identity.

This is a thesis about abstraction and its origins and affect. There are some oil paintings on woven surfaces, and a smooth glass surface. In the text there are three chapters each dedicated to the three surfaces of the space behind the eyes, the painted surface, and the electromagnetic screen surface. Surface is the point of connection between the ideas and sources that make up the written thesis. The written work serves as a skin for the body of paintings. Within the painted space symbolic codes make up its layered surface. An encompassing, unifying reality is presented through the surface; its world emerges through the synthesis of many layers. The surface serves as a vehicle, as a screen does, for the image. Like a liquid crystal display (LCD screen), or the layers of the retina, the layers of paint act in unison to bring about the entire image.

In this work, I catalog my art practice and corresponding research centered around three tenets: magic lanterns, interference, and grief.My research of magic lanterns is rooted in anticolonial analysis of their operations to transpose and manipulate information across space, specifically in its inception in the Baroque period and the way that it was received by European audiences in the Victorian period. I take a critical view of the Catholic institution that propagated them so extensively, and connect their mode of oppressive media to my own experience with grief.Mechanistically, I deal with grief by repeatedly recreating parts of myself that represent what I’ve lost. That repetition is obsessive, and in these self-similar reiterations, the larger-scale changes and patterns are what is isolated, cherished, and displayed. This process is best expressed with the operation of interference and moiré, which I discuss both scientifically and experientially. I use the technique of moiré extensively in my paintings, treating them as analog generative works. I discuss as a whole my art practice, obsessive nature, religious motivations, and most centrally, my personal process of coping and healing from personal loss through a repetitive and reproductive artistic process.

The clown, as a social phenomenon, has appeared in many cultures in many different forms. However, ‘clowning’ fundamentally maintains the same elements, humor that defies social norms with a license that permits just about anything. Clowns can provide more than humorous entertainment; they also have license for social and political critique. They exist in a liminal space, because of their position to critique society while existing as actor in said society.In my thesis I trace a history of clowns that moved from India, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire into Europe as Commedia dell’ Arte. Once in Europe I discuss the various characters that appeared in theaters of different countries; the Pierrot and Clown as we currently recognize them. As the Circus moved across the Atlantic, so did the clowns from Europe. The American clowns however took on distinctly different appearance to their European counterparts due to proximity to another popular performance in the 19th century, Minstrel shows.For my thesis I made two clowns, a Pierrot and a Circus clown. These clowns perform certain tasks based on the power dynamic these clowns would have in a performance. My research also influenced the physical decorations of these clowns as well.I started this research project to better understand contemporary fears of clowns. I found multiple representations of clowns that undermined their trust with the audience, however these representations only perpetuated a shared distain rather than cause.

Monsters and Miracles is a 48-page anthology of three short supernatural comics, each of which explores a particular aspect of the medieval period. All three are digitally illustrated using a style influenced by illuminated manuscripts and other medieval art, such as bestiaries, tapestries, and reliquaries. As well as drawing the individual comics, I also designed and printed the anthology in a physical book form. The first story in the anthology, “The Shape of the Locusts,” is a nine-page essay-comic about the design of locusts in medieval illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts, and how that design reflects broader trends in medieval art. The second story, “The Walking Reliquary,” is a 16-page fiction comic about a reanimated corpse meeting an alchemist in a bustling late-medieval city. Its narrative stems from research into the medieval cult of relics and contemporary theological discourse on the soul after death. The final story, “The Two Great Marvels,” is a four-page comic adaptation of an extract from the 14-century travelogue The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, in which Mandeville discusses two plant-animal hybrids that he had encountered in his travels.Many modern works set in the medieval period, especially genre fiction, set their stories in a pseudo-medieval fantasy world that stems from modern mythologizations of the era. The goal for this thesis was to create several stories from a historical perspective that draw their fantastical elements from heavy research into actual medieval art and literature. In this written portion of my thesis, I discuss the research that should be self-evident in the comic. The first two chapters center around the overall concept and form of the anthology, and the last three are page-by-page analyses of each comic.

Art historical and psychoanalytic research reveals a lot about the background workings of my mind as I made this series. First, I explore the way my subconscious has been allowed to work in the making of this thesis. Then, I discuss the concept of the sublime and the emotional effect of distorted selfportraits before taking an in depth look at the literature around beheadings in art and culture. Finally, the research is synthesized to broadly assign the paintings meanings.

In this art-biology interdisciplinary thesis project, I explored how art-making and field and lab practices can influence, complement and benefit each other. The biology side of this project focused on testing new DNA markers to differentiate two white oak species that coexist in Portland parks and natural areas, the native Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana) and non-native English oak (Quercus robur), as well as trying to identify potential hybrids in the area. The existence of Q. robur and the putative hybrids has been a concern for conservation ecologists in Portland. I tested three genes identified by previous studies in oak phylogenies as candidate markers and used existing markers to genotype Quercus individuals from Portland natural areas that were expected to be Q. garryana. While none of the candidate genes I tested could serve as good markers, my genotyping result performed with existing markers on the newly sampled individuals revealed a population of unexpected Q. robur in the Baltimore Woods area in north Portland.Beside lab work, I also researched both the evolutionary journey and cultural significance of the two oak species. While Q. robur is brought to PNW from Europe by the settlers, on an evolutionary level, the common ancestor of the two species first arrived in North America and the Q. robur lineage then traveled to Europe about 20 million years ago. The bidirectionality of the evolutionary and anthropogenic journeys of the two oaks inspired me to connect my lab work to the history of the local communities in the PNW and further expand it to a planetary scale. With this in mind, I constructed a white oak handcase that holds ceramic plates with leaf prints, collected oak branches and a booklet with oak gall ink writings. This installation serves as an artificial reconstruction of the body of an oak tree and a representation of my own experience of knowledge-making in this thesis project. In constructing this art piece, I also broadly explored the topics of colonial botany, contemporary practices that bring together art and biology, and the relationship between form and material in art-making.