Mountain Scholar :: Browsing by Author "Harrow, Del, committee member"

Browsing by Author "Harrow, Del, committee member"

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Open Access
A thing of things: Critter comfort
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Hagerman, Haley Leilani, author; Plastini, Johnny, advisor; Reip, Dave, committee member; Moore, Emily, committee member; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
This paper explores physical and theoretical layers behind the thesis show Critter Comfort which ultimately aims to immerse and enrapture the viewer in overwhelming giving. Split into four parts, the paper starts with the first two sections give with a more empirical mindset of the installation through exploring the situation of a museum setting, and the art thing(s) on display. Parts three and four deal with the intangible of what goes into creating art with tension, and the quintessential part beauty plays on a surface and metaphysical level. Ultimately this paper is an indulgent explanation of exactly why I made the type of installation I did for my thesis capstone show: to create and share what I find beautiful.
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Acceleration
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Witthohn, Alec, author; Ausubel, Ramona, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
Acceleration is a novel following a week of events in the life of Cameron Noh, a model from New York City who travels to Milan for fashion week as labor tensions among transit workers boil in the background. He meets with his agent, Simone, and a wealth of other characters as he debates whether or not to move to Paris. This work is written in the style of the weak novel, as described by Lucy Ives in her article "The Weak Novel," publish in the Baffler 2022. Its content is, more or less, plotless, filled with symbols such as snails, eyes, clothes, darkness and light as Cameron meanders from fashion shows to after-parties, in a kind of hedonic depression, searching for something that might fulfill him. Acceleration is also a comment on capitalist consumption and the culture that surrounds it, the way it generates this searching in all of us under capitalist rule. Eventually, the situation with the transit workers becomes untenable, resulting in what might be an act of terrorism focused on Milan's La Scala Theater.
Open Access
Acts of emergence
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) LaBarre, Sarah E., author; Lundberg, Thomas, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member; Kneller, Jane, committee member; Ryan, Ajean, committee member
In my thesis installation Acts of Emergence, impressions of memory and past experiences emerge from canvas through layers of stain and stitch. Each piece suggests a fragment of memory--real and imagined. Several dozen fragmented units represent a mapping of memory through space, as if each component manifests pieces of a moment in time, flowing across the wall. The format of this piece presents a kind of disjointed timeline that contains partial records of an experience. The work as a whole is scattered across and floating away from the wall, creating a fragmented composition made up of bits of densely stitched canvas. Viewed more closely, each fragment itself becomes a composition. Stains suggest the presence of memories left behind. Each piece in this panorama holds a moment; together the units present a kind of suspended place or moment in time. These fragments appear to travel across the wall, emerging from my memory and stained with references to a history, not unlike paintings made by the Mexica people of Pre-Hispanic Mexico, who conceived time and space as intrinsically linked. I draw much inspiration from the human body's capacity to convey many emotions. The dancing figures in my work are anonymous: each with their own identity, yet not seen as anyone in particular. They are frozen in specific moments, offering a view of that moment as well. Together, suspended figures plot multiple moments within this spreading map of memory.
Open Access
Agency of ecological landscapes through paintings of the American West
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Hinkelman, Adam, author; Osborne, Erika, advisor; Lajarin-Encina, Aitor, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member; Moore, Emily, committee member; Bowser, Gillian, committee member
The lineage of American landscape paintings invokes a hierarchical structure cresting with humankind and the divine. This evokes problematic relational dynamics between humanity and the natural world which is exacerbated by Anthropocentric activity. Traditionally, early western landscape artists illustrated nature as a sublime force displayed as vast expanses of "untamed" wilderness, ethereal mountain peaks, fertile valleys, and steaming brooks. Alongside colonial settlements, paintings effectively lured eager European Americans to claim land through western expansion. To promote mutualistic bonds between humans and nature and contribute towards a new decolonial ecology, my thesis instills agency to natural landscapes by exploring a synthesis between generational historicity to place, non-anthropocentric phenomenology through kinship, and a painting process enriched by the practice of ultra distance trail running. More specifically, my paintings recognize the innate agency of trees, mountains, and glaciers through non-human centric perspectives across time scales, spatial dimensions, and non-observable light wave spectrums. This invites observers to identify a kinship with nature from non-anthropocentric grounding.
Open Access
Formal complications
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Schweiger, Alec, author; Bates, Haley, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member; Moore, Emily, committee member; Malinin, Laura, committee member
This thesis is concerned with the experiential understanding of the everyday-tactile environment. From public to private, infrastructure to daily-use objects, the things that exist in the constructed environment around me compel my investigations of material, form, and function. Specifically, how these qualities work in concert to inspire associations of purpose and value. Inhabiting a variety of formats from jewelry to sculpture to installation, the work allows me the space to pose questions about what makes an object important, and how that may be determined. The responsive decisions I make are informed by my experience with, and a sensitivity towards, materials and objects associated with packaging, adornment, domesticity, and industry.
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Little mercy
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Walter, Robin, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member
Little Mercy is an exercise in interrogating the natural and exploring the intimately personal. Set in a cabin in the foothills of the Bighorns of Wyoming, the manuscript hopes to reach towards the universal through attending to the particular. This work engages the human and more-than-human worlds as equal partners in pursuing otherwise inaccessible truths. Engaging in multitude of forms derived from a variety of poetic traditions, Little Mercy hopes foremost to make its own language anew. The ethic of this work is grounded in a belief in the reciprocity of attention, attunement, and care.
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Lush the cradle
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Macintyre, Kristin, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
Lush the Cradle posits a mind for its speaker. In a formal sense, the collection is a mind. It cycles through six different logics, each section wholly its own and each, too, deeply connected to the others. Respectively, the sections are concerned with dream, memory, the addicted or endangered mind, the mind reborn, the desiring mind, and vision (of the prophetic kind). In each section, the poems relocate the I, pull it from the depths of itself further into the world. In order to recover, by which I mean in order to be, the I must find itself again beneath the sky. It must be warmed, it must be nourished there. It must be a part of the whole. In order to achieve this, the collection cycles through patterns, borrows images across and throughout its poems, and uses the line as a device to think, to reveal, and to elicit wonder.
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Mechanisms light and miraculous
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Schonning, Daniel, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille T., advisor; Fletcher, Harrison Candelaria, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
Mechanisms Light and Miraculous is a work concerned with form. From abecedarians to long stretches of terza rima, to the innovated "Little Box," each poem in the collection is beholden to a set of constraints that intimately informs the direction in which it grows. These containers are all derived, in varied ways, from the alphabet and the base unit of the letter. This gesture owes its metaphysical spine to such texts as the Sefer Yetzirah, which offers—in a Jewish mystic framework—a precise and profound relationship between the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and world that they inhabit. In all its component pieces, Mechanisms Light and Miraculous aims to apprentice its poems to the essential medium of letters, to listen to and learn from the systems and symmetries found therein. Yellowred, though similar in some respects, operates via utterly different terms. Yellowred, to borrow from the language of the work itself, is concerned with "the cold white distance between object and eye," or—perhaps more so—the distance between eye and mind, between mind and that object made anew. Before the word for "orange," it was not a color unto itself except in the imagination. Before the word for "sky" or "soul" or "self," Yellowred might posit, those things likewise did not exist—there was only the amalgamated whole. This manuscript means to understand and deconstruct those basest forms of making.
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Mosaic disturbance
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Brant, Cedar, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member; Cooperman, Matthew, committee member
In ecology, the most resilient landscapes are ones that experience a mosaic of disturbance. This means small swaths of windfall, wildfire, and beetle kill across a landscape that create a patchwork of forest dynamics. A mosaic of disturbance increases diversity, making the land more resilient to larger, potentially-catastrophic disturbance. These poems I trace the lineages of damage in the world and in the individual. What kinds of damage open us to the world in ways that become essential to our understanding of ourselves and others? These lines often lead back to an idea of home. These poems ask how one makes a home, even as those places—physical, emotional, ecological—are always in a mosaic of damage and change. These poems accrue as an inventory, using science, myth, and symbol as organizational nets to trace patterns of disturbance and regeneration across the boundaries between self and the rest of the world.
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Musician (lost at sea)
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Kneisley, John, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
In Musician (Lost at Sea), I am trying to understand poetry as a mode of caregiving and companionship for those crossing over from life to death. Inspired by the Ancient Greek role of the psychopomp – a mythic guide accompanying souls to the afterlife – my poems attempt both to show and to traverse the mysterious boundary between life and whatever might follow. In doing so, rather than considering death only as an occasion for grief or loss (yet no less removed from them), my poems allow death the potential to be warm, accompanied, and a space that could give way to new life. Almost all of my poems cannot help but establish themselves in the natural world: a place where death and life are so clear in their conjunction, the way a forest fire's ashes feed new plants, or the way a rabbit's body sustains an owl. Ultimately, these poems might make a seemingly impossible claim, as the Greek philosopher Thales first did, that life and death are strangely the same thing, and that to die might also be an opportunity for the soul, or other forms of life, to continue to live or grow. The speaker of many of these poems bears witness to the transitional space between life and death, observing those close to dying or already dead. From the collection's onset, the poems remain sensitive to this space's mystery, careful not to prescribe death with any one outcome, offering instead companionship and thought to the rich change occurring. In the opening poem/prelude, "Lost Graveyard in the Appalachians," the speaker walks among gravestones made illegible with age, lichen and moss growing over their names, before saying "this place / seems no longer / for my knowing." These lines, rather than simply dismissing a human way of knowing, open up both spiritual and natural possibilities for knowing the dead, which the collection will carry forward. "This place" might not be for "my knowing," but perhaps for the lichen's instead, or perhaps also for the psychopomp guiding those buried underground elsewhere ("each grave that vanishes / vanishes / as if opening / somewhere"). The collection creates space for the speaker, the reader, and even more deeply, each poem, to be just such a psychopomp: a figure that accompanies the dead on this journey elsewhere, and in doing so, gives care. Many of the poems adopt the second person "you," a pronoun that is both self-referential of the speaker and also inviting of the reader to take part in witnessing or walking with the dead. This "you" carries a strange intimacy, allowing empathy for an occasion that is universal and familiar (death) while also one that is completely unknowable to the living. The poems give the reader close access to this occasion and to the imaginative spaces beyond it, guiding them through various beings' deaths while maintaining the same careful and warm presence befitting a caregiver. Grief and loss are no less aspects of death here, as they always are, and yet they are understood more as parts of a larger journeying process, one that affects the dead just as much as the living who feel their absence. In the poem "Planting a Future Elegy in a Holloway," for example, the "you" allows both the speaker and reader to step into an imagined landscape and manner of grieving. The speaker finds themselves in a holloway, a woodland road caved in from its surrounding land, circular in shape, formed from erosion and centuries of travel. In planting a "future elegy," "you" have come to try to "orient a grief / you have not found / a language for / yet hold / and press / in older earth," the holloway providing an ancient space with which to shelter a poem that does not know its specific purpose yet, but does know that it will grieve. To plant a future elegy here, among "an exposure of roots, / moss, and quiet / mushrooms," a "rabbit's / bones," and "a worm / looping in and out / of loam" signals, like "Lost Graveyard in the Appalachians," a passing of understanding to the natural world, the land itself perhaps a more fitting agent for knowing and holding the dead. Further, by appearing at the collection's beginning, this poem suggests that the future elegy, perhaps a metaphor for understanding grief and death in general, bears out as the book progresses: an undeveloped seed that will take root in landscape, silence, and antiquity, as subsequent poems will reflect. In terms of subject matter, these poems, most of which adopt a narrative quality in describing a death or those already dead, range from the ancient to the contemporary. This variance accentuates the collection's larger motion – that of moving across narratives as a psychopomp moves alongside the dead – eventually transcending time and space despite frequently relying on Greek mythology. As the book moves, we move alongside figures like Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple from Ovid's Metamorphoses who turn into trees; a singing fisherman who drowns at sea, two ants carrying the dead body of another ant, Orpheus's head floating down a river, patients at an Alzheimer's unit mourning their daughter, an astronomer buried on another planet, and still others. These deaths, despite being distinct, each demonstrate a continuation of a life in one way or another, the poems acting as psychopomps in carrying the souls they house elsewhere. What happens after death may still be unknowable, but the poems at least hold that death is more a transition than a fixed end point, even if that transition is a human decomposing underground while providing nutrients to grow a flower. A much smaller group of poems, placed throughout the collection, use the first person "I" to speak from the point of view of the dead. These persona poems, most of which are titled "Gravewhisper," allow the reader intimate, albeit imagined, access to voices beyond the grave. The language and syntax of these short poems (the word "whisper" capturing both their quietness and brevity), are purposefully unconventional, suggesting that speech and language, even though decipherable, function differently in the afterlife. These "Gravewhisper" poems each appear directly after more traditional narrative poems featuring a death (from which stems the "I's" identity), the proximity allowing for the living and the dead to be in conversation with one another, even though neither may know they are doing so from their vantage point. Two related poems, each titled "Whispergrave," further accentuate language that might befit the afterlife, each of them adjusted to the right margin rather than the left, formally reflecting a "Gravewhisper" on the opposite page. Together, these poems invite the reader into acts of deep listening, bringing them closer to wherever the dead may now reside, and attuning them to how a being might speak after they have died. Although different from the "Gravewhisper" poems, there is a similar strand of communication to be found in the realm of dreaming and in the unconscious mind throughout the manuscript. In the poems "Experiment in Dreaming" and "The Obsolescent Clocks," for example, the speaker (or a "you") enters dreams in which strangers, both realistic and fantastical, speak about death. In the first case, "you" dream of a fishing village, and meet a peddler selling clay vessels by the sea who mentions a drowned bird. In the second, "you" dream of an abandoned clock shop where clocks can speak, each broken and spinning according to its own, chaotic time, and labeled with the identity of someone who has died ("A grandfather clock is named / 'musician lost at sea' / while a watch, spinning violently / is 'a burned ash tree'"). Both poems suggest, by way of their playfulness in attempting dream-like thought patterns, that there is something about the unconscious mind that bring us closer to death (or to the dead), even while temporarily asleep. The space of a dream might then also be a realm in which the psychopomp can thrive, each dream perhaps a kind of spirit guide in itself, journeying us elsewhere, where language, image, and narrative operate on a level buried below our normal span of thinking. Finally, my collection's title, Musician (Lost at Sea), taken from the line referenced above in "The Obsolescent Clocks," acknowledges these layers of movement between life and death the psychopomp traverses. The title can read like an epitaph thanks to the parentheses, naming a musician and their cause of death, allowing us to conceive of the collection itself as a kind of grave marker for one who has passed into an afterlife. The word "musician," beyond denoting a musical occupation, perhaps more simply alerts us to a role being played, the poetic spirit behind the collection able to function as a musician telling a story (or many stories), adrift in uncharted waters of a kind (the idea of imagining an afterlife). Perhaps the psychopomp, at once book, speaker, and reader, is a kind of musician too (or muse), guiding us toward a poetic, and therefore musical, understanding of the dead, and what it might mean to accompany them elsewhere, a place that cannot help but be "lost" because of its intrinsic unknowability.
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"Of a vale"
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Rice, Kylan, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member
Of a Vale uses the form of the poetic Bildungsroman to account for the formation of a poetic and a subjectivity, all while staying aware of the stakes, limits, and implications of the generic framework that it operates within, as well as the ways that all frameworks become generic, genetic. In five parts, each containing narratives of the development of a speaking subject, of a poetic consciousness, and of an erotogenic body, this manuscript tries to engage with and subvert mythic accounts of the "I." As Dan Beachy-Quick once noted of Of a Vale, this book traces "a coming into consciousness in the medium of that consciousness." Becoming conscious of its medium, this book takes the media of consciousness to be pre-given; that is, it takes the media of consciousness to be the word, the world, and the body. Each of these entities is constructive of, but wholly exterior to, the Self. Thus, the medium of consciousness lies outside the consciousness. Here, in Of a Vale, I seek some way to think my way back into feeling, back into a "global nonverbal experience." Here, I try to think past thinking. I try to hold out a living hand. I try to hold a living hand.
Open Access
Plant growth under photovoltaic arrays of varying transparencies – a study of plant response to light and shadow in agrivoltaic systems
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Hickey, Thomas, author; Bousselot, Jennifer, advisor; Uchanski, Mark, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member
Amidst the rising global pressures put on the interdependent systems in the food, energy, and water nexus, this document highlights the potential for systems-based solutions at the intersection of food cultivation, ecosystem services, and energy production in urban and rural environments. Agrivoltaics (APV) is a land-use model that enables simultaneous cultivation of food crops and electricity generation on the same plot of land. Agrivoltaic systems integrate solar photovoltaic (PV) energy generation with agricultural operations, maximizing the utilization of solar energy. This approach has gained significant research interest in the United States with scalable implementation is on the horizon. Research efforts at Colorado State University (CSU) aim to advance the understanding of plant responses to various shade conditions under PV arrays, benefiting stakeholders in agriculture, solar energy industries, policymakers, and governmental agencies. In particular, agrivoltaic research conducted at CSU's Horticulture and Landscape Architecture (HLA) department has focused on open field specialty crops and native pollinator plant species while documenting the overarching light and temperature growing environment. A replicated 2-year crop trial was conducted at the open field test site, comparing crop yield and growing conditions under three different PV module types with varying transparencies to traditional full sun production. Statistical analysis revealed a reduction in squash yield directly under the PV panels while no significant differences in yield for bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, lettuce and tomatoes growing north and south of the arrays. In a separate study, a simulated green roof structure was constructed around an existing PV array at CSU's Foothills Campus to explore the feasibility of rooftop agrivoltaics. A one-year study of six native pollinator plant species was conducted to assess differences in establishment, survivability, growth index, and growing conditions between full sun and PV shade environments. Overall, there were no statistically significant differences in mean Plant Growth Index (PGI) throughout the establishment season, however, notable variations in overwinter survivability were observed. In both studies the PV modules moderated the environment, resulting in lower maximum daytime ambient temperatures and even greater reduction in soil temperature throughout the growing season. Light levels are reduced under all PV module types with the least reduction under semi-transparent modules. Variations in growing conditions in these APV systems indicate the need for further research to optimize PV systems in order to maximize energy production and plant vitality.
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Skinned
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Ramos, Yusnavy, author; Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Levy, EJ, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member
"Skinned," is a collection of creative nonfiction essays that circle around what it means to love. Through the examination of Psychology findings, color, and masks that take on many forms, the pieces in this collection focus on the narrator's search for a happy ending and delve into experiences that often look and feel like love, but ultimately are not what she seeks. Through a combination of flash nonfiction and longer essays, the collection moves toward renegotiation as the narrator attempts to navigate the world, her family, and the ideas about love that she carries with her, both knowingly and unknowingly.
Open Access
Subliminal recognition
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) McGee, Mike, author; Bates, Haley, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member; Kneller, Jane, committee member; Tornatzky, Cyane, committee member
In the making of Subliminal Recognition I strove to create a work of art that will engage an attentive viewer and facilitate a contemplative experience. The writing in the following pages provides background information regarding the path of exploration that led me to the ideas and processes of its creation. It is designed as a resource to facilitate both an appreciation of this work and an understanding of my intentions as an artist.
Open Access
Surfaces of growth and decay, beauty and repulsion: addressing the abject and the sublime through drawings of the natural world
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Scheck, Naomi, author; Kokoska, Mary-Ann, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Ryan, Ajean, committee member; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member; Rickard, Kathryn, committee member
My artwork has largely been influenced by my understanding of the natural world as being in constant flux. Through my drawings I explore natural life processes that are both beautiful and destructive, addressing growth and decay. I seek to present a visual and sensory experience that generates emotions of awe and imagination, but also challenges and confronts idealized views about life and natural processes. My intentions are similar with those of abjection, which occurs when that which is normally ignored, unacknowledged, or uncomfortable is exposed. I work with tensions between beauty and ugliness in my artworks in order to address these ideas. My drawings work on a microscopic and macroscopic scale, which addresses relationships between intimacy and distance. I work with fine detail on large pieces of paper, so the drawings are viewed both from up close and from afar. At a distance the drawings look like organic formations or topographies, but up close, the detail and volume of marks become prominent. Obsessive accumulation is also important; the multitude of various marks cannot be counted or comprehended, which references the notion of the sublime. The various elements of the drawings work together to create the feeling of an amorphous entity in the midst of uncertainty and change.
Open Access
Synthetic inquiry of four-letter words
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Young, Amy Denise, author; Tornatzky, Cyane, advisor; Bukowski, Kristen, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member; Taylor-Massey, Julie, committee member
Four-letter words bear a few of the more intense emotional descriptors in the English language: love, hate, lust, and envy. My thesis series focuses on love but explores each of these four-letter words to display the complexity of human emotion. Each artwork in the series can be thematically categorized using love in relation to the dynamics of friendships, family, romance, or self. My thesis works reinterpret my experiences with themes of love and other four-letter words as an adolescent. The weavings depict and challenge rites of passage in American traditions and practices. Through weaving and reconstruction of items acquired in second-hand stores, I investigate human development and my own identity. The synthetic items found in thrift stores are manipulated to create factitious representations of my experiences and fantasies. In the safety of my studio and at the comfort of the loom, I inquire how these four-letter words shape and impact the recollection of my life up to this point. In this paper, my practice is detailed in two segments: Form and Themes. Form illustrates the physical labor of my studio practice which involves second-hand shopping, collage, weaving, and material-based processes. The theme segment relays the conceptual research that supports the artworks. Youth, love, and diversity are analyzed as linked themes through the lens of academia and cinema. Synthetic Inquiry of Four-Letter Words exhibits structures of interwoven thread, material, experiential information and investigation of identity.
Open Access
Systems of uncertainty: acting and undergoing
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Faherty, Lauren, author; Faris, Suzanne, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member; Moore, Emily, committee member; Kissell, Kevin, committee member
For most of my life, I have sought to understand how systems within the body function and engage with one another — how a healthy and organized structure can undergo rapid deterioration stemming from networks failing to communicate properly. The body is supported by an abundance of systems that are introduced to aging, disease and other biological effects throughout our lifespan. The transformation that takes place in the physical self when introduced to a biological disruption is the basis of my body of work Acting and Undergoing. The confrontation of my body's mortality was spurred by my family's genetic predisposition to autoimmune diseases. The organized structure of systems in our bodies lacks the security or stability many people enjoy. In my sculpture, Acting/Undergoing, thin, precarious wood structures work to support plush fabric pieces that are actively overtaken by black forms. Viewers looking at my unpredictable structures are confronted with their own bodily relationships — as one that is intimately familiar yet shrouded by the unknown.
Open Access
The boundaries of experience
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Price, Patrick, author; Faris, Suzanne, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member; Dineen, Mark, committee member; Soler Gallego, Silvia, committee member
As I make my way through the world, I rely on my senses to inform me of the things and events around me that allow me to continue living and growing as a human being. I am keenly aware of myself as a living human consciousness that appears to inhabit a body. My mind is the center of this being, and my body and the senses it employs are the interface between this being within, and the reality without. My artwork explores the boundary between these worlds and how it gives shape to reality. With a focus on history, culture, and science, and how they affect identity, my research investigates the way these factors inform the creative act of being in the world. The sculptural objects and images I create attempt to reveal answers to the questions my artistic practice revolves around. My work casting and fabricating objects and then placing them in specific contexts challenges the frameworks of collective and individual world-view constructs by revealing them for what they are. Material and landscape, objects and space, create harmonious or discordant relationships that aim to question what a culture can take as certainty. The trajectory of this body of work has led to my thesis The Veil of Isis, which through metaphor and allusion, points to the limits of what our senses can tell us about reality.
Open Access
The space between: cognition, constructs, and contemplation
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Guntren, Anthony, author; Faris, Suzanne, advisor; Harrow, Del, committee member; Kneller, Jane, committee member; Lundberg, Thomas, committee member
I frequently ponder the buzz that surrounds a person at any given moment in a day. Stopped at a traffic light, I gaze around at other people in their cars and think of all of the experiences that have brought this group of humans to the same point, waiting for the light to turn. These brief moments of simultaneity--these intersections of individual experiences, environments, and objects--are wonderful features of being alive; the ability to contemplate these brief moments is uniquely human. As well as offering critical analysis of five separate sculptures, this paper delineates the conceptual framework, artistic influences, material considerations, and compositional choices as it relates to the creation of sculptural body of work titled Cognition, Constructs, and Contemplation. The forms presented in this body of work attempt to reconcile ideas of "cognition" in visual form by abstracting isolated units of complex neurological systems that govern the transmission of thoughts, memories, and emotions. These sculptures are composed into naturalistic constructs that draw inspiration from cyclical systems found in both the natural world as well as the manmade. My intention is to evoke contemplation on the unseen forces found in the space inside and between living entities, and in the objects and landscapes that surround them. The space between bodies contains an unknown energy that pulses with the cognitive output of all living creatures.
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Turnskin
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Bright, Hannah, author; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Harrow, Del, committee member; Bunn, David, committee member
Turnskin is a monstrous exploration in human ferality. A true fairytale about a woman or a wolf or a girl nosing toward the wilderness within the self, it wonders at how to be both human and animal, imagined and real, alive all the way and all at once. Through tender reconciliation of the child and adult self, the project essays toward truth through dream, childscape imagination, the faerie, and the speculative. The story roots in hybridity—of self, genre, form, truth, time and word; and seeks toward Metanonfiction—an inquiry of what a human body can do with a story, and what story does in turn with the mammalian body. Hybridity is enacted in the intersections between poetry and prose at the level of the letter, word, sentence, paragraph, piece, and cohesive sensibility; in pressing the boundaries between what is 'real' and 'fantastical' by blending the conventions and tropes of fairytale and memoir; and in pushing against narrative time and logic through mutual influence of the past, present, and future on one another. Informed by studies in animal science, anthropology, fairytales, poetry, art, and creative nonfiction, the project seeks to expose the sinister implications of what we understand to be real/fixed and imagined/fluid and aspires to converse with the work of Angela Carter, Jenny Boully, Maggie Nelson, Sarah Shun Lien Bynum, Helen Oyeyemi and Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, amongst others. In wondering what it means to be a human animal that can both construct our experience out of story and also live it in the nostrils, nerves, pupils of the felt sense, this true story investigates how to unstory—at the level of the tooth, the feather, the bone, what it means to actually makebelieve.