Browsing by Author "Lajarin-Encina, Aitor, advisor"
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Item 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 memberThe 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.Item Open Access One man's trash, is another woman's treasure(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Hamilton, Samantha, author; Lajarin-Encina, Aitor, advisor; Osborne, Erika, committee member; Ryan, Ajean, committee member; DeMirjyn, Maricela, committee memberKitsch and related aesthetic sensibilities have a history of being undervalued and deemed flashy, sentimental, and "low-class." Kitsch aesthetics inspire "cheap" emotions contrary to the sophistication and control associated with an educated audience. Rasquachismo supposes a working-class sensibility, highlighting the hierarchy of materials and that these materials exist within systems of power and value. My work explores these aesthetic sensibilities by acquiring imagery from inherited or low-value sources such as thrift shops and transforming the second-hand or discarded objects I find into new artistic objects that conceptually reflect the materials used. References to gender, labor, utility, and mass production are evoked in my work through the use of found objects as the ground for the painting of second-hand floral patterns.Item Open Access That which sees me: painting's unique capacity in an ambivalent age(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Price, Justin, author; Lajarin-Encina, Aitor, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Kissell, Kevin, committee member; Emami, Sanam, committee memberI use the medium of paint to express my interest in problems for which I do not have the language to express. Born from my obsessive and indecisive tendencies, these preoccupations must be attended to at a distance from myself, a skill paint is specific to accommodate. Paint functions as a corporeal engine of thought, a notion expressed by French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, showing no distinction between the mind as non-extended or the mind as body/matter. Using paint to address my own disposition of ambivalence, its own ambivalent qualities provide a nuanced context for these interrogations. Paint exists both as itself, color made tactile and concrete, and decidedly descriptive with its illusionistic capabilities. These oppositions also provide a unique perspective to the fluid nature of our modern world burdened by the violence of its systematic naming and control as theorized by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Paint is agile to speak of the implications to these ambivalent systems created in ordering our world. Secundino Hernández, Tomory Dodge, and Joshua Hagler are three artist who also deal with the medium of paint as a logic unto-itself. Like them, I explore the subtlety of ambivalence in search of a new constancy.