Fine & Performing Arts (FA) Division Submission Information
Megan Berner
Intermedia - School of Art & Art History
Daydreams
"Daydreams" is an animation that starts out with a small pencil line that grows into larger, more complicated representations, moving from a figure lying in the grass and transforming into a cloudscape, an undersea world, birds in flight, and other whimsical imaginings. As the title suggests, the video is about daydreaming and using one’s imagination. Daydreaming is also a metaphor for the process of creation. It starts out with a small, unformed idea and grows into something more. And it keeps on growing, transforming with each recycling, into something more, something new. Daydreams have the power to transform energy.
Jennifer Fawcett
Theater Arts Trigger - excerpts from a full length play
In September 2007, eleven theatre artists came together to create a play exploring the role of guns in the lives of Americans. While most plays are created in isolation by the playwright, Trigger has been born out of a collaborative process. Each person has contributed to both the content and the form, helping to structure the development of the work, to create characters, refine story lines, research specific populations and guide the creation process. Set in Iowa City, the play peaks into the lives of ordinary Americans including victims of gun violence, hunters, members of the military, children, and video gamers. Is there a disconnect between the action and consequences of pulling the trigger? Do you see a gun as a weapon or a tool? Are we safer armed? Do we need guns? Or maybe more importantly, do we want them? Trigger is an intimate look at a complex issue that affects us all.
Kelley Johnson
Music Transcendent Beethoven: The Late String Quartets in Paris (1827-1928)
In 1827, Beethoven's late quartets were among his least admired newly composed works. However, by the 1900's Beethoven's quartets were among the most frequently played and well know works in chamber music circles throughout Europe. Nationalist and Transcendentalist movements both in America and Europe found spiritual aspects in Beethoven's music that resonated the mythical and thus adopted Beethoven music as representational of their ideals. This paper focuses on the audience reception change in Paris and the dedicated performers who championed Beethoven through four generations from the Franco-Prussian war up to World War II. Many resources in this research especially on Lucien Capet are from the original French. This is a journey of taste from abhorrence to veneration and on to transcendence.
Elinathan Ohiomoba
Writers' Workshop A Keeper of Sheep
"A Keeper of Sheep" is part of a collection that grew out of my research into the life of Bernadette Soubirous. The piece is a modern retelling of the experience of visionary-hood.
Nicole Pietrantoni
Printmaking "Beautiful Garden," a series of works on paper using traditional & experimental printmaking & digital media
“The Beautiful Garden” is a series of prints inspired by living and traveling in a rural American landscape. I am interested in how a sense of place shapes the stories and myths that create our identity. As a person who has resided only in major cities or sprawling suburbs, my recent move to Iowa offers a renewed perspective of nature and landscape. Imagery of fields and farms are digitally printed on black paper; then, a new series of imagery is silkscreened using a bleach solution, which eats away the pigment of the black paper, revealing the underlying digital print. The prints resemble negatives of photographs at once developing as they are disintegrating. My artwork provides a forum for both mapmaking and map reading I am encoding data from my experiences (i.e., photographs and drawings of the countryside) while simultaneously decoding new information that can only emerge in the creative process (i.e., abstract forms, drips, and spills that occur from printing, painting, and bleaching). The works weave a narrative about memory, place, and way finding, as well as the tension between reality and fantasy, loss and gain, holding on and letting go.
Deon Kay
Cinema and Comparitive Literature Abby
Part of an ongoing experiment in narrative collage, Abby is made up of documentary components, autobiographical text, and fictional narration. Stories are written over by other stories that are in turn partially redacted, or hidden behind the video s disruptive physical form. They cohere in the arena of passion, where fairytales and childhood fantasies shape our desires; but, perhaps allegorically, the video s formal characteristics disrupt our viewing pleasure in order to produce a more active audience as several threads are spun. Subtle games play with each other, hide and comment on each other; subtle games whose rules become more and more perceptible and rewarding the more the film is seen, and the harder one works as a viewer.
Nicole Donnelly
Painting and Drawing Light Enough to Illuminate
I have been painting from the source of rock faces and ice, the seemingly unchanging and that which shifts its state all too familiarly. Although they have the ability to act in very similar ways, perhaps it is merely the human perception of time that holds these substances so far apart. Ice has the startling ability to shift state under negligible temperature change; we conceive of ice with an expectation. Yet the earth and rock can erode beneath our feet. When we presume to know the nature of something, subtle and significant changes often go unnoticed or are taken for granted. Perception of the natural world can in some ways be seen as analogous to the dynamics of relationships and to consciousness itself.
Jessica White
Printmaking and The Center for the Book The Bad Sparrow
The Bad Sparrow is a hand-printed, handmade scroll that offers a squirrel’s-eye view of going into battle. Due to quick judgment, deficiency in diplomacy, and a lack of awareness, the woodland creatures gather to wage war against each other. The reason for the war is anyone’s guess, including many of the animals choosing to fight. They come prepared, with their catapults and balloon bombs, with no intentions of retreating. But it’s only the beginning; the battle has yet to begin, and there’s still a chance that they’ll come to their senses.
Cristina Iorga
Printmaking Blend Of Emotions
My work in the past two years at the University of Iowa is quite different from my previous artwork. The present I live in is at times so overwhelming that my art pieces have started to integrate in compositions a multitude of elements--none of which were part of my previous work. Most of these forms are spread chaotically and each one of them expresses a certain feeling I had in the moment of its creation. Meeting my future husband opened another new perspective in my life and exposed me to Asian art, to which I wasn't familiar with before.
Before coming to Iowa I was (and still am) fascinated by the universe of a line and by the different types of effects I could create with it. Even though I was deeply immersed in the universe of a line, I always felt a strong inclination to use color. Exposure to the Indian culture (my husband is from India) made this desire for it even more ardent. My need for color has been finally fulfilled through my encounter with Monoprint. I feel that Monoprint is a very important step in my artistic development because it helps me to express myself in new and fascinating ways which I wasn't aware of before. The combination of print and monotype allows me to follow my strong inclinations---the universe of lines and color.
Maggie McKnight
English - Non-Fiction Writing Swingin': A Study in Gender and Identity
Swingin’ is a graphic narrative, a combination of text and image in the comix tradition. In the story, a lesbian narrator reflects on gender representation and tradition as she and her partner prepare for and attend the narrator s sister s wedding. She recounts the ways her gender expression has swung wildly over the years, from feminine to decidedly boyish and back again. As she participates in the heteronormative traditions of a conventional wedding, she is reminded of the irony that her own committed relationship goes widely unrecognized.
Jane Munksgaard
Communication Orlan and the Visibility of the Performative Body: Utilizing Publicity and Parody as Effective Tactics for Resistance
This paper explores the corporeal body as a site for radical feminist interpretation and resistance. Specifically, it examines performance artist Orlan and her project, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan. The project is composed of a series of twelve plastic surgeries during which the artist appropriated aspects of canonically celebrated Western paintings and sculptures. She marks the surgical act, as well as the results, performative. By performing what Butler would identify as a parodic double-inversion, Orlan uses contemporary surgical methods to achieve a series of standardized conceptions of beauty that collectively amass her grotesque appearance. This paper proposes that the publicity generated through Orlan’s tactical over-identification with conservative aesthetic ideals, by using her body as a site of improvisation and resistance, marks her politics as uniquely effective.
Andre Perry
English - Non-Fiction Writing Language and Other Weapons
Design essays re-map our preconceived notions about the different forms prose may take on the page. Through the use of formal constraints such as writing an essay in screenplay format or using the structural framework of legal document (like a divorce contract) design essays seek to package the author’s intellectual and emotional discoveries in progressive forms. It is my hope that such radical rethinking of the presentation and form of nonfiction prose will lead to new levels of intellectual and artistic insight for the reader. After all, if one of our goals is to understand life, then we must continually provide ourselves with new lenses through which to view it. My essay, Language and Other Weapons, addresses tensions between African-American identity and sexuality in American culture. I filter these ideas through a design essay that employs standard prose, elements of screenwriting, email writing, and teleplay writing.
Christopher Renaud
Cinema and Comparative Literture A Certain Frisson
Frisson - A moment of intense excitement; a shudder; an emotional thrill. From the Latin frigere, “to be cold”; and the French friçon, “a trembling”.
Ryan VanMeter
English - Non-Fiction Writing Specimen
I wrote Specimen out of a genuine need to discover answers. Quite simply, I had never understood why, at the age of thirteen, I suddenly developed a nearly paralyzing fear of being abducted by aliens. In this essay, I hope to demonstrate that the narrator’s realization of his own difference from his peers begins to disrupt all areas of his life at school and home. Parents are to be our protectors from the “dangers” we face as children; but what happens when the child feels so afraid about the truth in himself that he cannot ask for protection?
Contact Division Head
Tim Gupton
Fine & Performing Arts/Humanities Division
Spanish & Portuguese timothy-gupton@uiowa.edu
