RGB11: RISD Grad Book 2011

RI SD GRAD BOOK 2 01 1

RGB 11

graduate student alliance executive board

Arianne Gelardin LDAR ’11, RISD Grad Book 2011 Editor Jason Huff D+M ’11, President Scott MacDonald LDAR ’11, Vice President Dylan Greif GD ’12, Communications Director editorial team

Graduate Student Alliance Executive Board Diana Mangaser M.Arch ’12 Phoebe Stubbs Glass ’11 design team

Lindsay Kinkade GD ’10, Book Designer, Zine Workshop Facilitator Mimi Cabell Photo ’11, Photographer advisory board

Patricia C. Phillips, Dean of Graduate Studies Jennifer Liese, Director, risd Writing Center Bethany Johns, Graduate Program Director, Graphic Design Amy Patenaude, Administrative Assistant, Graduate Studies Don Morton, Director, Office of Student Life © Copyright 2011, Rhode Island School of Design Images of individual student work are courtesy of the artists and designers, or, as noted, by Mimi Cabell. All graduate exhibition installation photos are

by David O'Connor, except that on page six, which is by Dimitry Tetin. Images from the zine workshop are by Lindsay Kinkade.

RGB11 is typeset in Prensa, designed by Cyrus Highsmith, and Klavika, designed by Eric Olson.

Catalog printed by Signature Printers in East Providence, Rhode Island, on 80 lb. Lynx opaque white paper. Zines printed by Allegra Thayer Street on Wausau Astrobrights paper.

Boxes constructed by The Custom Box Company.

RGB 11 RISD Grad Book 2011

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Editor’s Note ARIANNE GELARDIN

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Not Necessarily and Not Forever ...

PATRICIA C. PHILLIPS

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Go Back!

NAOMI FRY

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The Activist-Entrepreneur KELLER EASTERLING

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Graduate Work

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ARIANNE GELARDIN

Editor’s Note In 2010-2011, the Graduate Student Alliance (gsa)

at Rhode Island School of Design

appeared to be a group of overachieving, outspoken, highly organized, and efficient social gluts who enjoyed fantasizing about the utopic future of risd. Behind the scenes, however, they were simply a group of graduate students joined together by a shared concern for the quality of their education. Their official roles — President, Vice President, etc. — were often extended to support one another’s tasks as needed. This proved to be the key to their Zine workshop ephemera.

success; no one ever felt abandoned in his or her effort to engage the student body in open studio events, to gather feedback on schoolwide issues, or to collect submissions for this very publication.

How can one book represent the attitude, the aesthetic, and the material process of so many students within and across 16 disciplines?

Last September the GSA identified some difficulties with the Process Book, the precursor to this publication, the RISD Grad Book 2011 (RGB11). How can one book represent the attitude, the aesthetic, and the material process of so many students within and across 16 disciplines? Despite risd’s commendable reputation for teaching a heavily labored process of making, the Process Book was challenging in that students were hesitant to reveal work in its varying states of prematurity. Furthermore, to identify and declare crossdisciplinary groupings of process inevitably ran the risk of false or superficial categorization. How can we determine and organize patterns in thought, action, and object?

In reevaluating the process of the book itself, our team concluded that with all the energy required to fulfill the democratic intentions of this ambitious production—and in the midst of our own Master’s thesis projects—we needed a fleet of additional manpower. Lindsay Kinkade (gd ’10), who was selected to design the book, lives and breathes collaboration.

Upon her initiative and in line with the goal of

collective authorship, we developed a series of activities, workshops, and frameworks within which students could input the content of their choosing. Departmental zines were cut, pasted, and photocopied by the students themselves. Writing workshops and group-editing sessions were held to catalyze the submission of artist statements. Respected faculty were called upon to advise our design, content, and production strategies.

In determining how to organize our collected content into a cohesive book form, we scrutinized new and old publications for inspiration. Aspen magazine and Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s offered examples where a range of articles and authors are represented in a trove of smaller booklets, posters, vinyl, and film reels.

Marshall McLuhan’s Unbound and Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I have learned in my life so far suggested to us the serializing of collections of creative work. These models supported our belief that the RGB11 couldn’t be an individually authored book; it had to offer its participants the agency of choice. Thus, in these pages an exhibition catalog indexes the work of the Master’s theses, the culmination of two or three years of intensive focus, accompanied by written statements.

The collection of raw and unedited department zines that is the other half of this boxed set further elicits the idiosyncrasies of its makers.

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The RGB11 would not exist without the unwavering support of the Faculty Advisory Board: Patricia C. Phillips, Dean of Graduate Studies; Jennifer Liese, Writing Center Director; Bethany Johns, Graduate Program Director, Graphic Design. Don Morton, Office of Student Life Director, generously offered positive feedback and financial wisdom. Amy Patenaude, Administrative Assistant, Graduate Studies, was forever patient with our endless questions and requests.

The Editorial Team — Diana Mangaser (m.arch ’12), Phoebe Stubbs (glass ’11), and the gsa Executive Board—proved indispensable in the editing of 150+ artist statements. Mimi Cabell (photo ’11) was outstanding in her documentation of the risd 2011 Graduate Thesis Exhibition. Mark Moscone, Director of Exhibitions, is greatly appreciated for producing excellent public platforms for student work.

To complement the work of the 176 featured graduate students, we invited three well-seasoned individuals to write contributing essays for the exhibition catalog.

Patricia C. Phillips’s essay, “Not Necessarily and Not Forever… ,” bridges the inquiries of a risd Master’s student with the expansive discourses of art and design. In “Go Back!,” Naomi Fry playfully illuminates the transitional moment between educational and professional life. Keller Easterling’s “The ActivistEntrepreneur” provocatively explores emerging roles for artists and designers.

The gsa Execs showed incredible dedication to the RGB11. Jason Huff (d+m ’11), President; Scott MacDonald (ldar ’11), Vice President; and Dylan Greif (gd ’12), Communications Director, were the three greatest cheerleaders for the book. They always exceeded the call of duty by rolling up their pink sleeves, putting pen to paper, picking up the phone, or cooking a meal to help feed the project.

In the words of Mike Gunderloy, author of How to Publish a Fanzine (1988), “Fun (and its corollary, Friends) is an almost certain outcome of self-publishing.” Talent cannot manifest in isolation. Do not underestimate the power of your peers.

Arianne Gelardin received her Master’s in Landscape Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011.

She is a designer, writer, and editor who has worked on exhibition catalogues for the Whitney Museum of American Art and architectural books for William Stout Publishers.

She is a recipient of the 2011 risd Graduate Studies Grant for her project D.CUrbY, an afterschool community design project in Providence.

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PATRICIA C. PHILLIPS

Not Necessarily and Not Forever …

Jacques Rancière, who, I believe, uses “artist” to represent both artists and designers, writes: “Artists are those whose strategies aim to change the frames, speeds, and scales according to which we perceive the visible, and combine it with a specific invisible element and specific meaning. Such strategies are intended to make the visible invisible or to question the selfevidence of the visible; to rupture given Still from Pinkish, a video by Phoebe Stubbs (glass ’11), in which a hand luxuriates in a pot of paint.

relationships between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings that were previously unrelated.”

As artists, designers, critics, and writers we are chronically engaged in looking — back, ahead, across, around, up, under, and through.

As artists, designers, critics, and writers we are chronically engaged in looking — back, ahead, across, around, up, under, and through. We constantly consider, if in an indirect and unacknowledged way, how it is we see, what something looks like — and why. In the third volume of Modern Painters, 19th-century theorist and educator John Ruskin writes: “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw plainly. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”

Admittedly and confessionally, I watch risd and, in particular, what goes on in graduate education at risd.

What does it look like to be a graduate student here?

How do learning and making work here look just like they would at any other school of art and design?

What might be the subtle yet significant distinctions — and what do we conclude from these? Do we admire and seek to preserve these animating particularities or are they peculiar curiosities that generally remain out of sight or wisely out of mind?

Rainer Ganahl photographs and videotapes classes and seminars that he teaches at universities in Europe and the United States. In Reading Karl Marx (Warm Seas) (2001), he uses the lens of the camera to probe academic settings and conditions of learning to invite viewers to bear witness to patterns, anomalies, and enigmas in the politics of art and education.

The photographs serve as an active, introspective form of research, inquiring, prompting, and subtly revealing the salient question that inspires this work: “What does learning look like?” There is the conventional landscape of props on the seminar table: water glasses, pens and paper, and open books, presented in vertiginous angles with striking cropping. Students puzzle through dense and stubborn texts, hoping for a passage to yield insight and understanding. Others seem to have withdrawn and are missing in action. As striking as these images are, what making meaning looks like remains highly speculative.

Returning to Ganahl’s query, I add, “What does making look like?” What does designing a new way of thinking about design look like? Must there be something to see to know what something is? Recently, I worked with a graduate student on the subject of critique in design and art. We met weekly in my office at a round table, passed readings and observations back and forth, and shared thoughtful, if often inconclusive, conversations about this ubiquitous yet largely unexamined convention of art and design education. We have discovered that although there are countless texts on criticism in different fields, there is remarkably little written about the critique as a live, performative form of criticism persistently enacted — and re-enacted — in schools.

Looking at looking, theorist and art historian Irit Rogoff offers a provocatively unsettling proposition to culturally determined ways of seeing. In her essay “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture,”

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she proposes an agency inferred in challenges to conventions of looking and looking another way — away. Rogoff asks, “What is it that we do when we look away from art?” By allowing ourselves to both look at and look away, are we “opening up a space of participation whose terms we are to invent”? For Rogoff, “looking away” challenges the conventions of participation with art and creates other ways of engaging in seeing — the “flows and ebbs of mutuality” and an attention to each other’s actions that leads to a “lived cultural moment.”

Rogoff invokes Hannah Arendt’s concept of “space of appearance” in her iconic The Human Condition (1958).

Arendt describes the less formed and often ephemeral occurrences and appearances that shape our perceptions of shared space and time. Arendt writes: Unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of (people) … but with the disappearance or the arrest of the activities themselves. Whenever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.

Making art and design at risd looks like processes in radical transformation. If the spaces and conditions of art and design schools have not radically changed, the activities and behaviors — and how they appear —

are thrillingly unsettled. In the book visible: where art leaves its own field and becomes visible as part of something else (2010), sociologist Saskia Sassen sensitively describes art and design within a contemporary world that she partially sees, yet that remains undisclosed — obscure: There are rumblings in … artworks that signal that there is much happening beneath the surface of our modernity. I see these rumblings in the tension between generic modernity that can be globally present and the thick, situated making … [that] allows us to see something that gets lost in the visual order … one marked by generalities and the generic.

At risd, I observe each and every day the ineffable and idiosyncratic, spontaneous and premeditated character of thinking with and through ideas that produces a “thick, situated making.” As vigilantly as I watch, I know that there are worlds I do not see. While I do not look away, I know I cannot always look in. I embrace the looking away and the not knowing that offer partial yet

I observe each and every day the ineffable and idiosyncratic, spontaneous and premeditated character of thinking with and through ideas that produces a “thick, situated making.”

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compelling evidence of an emergent visual order. In her book Transforming Knowledge (2004), Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich writes: There is always another way to turn an idea, another perspective on a phenomenon, a different conceptual approach to explore, a fresh and startlingly suggestive example to be taken into account. What seems settled one moment is unsettled again the next.

In risd graduate students’ intrepid work ethic, their independent intellectuality, their undaunted creativity, their fierce generosity, and their “attention to each other’s actions,” I see how risd’s conserving history cultivates its own emancipatory subversiveness. Each day I am a witness to this. To work to see. To see this work. This time at risd is “only potentially, not necessarily and not forever,” but its vivid presence offers promising sightlines to the future.

REFERENCES Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) Angelika Burtscher and Judith Wielander (editors), visible: where art leaves its own field and becomes visible as part of something else (New York: Sternberg Press, 2010) Rainer Ganahl and Craig Martin (editor), Reading Karl Marx (WarmSeas) (London: Bookworks, 2001) Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Transforming Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) Jacques Rancière, Dissensus on Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010) Irit Rogoff, “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture,” in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance Gavin Butt (editor) (London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005)

Patricia C. Phillips, Dean of Graduate Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, is a writer and curator.

Her most recent book is Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working (New York: Prestel, 2011).

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, edited and abridged by David Barrie (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987)

I see how RISD’s conserving history cultivates its own emancipatory subversiveness.

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NAOMI FRY

Go Back!

In an early scene from Cameron Crowe’s 1989 teen dramedy Say Anything the underachieving protagonist, Lloyd Dobler, watches along with the rest of his graduating class as his overachieving love interest, Diane Court, steps up to the stage to deliver that year’s valedictorian speech. Having taken some college classes as a high school senior, Diane informs the crowd, “We’re all about to enter the real world. But I have something to tell everybody. I’ve glimpsed our future, and all I can say is ‘Go back.’”

A crowd on opening night next to Laura Swanson's Homemade Bull at the 2011 risd Graduate Thesis Exhibition.

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To begin to discuss the significance and meaning of an advanced degree in the arts through the prism of an ’80s teen movie might seem idiotic, or at the very least inapt. For one, students who receive an advanced degree in art or design have already, by that point, progressed over a fair amount of trajectory; have jumped through increasingly demanding hoops that have included — for many — laboring in some capacity in or around the creative field of their choice. Nevertheless, the very notion of the Master’s degree — perhaps because it is commenced when most people are already neck-deep in the ongoing narrative of their lives, perhaps because it requires faith in the idea of education as advancement, despite various school-related disillusionments already incurred over the course of years — is still intertwined with the idea of future motion.

As inevitable as it is, however, this idea of futurity also unfortunately implies that the student and her work might emerge from her educational sojourn as a packaged, readymade thing. For two or three years, the risd Master’s candidate labors, building this and trying out that, the protective nature of the studio facilitating a unique period of play and experimentation. But as she nears that period’s end, the dread as well as the anticipation remain: Will all this effort have a life outside the studio, outside the educational institution, or won’t it?

Not to suggest that these concerns aren’t completely

natural, and probably healthy as well: after all, there’s nothing essentially wrong with being ambitious, with wanting one’s endeavors to bear fruit beyond their native soil. The risk, however, is forsaking the exploratory attitude that graduate school has helped engender, and choosing, instead, to become a hardened end product of the educational process, market-ready, with perfectly defined work in tow.

One thing that often helps retain the symbolic distinction between studio work and the market outside it is the literal geographic remove between the two, and this is something that the risd program is importantly animated by. When selecting a school at which to pursue a degree in art or design, that institution’s proximity to and distance from a so-called “major city” is necessarily calculated. And while this is more of a hunch on my part than a proven statement, I’d venture that this is at least one of risd’s multiple strengths, and what partly makes much of its students’ work

There’s nothing essentially wrong with being ambitious. … The risk, however, is forsaking the exploratory attitude that graduate school has helped engender.

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A sense of grassroots-like agency flourishes at RISD, it seems, because of rather than despite the lack of a robust economy and a hectic metropolitan environment. so interesting. While it’s quite near enough to bask in the reflected cultural influence of New York — the inarguable American hub of and market for art and (to a lesser degree) design-related endeavors — risd is still far enough from it to provide a safe haven in which to experiment, letting a student’s practice develop, shift, and loop back around itself at its own pace. The comparatively small scale of Providence as a city and as a market and the local community’s special interest in and appetite for student-driven endeavors also play an important role in shaping the unique risd experience. A sense of grassroots-like agency flourishes at risd, it seems, because of rather than despite the lack of a robust economy and a hectic metropolitan environment.

But how to retain this sense of freedom, playfulness, and unfettered discovery once school is over, and the three hours and twenty-six minutes from Providence to New York City on Amtrak’s Northeast Regional line shrink down — if only metaphorically — to nothing?

For guidance, we might turn to the Victorian critic John Ruskin, who in his 1853 essay “The Nature of Gothic” draws an important distinction between instrumental production and humanistic creation. As Ruskin writes: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and

to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one, he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

It is this hesitation, I think, that is the essence of true education and development. And it is that which one might want to retain when leaving school and proceeding forth into the world. Perfection suggests repetition and stasis, while mistakes, reflection, and readjustments are the stuff of changeable, living art.

As Lloyd Dobler declares when asked by Diane’s father what his professional plans for the future are, “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed.” One way to avoid such a machine-like fate, as Diane suggests at the

Perfection suggests repetition and stasis, while mistakes, reflection, and readjustments are the stuff of changeable, living art.

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beginning of the movie, is, indeed, to go back. Not as an acting out of an infantilized impulse, or as part of a willful disregard for the realities of the world around us, but rather as a choice: to remember what was especially messy and exploratory about the period that has just come to a close, and to retain that sense while attempting — still — to move forward.

Naomi Fry is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She has written about art, literature, and culture for the London Review of Books, Frieze, n+1, the Artforum and Bookforum websites, the Israeli daily Haaretz, and the contemporary art journal Paper Monument, at which she is also a contributing editor. She has taught at Johns Hopkins University and nyu, and in risd’s Digital + Media department.

Remember what was especially messy and exploratory about the period that has just come to a close.

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KELLER EASTERLING

The ActivistEntrepreneur Anyone graduating from school wants to hear stories. There are no formulas for success— only stories about mixtures of good fortune, accidental associations, and bright, clear ideas.

For the artist and designer, the stories often characterize success in terms of careerist self-construction and competition for celebrity.

Yet, as this year’s risd graduate students demonstrate, more and more young artists and Working on the Glass department zine at an rgb11 workshop.

designers are choosing instead to pursue the artistic pleasures of the activist-entrepreneur.

The entrepreneur relies on a changing world that will accept multiple cycles of innovation, each introducing new wrinkles and ideas.

The role travels with some default assumptions.

The entrepreneurial role, it is often assumed, will derive from some kind of commercial mediocrity.

The activist role is often associated with the longsuffering provocateur who shows up at the barricades, border-crossing, or battleground, or the volunteer who works on a limited palette of programs (e.g. affordable housing, emergency humanitarian efforts, or green architecture). The most restrictive and tragic activist endgames only offer two choices—refusal or collusion.

Yet young artists and designers, like those at risd, are side-stepping these defaults and learning new lessons from the entrepreneur about work in a political realm. While artists and designers frequently wish to make a singular, permanent, memorable masterpiece, entrepreneurs want the opposite, hoping instead that their objects and products, once introduced, will soon become obsolete. The artist/ designer is often attempting to reveal the self with a soulful object, while the entrepreneur is wondering what the other person wants. Within avant-gardist scripts, artists and designers often characterize their work in terms of inversion, yet these inversions have routinely been treated not as one in a series of innovations, but rather as an ultimate utopian shift that remedies all. Historically, we are perhaps more enamored with absolutes and ideological supremacy than with the mysterious

pleasures of the market with its power to leverage and generate epidemic. We are more theological than entrepreneurial in this way. In contrast to the righteous activist, who imagines a somewhat more transcendent and singular moment of change, the entrepreneur relies on a changing world that will accept multiple cycles of innovation, each introducing new wrinkles and ideas.

Entrepreneurs understand the power of multipliers— a contagion or germ in the market that compounds exponentially. Although they often create the utilitarian objects of everyday life, the best inventors and entrepreneurs are unreasonable, yet they also foreground something that almost already exists.

A fascination with the entrepreneur joins changing habits of mind in our own disciplines. Beyond an appreciation of the singularly authored object, the arts now more readily experiment with networks, performance, and what Jacques Rancière has called “aesthetic practices.” In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière develops an understanding of aesthetics that “does not refer to a theory of sensibility, taste, and pleasure for art amateurs.” Aesthetics cannot be codified as a set of guides or rules that culture carefully tends and maintains. Rancière focuses on those aesthetic practices that both “depict” and enact, that articulate “ways of doing and making.” Significantly, he does not discuss the aesthetics of politics, but the politics of aesthetics—the politics surrounding the reception of a work of art. He describes, for instance, not the pageant

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of goose-stepping soldiers in a Zeppelin field, nor the aestheticizing of resistance as fervid disappointment.

Rather, he writes about the way that the reception of art generates political activity. The arts can introduce not only singular objects with cultivated references, but also deliberate agents that move through culture, garnering responses beyond our control. When Rancière writes that he would “rather talk about dissensus than resistance,” he describes this interactive process that destabilizes without squaring off in a fight over fixed principles.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s notions of “relational form” and “relational aesthetics” only echo this intelligence although perhaps in response to the narrower field of selected media and installation work. For Bourriaud, art is a “state of encounter” rather than “the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.” The relational aesthetics do not address outline or contour alone, but are rather expressions for a program of encounters in an active field.

In the broadest sense we might say that artists and designers are indulging in a fresh palette of active forms.

Active forms are the forms that always partner with, propel, and sometimes even rescue object form. Active forms shape not the object but the way the object plays.

They need not have anything to do with movement, but they are the infinitive to the noun. For instance, in Levittown, the consequential form was not the shape of the house but rather the active form that determined

an almost agricultural sequence for building multiple slabs, frames, and roofs—a house as an assembly-line product. A vehicle or a component (e.g. elevator, car, floor, or wall system) that acts as a germ in a population of buildings is also an active form, building relationships between parts and determining the morphology of object form. Active form may be the script that determines how object form aligns with power to travel through culture. Perhaps most importantly, active forms have the capacity for slyness and discrepancy.

As forms that are never named, their intentions are undeclared. They are not about what they say they are, but about what they are doing. Most artists and designers, indeed most powerful people in the world, would never turn down the chance to work with both object and active form. Yet, even though it is at least the other half of what we get to indulge in, we sometimes puritanically deny ourselves the pleasures of active form and the political cunning that can ride within it.

The projects of risd graduate students, whether they engage social, political, or material questions, are part of a new seduction. There is great pleasure and relief in

There is great pleasure and relief in deploying political craft in the service of something other than self-regard, careerism, or righteous certainty.

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deploying political craft in the service of something other than self-regard, careerism, or righteous certainty.

The utopian and visionary can sometimes bring with them the deadening reconciliation of consensus, but the entrepreneur’s confidence game teaches us that the less resolute, rumored news might be more contagious. New objects of practice, redefined in a relational register, offer artists more power to leverage their own projects toward their own political goals. That relational register reflects the ability of global networks to amplify structural shifts or repeatable moves. Whether or not schools of art and design are deliberately training young artists and designers in the artistry of active form, it is, nonetheless, refreshing to see so many young makers already beginning to enjoy their powers.

Keller Easterling is an architect and writer from New York City and a professor at Yale University.

Her book Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT Press, 2005) researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. A previous book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats.

A forthcoming book, Extrastatecraft: The Art of Infrastructure Change, examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity.

New objects of practice, redefined in a relational register, offer artists more power to leverage their own projects toward their own political goals.

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Jewelry + Metalsmithing

Landscape Architecture

Ceramics

Architecture

Printmaking

Digital + Media

Furniture Design

Glass

GRADUATE WORK Painting

Textiles

Sculpture

Teaching + Learning in Art + Design

Photography

Interior Architecture

Industrial Design

Graphic Design

Graduating students were invited to submit images and statements about their work. Some students submitted only images, others chose to submit only writing.

/ Thesis and degree project titles appear at the bottom of each page.

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GR A P HIC DESIGN

/ SALEM AL-QASSIMI

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The cultural identity of the United Arab Emirates (uae) is in a period of transformation. The country’s cultural costumes, habits, and traditions are evolving and adapting to change. This change is directly influenced by Western culture, especially mainstream American culture.

The younger generation of Emiratis behave in a hybrid of both the American and the Emirati cultures. They speak in English and Arabic simultaneously. Their clothes have also become a fusion, mixing traditional Emirati costumes with Western accessories.

In my thesis, I investigate the elements of the Arabish (Arabic & English) culture of the UAE, its syntactic language, and its appearance.

/ Arabish: The Cultural Transformation of the UAE

53 SANG HEE AN / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

My degree project pays homage to our risd graduate experience by collecting and archiving students’ works, holding memories both personal and social that can be shared with others. The archive will function as a storehouse of objects and an exhibition space, welcoming others to experience the collective spirit of risd. It will capture our memories as we pass through this threshold, similar in concept to a time capsule. As time goes by, students’ work will contintue to accumulate and be stored, eventually becoming part of our history. This space creates a body of knowledge that explores the past and reflects and enlightens the present.

/ Memory Archive

GR A P HIC DESIGN 

/  JANE ANDROSKI

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The complexity of the social and environmental challenges we face today calls for a new sense of agency in our practice—agency that is more than simply a conviction to intervene.

Design Agency is an approach that challenges us to bring the same level of accountability to our social practice as we do to our aesthetic one. It was developed as part of a collaborative thesis investigation with Emily Sara Wilson (see p.214) as a way for designers interested in effecting social change to cultivate an honest perspective about their role, to bring a measure of intentionality and reflexivity to their practice, and to allow collaboration and facilitation to replace the top-down, designer-centric models of the past.

/ Design Agency

55 LAURA ATCHINSON / T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

How do visual inquiry and observation inspire our creativity within the arts, sciences, and design? As an educator I strive to engage my audience as a whole through visual inquiry and engaging experiences.

I aim to help visitors understand the significance of the principles of art and design within our everyday lives.

Working with the Learning Community Charter School, my group created a tour that sought to connect everyday life with the principles of art and design. Ultimately my hope is that by building upon developing educational opportunities, art museum education can lead to greater appreciation of art and design across numerous fields: preserving memory, engaging community, and encouraging creativity as a means for further investigations of everyday life.

/ Creative Perceptions: Bridging the Arts + Sciences within the Art Museum

T E X T IL E S 

/  ANASTASIA AZURE

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PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

My thesis investigates the ritual art of Balinese palm frond weaving.

I interpret the beauty and mystery of ceremonial decorations from an observant yet external vantage. Through modern weaving technology and constructions, I alter the material, technique, and function of a dynamic tradition to create textiles with hybridized graphics and reinvented forms.

/ Transforming Tradition

57 AUDREY L. BARNES / I N D U S T R I A L D E S I G N PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I am a thoughtful maker. I believe in the power of collaboration. I strive to design product cycles — not product lines. My design process incorporates research, participatory design, and the iterative ideation of concepts and prototypes. By building connections between people, environments, and economies, we can create inclusive solutions that become positive and infectious parts of our world.

Food is central to everything human: from the deeply personal to the global. Community health, economy, and ecology are all intricately linked to our need for nourishment. My thesis connects people to food and ecology through small-scale agriculture. Teaching people to grow food empowers them to improve their health and wellness, their communities, and the environments around them.

/ Small Victories: Growing an Appreciation for Food

P HO T OGR A P H Y

/ JORDAN BAUMGARTEN

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/ Average Americans of the Right Type

59 JAKE BECKMAN / S C U L P T U R E PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Through my work I strive to make sense of my relationship to substance, value, and labor at a time in history when globalism and a post-industrial America seem to create as many disconnections as they do opportunities. I am drawn to the internal contradiction embodied in the decaying structures of the American rust-belt; they are simultaneously an enduring testament to human endeavor and a slow manifestation of nature’s gradual embrace. Striking a tone that is both somber and playful, I use the visual language of industry and the ingredients of the built environment — coal, sand, iron ore— to explore a connection to the processes that construct and sustain our material world.

/ Elaborate Longing: Meditations on Work, Substance and the Space Between

INDUS T R I A L DE SIGN

/ ELIZABETH BECTON

60

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I am inspired by the complexity within social, cultural, and environmental arenas. My hope is that thoughtful and ambitious design will spread within these fields and empower people to challenge adversity.

My thesis seeks to provide New Yorkers with an alternative to buying bottled water. By utilizing the social and cultural atmosphere of New York, I address the negative effects of the industry. Bottled water is ingrained in our everyday lives. Consumers don’t have desirable enough alternatives. How can we change such an ingrained behavior?

I think this is where we can use design for positive reinforcement against existing tendencies to tackle complex issues.

/ Outdesigning Bottled Water in New York City

61 KATHERINE BELL  /  P A I N T I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I am a home-maker.

I am a home-wrecker.

I make the home.

I wreck the home.

I construct and fix.

I dismantle and destroy.

I build the structure,

I take apart its contents,

and the materials dictate what I make.

uncovering what lies beneath the surface.

I remodel the surface,

I steal from it,

managing each decision.

reveal hidden things about it.

Laying the tile,

Pulling up the rug,

nailing the boards,

opening the closet,

and hanging the curtains.

and turning up the blinds.

/ Make (Wreck)

GL A SS 

/  ALEXANDRA BEN-ABBA

62

My work is my examination of my identity in the context of social, political, and personal relationships. Body and place are at the nucleus of my work: identity, femininity, exile and home are addressed through an exploration of the self and its relations with the outside world. Hot glass and the performative and collaborative elements of glassblowing are central in my process. I perform and collaborate using dress and ritual to construct work in which the surface of my body is the site for transformative actions. In this work, the personal has become the political and the political, personal.

/ Body and Place

63 JORDAN BISSETT / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

/ Dwelling in Transition

T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

/ KRISTEN BOYD

64

The walls that divide our homes from nature fascinate me. More specifically, I am interested in how humans treat natural objects differently indoors versus outdoors. My work also questions how we can make these two “environments” more congruous.

I have found the artistic approach of combining photography with mixed media and site-specific installations a flexible medium to express my ideas and questions concerning these themes. I’m excited to continue experimenting with and exploring different materials and photographic techniques.

/ Process Book

65 DEREK PAUL BOYLE / D I G I TA L + M E D I A

An ending.

My practice is framed by incompatible states of the self — restraint against release, the known with the unknown. My work engages psychological states of anxiety and scenes of tension — the fragmentation of the body against an uncertainty of mind. I’m interested in the attraction of opposites, the force of tense division.

In a wavering step between angst and humor, fear and pleasure, I want to give form to anxiety, a shape to contradiction. This is the uncertainty aesthetic, where questions rise above answers.

A beginning.

/ Incompatible States

P HO T OGR A P H Y

/ MICHAEL BRANDES

66

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

/ Both Teams Played Hard

67 BLAIR BRENDLI / T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

Those who teach art have the potential to be great inspirations.

Giving students the opportunity to explore different concepts, materials and ideas can be an invaluable experience. I provide my students with guidance, while simultaneously giving them enough independence to promote their own artistic discovery. With this in mind, I define myself in several different ways: I am an artist, I am a teacher, and I am an art teacher.

/ Process Book

A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  JARED BROWN

68

The city is a living organism. Scar tissue is the fibrous connective tissue that results from the biological process of wound repair.

To define scar tissue with regards to the city is to humanize it.

How do we deal with the scar tissue of a city? Do we seal it with programmatic functions? Do we graft sections of working cities onto it in the hope that it will grow? Do we surgically remove it and leave a void? Do we ignore it and let it stretch with age?

/ Symbiotic Implant

69 KATHARINE BRUMMETT / T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

Creating art is a learning process that every person, no matter his or her talent or background, can be involved in. It is my belief that hands-on, problem-solving skills that children learn while creating art help them in their daily lives, future schooling, future professions, and in their emotional and mental health. Every person is innately creative, and whether they end up in an art field or not, every person should be given the opportunity to understand how to use and apply their creativity. As an art educator, I strive to create experiences that provide this for my students.

/ Process Book: Line, Texture, Exploration + Collaboration

A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  NICHOLAS BUEHRENS

70

Longevity When the salt air had crept into every last recess, the yawning mouth groaned, and two centuries of echoing rails plunged into the ebbing tide.

The bridge lay, smoldering, sagging, embedding itself into fecundity.

Releasing its memory in the form of blue mussels, eel grass, alewife.

I came free, bolts worn, welds corroded, and sank into the mud, bobbing to the surface as a black goose.

/ Adaptations: Making Places on a Changing Planet

71 MIMI CABELL / P H O T O G R A P H Y

I work with text, performance, and video. I am a photographer.

My subjects are contemporary cultural signs and symbols, language and gender. I aim to destabilize the structures that support them.

I do not apologize and I am not sympathetic. I am direct and do not like ambiguity. I hear the catches in people’s voices, the discontent.

I do not hear grays in people’s voices, only the blacks and the whites.

I hear yes and no, here and there, on and off. Not maybe, or somewhere, or running at half speed.

/ Not Controllable Not Ill-Conceived

L A NDSC A P E A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  RYAN CASTRO

72

A riverscape is the landscape of a river system. It constitutes the various habitats within a river, the processes that create them, and the communities that reside in them. The site is designed with the intention of integrating the built world with the larger ecosystem, creating a balance between nature, technology, and society.

Historically, urban waterfronts reflect the needs of society and change with the cities they surround. These changes have been caused in part by the accelerating advancement of technology, which has affected the surrounding environment. With our city populations growing, the need for energy and the desire to reconnect with the waterfront is increasing.

Can urban rivers provide for the social, ecological and technological needs of cities? The river is an opportunity to connect people with each other and allows the community to build an understanding of their natural environment.

/ Riverscape Park: Equilibrium Between Nature and Technology

73 JENNIFER CAWLEY / P H O T O G R A P H Y

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real.”

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

/ it will be flowers

INDUS T R I A L DE SIGN

/ GUNTHER CHANANGE

74

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I am a human-centered designer, inspired by people and their bond to a shared set of principles. Discovery, engagement, and interactions help me find new opportunities in everyday environments.

My graduate studies focused on the investigation of social values and their relationship to design. Initially this required a complete understanding of my own personal values, and was followed by a second stage where I implemented these new “value-based components” into my design principles. This shift changed my design practice to one focused on fulfilling human needs over the manufacturing of wants.

My goal is to design for the general enrichment and benefit of people. / Seeing the Sun: A Strategy for the Prevention and Detection of Skin Cancer

75 JO-FAN CHANG  /  F U R N I T U R E D E S I G N PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Fold.

Folding is an action of bending a flat and

Folding.

flexible material by laying one part over

Folded.

another. When applying folds and their

Fold the unfold.

motion to different functional objects,

Fold and unfold.

there are endless possibilities to be

Fold/unfold.

explored, because folding transforms

Unfold and fold.

objects from one state to another.

Unfold the fold.

The hidden layers of folding are always

Unfold.

there, but it takes time to recognize and

Unfolding.

to realize. If even a fold can be redefined,

Unfolded.

I am sure there is another whole universe waiting to be rediscovered.

/ Fold

D I G I TA L + M E D I A

/ HAN-SHEN CHEN

76

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I am interested in the moment when people augment boundaries between their bodies and spaces of the imagination. Post-Industrial Revolution architecture often isolates one’s sense of environment.

Glass structures, mobile systems (such as cars and elevators), screens — these spaces create a sense of “immaterial” virtual material, immobile bodies watching mobile images. My work is about how to form haptic space that breaks the isolation of the senses, awakening people’s sensation to a place.

/ The Augmented Body

77 MARC CHOI / G R A P H I C DESIGN

An official narrative is still very much inscribed in the American cultural landscape. While significant steps toward a more inclusive experience have been made, ideological constraints continue to frame our collective understanding of what constitutes American identity.

My work, a response to this condition, seeks to shift perspectives and offer an extended look through fixed narratives, rendering them un-monumental. By claiming the role of outsider, I present an alternate vantage point. Definitive institutions such as church, state, and history, are disrupted, questioned, and re-understood. My work engages what it means to look another way—to look around corners, and see a fuller picture.

/ Unmonumental: Looking Beyond Official Narratives

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ HENRY HYUNG MIN CHOI

78

Through the process of commercializing a product, designers relate with both businesses and customers. Businesses support designers to develop design ideas that have commercial potential, while customers provide inspiration by purchasing the product and providing feedback on their interactions with the product. This project creates one space that can be shared with these three parties — designers, businesses, and customers — achieving synergy through solid communication and ease of interaction.

My intervention is to utilize the idea of transformation to create one platform that will suit all three entities. In the same way that water transforms from a solid to a liquid and finally evaporates into a gas, my space will utilize the transformation of an idea through various stages of its development.

/ Trans: Developing a Business Incubator for Designers

79 CAROLINE CHOU / A R C H I T E C T U R E

When meandering through a city, we develop a sense of orientation with time, place, and people; an understanding of our location in relation to a specific place or object. I’m interested in the movement of the individual, where orientation is translated between one’s surrounding and one’s self.

What is this translation? When we emerge from an underground train station to the ground plane above, how do we reorient ourselves? Where does threshold — a cross street that defines boundaries — begin and end between districts when moving along a path? How does our encounter with objects, such as the ground or a building, filter our movement and start to create moments and spaces?

/ Crossing Edges

A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  VAN HONG CHU

80

Our sense of identity is fundamentally tied to our relationship to places and the histories that they embody. The uprooting of our lives from specific local cultures has contributed to the waning of our abilities to locate ourselves.

We all have a psychological need to belong somewhere, whether it be in a geographical or social context. The act of assimilation is a complex process that not only changes the individual but leaves a lasting impact on the community.

My work addresses the ramifications of bridging residual spaces, foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, from estrangement into citizenship.

/ All the Wrong Places: The Assimilation of Residual Spaces into the Urban Fabric

81 HOPE CHU  /  G R A P H I C D E S I G N

I am interested in the American popular imagination and how it manifests itself in, or is manifested by, design and visual culture.

What motivations drive the political and consumer choices Americans make? What are the value systems that support those decisions?

What role do channels of content distribution, culture and taste, and visual rhetoric play in shaping and expressing these opinions?

How does the way we envision the world go on to inform the world or become self-fulfilling?

/ Power Play

A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  MARTIN CLINE

82

In a world of wireless technologies, is it possible for architecture to also become mobile? Mobile architecture is nothing new, but alongside technology, architecture has been steadily evolving toward lightness and transparency. Is it possible for a new typology to capture the same level of go-anywhere freedom and autonomy that has been discovered in mobile devices? This study analyzes high performance tents and outdoor gear while considering the urban environment and shelters meant for year-round occupation. The project points toward a new high-performance way of life: light and mobile, sustainable, urban, and comfortable.

/ Architecture as a Mobile Device

83 CORYDON COWANSAGE / P A I N T I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Through formal decisions and reductive choices I explore the psychology of the mundane space of “home.” My paintings evolve from an imagined environment—a particular set of sounds, colors, textures, spatial situations, and lighting conditions—and the way these details combine to form a mood. I find and photograph elements of existing buildings and neighborhoods and then assemble them into a reference image for this fictitious place. Through this process I use my immediate surroundings to create an alternate version of reality—a reality that, though at first glance appears naturalistic, is in fact composed of slight distortions, compressions, and omissions. / Empty Houses

L A NDSC A P E A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  MARIA DEBYE-SAXINGER

84

My work is about landscape and sensibility. I seek innovative ways of designing spaces in urban conditions, with an emphasis on taking advantage of the outdoors and specific qualities that help us to relax, rejuvenate, and regain mental and physical balance. My passion for creating heightened sensorial experiences in cities like Manhattan stems from my upbringing on a farm in upstate New York.

My thesis proposes a pedestrian park in the urban setting to provide opportunities to engage the senses in a heightened awareness of mind, body, and spirit.

/ Urbansensescape: Creatiing Sensitizing Spaces in Busy Places

85 JOHNATHAN DERRY / S C U L P T U R E PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Increasingly my work explores the paradoxical relationships between material and message, and between notions of the tragic and the comic.

It is where these incongruous shifts take place that imagination is captured. I present the viewer with a series of sculptural diagrammatic narratives. The viewer is tasked with interpreting the work’s meaning based on their own personal understandings of the cultural and symbolic references used in the elements that comprise the piece.

My work can be described as a set of objects displayed before you, with the hallmarks of a totem disassembled on the floor, which need the viewer to act as an anthropologist to transcribe their significance. / The Art of Not Knowing: Paradoxical Narrative Investigations

D I G I TA L + M E D I A

/ KYONG-SUB DO

86

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

The main concept behind all my work is “small talk with a funny friend.”

I design with the idea that the world is interesting and enjoyable.

It is my desire that my work could affect viewers in two ways: making people smile and having them spend time with the smile on their faces.

/ Experience Guide Book: A to Z

87 REED DUECY-GIBBS / A R C H I T E C T U R E

My degree project focuses on the recognition of the “other” in architectural work. Specifically, to understand the relationships between: the boundaries of context in relation to the project; material and the design concept it humbles; the architect’s preconceptions versus the inhabitant’s needs and desires; individual intentions and collective thought and production. It is a paradox that, by trying to recognize the”other,” the “other” inevitably becomes a part of one’s work, which can be daunting. How do you incorporate difference without subverting individual identity? Where do you draw the line?

Regardless of ability to answer the questions, this empathetic examination is necessary both in architecture and in our world.

/ Integrated Practice

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ CHAD ECHOLS

88

/ The American Cinema: Recapturing the Spirit of the Moviegoing Experience

89 EMILIA EDWARDS  /  P R I N T M A K I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I make art to collect and make sense of the images that shape my idea of the physical presence of my own body. In my work I layer various influences, including early medical illustration, decorative arts, and violent cartoons, to create large-scale wall installations of collaged drawings and prints. With this process, I have created a series of narrative scenes involving patterned backgrounds populated by a cast of intestinal forms that evoke an uncomfortable, mesmerizing beauty. I am interested in the recombination of grotesque images in a manner that nudges them toward opulent decoration.

/ Second Pulse

SC UL P T UR E

/ CRYSTAL ELLIS

90

I grew up on the vast flat plains of Illinois. It was empty out there on the land, by the water, below the sky. My childhood feels like a sunny place, but it wasn’t always. I had in my imagination the spaces under a cricket’s wing or below the belly of a snake, the freedom of a summer day, the small and the big together in an open field, mixed with a myriad of pets, deaths, pseudo science, winter, divorce, work, and isolation. Somehow, that is what my work is. I reach in and I empty these things out. From the places of memory, I collect, sift, sort, separate, and transform my pasts in order to make them present.

I create light-catching, soft, white, fluid objects that are hollow, empty, isolated, barren, over-worked, or tedious. They hold dual messages — purity and loss, hard and soft, weight and weightlessness, memory and reality, hope and experience.

/ From Knowing to Unknowing

91

JESSICA FANNING / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

/ Farmacy

A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ DAVID FERSH 92

93

in scale from an urban district to the individual.

/ Design for Development

BOBACK FIROOZBAKHT  /  I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

I believe design is the driving force in determining the success or failure of any development, ranging

GR A P HIC DESIGN 

/  ELIZA FITZHUGH

94

Can a culture that bursts with information, increased speed, and over-stimulation learn how to slow down, look harder, and linger longer? Can we, as the artist Robert Irwin describes, learn to perceive ourselves perceiving? My thesis examines how people look, why they look at what they look at, and how perception can be facilitated.

My projects gently distract, uncover the unnoticed, and slow the eye.

They invite viewers to build individual meaning and ask them to be more deliberate in their seeing. In my thesis, I utilize the language of graphic design to address issues of distraction and the rewards of pause and reflection. / Seeing Through Distraction

95 DARREN FOOTE  /  S C U L P T U R E PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

My process mimics the workings of memory, starting with a specific place or object, then slowly breaking down, combining, and transforming. Plaster, wood, and mirrors make up much of my visual vocabulary because I find these materials to be honest and direct, bearing traces of time through their distinctive properties, and engaging an awareness of the present moment. My work suggests a commitment to longevity and history, knowingly conducted by the steadfast march of entropy and rebirth.

/ Neverevereven

SC UL P T UR E

/ JAMES FOSTER

96

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Holes in a fence are for peeping.

I would establish boundaries and then let others be cowed, or look skyward, or investigate the situation and find the physical and mental points of egress that lead to topography, to cairns and to the highway.

To suddenly feel surrounded should give the viewer pause, but to assess in that moment the height of the enclosure should elevate the viewer above the construct — like projecting oneself over a maze to find the missed turn, but then stopping to consider that one was, in fact, aloft.

/ What Is a Koan? (Repeat)

97 SARAH FRANK / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

During my last year at risd, I’ve been exploring elementary school design within the context of a vacant church building. Specifically, I have been studying how design can reflect the combination of ideas from various educational pedagogies and philosophies within an art-integrated charter school environment. Do the spaces in which education takes place actually make a difference in a child’s ability to learn and grasp new concepts? By combining aspects from a variety of different pedagogies and philosophies, I sought to create something that is unique, insightful, and ideally can become a typology for elementary schools to be built in the future.

/ Pedagogical Design: An Elementary School

A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ ETHAN FRENCH

98

The physical formula Work stipulates Energy must be expanded to change the state of Any Body.

A gift enables a resultant state.

Or disables.

To earn is to walk the ground.

A gift.

/ 1 to 1

99 CAMILLA FUCILI / I N D U S T R I A L D E S I G N PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I design narratives.

My objects live in the space between the lines, in the gap between the human and the artificial — made of stories, poetry, and imagination.

Like small domestic sculptures, they talk about us and carry the marks of our existence, becoming metaphors of living — alter egos of their owners. There is no design in silence. Everything tells a story.

/ Between the Lines: A Story about People and Objects at the Table

INDUS T R I A L DE SIGN 

/  ELAINE YURI FUKUDA

100

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Design, alone, will not save the world. Designers are emerging, with a place at the table alongside scientists, engineers, economists, and policy makers. Like the others, they address some of the most difficult social issues we face.

I design through iterative experimentation, either actively facilitating interactions or observing in situ. Living through the everyday minutiae has the potential to reveal opportunities for design. Design research is strategic, exploratory, and intuitive.

My thesis looks at the breast cancer awareness movement reimagined in the current context. In what ways can we engage women to be more pro-active of their health? Can social relationships help facilitate knowledge sharing to promote these behaviors? On a broader scale, how can a designer, as an architect of choice, help people make better decisions for health and well-being? / Beyond Awareness: Creating Agency for the Early Detection of Breast Cancer

101 LEILEI GAO / A R C H I T E C T U R E

Space and time are objective realities. They are relatively stable and constant, and sometimes mysterious. However, their conditions change when a story unfolds, as in theater or a history book. The stability and rationality of space and time are broken down on the stage. In theater, the audience is transported into the space and time of the actors, their actions, and the atmosphere they create, very much so when the story is performed in a city that is over 3,000 years old — at the very beginning of the Silk Road.

/ Kaleidoscope Theater

L A NDSC A P E A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ LU GAO

102

Cities are dynamic and multi-layered systems that are physically, culturally, and historically complex. These layers were designed and constructed by different people, in different times, with different functions, without consideration of the connections between these layers. This has led to an isolated and fragmented contemporary urban landscape.

My intention is to design interactions between the different layers — between the bridge infrastructure, the air, and the river, highlighted by different water levels. By utilizing the space under the Washington Bridge in Providence and looking at the changing use of the bridge over time — walking/cycling/boating — different water levels can be revealed as useful, allowing a more integrated urban landscape experience.

/ Revealing the Invisible Layers

103 JENNIFER GARZA-CUEN  /  P H O T O G R A P H Y

Using the implicit forms of framing and editing in photography, as well as the literary form of redaction in texts, my work is a venture in narrative retelling. Reno is an exploration of cultural memory and inheritance through the revision, reenactment, and recounting of the myths of place, specifically those of Reno, Nevada.

/ Wandering in Place

L A NDSC A P E A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ ARIANNE GELARDIN

104

In a series of urban vignettes, constructed spaces appropriate the cues of blind navigation, orchestrating a sensorium that contextualizes the individual’s position within the larger urban system. An interruption of light, a momentary shift in kinetic rhythm or temperature, a re-mastered auditory composition—these sensory prompts introduce non-image based readings of a once-familiar place, suggesting another person’s experience. Empathy for others grows out of these quotidian moments.

/ I Sense Your Reality

105 STEPHAN GOETSCHIUS  /  I N D U S T R I A L D E S I G N PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

What excites me most is the meaning and insight that comes from transformative exchange, when the synergy of collective perspectives enables the birth of a new vision.

We each have the potential to contribute, from our being, toward socially effective development. Designing both the means and the ends by which we live out our ideals, we identify our human-environmental needs and learn together through an iterative exchange. It is not simply a matter of predicting the future and responding accordingly, but rather of choosing the future within which we want to live.

/ Yours Mine & Ours

D I G I TA L + M E D I A

/ ROHINI GOSAIN

106

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

As our population steadily increases, it is an interesting and distressing paradox that we are closing into ourselves more and more. We reduce and barricade the space around us such that we don’t stretch into the closest person. By eliminating others, however, we are left with just ourselves. That’s no fun! We miss out on the one thing that transcends space, time, place, and language: the warmth of human relations. In my work I create spaces that bring people together, where they chance upon a journey within, evoking a pleasure that comes with being in the company of others.

/ A Curious Contrast | Chanced Upon

107 JESSICA GREENFIELD / G R A P H I C D E S I G N Most graphic design work today is made while the body remains static, staring into a computer screen. Gesture — motion deeply encoded with human identity — is lost.

In my work, I reintroduce the human body into the graphic design process by combining analog and digital methodologies in an effort to embrace human gesture. I employ mark making and shifts in scale to make the body visually evident through handwriting, performative typography, letterpress, and alternative photographic processes.

My thesis work emerges from a deep love of printmaking’s tactility and physical scale, and a desire to reinterpret that process within graphic design.

/ Tactile Exchange

P R IN T M A K ING

/ STEFAN GUNN

108

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

/ The Pixellated Ember: A Nomadic Journey through Psychedelic Fantasy Conceptualism

109 BRADY GUNNELL / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

/ Growing on the Food Frontier

D I G I TA L + M E D I A

/ BYEONGWON HA

110

For an interactive medium of reality.

I used to live along a river that was intertwined with a longer river that led into a huge sea. I enjoyed catching crabs with my friends and I remember the moisture and the coldness of sand, the hardness and the sharpness of a crab, the smell and taste of salt, and the sunset that said, “Come back home.” I’m not sure why I stopped catching crabs, whether the crabs themselves disappeared or if Legos and video games immersed me. However, crab-catching remains the only authentic piece of interactive nostalgia left in my life.

/ Unfolding the Tiny Quad: Multi-Screens the Korean Way

111 RICO A. HARRIS / T E X T I L E S PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

My work, as a whole, attests to the process of unification. To unite is “to make or become an integrated whole.” Combining two or more visual concepts relates to my spiritual practice. I follow the emblematic meaning of Pan-Africanist philosopher Marcus Garvey: There is “one God, one aim, one destiny.” In this light I see myself, my art, and the world around me as a synthesized whole.

The work’s physical form is printed and hand-dyed textiles on natural fibers, recognizable by its representation and achievement of simplicity, balance, and luminous color.

/ 1 + 1 = ∞ : A Process of Unification

PA IN T ING 

/  COLLIN HATTON

112

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I create paintings that unite a wide range of associations into a uniquely coalesced form. In rearranging hierarchies, injecting the personal into the socially constructed, and manipulating high and low, my work exposes, explores, and pushes boundaries of taste, materiality, phenomenology, and abstraction. I want to bring together a pastiche of information that depicts the world as I experience it in a richer, weirder, and more complex pictorial way.

/ In the Fold

113 OMER HECHT / P H O T O G R A P H Y

“We must never forget that we are human, and as humans we dream, and when we dream we dream of money.” —G. Lang

/ The End of the Line

T E X T IL E S 

/  VEDRANA HRSAK

114

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Through my thesis work I seek to document and explore the contradictions inherent in the cityscape of Providence, how the sensations created by urban decay and restored architecture are redefined through a dialogue with human experience. By combining these elements into textile designs, my hope is to offer a perspective that engages with the present as well as the past.

As these narratives unfold in my process, I aim to reassemble them in fabrics and garments that exhibit the tensions of the permanent and transient, the new and old, the clean and rough, the bare and the covered. / Providence: Ruin and Restoration

115 CYNDIA HSU / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

/ The Senses Distillery

D I G I TA L + M E D I A

/ JASON HUFF

116

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

“ Wiktionary defines the noun ‘artist’ (Singular: artist; Plural: artists) as follows: A person who creates art.

A person who creates art as an occupation.

A person who is skilled at some activity.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the older broad meanings of the term ‘artist’: A learned person or Master of Arts One who pursues a practical science, traditionally medicine, astrology, alchemy, chemistry A follower of a pursuit in which skill comes by study or practice A follower of a manual art, such as a mechanic One who makes their craft a fine art One who cultivates one of the fine arts - traditionally the arts presided over by the muses A definition of Artist from Princeton.edu: creative person (a person whose creative work shows sensitivity and imagination).”

—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist#Dictionary_definitions

/ Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era

117 SEUNG HWAN HWANG / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

/ The Community Center of the Arts

A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  TAIGO ITADANI

118

The definition of figure and ground is expanded, from a simple perception based on contrast, to include abstract binary concepts such as melody/harmony, positive/negative, public/private, and inside/ outside. Both a series of material experiments revealing an emergence of rust from within and the interpretation of The Last Judgment by Michelangelo provide analytical tools which are of considerable value in assessing the epistemological importance of these terms. Spatial and ephemeral aspects of these concepts are recognizable through the complexity, variety, and abundance of an individual, clusters, or chunks of bodies with their postures, movements, gestures, and expression.

As a contemporary confession, my thesis examines a house shared with various occupancies in which a linear story does not exist, but different realities coexist.

/ A House of Revelation

119 AI ITO / A R C H I T E C T U R E

“Pain and imagination are both a condition of intentionality and each other’s counterpart. They are the framing events for man-as-creator in which all other intimate perceptual, psychological, emotional, and somatic events occur.” — Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain I am interested in how we become implicated into each others’ sentience through verbal and material artifacts, how people become visible or cease to become visible to us. Located at the intersections of language, navigation, and architecture, in my work I attempt to understand the possibilities of agency and the creation of a spatial structure of affirmation.

/ Navigational Dreaming: Authorship of Socio-Political Space

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ SEO YEON JIN

120

Can the coexistence of public and private space in an urban habitation influence the relationship between residents, visitors, and the community? How can a mixed-use structure foster interaction and create synergy between both public and private inhabitants? My thesis, using the term “hive” as a social metaphor, explores the dynamic exchanges that occur by creating a program in which private and public space freely overlap.

/ Urban Hive: A Social Hub in the Middle of an Urban Habitation

121 LEE JOHNSON / C E R A M I C S

With digital communication and functionless objects as my muses I collaboratively and independently fuck iconoclasm.

“Over absurdity, confusion, and overstimulation sits the work: a detonation of materials, information, and fervency that simultaneously assaults and blames the viewer. Vaguely domestic environments, hobby-crafted tactile media, and digital moving pictures exist in the hole between past and future while dismantling the present. Combined with performance and temporary public projects a question surfaces: What does it mean to outsource one’s cultural values?” —Abigail Blank, July 16, 1945

/ The Cultural Apocalypse

A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ THOMAS JONAK

122

As a field of study, architecture has been and will continue to be about how we occupy and experience space. Often the study is “the new.”

Ideas are planted in virgin ground or are bulldozed and started again.

We are no longer in an economic- or resource-rich world, and so I ask, how can we begin to reoccupy existing pieces of deteriorated architecture as if they are the new, open, and untouched landscapes?

With limited funds and a minimal impact, remnants of urban infrastructure — skeletons — are what we need to reuse, to design within. We must find a balance between the reoccupation of nature and man.

/ Dynamo

123 HOGIL JUNG / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

/ Finding New Flavor

PA IN T ING 

/  ANINA FIELD KALLOP

124

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Rooted in the study of scientific phenomena, my work explores elemental processes as a means of making an image. I employ chemical reactions, harness natural forces, and execute physical procedures. I use basic materials such as ink and bleach as I attempt to achieve a richness of results through an economy of means. With an empirical approach, I examine, manipulate, and orchestrate processes, capturing the residue that they leave behind as my subject matter. These traces are often abstract and geometric in form; circles, spirals, and grids reveal the beauty and order inherent in the physical world.

/ To Embrace the Universe

125 JENNIFER KALLUS / T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

I am concerned with the act of looking — both in my own work and in my teaching practice. It can be difficult to maintain the curiosity necessary to appreciate the inspiration of our environments. When I am able to maintain that curiosity, I find that I am endlessly fascinated with my surroundings. In my teaching practice, I search for ways to impart that fascination to students.

I believe art can have enormous power and relevancy in our lives; it can transform our environments. Learning to look allows students to make connections between art and their everyday experiences.

Learning to look makes art accessible.

/ Process Book

INDUS T R I A L DE SIGN

/ CHRISTINA KAZAKIA

126

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Inspiration emerges from curiosity. Through observation, my creations respond to the natural inclinations and needs of people by encompassing five main principles: adaptability, helpfulness, playfulness, functionality, simplicity.

My designs purposefully involve people, helping both the individual and the society. Form, function, and empathy are the tools I use to unfold new interactions between objects and people.

My thesis explores engaging catalysts to reconnect urban children with their surrounding natural environment. Through design I am making natural experiences accessible and increasing children’s exposure to nature triggering interaction and imagination.

/ Natural Imagination: Reconnecting Urban Children with Nature

127 ALEXANDER KELLER  /  A R C H I T E C T U R E What architectural seed can be implanted within a city that will alter its fabric and create a lasting impact?

My thesis examines new ways of uniting disconnected parts of St. Louis with an elevated light rail system, while also creating new infill buildings along the transportation line that serve as stop locations.

Both the urban scale and architectural building scale strive to address whether it is possible to implement new transportation strategies into an urban landscape that addresses the pedestrian and could serve to revitalize a struggling city.

/ Nodal Connections: The Integration of Architecture and Rail Along the Main Spine of St. Louis

D I G I TA L + M E D I A

/ BENJAMIN KENNEDY

128

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

My current practice investigates the orphaning and displacement of the object in the historical contemporary. Because my work is an alternation between”cropping” and “sharing,” I’d like to pronounce that I am more a “sharecropper” than an artist. My practice often involves collaboration with dancers, advertising performers, Chinese painters, corporeal mime artists, and massage therapists. I produce scenes and objects taken out of the context of theater, while simultaneously referencing its historical failure. In my current body of work, my production considers the object via speculative philosophy for the non-ordained.

/ Immobile IMMOBILITY

129 LYNN KIANG / G R A P H I C D E S I G N

Behind every good cabinet of curiosity is a collector — one who finds the most common ephemera worth noticing and storing. This collector seeks, often without intention, with an acute awareness of the wonderful. Each item is a totem of places found and memories evoked. The cabinet is lined with shelves and compartments, fixing each item to a homestead in relation to the others. However, their placement is temporary and, at the whim of the collector, they are swiped clean and rebuilt. In so doing, a new collection is created and meaning is transformed.

/ Cut+Run: Video Graphic Design

A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  MEGAN YOUNGKYUNG KIM

130

Architecture should never be considered a static, finished product.

Rather than fighting its changing surroundings, architecture should allow for change. In this way it can develop rather than degrade from the moment of completion. In this evolution of architecture, what is mutable and what is fixed?

The landfill is understood as a continuously moving surface, the result of oblivious collective behavior, disposing of the unwanted.

Using a site that is unstable and volatile, architectural intervention embodies a conscious effort of collective commitment.

/ Appearance | Disappearance: Constant Motion in Time

131 NA REE KIM  /  I N D U S T R I A L D E S I G N PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Most revolutions that change the world in new, beautiful, and abundant ways come through small, incremental behavior changes.

My thesis started from my goal to learn, investigate, and instill my ecological caretaking role as a designer in the next generation. I created tools and resources that gave opportunities for children to develop an appreciation of the environment.

Where can I take design to help children become aware of the importance of conserving the environment? What role can I play as a designer to help children create a sustainable future? What small steps can create a bigger impact, fostering sustainability in our everyday life?

/ Small Steps, Big Impact: Promoting Ecological Skills and Responsibility in Children

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ KAYLA SOO-YOUN KIM

132

Healing is a process and a transitional period. It is a turning point to recovery, the start of a journey in which survivors resolve fears, achieve self-actualization, gain confidence, and live beyond cancer. The collaborative act of gardening promotes social interaction among cancer survivors, enabling them to build bridges among themselves, staff, and caregivers. More importantly, the relationship between survivor and plant is symbiotic. Plants need constant support and care. Survivors, through providing that care, gain a sense of accomplishment and selfcontrol, creating a foundation for living beyond fear. It is a co-creative process, where survivors and nature are essential to each other.

/ Healing through Social Activation

133 WILLIAM KIMMERLE / A R C H I T E C T U R E Representation superimposes mathematics on the spaces we perceive.

It often manifests perception in abidance with strict frameworks based on pure, geometric misunderstandings of optics; it supposes that experience blindly follows math. At times we experience through schema, both strict and interpretive, both learned and innate, but in the same moment, architectural space changes — even dimensionally — for reasons personal to us.

We inhabit and design by assembling perceptual and orthographic space simultaneously. My thesis is an investigation to equalize geometry (earth measure) and perception (taking in), by consciously accounting for the influence of memory, emotion, and attention.

/ Experience: Perception + Orthographics

A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  BRADLEY KISICKI

134

In most contemporary cities, we move amongst dense packs of people throughout the day without notice. Crowd creation can become dangerously unpredictable and, at times, lead to tragedy. The line between crowd and crush is almost imperceptibly thin. I have created an architectural blueprint to solve future calamity by examining past crowd tragedies and uncovering the patterns of failed design. An architecture emerges that embraces the industrial and maritime history of the chosen site in Vancouver, British Columbia. The grounds offer a myriad of potential programmatic uses. Likewise, an infrastructure presents itself to be manipulated, and innovative arrangements reveal themselves to be created.

/ Steering the Crowd

135 LISA KLINGER / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E

Wild elephants swim in the Woonasquatucket River. At least they did during one hot July evening in 2008 when the river’s full story came alive in my dreams. The juxtaposition of these graceful giants gliding through the murky downtown canals continues to linger as I construct my degree project.

The design uses the ghost of the Riverside Worsted Mill compound to form the identity of the present intervention. The beautifully deteriorating masonry mill shell becomes a sculpture within the bounds of the new center.

/ An Urban Environmental Center for The Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council

A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ ADA TAK KO

136

Water drips, trickles, meanders, gurgles, gushes, bubbles, sprays, splashes, surfs, cascades, falls, plunges, churns, rumbles, surges, swells, pounds, crashes, rages, roars, overflows, floods, inundates, drifts, melts, freezes, evaporates, and dissipates. Water flows, moves on, and leaves behind its imprints.

Can architecture provide, for both the visitor and the community, a space for “immersion,” immersion in water, immersion in culture, immersion of the senses, immersion in thinking, immersion in making? Can the impressions left behind by such immersions humbly remind us of our oneness within an ineffable whole, and inspire respect and awareness for this limited resource?

/ Capturing the Ephemeral

137 ANDREW KOPP  /  F U R N I T U R E D E S I G N PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I am inspired by relationships and how different entities interact.

All living things are dependent on each other in some way or another. and I enjoy exploring this dependency in the form of furniture.

I translate symbiotic and intimate relationships in nature into material, structure, and connections. The human body plays an integral part in my furniture. Muscles and joints can aid in making components functional, forming new structures. A one-legged stool will not stand without the use of human legs, and the human cannot sit without the wooden stool.

/ Dependency: Mutually Reliant Furniture

A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ BRITTNEY KAILESE KROON

138

To Vitruvius’s “utilitas, firmitas, venustas,” I would add “civitas.”

Architecture is an expression of civic responsibility. “& hence the web of life is woven, and the tender sinews of life created.”

— William Blake

139 CALVIN KU / I N D U S T R I A L D E S I G N PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

My thesis questions the paradigm of conspicuous consumption within the incredibly vague yet widely embraced concept of the “American Dream.” It explores the motif behind the reasons we buy things and how a general lack of awareness of the effects of consumption affects both individuals and the people that surround them. My intention is not only to convey this awareness, but also to offer coping mechanisms in response to the allures of consumerism. In a world where noise is everywhere, silence speaks for itself.

/ The Good(s) Life? Awakening from our Subconscious Lifestyle of Conspicuous Consumption

D I G I TA L + M E D I A

/ YASIMIN KUNZ

140

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

/ Exile from Memory

141 EDWARD LAEMMEL / A R C H I T E C T U R E The construction process in today’s building environment is managed by the ease, low cost, and standardization that our society demands.

I explore how a building can open a conversation between design, construction, and space. Can we as architects introduce a building system that allows for repetition and ease in the construction process, leaving the design up to the inhabitants? This question is in response to the mass-produced home, which is stamped across a site, which starts and stops at the color of the exterior, disregarding site, culture, and inhabitation.

T E X T IL E S 

/  ELIZABETH LAMB

142

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I have always been interested in storytelling and the transformations that occur as a story is told and retold. Through drawing and painting I am able to compose moments in time, creating and combining images to describe my own personal mythology.

My thesis collection intends to evoke the narrative of fairy tales as it exists within. I imagine characters and readers who venture into an enchanted forest and choose to stay rather than find their way out.

Knit garments are inspired by the lush textures of ancient trees; ghostly wall coverings echo the voices of mystery and antiquity.

/ Rediscovering the Enchanted Forest

143 SHINAH LEE  /  A R C H I T E C T U R E

Architecture is a physical body that not only represents culture but also facilitates the development of social behavior and cultural patterns.

I lament that modern Korea is losing many of its unique ways of building from earlier eras to homogenous cityscapes of modernity.

I propose a University Campus Research Center adjacent to an expected flood zone from the construction of a dam on the upper stream of the longest river in Korea. The program aims to compensate for the environmental impact and loss of historic landmarks, as well as to create local industry. The design follows the characteristics of traditional architecture in a modern language. Ascending roof lines, eaves, pathways, and courtyard spaces are loosely connected to define porous boundaries.

/ Returning to Homeland: Architecture and Cultural Values

D I G I TA L + M E D I A

/ JAE OK LEE

144

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I create or appropriate 3-D digital models and graphics based on my childhood memories. This allows me to scrutinize not only my own psychology, but also the empathic resonances of the socio-cultural engagement of digital models. Examining the broader social implications of digital artifacts, my works question and challenge the general notion that they are impersonal.

/ Hybrid Gaze: Digital Artifacts and Memory

145 ARAN LEE  /  I N T E R I O R   A R C H I T E C T U R E

Due to the advancement of technologies, the modern lifestyle is faster, more flexible, and prone to change. The form and location of a building can be shifted in a second with a simple computer program.

However, once built, architecture still remains a somewhat permanent medium. Because of this permanence, architecture has difficulty accommodating change. Mobility and flexibility in architecture is less dominant than stability and firmness. Understanding adaptability within architecture can improve the way in which we approach traditional architectural alterations.

My thesis observes the relationship between transient and permanent space by using an architectural language. By exploring the juxtaposition between presence and void, flexibility and rigidity, I would like to find a way to convey the rapid changes of advanced technologies within the setting of traditional architecture.

/ Transportable Space

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ JUNG EUN LEE

146

This project started from my personal interest in looking at the quality of abandonment. I have always thought that lost spaces have energy that eludes explanation, and this energy continues to inspire me to imagine spaces that can become so much more than what they currently are.

Spaces that have lost their function; prominence or visibility have not lost their potential. This project seeks to “find” these spaces and reimagine the program and design approach to reeducate the public to see them. By discovering “lost” spaces and rejuvenating them, the project provides a place of pause, a “third” space in the trajectory of our busy daily lives. This method demonstrates the potential to revitalize urban landscapes, which can be applied to any city.

/ Finding Lost Space

147 SEUNG CHAN LIM / G R A P H I C D E S I G N

After a nine-year career practicing both computer science and interaction design, I have spent the last three years in a traditional art school immersed in dialogue with physical materials—including my own body. Through a series of studies in acting, dancing, drawing, writing, and making with clay, glass, light, metal, paper, plaster, plastic, type, and wood, I realized that making with physical materials is analogous to engaging in an empathic conversation with another person. Based on this experience, I imagine in my work how our interaction with computation can afford the same qualities.

/ Realizing Empathy

A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ CAROL ANN LIVINGSTONE

148

Who are you, and where are you? What is the form of your belonging?

Temporary architectural installations abound, with timelines stretching back centuries or even thousands of years. We dwell in a panoply of constructions for the body and soul, unique genetic markers of time and place. The Passamaquoddy, a Native American tribe in eastern Maine, believed that rock was a house for spirits — but even rock is temporary. How, then, do you define your community, your place, your space? Your active participation is the genetic marker for your existence — your active awareness, its quality and inherent order.

/ Architecture Pro Tempore: Time, Speed, and Agency

149

restrictions, limitations, and perceived potential. This art form often yields a product far more inventive, intelligent, and elegant than a project free from boundaries and confines.

I explore the perceived design limitations associated with the disability of autism, commonly regarded as a sensory processing disorder. I celebrate these restrictions in a design tailored specifically for individuals with autism. The way in which these individuals experience a space is not wrong, simply different.

Emanating from perceived limitations, a therapy space for those with autism will flourish.

/ Embrace

ABIGAIL LULEY  /  I N T E R I O R   A R C H I T E C T U R E

Interior Architecture is an art where creativity flourishes under

L A NDSC A P E A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ SCOTT MACDONALD

150

“My power to reach the world and my power to entrench myself in phantasms only [come] one with the other; even more: [it is] as though the access to the world were but the other face of a withdrawal.”

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

/ Mundane: Memory | Perception | Imagination

151 MIKHAIL MANSION / D I G I TA L + M E D I A PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

How are ecological actions transformed through digital tools? The advent of technology in the age of advanced capitalism might seem to have empowered humanity, but more often than not it abates the critical imagination needed to act meaningfully by espousing fantastic images that besiege thinking and divert true action. Ecology through many contemporary modes of electronic media has eroded our critical ability to relate to the natural systems around us, and as such requires a cultivation of imagination in order to establish stronger ecological bearings and engage with complex environmental issues. My work is about overcoming the impediment of fantasy by composing new forms of action, where ecology is not just mediated, but is rather a medium for imagination.

/ Natural Fantasy

P R IN T M A K ING

/ DAVID MAY

152

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

.

Meant to send this earlier in the day but fell asleep— Egodystonic whatever and I’m trying to fuck Sharon Stone, like every fucking day.

/ The Fish Market Restaurant

153 RYAN MCINTOSH / P R I N T M A K I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

/ An Illusion of Progress

T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

/ KIRSTEN MCNALLY

154

As an arts educator, I want to facilitate learning fueled by wonder and awe. I believe that this type of learning encourages passion and creates deeper understanding. Understanding is more intuitive and much less prescribed when there is an element of magic involved. If nothing else, the way we educate students should be in direct relation to, or perhaps in collaboration with, their lives.

/ Process Book: Harmony

155 LAUREN MEENA / L A N D S C A P E A R C H I T E C T U R E

The fundamental question that drives my thesis investigation is how to provide an educational environment that benefits the whole child, while considering their individual learning style. Through the vehicle of landscape architecture I approach the restructuring of ill-equipped and poorly designed schoolyards. Instead of continuously treating these important spaces as an afterthought, we might begin addressing them as valuable opportunities, capable of bridging the gaps between learning and play and between a school’s curriculum and the surrounding context. Initiating a conversation within the school’s immediate vicinity facilitates a holistic educational experience that can manifest itself within the curriculum while strengthening the fabric of community.

/ Inside/Out: Schoolyards as an Extension of Education

P HO T OGR A P H Y 

/  MICHAEL MERGEN

156

My work focuses on the unique yet everyday spaces of democracy in the United States: the voting booth, the jury deliberation room, and the naturalization ceremony rooms where immigrants become citizens.

I photograph America, exploring the perceptions between the rhetoric of American democracy and the realities of the often banal spaces where democracy is manifest.

/ Between Rhetoric and Reality: Spaces of American Democracy

157 CHRISTINA MILES / T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

As an artist and new educator, I am constantly processing what I see.

I do this in the hopes of expanding upon what I know and to explore what could be possible.

I seek to increase my students’ understanding of their surrounding visual world. I want them not only to take a second look at the familiar, but to see a subject from multiple perspectives, encouraging them to envision possibilities and to build connections. It is my hope that through my teaching, my students will learn to look.

/ Process Book: The Art of Looking

F UR NI T UR E DE SIGN 

/  RYAN MURRAY

158

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I had just turned 27 when I applied for graduate school. While it seemed like the next logical step, the plummeting economy had me doubting whether it would actually pay off. My other option was to live a life away from society, migrating from southern to northern Arizona.

I decided that my future would ride on the outcome of the looming presidential election.

My thesis tells the story of my alternate life: the life I envision I would have lived had the outcome of the election gone differently.

The objects I created during this fictitious nomadic journey fit somewhere between camping gear and high-end mobile furniture, formulating the stories of my travels that suggest how other cultures and people live their lives.

/ Functional Concepts of Nomadism

159 SHERATAUN NUSS / A R C H I T E C T U R E

Space is only what you make of it (so let’s go get a karaoke machine).

/ May Not Architecture Again Become a Living Art?

T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

/ ALLISON PACE

160

For me, art education is about the everyday and seeing the familiar differently. In my teaching practice, I hope to provide new ways for students to experience their environments and communicate their observations. I hope to encourage learners to question and find meaning in the ordinary. As a result the arts become more accessible and the classroom becomes a place where learners push their skills beyond what they think are the limits of their abilities. Art education is about creating, but it is also about pausing to look longer, more closely, and with intention. It is about finding the extraordinary within the ordinary.

/ Process Book: Lessons on the Everyday

161 JASON PACHECO / C E R A M I C S PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Clay is my material. It has a memory, it preserves the evidence of touch, and its processes are important to my studio practice. I use forms from my surroundings — such as architecture, landscape, and machines — to intuitively build my own “shape” vocabulary, producing angles that loosely reference my environment. By making pieces based on memory, I can push, distort, and create pieces that are ultimately playful in quality.

/ Production

PA IN T ING

/ NELL PAINTER

162

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

People’s interaction in society—a theme my art shares with my previous vocation of American historian—fascinates me. I’ve known all along that how people act and how they look accord with where they are and who’s interacting with them. As an artist I note the way light compounds the role of social interaction, influencing personal appearance in the eyes of a range of viewers. Not surprisingly, portraits, including my own, have long intrigued me. Does a healthy dose of vanity nourish my love of self-portraiture? That may well be; I often return to self-portraiture, compelled by the many ways my hand translates my image.

163 LAUREN PAKRADOONI  /  P R I N T M A K I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I reflect on the history and processes of printmaking through framing, isolating, and obscuring the subjects within my work. This process creates situations where a clearly composed viewpoint is presented to the viewer, but the focal point is obscured or obstructed. Printmaking methods are a filter through which I clarify and distill my ideas about representation; engagement with these processes reflects my way of perceiving the world.

/ Dark Glass: Recordings for a Vessel

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ JAE HYUN PARK

164

The world of commerce is changing. It is now not enough for companies to merely sell a good product — they must sell an experience, an image, an idea. The purpose of my degree project is to create a cultural hospitality space sponsored by a global prestigious brand group, lvmh.

This space is not used to sell their products, but to bring and blend their core value and brand identity into the interior architecture so that visitors can recognize them consciously and unconsciously while eating, drinking, and socializing in this space. With a comprehensive understanding of the brand, how to translate the brand identity and values into the interior architectural language becomes the essential issue.

/ Brand Meets Hospitality

165 KATHERINE CHASE PETERS / J E W E L R Y + M E TA L S M I T H I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

The decadent happenings of the hours of darkness have punctured my being. The shooting stars of the cosmos battle the flashing lights of the metropolis. Within the mask of the night, fabulously adorned figures flutter in the glitz and glamour of disco.

I utilize elements from the costume jewelry industry to induce a new life in them. I believe all that glitters is gold. The superficial layer of glamour in my work rejuvenates a rusty and tired piece of steel.

At the end of the day we are all ugly and we are all beautiful. We are all just human.

/ Visual Thunder

C ER A MIC S

/ BENJAMIN PETERSON

166

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

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“And so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another moment’s hesitation. The result was precisely what I hoped it might be. As it is myself who now tell you this tale — as you see that I did escape — and as you are already in possession of the mode in which this escape was effected, and must therefore anticipate all that I have farther to say.”

—Edgar Allen Poe, A Descent into the Maelström, 1841

/ Disgusting Comfort: The New American Dream

167 JUSTIN PHILLIPSON / D I G I TA L + M E D I A

I am interested in the anxiety between tension and release. In music theory, this is known as dissonance and consonance — where unharmonious chords are built up and held to allow for more resonant and harmonious chords. Not all resolutions that provide relief, however, are perfectly harmonious. Sometimes anxious tension is relieved through failure, especially from the machine. The unblemished car, for example, remains a source of anxiety until the day it receives its first dent or scratch. This tension is where my work plays, within the juxtaposition of the anxious and the failed.

/ Sostenuto

PA IN T ING 

/  ANNA PLESSET

168

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

As part of an interdisciplinary practice that includes painting, drawing, photography, writing, and audio, I make work that draws on my broad interests in psychology, memory, and language. I employ restraint, withholding, and distance, using disparate approaches to construct visual and audible experiences that balance presence with absence and truth with fiction. Through these layered mediums and methods, my work offers a temporal experience using surrogacy and substitution to represent reality and, as in my current work, to mimic the often complex, fragmented, and inventive ways we might consciously and unconsciously recollect. / Contiguous Pictures: A Preface

169 PONNAPA PRAKKAMAKUL / L A N D S C A P E A R C H I T E C T U R E

In a peri-urban area of Bangkok, urbanization has decreased a sense of community, resulting in a physically connected but socially isolated neighborhood. My thesis explores how a shared response to an urban annual flood can serve to build new social interactions. During the flood, residents participate in the collective construction of an ephemeral flood landscape, creating a moment of collaboration—a physical and social space that provides reciprocity between community members.

/ Celestial Resonance

L A NDSC A P E A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ IAN QUATE

170

“Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects.”

—Baas-Becking hypothesis, 1934 The designer makes a ground, and biota it collects.

The ground is an instrument, biology the keys.

Designer ecosystems tailored to our future needs.

/ This Situation May Appear Bleak for Wildlife

171 SARA RAFFO  /  G R A P H I C D E S I G N

Design is called on to assist with everything from social issues to serious environmental concerns. As we negotiate these situations, it is critical that we are aware of our own intentions, the clarity of our communication with others, and the real-world effects of our actions.

To be so, we must simultaneously critique and question our own processes as we work. How do we engage with the world as process?

Here is a working model: suspend the state of unknowing, be aware of how we operate as designers, and create a continuous cycle of listening and expression.

/ Probability Cloud

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ CHRISTINE RANKIN

172

/ Sorted: Made by Me, You + the Stuff that Surrounds Us

173 RUTH REIFEN / J E W E L R Y + M E TA L S M I T H I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Constantly exposed to visual stimuli that are supplanted by new stimuli at a dizzying pace, we gradually become desensitized, in need of heightened visual effects to arouse our interest. Mass digital media confuses our understanding of what is genuine; the natural often looks artificial, and the notion of the natural is consequently blurred.

In the form of flowery asymmerical compositions, I make in the same way that I perceive the natural world, rather than mimic its appearance. My aim is to make pieces that nature is unlikely to create, that surpass nature: exaggerated, theatrical, enhanced, humorous versions of natural forms. / Floral Charades

T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

/ ANNE REINHARDT

174

My work as an art educator stems from my roots as a teacher of young adjudicated males, ages 13-20, who have been placed in a high security facility for chronic violent offenders. Over the past four years, I have seen art influence the most disengaged of learners. I educate with the belief that youth who engage in art programming develop bonds with positive role models, are more well rounded, “whole” people, have higher self-esteem and a strengthened sense of identity. I believe that youth who engage with art have greater success in school, are more productive, and are less likely to engage in delinquent activity.

Subsequently, this growth affects the individual’s larger community positively, especially within communities that struggle with socioeconomic instability.

175 KENDALL REISS / J E W E L R Y + M E TA L S M I T H I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

As owner of the object I view it as the beloved As maker I view the object as material and subject matter As artist I view the object as inspiration As human I view the object as a symbol As manufacturer I view the object for its function As curator I view the object in relation to others As scientist I view the object’s physical qualities and characteristics As historian I view the concrete facts of the object and its past As poet I view the objects whisperings As a craftsman I view the object as humble

/ Places of Pause

A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ CATHARINE RHA

176

My work begins with the realization of a single discrepancy — a feeling that something doesn’t quite fit — in a moment of silence, set in this world. If I can pick through the chaos to find the momentary void, I have found my beginning. Mapping creates an awareness of the hidden latencies embedded in a place. I use the existing canvas to tease out and layer architectural intervention. I am concerned with the social and with the integration of landscapes. The goal is to learn and take from the assemblage of small pieces that align to form a holistic work.

177 MARK RICE  /  P R I N T M A K I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Through the medium of engraving, I create prints that document my installation and sculptural work, as well as important moments in the history of printmaking.

My engravings also explore a vocabulary of personal symbols in a post-apocalyptic narrative. These allegorical tales probe the larger subjects of modern communication and environmental damage, while sifting through personal and autobiographical relationships such as dislocation, memory loss, doubt, and creative confusion. Drawing influence from the earliest printed books and works of science fiction, these prints are sometimes accompanied by an invented text to afford slower contemplation.

/ FLF: By Kevinator

P R IN T M A K ING

/ JOHN ROMERO

178

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

/ Rene Abythe & Fanfare

179 DUHIRWE RUSHEMEZA  /  P R I N T M A K I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

As a Rwandan living in Providence, RI, I configure ways of expressing the in-between state of being stuck in a perpetual transit lounge.

Using humor bordering on the ridiculous, I engage complex narratives to discuss issues of displacement, cultural adaptation, and what it means to be an immigrant today. My work calls into question assumptions around hybrid identity in this increasingly globalized world. In exploring these issues, I fixate on the transitional material of iron oxide to create a variety of sculptures, installations, prints, and paintings. I juxtapose disparate components, suspending them in space, to suggest geographical collision.

/ Transit Lounge (Assimilation Laboratory)

A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ BENJAMIN SANDELL

180

Architecture is neither a hollow shell nor a static object. Today, however, much of the “architecture” that is produced can be thought of in these terms — houses so empty they read as mausoleums, suburban developments lined up on a vast horizontal grid like gravestones . The space is not felt, the architecture not experienced, the atmosphere not remembered. How then can architecture be internalized, not just inhabited? Can architecture gain permanence in our mind and the built landscape, achieving both personal and public monumentality? How can architecture gain weight? Can architecture be or convey light? Can architecture be in equilibrium, in the sense that it can represent equally and simultaneously mass and ether — life and death?

/ Weight of Wait: Repetition and Ritual in the Search for Equilibrium

181 MICHAEL SCHREIBER  /  P A I N T I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Our culture charges images, objects, and phenomena with associative values. This fundamental process is dramatically compounded within art contexts. My work begins when I notice a thing in the world that merges the associative and the art context in obvious, yet paradoxical ways.

I take strong, loaded subjects and hollow them out, attempting to free them from commonplace understandings. I complicate and coax more open subjects toward metaphor and symbolic representation in order to illuminate the particular and telling details that brought them attention in the first place.

/ Popular Mechanics

T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

/ WENDY SCHREINER

182

In teaching art for the last two years, I have explored the question of where artists get their inspiration. By helping my students see the myriad possible answers, I hope to make art accessible to them and show how it is already a part of their everyday lives. Recently, I have been interested in looking closely at objects and places that are often overlooked. By stopping and looking, we can make beautiful and unexpected discoveries. Helping students make these discoveries and realize how essential art is to our existence is what inspires me to teach.

/ Process Book

183

screens. Extract the layers, then build them back. The Museum of Intangible Culture. Gallery openings 2011, 2021, 2031 …

/ Expressions of Intangible Culture

SANNA SHAH / A R C H I T E C T U R E

Skinny birch trees make a white column forest. A cleared space for the hand, mind, and tongue. Out of site, see the water through the

GR A P HIC DESIGN 

/  BENJAMIN SHAYKIN

184

In this moment of transition from the page to the screen, our relationship to books, both as objects and as texts, is changing.

A book is both finite and limitless. Its borders are clearly delineated, yet it expands infinitely outward: through the turning of its pages, through the act of reading, and through the connections made between texts and readers across time.

In my work, books serve both as subject matter and form. I restore the ephemeral into physical form, making abstract notions tactile.

I play in the liminal spaces, the moments when the page turns.

/ The Book in Translation

185 AMBEREEN SIDDIQUI  /  P H O T O G R A P H Y

Inabilities to be in two places at once, to amalgamate experiences, to be cognizant of my own biases.

And abilities, to call more than one place my own, to distinguish one from the other, to recognize some of the biases others hold.

Of challenging and exploring the voids and brims of these dualities.

Of experiencing and grappling with borders and demarcations.

Of organizing, categorizing and defining both body and space.

In my practice I explore acts of clinging and assimilating, resisting and mediating, including and eliminating. Working with photography, video, and animation, I reference borders that are no longer just physical, battles that are no longer just tactical, and displacements that are no longer just personal.

/ Seven Seas Without

C ER A MIC S

/ ELI SIMON

186

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Our culture has a great affinity for nomenclature. All things must be named, ordered, catalogued, tagged, and defined. It is parametric; establishing parameters is constant in all facets of life. But somewhere, there is a moment, an emergence that preempts our inevitable need to constrain. It is primordial and psychedelic. It is the unformed and the undiscovered. This is my place. I want to protract that emergence and record the trail of the wild and wonderful worms of light, color, mud, and sound as they float away into an unnamable future: Dazzle Ships.

/ Dazzle Ships

187 ROSE SIMPSON  /  C E R A M I C S PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Once upon a time a Passion crafted its own life on Earth.

It found that creation was a sensation of excitement and dynamic challenges that ranged from physical pain to true joy. The tactility of physical relationships with matter and energy became fascinating, and this Energy began to play with ways to inspire feeling: energy vibration, empowerment with material stability, and freedom/release with ephemerality. These abundant experiences of creativity rose as countless gifts of perspective, and this Soul asked questions of its consciousness by creating itself over and over again in a multitude of these reflections.

To this day you can find it at play in all the forms it may choose to be, and all of its combined Essences find it truly awesome.

/ Absolution; Logic, Clay, Soul

SC UL P T UR E

/ CURTIS SINGMASTER

188

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

My approach to objects and material is restless and unconventional.

Sly, silly, rambunctious, deadpan, average. I like to create things that possess the possibility of changing one’s perception, and discovering unforeseen potential. I have a passion for old techniques such as joinery.

I contrast these old techniques with contemporary objects or ideas.

I like using found objects. I often apply the “right” material to the “wrong” technique, or vice versa. I like to play with scale. When I work outside, I often create sculptural interventions of minimal means in public sites troubled with neglect. I interject humor or beauty in an attempt to rejuvenate the site into a new experience. I am equally concerned with where an object is, as opposed to what an object is.

I like the idea of touching someone artistically when they least expect it. I sometimes group my indoor works in a salon style fashion, allowing the work to project a collective voice. I like to keep things physically simple and stripped down, but conceptually rich.

/ Shift: From Something to Something Else

189 ANNE SLICK / A R C H I T E C T U R E

“He wrote me: We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

He wrote that he liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories.

He wrote: I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.” — Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

/ Camera Obscura: Roger Williams Park

F UR NI T UR E DE SIGN 

/  ALEXANDRA SNOOK

190

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

My eyes are closed and the sheets are cool. Pencil in hand, I begin to drift and think. I am in between sleep and wakefulness. Flashes of color, form, and memory play behind my closed eyes. They are stills from my movie. I draw loosely and without fear or censor. This is the most fruitful way and time for me to think. Upon waking, I look at the jumble of lines and thoughts. I can work with it. I extract the concepts and elements that interest me. I play, draw, sculpt, and construct upon these initial quiet thoughts. This is the beginning.

/ Borderland

191 KEITH ALLYN SPENCER / P A I N T I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

“Keith Spencer’s work radiates from my walls. It is no exaggeration to say the best of his work possesses a profound energy that comes from a remarkably unique and intense palette and a deep connection with the subject matter, whether it’s the familiar landscape of the South Carolina horse farm where he lives and paints, or the nudes, portraits, and Indians that live even in his abstraction. He has earned his way to the new and visionary work he creates that blurs the line between realism and pure abstraction. His work is alive.”

—Owen Riley, photojournalist and art collector

/ Backsides Revealed

L A NDSC A P E A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  DEMETRIOS STAURINOS

192

My thesis is an investigation into the subsurface. The exchange between the uniform or continuous surface exposes the ground below, the essence of which reveals a truth. The singularity of the object (surface) has a subtext or a composition (subsurface) which can relate to the formation of the whole. This is not meant to study the accidental exposure of the subsurface, but the systematic and deliberate explorations of the underground. This exposure and engagement with the ground below can be used as an impetus for future growth or change within the dynamics surrounding the object. The question becoming: How can the exploration and value of the underground become apparent and useful to the surface? What becomes the expression of the surface as composed by the impressions of the subsurface?

/ The Authorship of the Underground

193 MATTHEW STEVENS / G R A P H I C D E S I G N

I am interested in two’s, pairings, comparisons, relationships, contradictions, registration, bending, juxtaposition, duality, separation, juxtaposition, illusion, and the space between.

/ Definitively Indefinite or In Pursuit of Logical Questions

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ BENJAMIN STEVENSON

194

Alzheimer’s Disease has become the biggest growth industry in chronic care. ad is a frightening, irreversible, progressive brain disease that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and eventually the ability to carry out simple tasks. Design can dramatically improve the way of life and dignity for those who suffer from ad. My investigation and study explores opportunities that include, but also go beyond, the immediate fabric of the building in which those with Alzheimer’s are cared for.

I explore the use of sound, the resonance of music, and the vitality of art to create a tranquil, sensual, poetic environment within which inhabitants can feel at peace and secure.

/ Alzheimer’s Adult Day Care

195 PHOEBE STUBBS / G L A S S PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

From my studio windows I can see figures from the outside world in miniature; they enter buildings, have wild gesticulating conversations, get in little cars and drive erratically. Their little world is as distant to me as a film or puppet show. I am separated from it, yet experience it as a known reality. My interpretation is my only experience, my imagination of which fills in the gaps, and is ultimately all I can “know.”

Are we not always constructing and projecting? Is that not a fiction?

And is that not what makes art have effect at all?

/ What’s Red?

C ER A MIC S 

/  ELIZABETH SUELLENTROP

196

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

.

The body is a tool, an instrument that plays a critical role in the interactions of our daily lives; it is our threshold for contact and communication with self, others, and the environment.

How do we treat ourselves, and how does our body treat us in return?

My objects and environments examine the notion of body as other.

Sculptures allude to a physical understanding of what we know as the body, but suggest something gone awry. I investigate psychological and physical conditions as temporal experiences that elicit pleasure and pain. Familiarity becomes awkwardness and discomfort, questioning the truth of imperfection. / With Breathless Expectation

197 WENHAO SUN  /  L A N D S C A P E A R C H I T E C T U R E The main goal of my thesis is to discuss the aesthetic and philosophical values of the rules in landscape architectural design. The narrative is based on practice and methodology as well as on an understanding of rules from an abstract point of view. Knowledge of rules in sociology and philosophy also guides the design process.

/ Rules: An Exploration in Landscape Architecture

D I G I TA L + M E D I A

/ LAURA SWANSON

198

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

“The memory of the pre-colonial period is still very much alive in the villages. Mothers still hum to their children the songs which accompanied the warriors as they set off to fight the colonizer.

At the age of twelve or thirteen the young villagers know by heart the names of the elders who took part in the last revolt, and the dreams in the douars and villages are not those of the children in the cities dreaming of luxury goods or passing their exams but dreams of identification with such and such a hero whose heroic death still brings tears to their eyes.”

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

/ A Call to Arms

199 ERIKA TARTE / G R A P H I C D E S I G N My work is a meditation on transformations to memory occasioned by media. How have memory-bearing technologies imposed order on knowledge? How does the formal ordering of knowledge influence the stories re/constructed from remnants of the past? I use design to make observations on the evolution of mnemonic techniques, developing a theory of digital temporality separate from the experience of past and present in the physical world. I build tools that require more conscientious interactions with new media. I provide strategies for designers to more rigorously interrogate media and a methodological framework for the designer as “future historian” — the gatekeeper between past actuality and potential representation.

/ Design Future History

GR A P HIC DESIGN

/ DIMITRY TETIN

200

At once bare and over-saturated, mute and overpoweringly loud, repulsive and seductive, the city is a place of surplus amenities, experiences, and chance encounters. I view the city as existing between the decentralized, fluid, and stochastic nature of memory and the highly static nature of the museum that archives, articulates in space, and makes legible memories of a culture. The overlaying narratives and serendipitous relationships make the city at once dynamic and exciting, but also illegible and resistant to representation.

I traverse, research, read, and write in the spaces of the city in order to understand how narratives are communicated there.

/ Traverse — Design & Reflection in Public Spaces

201 AMY TISCHLER / T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

The education system plays an undeniable role in child development.

Teaching enables me to tangibly convey an often overlooked truth: throughout our history, the creative arts has played a role in every part of the education system. I find that when visual arts are integrated into the classroom and arts educators work in conjunction with academic educators, a child receives a more well-rounded and enriched education.

The collaborative conversations that happen in the art classroom develop a child’s ability to problem-solve and cooperate.

/ Process Book

A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ SALLY TO

202

My proposed program calls for three guest houses to allow visiting scholars to stay and study at the Gropius House, an architectural icon in Lincoln, MA. The contour lines, which form the basis of the addition’s morphology, describe a relationship between the exterior envelope and interior layout of spaces. Variation of the topography correlates with the progression of the interior spaces. The constant interaction between entities replaces the critique of the edge, creating an architectural dialogue that is primarily driven by circulation.

The addition creates a new landscape that responds to the existing site and extends programmatic function.

/ In Between: Forming Dialogue

203 COLLEEN TUITE  /  L A N D S C A P E A R C H I T E C T U R E PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Can a deployable, adaptable, architecturally augmented infrastructure remediate our environment? How can a biotic system infiltrate and armor our social and dwelling spaces?

Toward a thick(er) skin and a new hybridity. Mexico City: In a hyper-dense urbanity there is no choice but to build among.

Thus: an intervention that hinges between Spanish baroque, modernism, and a visceral horticulture, between relics and the almost-imagined.

It gleans and processes what is most plentiful in the d.f.: pm10, aka, smog.

/ Suspended Harvest: Smog Farming in Mexico City

INDUS T R I A L DE SIGN

/ EMILY TUTEUR

204

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

Through design, I strive to facilitate transformative experiences that reveal opportunities to foster social, economic, and environmental change.

My approach focuses on the creation of experiential scenarios that promote collective action amongst groups of individuals. Through iterative explorations, I design quiet probes to enable participatory solutions that activate users to co-produce benefits. Face-to-face interactions reinforce our social fabric and enable us to work together to create positive change.

My thesis explores collaborative consumption — alternative forms of consumerism rooted in sharing. Collaborative consumption is reshaping the way we own things, allowing us to consume together, reduce our impact on the planet, and enhance social capital within our communities through the redefinition of value in products, services, and systems.

/ Ours: Enabling and Inspiring Collaborative Consumption

205 MARIAH TUTTLE / J E W E L R Y + M E TA L S M I T H I N G PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

sometimes you might catch your breath, sucking in at the delicacy of lacy patterns and lines. sometimes you might just wonder, how is this caulk? it can be cream and white and blush so soft. black spikes look wet. a glimpse into refinement. edible. haute couture. fetish. embroidery. elegantly weird in a motley confusion of materiality and worth. a blur of references, ideas, and textures coalesce into an aesthetic that responds to both making and wearing. transposing simple with ornate, modernity with history and the handmade. irreverent. subversive. teasing. colliding.

/ Glimpse

A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  MAN CHUN UN

206

Ex-porting Land is situated in Maldives, the lowest-lying country in the world. With 80% of its land under one meter above sea level, this island nation is facing two catastrophic threats: the global rising sea level is contesting Maldives with its lack of habitable land, and the rising population density threatens the native coral reefs.

My project is conceived as a provocation and speculation on how these two demands can be hybridized as an alternative to the migration proposal suggested by the Maldivian President. Instead of abandoning the precious natural and cultural heritage, a new form of symbiotic ecology is proposed.

/ Ex-porting Land

207 KRISTEN VAN LIEW / S C U L P T U R E I imagine that most people feel “typed” at times. People live in spheres that reinforce certain behaviors or modes of being and inhibit others.

I suppose I try to highlight that by creating (or implying) spaces and people that don’t quite fit in or make sense. I create installations, animations, and character-based performances to serve this purpose.

They highlight a gap between real life (whatever that is) and one’s desires, and they imply that both realities can exist in the same person or place at any given moment.

/ On Make Believe & Madness: An Interview with Myselves

T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

/ TANYA VAZIRANI

208

Art education is exploring the growing possibilities of an idea: students should be granted the freedom to find out what they are capable of and how they can make a change. Currently, I teach elementary school, and soon, I will be teaching high school. The excitement and curiosity I see in the classroom inspires a plethora of student artwork. Included in my lesson plans are art projects exploring close encounters, mapping and place-based design, and drawing. I want to help students connect art with their daily lives, as well as teach them how places and things overlooked can be turned into visual narratives. / Process Book: Connecting Art + Design Education to Our Everyday World

209 OLIVIA VERDUGO  /  G R A P H I C D E S I G N

A leaf falls and slowly decays, leaving only the pith. Ice crystals aggregate in delicate strands across a pane of glass. A neuron fires as you read these words, sending out tiny pulses of electricity which spread through your brain in an intricate web. While apparently disparate, these events share a common systemic underpinning. There is a compositional grammar and order underlying every aspect of the natural world. In my work, I court the unexpected. I use seemingly wild yet highly ordered natural phenomena as lenses to view my own practice and as creative prompts to conceive new methodological and formal approaches to graphic design.

/ Bio-Curious: A Series of Graphic Experiments

T E X T IL E S

/ NATHAN VOIROL

210

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

My thesis project is meant to depict an internal landscape where thoughts and emotions rise and fall in a continuum of inner experience.

There are five textiles in the group, each based loosely on one of the five koshas of Vedanta: Anandamaya Kosha, the sheath of bliss, Vijnanamaya Kosha, the sheath of wisdom, Manamaya Kosha, the sheath of mind, Pranamaya Kosha, the sheath of prana, and Anamaya Kosha, the sheath of food. Gesture, color, texture, and material play a central role in suggesting these elusive yet distinct states of consciousness.

/ Subtle Bodies, Subtle Selves

211 ERIC MALIK WAGENSEIL / T E X T I L E S PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

I explore my family history through textiles, using pattern, color, and material to infuse personal memories and stories with visual narrative.

Each textile is meant to explore one of the different ways a location or moment contains my family’s heritage—from the blurred dreamscapes of childhood to retold stories of my mother’s transient life. Color, fabric and line describe these experiences and allow the lives and places past to emerge.

Importantly, I envision my work as an installation, where the viewer encounters each textile piece and enters its history.

/ Heirloom

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ CHIA-MIN WANG

212

“Culture, and by extension the creative industry, is a key element in urban redevelopment.” —Paul Rutten My thesis project embraces and illustrates Rutten’s viewpoint through the adaptive reuse of an existing space to design a new art center for FirstWorks, an energetic arts organization in Providence. The project reevaluates how design can define the organization’s identity, which serves as a center of hospitality, vitality, and creativity.

The proposed art center contains a performing art space, a visual art space, galleries, and a multifunctional public plaza to support various cultural events. It also provides public leisure and artistic activities to encourage mass participation and easy continual observation.

/ A Flight of Fantasy: FirstWorks New Art Center and Creative Culture Revival in Providence

213 TONG WANG / L A N D S C A P E A R C H I T E C T U R E

Where do you see boundaries affecting our reality? You see them everywhere. When you walk into a building, there is a relationship between the ceiling, beams, and columns. These elements are interconnected. At the same time, each plays its own role. Its separate function and interface defines its boundaries. For example, the wall is the boundary of a room. The surface of a building is the boundary between the inside and outside. When you walk into Manhattan’s Central Park, the gardens and lawns define the boundaries and functions of the space. At a larger scale, the boundaries of countries endow different regions with different meanings.

/ Reconnection

A RC HI T EC T UR E 

/  CHRISTOPHER WHITE

214

I am interested in how architecture reveals the situation it exists within, and the conditions it has come from. In my work, I appropriate these conditions. I explore making as a set of operations performed on an existing structure. Architecture for me exists in the connections that materialize form, space, and order.

/ Re_MAKING: Operations on a Grid

215 BENJAMIN WILLIAMS / A R C H I T E C T U R E

this is a Master’s thesis in which transparency is looked at as a construction inherent to the built world and by organization, orders information about a place through connective transparent thresholds and volumes.

/ Trans — The Architecture of Beyond

GR A P HIC DESIGN

/ EMILY SARA WILSON

216

As part of a collaborative thesis investigation, Jane Androski (see p.52) and I designed and taught the graduate course Design Agency—a small attempt to transform the way we approached socially engaged practice within our own institution.

The course provides a parallel support structure for graduate students from across the design disciplines to examine the systems within which they work, to develop a consciousness about the way they communicate, and to do so in service to community. As an ongoing practice, it’s a way for each of us to more consciously align our skills as designers with our values as people.

/ Design Agency

217 JINGHUA WU / I N T E R I O R A R C H I T E C T U R E I believe that aging should not stop the passion for creativity and artistic endeavors. Instead, aging should be embraced. Therefore, I propose the construction of an experimental senior artists’ community where we can research how an interior architectural space involves and influences the aging process.

Those elderly who lack mental and physical stimulation deteriorate more rapidly. I propose their housing be designed to enhance an active artistic lifestyle and provide a space where creative mental and physical activities can be performed daily.

/ A Sound Mind in a Sound Body: Working & Living Space for Senior Artists

L A NDSC A P E A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ XIAOWEN WU

218

At a moment when certain cities and territories race to assert their economic strength, new scales of industry have emerged. Many of the resulting urban environments have proved to be inhospitable to their recently urbanized inhabitants. To introduce sub-landscapes that recall the village of memory may ease the process of transition.

My thesis is the redesign of “street life” in the factory, an effort to re-guide people’s daily routine, providing spaces of dynamic exchange, where they can release stress and gain a sense of belonging within the factory.

/ Uniqueness in Landscape: From Village to Factory

219 JIE YU / L A N D S C A P E A R C H I T E C T U R E The spaces in between communities and neighborhoods lead to physical and cultural disconnects. As a result, the opportunity to share different cultural, historical, social, and educational resources could be lost.

How can landscape architects provide a shared space for the “spaces in between?” How can they bridge people of different ages, educational levels, and disciplines? How can diverse groups express, communicate, and exchange their knowledge and interests?

How can landscape architects physically and culturally bridge isolated communities and neighborhoods? How can different communities have a sense of ownership to express who they are and what they can do in this shared space?

/ Space in Between

IN T ER IOR A RC HI T EC T UR E

/ KAREN ZHANG

220

The “crossing point” refers to the moment when one element crosses another. In architecture, it refers to a place where one program encounters another, activating layers and spatial hierarchy to trigger attention and emotion. My work strives to introduce another space typology (the bike rental) to a hospitality space in order to create an interesting architectural crossing point that stimulates the interaction between people, especially strangers.

/ Crossing Point

221 KATHERINE ZISKIN / T E A C H I N G + L E A R N I N G I N A R T + D E S I G N

My work as a museum educator, learning facilitator, discussion prompter, and creator of wonder is grounded and rooted in two main ideas: 1. Art is created as a byproduct of personal, societal, cultural, and philosophical ideas, experiences, and experiments. Art is the most impressive impression of a zeitgeist.

2. The act of questioning, researching, wondering about, and inquiring into painting, photographs, sculptures, collages, drawings, prints, and architecture produces creative, critical, interested, and communicative life-long learners.

/ Using Art Museum Collections and Practice in Interdisciplinary, Holistic, and Engaging Learning Models

INDEX 224

ARCHITEC TURE

CER AMICS

GR APHIC DESIGN

Jared Brown

66

Lee Johnson

119

Salem Al-Qassimi

50

Nicholas Buehrens

68

Jason Pacheco

159

Jane Androski

52

Caroline Chou

77

Benjamin Peterson

164

Marc Choi

75

Van Hong Chu

78

Eli Simon

184

Hope Chu

79

Martin Cline

80

Rose Simpson

185

Eliza Fitzhugh

Reed Duecy-Gibbs

85

Elizabeth Suellentrop

194

Jessica Greenfield

David Fersh

90

Ethan French

96

DIGITAL + MEDIA

Leilei Gao

99

Derek Paul Boyle

63

Sara Raffo

169

Han-Shen Chen

74

Benjamin Shaykin

182

Shih-Hwa Hung

92 105

Lynn Kiang

127

Seung Chan Lim

145

Taigo Itadani

116

Kyong-Sub Do

84

Matthew Stevens

191

Ai Ito

117

Rohini Gosain

104

Erika Tarte

197

Thomas Jonak

120

Byeongwon Ha

108

Dimitry Tetin

198

Alexander Keller

125

Jason Huff

114

Olivia Verdugo

207

Youngkyung Kim

128

Benjamin Kennedy

126

Emily Sara Wilson

214

William Kimmerle

131

Yasimin Kunz

138

Bradley Kisicki

132

Jae Ok Lee

142

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

Ada Tak Ko

134

Mikhail Mansion

149

Audrey L. Barnes

55

Brittney Kailese Kroon

136

Justin Phillipson

165

Elizabeth Becton

58

Edward Laemmel

139

Laura Swanson

196

Gunther Chanange

72

Shinah Lee

141

Camilla Fucili

97

Carol Ann Livingstone

146

FURNITURE DESIGN

Sherataun Nuss

157

Jo-Fan Chang

Catharine Rha

174

Andrew Kopp

135

Christina Kazakia

124

Benjamin Sandell

178

Ryan Murray

156

Na Ree Kim

129

Sanna Shah

181

Alexandra Snook

188

Calvin Ku

137

Anne Slick

187

Emily Tuteur

202

Sally To

200

GL ASS

Man Chun Un

204

Alexandra Ben-Abba

60

INTERIOR ARCHITEC TURE

Christopher White

212

Phoebe Stubbs

193

Sang Hee An

51

Benjamin Williams

213

Jordan Bissett

61

73

Elaine Yuri Fukuda

98

Stephan Goetschius

103

Henry Hyung Min Choi

76

Chad Echols

86

Jessica Fanning

89

Boback Firoozbakht

91

Wenhao Sun

195

SCULP TURE

Sarah Frank

95

Colleen Tuite

201

Jake Beckman

57

107

Tong Wang

211

Johnathan Derry

83

Cyndia Hsu

113

Xiaowen Wu

216

Crystal Ellis

88

Seung Hwan Hwang

118

Jie Yu

217

Darren Foote

93

Seo Yeon Jin

118

James Foster

94

Brady Gunnell

Hogil Jung

121

PAINTING

Kayla Soo-Youn Kim

130

Katherine Bell

Lisa Klinger

133

Corydon Cowansage

Aran Lee

143

Collin Hatton

110

Jung Eun Lee

144

Anina Field Kallop

122

TEACHING + LEARNING IN ART+ DESIGN

Abigail Luley

147

Nell Painter

160

Laura Atchinson

53

Jae Hyun Park

162

Anna Plesset

166

Kristen Boyd

62

Christine Rankin

170

Michael Schreiber

179

Blair Brendli

65

Benjamin Stevenson

192

Keith Allyn Spencer

189

Katharine Brummett

67

59

Curtis Singmaster

186

Kristen van Liew

205

81

Chalermsak Tantipanitkool

Beth Clevenstine

Chia-Min Wang

210

PHOTOGR APHY

Jinghua Wu

215

Jordan Baumgarten

56

Jennifer Kallus

123

Karen Zhang

218

Michael Brandes

64

Kirsten McNally

152

Cassandra Foral

Mimi Cabell

69

Christina Miles

155

JEWELRY + METALSMITHING

Jennifer Cawley

71

Allison Pace

158

Katherine Chase Peters

163

Jennifer Garza-Cuen

101

Anne Reinhardt

172

Ruth Reifen

171

Omer Hecht

111

Wendy Schreiner

180

Kendall Reiss

173

Michael Mergen

154

Amy Tischler

199

Mariah Tuttle

203

Ambereen Siddiqui

183

Tanya Vazirani

206

Katherine Ziskin

219

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

PRINTMAKING

Ryan Castro

70

Hae Min Choi

Maria Debye-Saxinger

82

Emilia Edwards

Lu Gao

TEX TILES 87

Anastasia Azure

54

100

Stefan Gunn

106

Rico A. Harris

Arianne Gelardin

102

David May

150

Vedrana Hrsak

112

Scott MacDonald

148

Ryan McIntosh

151

Elizabeth Lamb

140

Lauren Meena

153

Lauren Pakradooni

161

Nathan Voirol

208

Ponnapa Prakkamakul

167

Mark Rice

175

Eric Malik Wagenseil

209

Ian Quate

168

John Romero

176

Demetrios Staurinos

190

Duhirwe Rushemeza

177

109

RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN GRADUATE CLASS OF 2011 Architecture Ceramics Digital + Media Furniture Design Glass Graphic Design Industrial Design Interior Architecture Jewelry + Metalsmithing Landscape Architecture Painting Photography Printmaking Sculpture Teaching + Learning in Art + Design Textiles