Subverting the Male Gaze: Empowering Women through Art by Ally Wilber
Art
This essay analyzes the harmful effects of the male gaze in art and advertising throughout history, and highlights contemporary feminist artists who seek to subvert this gaze and create artwork that is both empowering and uplifting for women, utilizing the typically sexualized female form.
Alexandria Jean Wilber
Senior Showcase Oral presentation
Ripon College
April 18, 2017
The author reserves all rights.
pdf
Majors: Studio Art, English
Navarino, Wisconsin
The Social Hell of William Blake: the Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Blake's Illustrations of Dante's Inferno by Myat Aung
Art
In 1824 CE, William Blake was commissioned to illustrate the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Amongst 102 illustrations, Blake devoted two thirds to the Inferno. Within the scholarship on Blake, the prevailing analysis of his illustrations shows his treatment of religious imagery. Such treatment does not emphasize how Blake’s illustrations reflect the social changes in nineteenth-century London. I thus examine Blake’s Inferno and articulate how it conveys ideas not present in the original text. My research revolves around Dante’s allegory and how Blake would have interpreted the work in his day. When Blake started painting the Inferno, the Industrial Revolution had already begun. As London became highly urbanized, factories were built with the promise of better commodities. Concurrently, transportation, communication, and access to mechanized goods improved. Amidst advances in science and industry, London became a crowded, unsanitary place covered in smoke, where workers suffered from diseases and low wages due to coal burning and laissez-faire capitalism. Because over five hundred years separated Dante from Blake, I ask questions about how Dante’s text informed Blake’s thinking. What was Blake’s perspective on daily life in London? What type of imagery in Blake’s drawings deviated from the descriptions in the text? How did Blake approach the Inferno in the nineteenth century? To answer these questions, I identify four themes that Blake used in his illustrations to reimagine Dante’s Hell. I ultimately argue that William Blake’s illustrations of the Inferno are his social commentary on the status quo of London during the Industrial Revolution.
Aung, Myat
Senior Showcase Oral presentation
Ripon College
April 19, 2016
The author reserves all rights.
pdf
Majors: Art History, Classical Studies
ART 570 - Senior Seminar in Art
A Work in Progress: The Creative Process Behind "Householder" by Christian Krueger
Studio Art
<em>Householder</em> plays on the absurd and the uncanny to elevate the work of the housewife. It lays bare the domestic toil that frequently goes unnoticed by pitting landscape and household familiarities against each other in search of agent and origin. In this juxtaposition, I seek a quiet and resolved beauty as fulfilling as homemaking. Traditional women's handicraft, such as needlework, exemplifies the constant effort put forth by the housewife. Together, these pieces stitch together a surreal living room wall dedicated to domesticity. -Artist's Statement.
Krueger, Christian Yvonne
Senior Showcase Oral presentation
Ripon College
April 23, 2015
The author reserves all rights.
pdf
Majors: History, Studio Art
Minors: Spanish, Museum Studies
Oshkosh, Wisconsin
ART 500 Senior Studio Project