Digital Collections Willamette University
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Jesse Armstrong, 2025
No full textFor my thesis I created a series of character designs, poster illustrations, and icons for my story As Above. In this narrative, the Hell Vessel has descended upon the planet Antigone and unleashed an invading demonic horde. Our protagonist, Princess Alexandria, is fighting to protect her kingdom, but the invasion unearths deeply buried secrets that may tear her kingdom and family apart.
The entirety of the project is executed digitally on both Procreate (iPad) and Photoshop (computer). Prior to executing each design I spent time collecting and reviewing reference material, before moving into the thumbnailing and sketch phases, and then into the line art and rendering phases
Blue Corvidae 2025
No full textPRISMATIC MELANCHOLY was constructed with anti-capitalist collective care in mind and an understanding that collective work must start with the self. This research originated with a desire to find a way for my spiritual-artistic practice to live in accordance with collective care praxes. With this in mind I adopt an autoethnographic exploration of my early experiences with religion and trauma– specifically the fragmenting effect they had on my developing queer-trans sense of self and how I might reapproach spirituality as a survival pathway through apostatic faith practices. As a mad, disabled, queer-trans multiplicity I was born into a series of tragedies that assured my bodymindspirit would never truly feel there was space enough for me. Strung from one ill-fitting home/label/town to the next, I began to crack, we began to splinter. Before long, compacted within the contours of societal expectation, our consciousness had shattered into multiplicity, pushing us to think multivalently despite our melancholy. In this project we were called to ask: what kind of relationship with divinity could support us in bearing the emotional distress of ongoing global catastrophe? And, more importantly, what kind of space could hold us, in all our multiplicity, such that we might be able to approach divinity
Keith E Kesler 2025
No full textOlly Olly Oxen Free is a multidisciplinary MFA thesis that explores the role of the artist as a “wounded healer,” interweaving personal history, psychoanalytic insight, and creative practice. Bridging my careers as both a visual artist and physician-psychoanalyst, the work investigates how emotional wounds—personal, cultural, and collective—can become sites of transformation and resistance through art. Inspired by Carl Jung’s notion of the shadow and the archetype of Chiron, this thesis frames creative practice as a form of psychological integration. Drawing upon myth, memory, and contemporary visual culture, the exhibition and writing trace a path of healing that emerges not from resolution, but from inhabiting the uncertainty and pain of lived experience. Through sculpture, photography, and narrative, the project reflects on dualities such as visibility/invisibility, control/autonomy, and trauma/resilience. Emerging from the pandemic and a climate of escalating cultural marginalization, works such as Olly Olly Oxen Free, It’s a Texas Thing, and Jazz Hands explore themes of exclusion and belonging in a Texas landscape shaped by regressive policy. Community collaborations, including Photography projects with OUT YOUTH in Austin, TX, centered on affirming the presence and identity of LGBTQ+ teens, exemplify the healing potential of portraiture and visibility. The experience of my trans granddaughter’s forced departure from university, underscore the real-life impact of political hostility and the need for compassionate presence. This work is not only autobiographical but operates as a cultural mirror, using materials like steel, plaster, and reclaimed objects to forge ritualistic totems of grief and resistance. In reclaiming artistic identity within the frame of therapeutic practice, the thesis asserts that creativity and vulnerability are tools for both personal metamorphosis and social critique. Ultimately, Olly Olly Oxen Free is a call to step out of hiding, into the light—an invitation for artist and viewer alike to witness, to feel, and to heal
Rissa Martinez 2025
No full textThis essay examines the intersectionality between Chicana, Punk, and Queerness through the lens of auto-ethnographic biography, specifically commenting on a long-debated feminist issue of domesticity and patriarchal gender roles. With Tomas Ybarra Frausto’s ideas on Rasquachismo and Amalia Mesa-Bains ideas on Domesticana as a basis for my research, I add to their efforts in outlining a new era of femininity through the perspective of punk subculture; that which I refer to as, Punkeras Domestica.
With respect to history, current and future generations of Chicanas are still at odds with their expected roles and as we enter our “Señora” era, we
find ourselves asking, what do we take and what do we leave behind
Alexa Rose 2025
No full textANUNUGBA is a 2:37 minute animated short film about Celene, an overseas Filipino worker. When memories from Celene’s past seeps into her life in the present, she realizes the regret she feels for the years she’s spent away from her loved ones. The title, “Anunugba,” is a Visayan word that translates to moth. ANUNUGBA uses the analogy between overseas Filipino workers and moths to represent the exploitative nature that overseas workers have to go to and the unattainability of their wants. This analogy was heavily inspired by the phrase, “like a moth to a flame.” Within the context of Filipino culture, moths (and butterflies) hold significance as there’s a commonly-held belief that passed loved-ones come back to visit as these insects.
This project acted an animated production, with the crew members completing the entire animation in under 3 months. Over the course of this time, I directed more than 20 people. While I did the majority of the pre-production and clean-up animation, my team assisted with some of the rough animation, clean-up, and backgrounds so that the film could be completed by the deadline
Samuel Jayms Case 2025
No full text"Love Letters" is an exploration of queer hope and queer futurity. Using the writings of Edouard Glissant and Jose Esteban Munoz as its conceptual backing, the visual work combines drawing, plastic, wood, candles, and nylon cord to describe a private artist's hopes for the future. Lace becomes a metaphor for the ways that the patter of queer history is traced, interpreted, and passed along to future generations. Each piece is an epistolic portrait of someone who the artist hopes will be a part of their queer future
Yitong Li 2025
No full textDaydream Tavern is a worldbuilding project that focuses on character design and interior design. This worldbuilding concept is suited for industries
such as game development. But I do not focus on game development or story writing; I Focus only on design and visual arts part. Daydream Tavern, is a small riverside tavern standing along a stream that flows toward the sea. Its setting is inspired by Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. During the day, travelers stop by to rest and enjoy familiar meals. The atmosphere feels peaceful, yet there is an odd sense of mystery surrounding the place. People are curious about this mysterious tavern, as it is said that you can find some unusual ingredients there. But
what truly sets this tavern apart is what happens after sunset. At night, the tavern serves only monsters, and humans cannot pass through its doors.
Even the owner herself is not entirely human, at a certain time, she transforms from her human appearance into a monster so she can serve the
nighttime monster guests
Hali Autumn 2025
No full textThis thesis sits at the intersection of feminist visual studies and phenomenological approaches to art, examining the conventions through which femininity is expressed and remembered within analog filmic media. Focusing on both still and moving, super 8, images, the project traces a lineage of spectral femininity: a mode of being articulated through visual languages of absence, ephemerality, and spectral presence. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theories of trace and hauntology, the research conceives femininity not as a stable visual entity but as an apparition that emerges through deferral, disappearance, and the material contingencies of experimental darkroom processes.
Working through analog methodologies, the project explores presence as a condition constituted by residue and haunting. This archive is understood not as documentation of facts but as an index that is shaped and measured by erasure, affect, and embodied memory. The thesis follows a palpable lineage of women artists: singular figures such as Alix Cléo Roubaud, whose photographs stage a self between visibility and vanishing.
Alongside these visual practices, Hélène Cixous’s writing provides a theoretical and poetic grounding for understanding the feminine as a force. Her call for a writing of the body resonates with image-making as a tactile inscription of vulnerability and desire.
Through the tracing of this spectral lineage, artistic production is reconceived as a dialogic encounter across time.
The project proposes new configurations of visibility within imagery. It argues that feminine presence, when approached as spectral and phenomenological , destabilizes normative visual paradigms and opens avant-garde modes of attunement to absence, vulnerability, and persistence. Through the interplay of material process, embodied knowledge, and affective resonance, the thesis offers a framework for understanding how femininity endures within and beyond the frame as an ongoing, relational, and haunting energy
Guidian Owen 2025
Full text linkSOUNDCHECK is a series of four mixed media posters highlighting queer musicians. I wanted each illustration to feel unique to the style of music, attitudes, and aesthetics of each band. The artists I depicted are Um Jennifer, Glass Beach, Kevin Abstract, and Adrianne Lenker. I was interested in depicting queer musicians because I have always been interested in how queer musicians generally express their queerness through both visuals and lyrics. I also grew up listening to queer musicians, they made me feel more comfortable in my own queer identity and inspired me to express my queerness through my art
Claire Frances Spaulding 2025
No full textHow do I face the material reality of a studio practice balanced against a theoretical framework centered upon environmental criticism and affect theory? What does it mean to coexist in an ecology of plastic as contributor, as collaborator?
A combination of found and new material, Doing Despite explores material flirtation to utilize kitsch and fem aesthetics as a hyper visual language. The compositional elements are inspired by oceanography, topographical striations, and geometric patterns – a blue wave recedes and ascends from sandy, scalloped edge’s reminiscent of Americana pomp and circumstance. An amalgamation of synthetic and natural fibers, the work represents a convergence of ecology and new materialism: “ecodread”.
“Ecodread” is a sensitizing concept of cognitive dissonance and ecological affect. It is the tension between social expectations of sustainability and subjective material engagements: the discomfort between a desire to exist in the world as eco-conscious as possible against a reality where the expense of those decisions is not attainable. Working through the dissonance and dread, the climate crisis is faced with a “doing despite” mentality rather than anxious paralysis.
Polyethylene terephthalate – it’s what persists long after objects are discarded, disintegrated into microplastics, or smashed together as a conglomerate of mineral, media, and matter. Plastic was a promise of infinite potentiality, of endless supply for a demand of clear, synthetic, reflective, durable objects meant to last a lifetime. But whose lifetime? Ours or polymers? Material or mineral? Doing Despite works through the dissonance to consider an ecological futurity where matter and audience embrace the entanglement of vibrant plasticity.
Doing Despite is a visual compliment to the theoretical framework and qualitative research undertaken in my MA Critical Studies Thesis: “Ecodread: Dissonance, Material, and Ecology within Creative Practice.” This project positions ecodread into the fields of new materialism and environmental criticism as an offering and proposal that the personal, the self is able to reenter the rhetoric on impact and futurity