No description available.

Changing Lines is a collection of five short stories that focus on pairings of opposites. In the title story, a boy in split custody chooses whether to live with his fundamentalist Christian father or his occult mother. In "Diminishing Returns," a gifted girl is paired with an incompetent girl for a badminton tournament in her high school gym class. In "Invisible Orbits," a talented guitarist in poverty joins the band of a wealthy and well-connected singer. In "Unable to Die," an older therapist confronts her past as she consoles a grieving student facing his uncertain future. The collection closes on "The Color in Your Cheeks," the story of a successful game developer who finds out his younger brother has run away from home to make adult videos with their childhood next-door neighbor. The stories all center on the tension and change liable to occur when heavily contrasting individuals are forced to interact, portraying how these worldviews are formed with an aim at psychological and sociological nuance. While each story is told in a traditional linear narrative style, the collection is varied in its use of point of view and vantage point. Questioning truisms serves as the main driving force of the collection, while the themes of how neuroses are formed in childhood, spirituality, projection of one's own weakness onto others, coping mechanisms, the psychological effects of demographical status, and internalized contempt are all explored in varying degrees.

This is the collection of a novel, Cuban Jam Sessions in Miniature: A Novel in Tracks, and an embedded short story, "Shred Me Like the Cheese You Use to Make Buñuelos." The novel tells the story of Palomino Mondragón, a Colombian mercenary who has arrived in New York after losing his leg to a mortar in Korea. Reclusive, obsessive and passionate, Palomino has reinvented himself as a mambo musician and has fallen in love with Etiwanda, a dancer at the nightclub in which he plays—but he cannot bring himself to declare his love to her. His life changes when he is deported from the United States at the height of the Cuban Missile crisis without having declared his love. Through the thirty years chronicled in the novel, Palomino does all possible in his quest to return to the United States to find Etiwanda despite the fact that he knows she has grown to be a fantasy, an obsession of his imagination. Palomino’s quest takes him to the United States and back three times, as he becomes more and more desperate, as he becomes involved with drug traffickers and for-hire murderers like Polo Norte, as he loses track of what it means to feel alive. Palomino is trapped in a tug-of-war between his rational desire for a normal existence and his irrational but inescapable longing for Etiwanda. In the end, his desperation to get to Etiwanda brings the underworld of Polo Norte to her doorstep. "Shred Me Like the Cheese You Use to Make Buñuelos" tells the story of Polo Norte, Palomino’s antagonist, on his last day on earth, as he is followed by a writer who has agreed to watch him commit suicide. Together, the stories explore the history and nature of the Colombian Diaspora in the United States, and the violent circumstances surrounding the relationship between both countries and the migrants stuck in the middle of it.

This thesis explores the evolution of my artwork with synthetic materials through influences of the Minimalist and Process Artists of the 1960's and 1970's, inspiration from natural forms, and my exploration of concrete painting. Each work reveals discoveries of different processes and materials, accelerating the creation of new works. It is my hope this thesis will inform viewers about the process and concepts that my work embodies.

No description available.