Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1938. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

The goal of this independent exploration is to present a cogent thesis on the limitations of language and visual representations of anxiety in contemporary art. Using the structuralist thinking of Roland Bathes as a conceptual and theoretical fulcrum, I explore human reliance on semiotics and referents.

<p> My Thesis exhibition is an exploration of site specificity; mitigated through technological media with the intention of re-contextualizing extracted, site specific material. This exhibition featured two sculptures, a video work, and a group of photographs. Technology played a major role in the creation of the work in this exhibition, numerous digital processes were employed including 3D scanning, CNC milling, computer modeling and photography. The final result was a staged landscape like installation that was composed of three main works that, together created a scene while also functioning as independent artworks based on separate, specific sites, forms and information. The connection between landscape, site specificity, technological replication and the pursuit of the sublime was a central theme and investigation in my work. </p>

<p> My thinking once privileged the logical path as my architecture training had taught me to do, has grown to include equally the emotional influences of my lived experience. The unique contributions of each of my parents have come to bear on this change in thinking and in my development as a sculptor. My mother was a maker of textiles. Within her works, she clearly communicated a message of appreciation to the wearer, as represented in the multitude of carefully crafted stitches. My father is an architect. In his drawings of buildings, I see order, form, and the expression of space clearly articulated. Together, my parents imparted their lessons to me during my formative years. These influences carried me forward, yet I always viewed them distinct from one another. The self-reflective experience of graduate school revealed a relationship between these different ways of making that I had not initially realized. This has had a direct impact on the type of work I produced in which I tried to expand these boundaries. </p><p> This thesis speaks to my journey from being an architect to becoming a sculptor.</p><p>

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / N/A / 2031-01-01

This practice-based thesis examines the relationship between space, time and the human presence. It is concerned with the dialectic exchanges between my work and the places in which its meaning is defined. Oppositions between space/place, place/non-place, and immobility/movement, articulate the spatial and temporal limitations that delineate my site-specific practice and its experience. The exploration of the relationship between the notion of time and my practice has profoundly affected my research, which has itself endured for an extended period of time. This is described in chronological sequence: 1)initial site-specific installations, 2) site-writing: the thesis and photographic documentation of the installations, 3) installation of the documentation of the initial site-specific installations on the occasion of my viva. My thesis emphasises the role of the viewer’s presence, including the moment in time and the presence of other people in experiencing the site-specific work. The question posed is whether the ‘literality’ of site-specific art can encompass antithetical notions of site as they appear in contemporary life. The hypothesis advanced is that by adjusting the limits between the double experience of the fluidities and continuities of space and time, on the one hand,and their ruptures and disconnections, on the other, site-specific art may allow viewers to think and experience apparent contradictions as sustaining relations. My thesis looks at three works: 'Central Corridor' (2003), 'Seven Windows Divided by Two' (2004) and 'In Site Compression' (2007). Their documentations emphasise the paradox of representing site-specific work on the page. Another set of documentation will be exhibited at the viva, comprising the material of anew situation with its own spatio-temporal relationships (other than those of the initial installations), and will require anew the physical participation of the viewer to be perceived.

abstract: The poems in The Only Living Boy in Omaha tell the story of Simon, who, after his mother dies giving birth to him, is raised on passenger trains by his father, a conductor. Set in the 1940s and '50s, the book follows Simon as he travels across the American West, back and forth between California and his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. Along the way, Simon gets to know other passengers, falls in love with radio and California's past, befriends an inventor, and discovers the story of his miracle birth. Blending lyric and narrative, history and fable, these poems revisit a time when passenger trains were popular, and explore the unique childhood that took place there. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. English 2012

abstract: The poems in this book are lyric, meditational, and narrative approaches to autobiographical tales. These works, through various poetic forms, are an attempt to assess and equate personal life experiences with those larger human and universal occasions. Spanning both physical time (a cross-country move from Virginia to Arizona) and spatial time (Virginia and Mississippi during the civil rights movement), the works evaluate and validate the human experiences of loss. Through poems addressed to various family members and historical figures, the book attempts to terms with the often humorous, often terrifying experience of being an African American male in the United States in the 21st Century. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Creative Writing 2012

abstract: I Hate Everyone But You bears witness to the quiet moments that force us to confront ourselves. In these stories, people in search of connection--to lovers, to family, to strangers--instead discover their own secrets: truths both haunting and empowering. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2015

abstract: Black Laurel is a book-length manuscript which has at its center poems that reveal and explore issues related to Michele Poulos's identity as a Greek-American writer, discovering the connections that link the past and present of both Greece and America. These poems often work as a quest to recover identity. They explore the idea that it is her own privileged perspective as an educated Greek-American woman that both allows and in some ways prevents her seeing herself in the Greeks who today are struggling economically, emotionally, and psychologically. Many of the poems work to achieve a complex understanding of both an individual as well as a broader cultural history. These poems sometimes take on the personas of striking figures from other times and other landscapes, while others draw on materials which are somewhat more autobiographical. In one poem titled "Before My Mother Set Herself on Fire," the speaker is an imagined daughter in a modern-day Greek family. The poem, inspired by a news story about an elderly man who shot himself in the head in front of Syntagma Square in Athens to protest the austerity measures imposed on the Greek population, explores the various ways in which a national crisis may affect an individual family. Alternatively, Poulos delves into her personal family history in "When the Wind Falls," a poem about the Nazi invasions of northern Greece. At the same time, this focus on past and present Greece is only one strand in a wide-ranging manuscript woven of materials which also include a variety of subjects related to science, history, eroticism, mysticism, and much more. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Creative Writing 2013