Greetings from...

Greetings from... is a reflection of my roots in the tropical vacationland of Florida, a place for which I feel both nostalgic and conflicted. Growing up in southern tourist destinations, I was confronted daily with the extreme contrasts of living in paradise. In my artwork, I am translating the cacophony of Florida through the lens of materiality. By re-configuring commodified objects of the tourism industry, the sculptural works in this show exhibit my consideration for the paradoxical relationships that exist between materials and place. Much like the avant-garde Surrealist object, or the assemblage of found materials in provocative combinations that challenged reason, I am interested in drawing parallels between the irrational juxtaposition of objects and ideas. My research is relevant within the context of contemporary artists like Elizabeth Turk, Maurizio Cattelan, and Tara Donovan who are creating politically and socially engaged art, critically exploring concepts of materiality, and reinterpreting traditional craft techniques and processes. Greetings from… explores the realities and misperceptions we all associate with the Sunshine State, and in doing so, has allowed me to dig deeper into my personal history with a place

Affordances in the Work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: Pedagogies of Writing, Reading, and Making

For many who have been transformed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick through reading her books and essays, by being a student of hers, or in friendship with her, the question What does Eve do? is often a mystery with no precise answer. These transformations can be highly varied in their manifestations. In his essay for the 30th Anniversary edition of Between Men, Wayne Koestenbaum discusses an Eve effect which makes her listeners more curious, more intelligent, more consecrated to the vocation of being thrilled (emphasis in original, xiv). This dissertation unravels some of these mysteries by tracing how the Eve effect can work on a reader/student/friend. Using the concept of affordances as first coined by perceptual and environmental psychologist James J. Gibson, carried on by design and ergonomics writer Donald Norman, and numerous UX analysts, Sedgwick\u27s work is examined according to what it enables you to do. The structure of her writing is analyzed in terms of the prompts they offer for recruiting the reader as writer, allowing readers to participate in writerly contributions within the spaces of the prose. The invitations of her paper- and fiber-art (identified here as dimensional work), are analyzed in terms of their affordances for non- traditional reading strategies such as non-linear reading. The final chapter is experimental in form, making use of Sedgwick\u27s graduate-level reading and studio course, How To Do Things With Words and Other Materials. Using mathematical techniques from the field of combinatorics, the final chapter consists of ten sections which link every possible duo of five different subject areas of interest to Sedgwick: 1) Absence, Negation, Refusal, Emptiness, Nothing; 2) Buddhism, Afterlife; Spirit; 3) Impermanence, Death, Medicine, Illness; 4) Materials, Body, Crafts, Texture, Touch, Making; and 5) Writing, Paper and Pen, Word Processors. It is presented here in standard pages, but it also exists as ten hand-made fascicles, created in order to more deeply explore the haptic, textural engagements of writing that Sedgwick\u27s course addressed. The result is a performative and peri-performative expression of the principles of the Materials course that makes use of both Sedgwick\u27s ideas and artistic methods

INTEGRATED STRATIGRAPHY OF THE CRYOGENIAN AND THE EDIACARAN–CAMBRIAN BOUNDARY: PERSPECTIVES FROM SOUTHWESTERN NORTH AMERICA AND SOUTHERN AFRICA

This dissertation (1) examines sedimentary records of Cryogenian (717-635 million years ago [Ma]) glacial deposits to constrain records of carbon cycle perturbations and extreme climate change and (2) examines sedimentary records across the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition (c. 550–530 Ma) to test hypotheses regarding the tempo and drivers of biotic and geochemical changes during early animal evolution. Chapters 2 and 3 are studies of Cryogenian strata preserved in California. In Chapter 2, I solidify chronostratrigraphic correlation to strata on other paleocontinents, supporting interpretation of two distinct Cryogenian snowball Earth glacial epochs and demonstrating that a Cryogenian nonglacial interval lasted for at least 9 m.y. In Chapter 3, I produce high-resolution multiproxy stable isotope records from Cryogenian nonglacial interlude carbonate platform strata to test the relationship between carbon isotope perturbations and climate variability. Based on these results, I suggest that these carbonate strata preserve records of local organic carbon production and remineralization that do not necessarily reflect coeval global carbon fluxes. Chapters 4–6 are studies of strata deposited across the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary preserved in California, Mexico, and South Africa. In Chapter 5, I document structures preserved in terminal Ediacaran siliciclastic rocks of California that resemble late Ediacaran body fossils but are instead interpreted as a rare type of peritidal microbially induced sedimentary structure, suggestive of unusual paleoenvironmental and paleoecological conditions at the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary. In Chapter 6, I report integrated stratigraphic data sets from Sonora, Mexico, which (1) demonstrate a temporal relationship between the regional disappearance of Ediacaran fossils, a marine carbon isotope perturbation, and rift-related basalt volcanism, and (2) provide the first radioisotopic age constraint on the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary in North America. In Chapter 7, I report integrated stratigraphic data sets from northwestern South Africa that provide a precise age model for trace and body fossil biostratigraphy and carbon isotope chemostratigraphy in the terminal Ediacaran. These results indicate that the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary carbon isotope excursion, the disappearance of Ediacaran-type body fossils, and the appearance of basal Cambrian trace fossils are all younger than previously recognized, suggesting a more condensed early Cambrian biological radiation