Mountain Scholar :: Browsing by Author "Lehene, Marius, committee member"

Browsing by Author "Lehene, Marius, committee member"

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Open Access
A Psychosomatic condition: prints as symptoms
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Conley, Allison, author; Dormer, James, advisor; Plastini, Johnny, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Kneller, Jane, committee member
To transcend my standard way of art making, I have revoked all intent or previous purpose. I work intuitively, reacting to each mark as it is placed and developing an image on the matrix rather than the mind. This mode evokes internal conflict to spill into the physical world, as they are not allowed to dawdle in the mind. The resulting images are psychosomatic: they are the physical symptoms that manifest from an underlying mental disturbance. They are not the cause of the problem, only the residue created from the mind taking form.
Open Access
Being: in badges
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Coder, Cara, author; Bates, Haley, advisor; Moore, Emily, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Canetto, Silvia, committee member
As a woman in contemporary society, I am often at odds with my physical appearance and comparing it to how I “should” look. Through Being: In Badges I use the format of the brooch to make visible my daily battle to love and accept my physical body. Using colored glass as a marker of emotion and silver as a marker of time, I depict an abstract record of my relationship with my physical appearance on a daily, or even hourly basis. I do this as a means to be honest about my experience as a woman who wants to love the body she’s in. Cognizant of societal pressures to exert women to hate how they look, I strive to love my body and my appearance.
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Burnley: for the noumuns
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) McCallum, Alick, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Dungy, Camille, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
BURNLEY: for the noumuns, excavates the history of Burnley—a deindustrialised town in Lancashire in the North West of England. As a poetic rendering of autoethnography with ecopoetic leanings, the collection attempts to situate Burnley's present moment in relation to the town's geologic and anthropologic past. The North of England has been described by Neal Alexander as a hypercomplex "social space," "a meeting place" where "borders are porous and shifting." BURNLEY: for the noumuns interrogates the history of the town's hypercomplex cultural experience and asks how heterogenous cultures of Burnley's past intersect, produce, and re-emerge in the town's present world.
Open Access
Collecting my thoughts
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Grossett, Laura, author; Simons, Stephen, advisor; Dormer, James, advisor; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member; Flippen, Paul, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Steingraeber, David, committee member
This work is based upon the accumulation and slippage of memory in relation to loss. Through shifting line work and the layering of printed semi-transparent sheets of paper, I acknowledge the imperfection, selectivity and collection of thoughts and experiences that shape an individual. These relief prints are inspired by personal reflection on moments passed and relate to my life. My subject matter alludes to feelings of absence but also functions as a memory trigger, each object depicting a link to specific events. The viewer is allowed access to images related to my past but seen through the window of their own life experiences.
Open Access
Constellations
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Todd, Michael, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, committee member
Constellations is a researched book-length lyric essay concerning notions of faith and belief weighed against science and the bodily experience, of layers of meaning, of personal truth. The piece takes the form of "constellations" of text in place of stars. The text appears on 4x6" cards against a black background with speckled white to indicate "space"; white lines suggest an assembly which corresponds to a map with instructions. However, the same instructions encourage user agency in how to assemble and navigate the work—flipping through the cards in a numbered sequence, or in a random sequence, or assembling them according to the map, or assembling them as they, the audience, see fit.
Open Access
Dialogs
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2005) Hannigova, Marie, author; Gravdahl, John, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Dormer, James T., committee member; Risbeck, Philip E., committee member
Dialogs, my body of work, strives to show that computers are not to be blamed for the deterioration of design quality in general. My work brings back the human touch to computer design. Although computer-based, it is visually stimulating, interactive and personal. The irregularity and imperfection that result from traditional art methods are amplified and elaborated upon in computer programs. The images are abstract in nature encouraging the viewer to use his/her imagination to interpret them. The viewer is encouraged to actively participate in the pieces: to touch them, change the image by opening a blind, flip pages of a book or place a removable tattoo on his/her body.
Open Access
Domain: eminent
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Johnson, Amy, author; Bates, Haley, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Ferrer, Kim, committee member; MacDonald, Bradley, committee member
As an artist with a background in politics, my work is propelled by a need "to do something". I am particularly interested in the crossroads of action and inaction. My work history, the political actions I have organized and participated in, and my transition to the art world lead up to my final body of work. Domain: Eminent is an installation of abstracted claw forms that is a reliquary to fossil fuels. The dueling political tensions between curbing climate change and expanding economic prosperity inspired and motivated this work. The installation honors the beauty and benefits these fuels have brought to our world while at the same time symbolically putting them in their "restful" space as an untouched material.
Open Access
Drawing questions
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Croghan, Nicholas, author; Kokoska, Mary-Ann, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Flippen, Paul, committee member; Mackenzie, Matt, committee member
In my artwork, the questions I am interested in are those that begin with our experience of the world. Specifically, the connections between an embodied subject, the environment and the different roles the senses play on the temporality of consciousness. Other enigmas that have occupied my mind are those regarding the relationship between self and other and how to create an art that provokes a participation in the inter-subjective living moment. To investigate these themes I create two and three-dimensional objects which provide a multi-sensory experience that is aesthetically engaging, conceptually provocative, and layered with levels of meaning. To invoke a fascination in these ideas, I have used intricate and evocative imagery, incorporation of kinetic and interactive components, and elements that change with time or different environmental conditions. Important is a necessary mobile perspective that breaks the viewer free from a static cone of vision and seduces him or her into a labyrinth of puzzles. Formally I juxtapose various materials including silverpoint, transfers, vhs tape, polarized screens and found objects with supports ranging from folk art-style assemblages to meticulously crafted panels and glass. Subtractive processes such as carving, erasing, and veiling constitute another aspect of the layering that gives rise to the finished piece. Employing these materials and processes with subject matter that is representational as well as abstract, narrative, or illustrative of mechanical and anatomical diagrams allows me to take the viewer from a place of the known to one of not-knowing. Every work is both a sensory and cerebral playground in which one can investigate the curious nature of perception. It is important for this exploration to absorb the viewer in multiple epiphanies that lead to questions, self-reflection and a state of being conscious of consciousness. My art practice is inspired by the mutual arising or transactional interaction between the viewer, myself and the art experience.
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Drewest
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) Webster, Andrew, author; Cooperman, Matthew B., advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan J., committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot wrote, "[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour." This injunction hovers over these poems. They are working for a tradition--something to belong to. In a sense, the subject of their problem is their work--poetry. Therefore that is the work that has had a need to be done. On the one hand these poems represent three years of working to understand one's own tradition; on the other, they represent the struggle of maintaining one's identity in the face of an ever present lineage. Think of identity as a bird's nest--A singular place to return to. The bird nest as subjectivity preferred strict objectivity; although the social aspect of a bird's nest is certainly important, something forces a return to the nest. Moving further inward, the songbird's syrinx, the lyric mode, as opposed to the epic. A sole singer, Sappho and her lyre, and so poetic identity. A bird's nest, a personal tradition, a linguistic conundrum. The opacity of language a paradox: the need language to communicate, ideate, the world; yet the semiotic condition persists, and a thing which signifies is not the thing which it signifies, and so there is a gap. John Clare's "Thee Nightingales Nest" [sic], describes a speaker "creeping on hands and knees through matted thorns / to find her nest. . . ." and so crawls into a tradition. The nightingale's nest is hidden, but curiously so, "where rude boys never think to look." In the grass, not in a tree. On hands and knees "all [seem] as hidden as a thought unborn." The speaker has "nestled down / And watched her while she sung." From the nest issues a song. We hear the song, but we don't see the singer. The bird's nest is an idea and a thing--it is, and stands in for, a thing: clarifying and obscuring. The bird will be outlived by its nest, its singing; the problem, the work; a tradition, an individual; poetry, making.
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Drift
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Delfino, Annmarie, author; Dungy, Camille, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member
The poems in Drift explore cyclical, nonlinear ways of experiencing and viewing time and our relationship to the natural world. Centered in the coastal landscapes of Southern California, these poems examine how ecology shifts over time. Interspersed throughout the collection are poems from the point of view of a young speaker as she revisits her childhood memories, connects them to the present day, and imagines how her present self might evolve in the future. Both the landscape-centered and human-centered poems question what appears stable and fixed, exploring the ways memory and landscape are malleable, fluid, and interconnected.
Open Access
Embrace your brokenness: a narrative journey of an immigrant
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Monem, Nikoo, author; Bates, Haley, advisor; Aoki, Eric, committee member; Emami, Sanam, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
"Embrace Your Brokenness" unfolds the symbolic narrative of my immigrant journey through a collection of works, capturing the intricate complexities of identity and resilience. The artworks delve into themes of connection, border blending, and the interplay between external presentation and internal reality within the context of my own life. This thesis explores the unity and dissonance inherent in my personal experience, delving into the transient nature of memories and the emotional intricacies they hold. The signature of this collection are the delicate rose pattern porcelain pieces which serve as reflections of my roots and connections to my homeland, evoking a profound sense of belonging and contributing to my self-portrait within this collection. Utilizing visual narratives, each piece becomes a nuanced story, framing my daily struggles with adapting to a new life in the United States. Aligned with a broader theme of unity, "Embrace Your Brokenness" unveils the complexities of the immigrant experience, offering a tangible representation of the often-unseen challenges I have faced as both an immigrant and an artist. Through this body of work, viewers are invited to contemplate the concealed stories and connections that contribute to the collective human experience.
Open Access
Entropy and cycles
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Mills, Bartow, author; Yust, David E., advisor; Sullivan, Patrice M., advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Steensen, Sasha, committee member
This body of works subject and focus point is the cyclical nature of matter and the forces therein. There have been explorations of this concept on all fronts including metaphysical philosophy, science, and art. It is the recurring realization of matter as a cyclical form being driven by unseen forces that leads me to believe the subject is of utmost importance. Through the use of a specific set of marks, surfaces, symbols, and imagery I am attempting to conjure this realization and come to a better understanding of the concept, and to ultimately echo a similar response in an audience.
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Falling unfolded silhouette: a poem
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Moore, Richard Owen, author; Beachy-Quick, Dan, advisor; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Lehene, Marius, committee member
The work of my thesis seeks to formally enact my poetic. My poetry is a way of interrelating awareness, language and nature. The trajectory of my thesis is an amorphous vision that develops the language in which I think, and in turn speak of the environments in which I've been. It is a vision of the dynamic force between things. It interweaves by creating relationships--it is meditation that is also mediation. It is a poetry that seeks to strengthen the fabric of interdependency. It recognizes the existence of non-human things and their ineluctable value. It is a poetic that attempts to enact an amorphous form of awareness--one that shifts as it speaks, and thus lives--in a language that is aware of itself as the unique utterance of a universal tone. Thus, a collection of poems.
Open Access
Formal fluidity: the blending performance of gender, identity, and art making
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Gillespie, Spencer, author; Osborne, Erika, advisor; Leal, Francisco, committee member; Riep, Dave, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
My art, like life, is in a constant state of flux. I bring a personal and unique history to the making process each time I enter the studio. My work is visually autobiographical with written text and expressive mark making. I deal with thoughts of mental health by journaling on the surface of my paintings. I use my body to physically express and work through thoughts of sadness or joy. Throwing materials at the work, gouging the surface with tools, jumping to reach the top edges, or throwing water on top of the painting are all examples of that. I transcend stigmatic social labels of gender norms by hiding and subverting the performance of my actions through layers of work and process, mirroring and recording how I felt in the execution of creation. While working in my studio and critically engaging with the fragility of my process, I am also constrained by my formalist teachings. There is a balance between merging this formal training while engaging in self-reverential work. The blending of these two elements allude to a closer look at myself and how I choose to present myself within the context of a heteronormative society. Subverting gender performativity through nonrepresentational art making while engaging in the process of highlighting my gender identity allows for a performative, fluid process in which I place myself in the world.
Open Access
FUNdamentalist DOLLS
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Arnell, Nicole L., author; Gravdahl, John, advisor; Cooperman, Matthew, 1964-, committee member; Huibregtse, Gary, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.
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Half-red
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2015) McCarroll, Gracie, author; Cooperman, Matthew, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
My process in writing this manuscript was much different that any process I had prior: I typed all the poems on a typewriter, made edits with a pen, then retyped them again and again on the typewriter. I didn’t touch the computer until I felt each draft was as close as possible to its highest pitch. I think this process allowed for a kind of fruition of the line that I had never before experienced. I hope for this manuscript to be a demonstration of the ways I have learned how to listen to my body, my ancestral echoes, my feet, and my poems. In line with Federico Garcia Lorca's conception of duende, I tried my hardest dismantle any intellectual scaffolding that began to appear in my poems. I wanted the poems to sing themselves into being. This involved radical tracking of each sound, word, and image. More specifically, I tried to see the first draft of the poem as containing all of the answers for revision. Words repeat; however, meanings never repeat themselves. This is something the Greeks knew in their conception of metis, meaning "beautiful arrangements." Arrangement activates words, strengthens their charges. Another hope for this work is that it eliminates the binary that seems to prevalent in academia between visual and literary arts. Writing my poems drove me to action. I believe that all art should drive the creator and audience into action. So I found myself meditating on Nick Cave's notion of art being capable of "creating a form for the spirit," and in doing so, I realized that poetry wasn't a large enough vessel to contain me or my grief. I stopped reading and thinking like writer. I started reading and thinking like a spirit. I bought two wedding dresses from Goodwill and began altering them with Cave's Soundsuits in mind. I started by sewing over 200 fake rose petals on each sleeve of one dress all by hand. This idea was prompted by Sappho's fragment "with arms like roses." I had in mind to create a dress that was the embodiment of romantic stage of a relationship. So I adorned the dress with fake ornaments until fabric started to rip. This was over a process that took about 6 months, as I did not own a sewing machine and the matter of using my hands to attach these objects seemed important for my body to understand the way the dress would function. For the second dress, I meditated on the disillusionment of a relationship and its dismantling. I sewed around a hundred glass test tubes from campus surplus store onto the wedding dress with fishing wire. This process took about 3 months. But to state the symbolic life of each dress is to belittle them and their potential. I am simply showing the evolution of my thought as concisely as possible. In truth, I did not know each dress would function as they did until I activated them but putting them on and videotaping myself. This activation made their function apparent as I began to let the ground and the dress move my body. I took many hours of video that I deleted, as I figured out you can just put something weird on and move around. You must craft gesture as you craft a line in a poem. My intention in the introduction is not to explain what the video work means to the manuscript or what the manuscript means to the video. I simply want to put them side by side and allow the audience to experience them (see my website http://www.graciemccarroll.com to watch the video; it is also important that you read the essay on the site that accompanies the video—the video and essay can be found under the "performance" tab; I very much want to video to be included in our defense conversation). I can only thank you all, from the sincerest part of my heart, for the faith, understanding, teaching and work you have done to help me become a better person, and therefore, a better artist. I hope you enjoy what follows.
Open Access
History of peculiar traits and others
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) House, Joshua Bryant, author; Simons, Stephen, advisor; Dormer, James, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Moseman, Eleanor, committee member
My paranoid neurosis is the focus of my recent printmaking work. The absurd and frequently surreal imagery is derived from the continuous oddity of my everyday thought, from issues I know are clearly the result of overactive imagination or the serious dread of bizarre circumstances I often find myself in. The medium of printmaking allows for obsessive levels of detail and engrossment in the image making process, as well as a granting the ability to make unique marks that other mediums are incapable of. By placing these thoughts in figurative scenarios in a playground of psychological space, I synthesize the connection of symbolism in relationship to personal experience. The final product is a dialogue between the absurd idea and the logical means attempted to bring understanding.
Open Access
Humanity unmasked
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2009) Scott, Stanley James, author; Dormer, James T., advisor; Simons, Stephen R., advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, 1973-, committee member; Flippen, Paul, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
The darker facets of human nature drive my work. The figures you see in these prints and drawings are very real depictions of, and responses to, internal conflict. These figures offer the viewer a deeper level of understanding of the human condition as present both within the artist and society as a whole. I am particularly interested in the elements that make us uncomfortable and the aspects of ourselves we deny. These unexpressed emotions are the source of the tension in the images. The tension that binds each of these figures is inside us, driving our own actions and choices. I feel we need to accept and acknowledge our inner demons, both at an individual and a societal level. My work accepts this internal conflict as a normal part of the human condition that we all feel when we struggle. By speaking honestly through the works, the viewer is challenged to redefine their relationship to the internal struggle invoking a raw response.
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In small rooms
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Naughton, Kathleen, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
The form the language of these poems takes is linked and cannot be separate from how it means to mean. In some ways, the poems are "about" the language used to talk about the most mundane and universal human experiences—love, loss, aging, death, the passage of time, the interaction with place, the persistent idea, if not presence, of the sacred or ineffable, constructions of the self and how the relationships with those closest to us, with place, with age the passing of time, become a part of that sense of who we are. The sonnet-poems are the core work of the manuscript, and that they don't want to pause at all to explain themselves, to focus themselves. They refuse to consider where they're coming from and where they're going, they refuse narrative, they try (impossibly) to contain everything each time in each 14 lines, over and over, and always fail. This compression feels necessary to getting every everything up next to each other consistently; it also feels necessary to let myself as poet know that it will all be over soon, which is probably also important to the reader. Important because the poems are dizzying and stressful to read and it seems necessary for the sanity of all involved that we know that our engagement will be a limited one; important, too, because these poems are terrified by time, mortality, what happens at the end, and the series of small poems gives the work an opportunity to practice the end over and over and over. And practice beginning over and over and over. I don't think these poems are about reincarnation, but perhaps they are about the many deaths and rebirths within a single human life, and about the human on an ecological scale, in which one human lifetime is just one start and end in a series of continuous starts and ends.
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Let light eat the spine and Speaker for bones
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Weber, Kelly, author; Steensen, Sasha, advisor; Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison, advisor; Beachy-Quick, Dan, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member
My multi-part thesis, Let Light Eat the Spine and Speaker for Bones, reflect different methods of creating lyric corporality and different manifestations of my concern with vulnerability. The poetry portion considers the body as a site of connection between chronic illness and the Anthropocene, using poetry's sonic and imagistic qualities to produce a bodily response in the reader that's an alternative to the harmful language of the contract and the law. It is one book-length poem made of several smaller poems, a body of text tearing itself apart. By contrast, the creative nonfiction portion explores a constellation of concerns around gaze and bodily exposure in several stand-alone essays. Both manuscripts center a body-driven ecopoetics of thought and feeling.