Breaking Out: 2021 BU CFA School of Visual Arts BFA Thesis Show Catalogue

Message from the Director I introduce the 2021 College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis catalogue with deep gratitude to the graduating BFA students in Painting, Sculpture, Printmaking, and Graphic Design who created compelling individual and group thesis projects under challenging collective circumstances. I am proud that in 2020–21, during a global pandemic, the School of Visual Arts was open, offering access to studios, classrooms, presses, and a new RISO printer—and the vital opportunity for students to work with faculty mentors in the studios. The work in this catalogue and in our galleries attests to the innovative vision, flexibility, and discipline shown by our students. Given all that these students faced with grace and creativity, I feel especially proud of this year’s graduating BFA seniors.

In fall 2020 SVA opened our usual studios as well as a renewed 855 Commonwealth Avenue building and renovated Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery. However, our community did not enter this academic year in habitual ways. Our eyes were opened to longstanding and newly forming social problems. Our full senses were opened to new ways of navigating space—real, virtual, or marked by red wayfinding signs. Students learned that they did not need to be physically together to experience genuine collaboration. The BFA thesis exhibition in Stone Gallery, Commonwealth Gallery, and in the studios exemplifies the strength of the class of 2021’s collective efforts: Graphic Design students created exhibition designs with interactive reading and gathering areas to showcase their books and projects; Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking students planned for integrating their work in exhibitions in Stone Gallery, Gallery 5, and large studio rooms; and the BFA Branding team created a multi-platform brand for the entire group with Breaking Out as the theme of this year’s thesis exhibition. Our seniors broke out with work that pushed against the pandemic limitations of this past year, and with a brand identity characterized by humor and beauty. It exemplifies the ability of creative work to transform complex, shared, emotional experience into a communicative new form.

Please look closely at each senior’s work on these pages. Each has honed concept and practice in individualized ways. Leah Triplett Harrington, this year’s curator of the Stone Gallery exhibition, writes, “As they graduate into a new world, no subject, process, or style is off-limits to these artists. Each artist brings their own particular inventiveness to their work, with themes or materials from their personal and shared experiences alike.”

I leave this year feeling hopeful and strengthened by the work of the students, faculty, and staff of CFA SVA. I am grateful for the privilege to lead an art institution at a time that calls for the power of the arts to connect us all. Humane responses and human truths are here in this catalogue. Thank you to the BFA branding team—Natalie Bolton, Lena Johnson, Morgan Recker and Mariana Velasquez—for working with Assistant Professor Mary Yang, co-chair of BFA Graphic Design, on this wonderful catalogue and on the BFA thesis branding for the class of 2021. The thesis work is a testament to the teaching and artistic mentorship by the professional artists and designers on the SVA faculty, which required an exceptional degree of dedication and flexibility this year. I sincerely thank the professors who taught senior thesis courses alongside me: Deborah Cornell, James Grady, Meena Hasan, Zach Horn, Breehan James, Richard Ryan, David Snyder, and Mary Yang.

The BFA is a four-year journey, and I recognize the impact of all SVA faculty on the senior work as well as the contributions of professional advisor Beth Zerega, Assistant Director for Administration. Thank you to Boston University Art Galleries and Lissa Cramer, who helped prepare our students professionally, and to the SVA staff who worked so hard to make the thesis process run smoothly, particularly: Jessica Caccamo, Assistant Director for Admissions; Julianna Augustine, Administrative Coordinator; and Technical Associates Josh Brennan, Brandon Cohen, and Gus Wheeler working with Logen Zimmerman, Operations Manager.

On behalf of the School of Visual Arts, I sincerely congratulate the BFA class of 2021! You have each transformed our community by your work and presence. I am sure that you will transform the world you enter this May as young artists and designers.

Dana Clancy Director and Associate Professor of Art School of Visual Arts

☁ Table of Contents

PAINTING SCULPTURE PRINTMAKING GRAPHIC DESIGN

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Ruby Breier Schwat Rachel Chung Camryn Connolly Isabel DeContreras Elianna Dryer Abby Fenn Brittany Ficaro Karlena Fletcher Parker Garvin Molly German Matthew Guattery Ran He

PAINTING

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Brooke Jones Yeon Soo Kim Henry Louris Qiu Yu Hong Lu Rebecca Martin Cailyn Masson Adelaide Probert Julia Smithing Sam Weinberger Meghan Young

RUBY

BREIER SCHWAT www.rubybreier.com @rubybreierart

Johnny, 2020. Ink, acrylic, and oil pastel on paper. 49.6 × 47.75 in.

Ruby Dream House, 2021. Mixed media on canvas. 26 × 36 in.

My bedroom has always been a protected place for imagination and exploration of self. I’ve been playing dress-up for as long as I can remember, transforming my bedroom into office spaces and runways. In this space I have fantasized, I have dreamt, and I have played. At the age of 22, this habit has not changed, and it follows me into the studio. Through my practice, I explore bedrooms as a place of comfort and a reflection of one’s inner identity.

I’ve composed my own visual vocabulary of repeated icons and recognizable forms that make up the language I work through, allowing me to experiment with description and representation. This lexicon of imagery flows from my hand to the work easily, creating a composition for me to test textures, color, and pattern within.

Through my artistic process, I transfer this notion of play, experimentation, and imagination from my identity into tactile and vibrant spaces. I apply, remove, layer, cut, and paste a multitude of materials. I allow myself the freedom to be anything and try anything that I desire, mimicking the act of playing dress up. While the physical materials of my process can change, the setting does not. The objects and furniture have become characters that dance around my compositions in a dreamlike state rather than the figures that previously occupied them. The bedroom is a constant in my work and remains a safe environment of comfort and uncovered desire.

Intuition drives my practice, and the vocabulary I’ve built allows me to freely follow instinct and taste, to create without holding back. My paintings are snapshots of the dreamlike reality I experience, a description of my mind through the language I am most fluent in.

PAINTING

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RACHEL CHUNG

Pure Lavender, 2021. High flow acrylic and ink. 30 × 22 in.

Surge, 2021. Charcoal, acrylic, and ink. 22 × 30 in.

Up. Down. Sideways. Across. Around. My eyes dart from object to object, taking in the environments and atmospheres I explore. I immerse myself in environments filled with architecture. I connect the lit windows in buildings, the dots of grainy cement, or the lines on a shaggy rug that become translated into my linework and mark-making. The lines, angles, and unnoticeable patterns stimulate a field of energy of colors and marks that are stored in my brain. I take these energy fields and put them onto paper for others to experience. I utilize a repetitive mixture of rigid and fluid lines in order to create a space for viewers to feel like they are being engulfed by the compositions.

Line after line, splotch after splotch, this repetitive motion and pattern generates a composition translating the way in which I visualize these abstracted spaces internally. The use of layers in my work enables me to create a visual distortion and illusion, which I employ as a tactic to draw my viewers in close. At some points I am in control over my lines, and at others I allow myself to introduce the aspect of chance into my work, giving it a sense of play. Guided by anything from paintbrushes to embroidery floss to gravity, the motion of my shoulders and the paint create lines I see in my head over and over again. My lines also communicate with the music that fills my studio space and become a factor in the speed of my mark-making and even the colors I choose to paint with. My body and painting tools are in sync to create the energy fields that fill my brain when exploring my memory of places. Dribble, scratch, splash.

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CAMRYN

CONNOLLY www.camrynconnolly.com @camrynscollections

Butter Me Up, 2021. Oil and mixed media on canvas. 30 × 40 in.

Then & Now, 2020. Oil and mixed media on canvas. 28 × 62 in.

At first glance, my paintings and installations may seem like normal spaces, but in each piece there are bizarre moments that snap the viewer out of the reality of the work, usually through the distortion of perspective. I utilize perspective as a way to enhance the interpretation of my pieces. I think about hierarchy within the confines of painting, deciding what are the most important aspects, and then making choices to emphasize what I deem important.

I bring depictions of mundane objects together to create spaces that give the viewer the chance to take in the full piece, and then invite them to step in closer to examine each individual object.

Each object signifies a specific idea, quality, person, or time, expressing meaning in an indirect manner. I use domestic objects as the common denominators of our personal environment, constructing a space around us that is layered with hidden meaning. Encoding my personal life and the lives around me into the work, I insert my own personal experiences within this external space. Everything has a reason and purpose, which is enhanced by the material or manner in which the specific object is depicted. Domestic spaces are rebuilt into installations using painting, sculpture, and mixed media. Within my pieces, there are indications of the unsettling current issues integrated into the clutter of domestic problems. Ultimately, these pieces serve as a commentary on human nature, exploring our relationships to objects, time, and the way these objects reflect who we are. Objects hold many different meanings, and I leave it to the viewer to project their own personal experiences and connect with the object in their own way. Ultimately, by navigating memory and sorting through the world, I discover meaning in the most ordinary places.

PAINTING

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ISABEL

DECONTRERAS @decon.isabel

I Hope You’re Finding Your Way Through It All, 2021. Oil on wood panel. 14 × 11 in.

Their Sister’s 35 Drive, 2021. Oil on wood panel. 7 × 5 in.

Do You Have To Earn The Right To Absurdity?, 2021. Oil on wood panel. 12 × 9 in.

Time is a collection of moments that exist to be noticed. Light, softness, and palpable atmosphere fill gaps in the day between activity and sleep. I find breath in the sky and peace in spending time with the light between my eyes and eyelids. Stillness is fruitful and grounding. I am never bored. These acts of introspection guide my practice.

Giving attention to these ephemeral moments is my gratitude; painting them memorializes observation. And, as I render the warm, radiating feeling of moments in paint on a surface, time stretches and curves and spirals carefully; it becomes big and slow. A split second is woven into an enduring engagement. My act of love for these winks of time is in giving them enduring form.

While engaged in the surface, I often find myself breathing into and out of the painting, in an exchange not unlike one with a tree. I breathe the painting in, pause before exhaling along a crisp edge, exhale in a swipe of release, inhale and rise. I am nourished. Breathing steadies me in my body and unifies me with the moment and the object. The time the painting holds is not counted in numerical duration, but in quality and depth of breathing. My act of love for these winks of time is in giving them my breath.

I am committed to collecting moments where light dances and opens and performs magic; painting them is my homage.

PAINTING

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ELIANNA DRYER @dryerpaint

Untitled, 2020. Watercolor on paper. 17.5 × 12 in.

Language can contain, but not all things can be contained by language.

This will be its own piece. This will be a piece to augment the art, and a piece in and of itself.

Most things can’t be contained by language. It confines. It limits the extent of what something actually is.

I am a person separate from those events in my life. Can you separate me from my past? My history? My people’s history? Can I be more than that?

Can I define myself how I choose?

It’s just a thing that happened to me. It doesn’t define me. I don’t want it to define me.

Stop talking about it.

My hands My body My experiences My circumstances My surroundings My memories My intuition My emotions

I feel the need to create and share.

It’s my way of sharing and connecting with the world.

It’s my way of helping other people share and connect with each other.

It’s my way of giving to the world.

It’s my contribution to the world.

I want it to be a story. Or a poem. Something pretty. Something dark.

Something confusing. Something to question. Something to contemplate.

I want it to explain.

And contradict.

I want it to mean something.

I want to mean something.

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ABBY

FENN www.abbyfenn.myportfolio.com @afenn_art

Scrap Quilt, 2021. Dye and ink on fabric. 36 × 36 in.

Stamped Blue, 2021. Fabric dye on polyester spandex. Installation, approx. 84 × 144 in.

My work arises from the textiles, patterns, textures, and photographs that I grew up with and around. A quilt made by a great-grandmother, a blanket given by a sister, a crossword puzzle completed by a grandfather, treasures collected with a mother, a family vacation captured on a camera: all are meaningful frameworks that I am able to build off of through the process of making. Focusing on the nuances of these and other collected items, my experimental studio practice centers around this accumulation of objects, materials, and imagery. I play and experiment with them until a discovery is made. I respond to how the materials react to my manipulations, thus creating an endless journey of chance in which we take turns making moves and collaborating with one another. Throughout the process, the visual structures of my past merge with the materials of my present through play. As a result, the works become indirect collaborations with family members and a past self. They allow me to pause and reflect as I search through archives for something missed.

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BRITTANY FICARO @brittanyrosef_

I Tried., 2021. Oil and acrylic modeling paste on canvas. 36 × 24 in.

Red Latex Skin, 2020. Enamel spray paint on canvas, plaster, and acrylic modeling paste. 16 × 49 in.

My art exists as an extension of my person. It is an expression created by learning and conducting research. My work develops parallel to the human experience by discussing matters of the life cycle through literal and metaphorical growth, accumulation, decomposition, and structural elements.

These structures can be manmade or found naturally. The process of bringing the work to life is both additive and subtractive in thought and physical manipulation of materials. It creates a rigid structure that concurrently decomposes itself into an organic development that then allows the art to function as living beings.

Each work made influences the next and teaches me something new, either about myself or about the material. Much of the work stems from personal experiences, but they are not exclusive to myself; these experiences are thoughts that can often be interpreted without an explanation. These moments influence the specific materials chosen. The materials are a performative element in the piece as I manipulate their transference to something separate from their proper function. Paint, wire, plaster, acrylic modeling paste, and fabric become a part of “the body” in the process of making my work.

The paintings are simultaneously my body and the viewer’s body. Viewers interact with the work through their visceral reactions and thoughts. By participating in conversation between myself as the artist, the painting, and the viewer, the piece lives in a public space as an engaging performance.

PAINTING

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KARLENA

FLETCHER @artbykarlena

Double-Pane Window, 2021. Oil on panel. 14 × 11 in.

Inside, Looking In, 2021. Oil on canvas. 15 × 16 in.

Ocean, 2021. Oil on panel. 14 × 11 in.

In a window, glass becomes more than a shiny, transparent material: it is the meeting place of two worlds. I study the windows in my fourth-floor apartment every day, entranced by the way glass captures, combines, and distorts light outside with light inside, creating a naturally occurring painting.

In reality, one’s eyes may focus beyond a window one second, then refocus, suddenly confronted by reflections. My paintings consider both external and internal focuses simultaneously. They borrow from compositions on my windows, rearrange the content even further, and ultimately produce a world of ambiguous shapes or unrecognizable lights. These images perplex viewers as they walk the line between representation and abstraction. Is that a street lamp or an overhead fluorescent? The glow within my closet, or a television across the street?

My practice is rooted in my longstanding sensibility of noticing and preserving the beauty in overlooked places. I share this sensibility with numerous postwar observational painters, including Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher, and Fairfield Porter. I align myself with this movement’s rejection of the grand, newfound, and political, instead accepting meaning from the everyday and the mundane.

The illusionistic techniques essential to these paintings require materials that can mimic the subject in texture and color. I religiously prime and sand my supports for days until the surface feels like glass. I render the image through many glazes of oil, each adding vibrancy and depth. Painting in thin layers provides opportunities to add, remove, pull forward, or push back elements as I discover them in person or recall them from memory. These slow processes allow for a paradoxical meditation on this temporal subject.

Painting glass demands diligence and patience, therefore teaching me and the viewer to study minute details, appreciate mistakes, and commit exquisite visual moments to memory.

PAINTING

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PARKER GARVIN @parkertgarvin

Survey, 2021 Oil on canvas. 30 × 24 in.

Terminus, 2021. Oil on canvas. 24 × 36 in.

My practice hones in on oil paintings and ink illustrations to communicate narrative and metaphor. My work is driven by storytelling, exploring moral ambiguity and the sinister nature of the archaic tales designed to implant lessons. I use world building and continuity between pieces to make the work rich and rewarding. In a recent series, I tried to visually represent the appropriation of darker fables and mythologies into bright contemporary and artificial narratives. Often these corporate filtrations conceal so much about their source material that they lose the core of the narrative. My work tries to conceptualize what it would look like if the signatures of modern children’s media were to occupy the same space as the dark and unrelenting world of tradition.

While constructing my work, I focus on composition and staging, using the framing devices of cinema as an influence; these elements can convey tone and metaphor in and of themselves. The images I create are singular and static; they operate differently than filmic visuals, which use multiple frames to create a story. I want the work to feel like a doctored snapshot of a broader narrative packed to the brim with metaphor and color, which allows the viewer to imagine the story in between.

One of my broadest themes is the comfort one can find in the depictions of fear. The role of disturbing imagery in my work is not provocation but control. A corpse isn’t a corpse; it is panic, dread, anxiety—everything that keeps me up at night and propels me to create work in the morning. Fear is a useful tool, but it can overwhelm. My work is an attempt to reach within myself and locate the source of what makes me apprehensive, then trap it in my art, and maybe even inject a little humor.

PAINTING

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MOLLY

GERMAN www.mollygerman.wixsite.com/studio @mollygermanart

Ticket, 2020. Oil on canvas. 50 × 40 in.

Pink Box (diptych), 2020. Oil on canvas. 20 × 32 in.

I have a close attachment to notes left by my family, friends, peers, and strangers. They are thoughts and unspoken words frozen in time. They are precious gifts that recall long or short memories. They are my roommate’s grocery list, my mother’s figure drawing, and my father’s sketched directional map. Even simpler than written records, notes appear to me as neglected remnants—ticket stubs, Post-it reminders, and boxes of microwaveable enchiladas.

When I find a note worth keeping, I transform and elevate its visual skeleton through delicate duplication, disguising, tearing, and rearranging.

These notes become lovingly handled, emotional, and warm collages that inspire my paintings. On canvas, they become ghosts of their original colors, shapes, or details. They become crafted symbols, biographies, and visually rendered sentiments. They are all records of ordinary notes and remnants, pardoned from the trash or recycling bin, and they live proudly as reimagined physical creations.

PAINTING

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MATTHEW

GUATTERY @jeano.guatteri

rəˌvərbəˈrāSH(ə)n ˈsīkō, 2021. Ink on paper. 47 × 42 in.

So rested he by the Bumbum bog and Stood Awhile in thought, 2020.

Oil and acrylic on panel. 36 × 60 in.

My artistic practice emerges from free-associative drawings and collages that are constructed into surreal or nonsensical narrative vignettes. These psychological, maximalist spaces are realized in paintings, drawings, and animations using graphite, crayon, ink, digital media, and oil or acrylic paint.

Within my practice, I am interested in the development and juxtaposition of different forms of rendering that synthesize a nebulous web of influences and interests ranging from Adventure Time and Ralph Bakshi films to Maus and Earthbound to the work of Ray Harryhausen and Fleischer Studios.

I aim to construct a mesh of opposing fields of knowledge to create a new, strange realm of understanding that is both self-contained within the image and connected to the larger, ever-growing cosmos of my work and the still larger cloud of influence I infuse into it. The disparate themes within my work represent the contradictions and spaces between popular fantasy and science fiction, and art-historical abstraction and mythology. These spaces, to me, open the door to exploring multiple binary concepts such as the biologic and mechanic or the archaic and modern in a way that can highlight their common natures.

Moreover, I consider my works as providing contradictory psychological spaces related to the ideas of a labyrinth and a sandbox. The labyrinth represents an incomprehensible and ever-changing maze that torments the participant, while the sandbox represents an open and consequence-free zone designed to support low-stakes play or experimentation with no goals in mind.

As I expand my drawing language, I set out to create an ongoing illustrative world of complex psychological narrative interactions. They ultimately provide a space for me to examine signs and symbols and interact with allegory, humor, and the grotesque to satisfy my own subconscious expectations as I move through this world.

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RAN HE @heirart_

Untitled, 2021. Acrylic and watercolor on paper. 18 × 24 in.

Windy Boston, 2021. Acrylic and watercolor on paper. 18 × 24 in.

Art is always a reflection of its culture; landscapes from China’s Ming dynasty have provided my starting inspiration. In these paintings, the rhythm comes out of the border and grasps the whole rather than sticking to the details. With this influence, I create abstract paintings to manipulate my sensory organs and to see from the viewpoint of my subconscious and imagination. Kuriyagawa Hakuson, a literary critic, stated in his text Symbols of Depression that inspiration is understood as the desires of the inner mind and represents the demands of survival that lurk in the shadow of the unconscious mind. I consider form and color as languages that can describe a fluid, narrative space rendered from my unconscious. I transfer the unconscious desire to my finite platform—the canvas, paper, etc.—in order to produce infinite creativity.

Currently, my intuitively constructed landscape paintings function as both utopias and dystopias that physically represent the forms I see in my mind and change according to my own immediate environments and moods.

Most of my works do not follow painterly rules of realism. There is no gravity; objects can be anywhere. The light source is uncertain; light can shine from everywhere. There is no perspectival effect; closer objects can be smaller than distant ones. I make the work while guided by two fundamental principles: color and mark-making. The speed of my mark-making is very important, and that speed paired with emotive colors, like a calm blue, are what generate my subconscious. When strokes are painted rapidly, the emotion shifts to anxiety; when strokes are rendered timidly, the emotion tends toward melancholy. I experiment and push my color sensibility, expanding beyond a calm blue to include warm colors, and I am interested in how different colors can embody a subconscious and internal mood.

PAINTING

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BROOKE JONES @brookejonesart

Birthday Cake (Explicit), 2021 Oil on canvas. 48 × 36 in.

Pretty Boy, 2021. Oil on canvas. 48 × 36 in.

Sweet (floral) Escape, 2020. Oil on panel. 36 × 24 in.

Femininity is strong, complex, and beautiful, but too often things deemed feminine get dismissed as silly or vain. In my work, I explore ideas of beauty and indulgence by layering traditionally feminine aesthetics that are thought to be shallow, such as the color pink, sparkles, flowers, and decorative objects such as frames. I paint these ideas in a way that is genuine to show their beauty but also in an over-the-top manner that revels in excess. Growing up as a dancer, I have always felt a strong connection to performance and the artificiality that comes with it. Therefore, I like to embrace the artificial, and create paintings that are obviously fake and aware of their fakeness.

Many things that I personally find beautiful are piled into my work, such as flowers from 17th-century Dutch still life paintings, which are a luxurious fantasy themselves. Eggs appear throughout my work as a symbol of womanhood and strength: it is almost impossible to break an egg by placing in the crook of your elbow and flexing your bicep. The flowers I paint are often heavy and metallic. The oversaturated colors are obnoxiously and unapologetically girly. These colorful, dense compositions offer the viewer a kind of feast for their eyes that is shiny, sticky, loud, sexy, and decadent.

PAINTING

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YEON SOO KIM

You Like Blue?, 2021. Flashe paint. 30 × 22 in.

Paint the Town, 2021. Flashe paint. 30 × 22 in.

Nirvana, 2021. Flashe paint. 18.5 × 24 in.

Repetition is one of the main driving forces behind my paintings. Metaphorically speaking, my paintings are similar to a tree in which ideas and shapes continuously branch off, produce diverse visual themes, and manipulate compositional rules. Organic, abstract shapes facilitate this system of repetition across multiple works, as their size, orientation, and placement are spontaneous and adaptable. The shapes’ fluid nature and behavior yield countless possibilities to explore color relationships and visual illusions. To me, the practicality of my shapes is obvious: each one influences and interacts with the ones that follow. The repeated system of shapes grants me the liberty to focus on the interdependent nature of my decisions, in which each formal choice is a force for visual change. This freedom eliminates the detrimental labeling of mistakes, and instead the open-endedness of viewer interpretation flourishes.

Conversely, understanding the personal or symbolic attachment to my shapes has been less evident. Rather than being driven by emotion, my paintings operate off of my instincts regarding spatial composition. As such, I rely on repetition to become my strongest ally in further pushing abstraction in miniscule or grand gestures. I emphasize and alter positive and negative space through the interactive shapes. The overlapping sections of the shapes also become exciting opportunities for change. Varying materials and color pairings can uniquely emphasize these areas of spatial design.

Personally, I find a lot of comfort and ease in monochromatic palettes and complementary color pairings. These limited palettes allow me to explore the range of shades that an individual color can encompass. As the scope of color choices narrows, I begin to rely on complex tonal differences and coloristic illusions to continue themes of abstraction.

PAINTING

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HENRY

LOURIS www.henrylouris.com @henrylouris

Touch Me, 2020. Oil on canvas. 36 × 60 in.

All I See is Red, Red, Red, 2020. Oil on canvas. 60 × 84 in.

My work contemplates infinite states in which not only all possibilities occur at once, but all things are both opposite and equal. This is a cyclical scenario in which boundaries between things dissolve into one before splitting and starting again. I engage in this moment of transition between unification and separation by depicting the confluence of different artistic genres and historical methods. By engaging in something that is both monolith and multitude, my work alludes to both my metaphysical and art-historical involvements.

I’m interested in a constant back and forth between formation and dissolution. This manifests itself in my work through perpetual erasing and redrawing, building a structure of residue and continuing to pull more images out of it. I often begin with an allover gesture drawing and destroy it in some fashion, working out of the remnants with images; the result is semi-body parts and humanoid landscapes. I continue this process of destroying and rebuilding the image until I have something that’s in between dissolving and forming. Through painting, I am able to continually pull forms in and out to achieve this effect.

Working this way leaves some room for chance in the building of the image. I look for a state in which the piece has taken on a life of its own and hopefully reveals a subconscious aspect of myself that renders the artistic process a means of self-discovery. When developing a project, I generate ideas that I could never access otherwise. Therefore, painting helps me realize that I have no sense of my intellectual limits and spiritual boundaries, and I continually open myself to new personal and artistic discoveries.

PAINTING

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QIU YU

HONG LU www.qiuyuhonglu.myportfolio.com @fetchmeramenpls

Village, 2021. Oil and charcoal. 30 × 30 in.

New Year’s Eve, 2021. Oil and crayon. 40 × 48 in.

“So . . . where are you from?”

I have a love-hate relationship with this question. It always makes me feel nostalgic because I immediately think of all the different places and cultures I have encountered. My art thrives on this speechless melancholy.

As a member of the Chinese diaspora, I spent my formative years in different places around the globe; I have called many rooms and buildings “home.” While comparing what I am seeing and feeling to what I have seen and felt, I became drawn to the process of recalling memories and their plasticity. My current experiences not only alter my recollection of the past but also freshen up some long forgotten sentiments. These internal conversations between the past and the present find their way into my drawings, paintings, prints, and installations. I visualize these thoughts by complicating representational figures and lush foliage with fragmented spaces. I combine different mediums and leave out parts of the narratives to let my work exist in a dreamlike state. I create images to capture the ephemeral state of my being and displacement.

My work should be explored like a graphic novel with multiple endings, contemplated like an unfinished dialogue, and appreciated like poems recited in different tongues.

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REBECCA MARTIN @rcmw_

Nocturne (b-iii), 2021. Oil and enamel on canvas. 72 × 48 in.

Nocturne (g-i), 2021. Oil and enamel on wood. 24 × 24 in.

I am concerned with the internalizing and externalizing processes through which I perceive, collect, and arrange images. I consider how they layer and superimpose on one another within and without me—how those images enter and emerge from me, both expose and obscure me. These images exist as iterations of one constantly shifting image that guides me from one work to another, manifesting as accumulations of painted and found marks.

It is a negotiation between the internalizing experience of surroundings and the externalizing material cooperation. And on top of that, it is a fluctuating state in which I can work, in which I can locate a semi-clarity of being. I find this in the air at night, in the interlacing of artificial lights in the dark, in the endless transmutations of water, sky, and land. I am obsessed with the vacillating tension between flatness and depth, between the sky as a projection and the recession of deep space: its expansion, its motion, its division, its collapse. It is a nocturnal space where color exists in an ever-unfolding field, changing with the eye, with the body, with the awareness of being in relation.

PAINTING

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CAILYN

MASSON @cmasson_art

Lifetime of Skies, 2021. Oil on canvas. 60 × 84 in.

Golden Hour, 2021. Oil on canvas. 8 × 10 in.

My thought process centers around representing things, colors, ideas, and symbols that mean something to me or appeal to my sensibilities. In addition to painting, I am enthralled with learning new hands-on skills such as embroidery, sewing, and bookmaking and being able to make beautiful things for myself. My love for the handmade allows me to imbue heartfelt, genuine, and calm feelings into my work through thoughtful gestures and color. Each piece represents my presence through both delicate decisions in color and bold, steady use of structure.

Full of simplicity, my work stems from thought, emotion, memory, and intuition. I find myself taking many photos of the sky. I choose specific colors, symbols, and imagery, spending time carefully planning until the work aligns with my thoughts. I often find my subject matter in memories; much of the time I am influenced by place and landscapes. It is not always a singular memory that I work from, but the accumulation of visuals and experiences.

Place is incredibly important to my work. I have lived in many homes, and nods to them can be found in my work: the sailboats from my grandmother’s shutters that so simply reflect my love of the sea, a collection of flowers my family lovingly cared for in Wellesley, and a book fondly illustrating the number of times I have been uprooted.

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ADELAIDE PROBERT @addyprobart

It’s Cold Out, 2021. Oil on canvas. 32 × 40 in.

Can You Hear The Electricity, 2021. Oil on canvas. 46 × 55 in.

I spent my childhood surrounded by woods, playing in the trees and reading mysterious stories about what lives among the forest. Throughout my life I would return to the woods to refresh my mind, feeling the peace that being there can often bring. I began to record what I saw, making fast charcoal drawings and then bigger watercolor paintings to convey to people the mystery and serenity I felt so deeply while I was there. This is where my current practice started.

I choose extremely specific, amplified versions of the colors I see in real life. These vague and indescribable colors give viewers the chance to impart their own meaning to my paintings. Dusk offers the most vibrant and specific colors the natural world has to offer. It hides a lot of what our eyes can see but exposes just enough to give us the chance to decipher what we are looking at. An overcast day can set the tone so intensely: dreary skies muddle the bright colors we are used to seeing and alter our perception of the world for a day. I can’t help but try to capture that very feeling. I work to make the spaces of my paintings feel overwhelming and to fully take over the viewer’s vision as if they are standing in that very world.

Through painting I re-create moments I see every day in new ways so people can understand the magic and beauty that I notice in these mysterious landscapes. These spaces can feel so unfamiliar to most, yet they are the most familiar and comforting to me. My works ultimately show the world through my eyes, a place where bright colors, mystery, and comfort can exist together in a landscape.

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JULIA

SMITHING www.juliasmithing.wordpress.com @juliasmithing_art

Fruit Harmony, 2021. Oil on canvas. 40 × 32 in.

Newton’s OutDoors botanical door design, 2021. Digital media. Dimensions variable.

Flower Whisperer, 2021. Oil on canvas. 34 × 22 in.

My works are about nature in relation to all living organisms, and their movement, interdependence, and delightful uniqueness. I develop my paintings slowly through sketches, exploring the harmony among the natural forms of subjects, their connectedness and dependence on one another. My inspiration sprouts from small microbiological components and seeds that give life to fruits and vegetables, which then become energy sources for our human bodies. The study of human anatomy and movement through competitive sports gave me an understanding of how our bodies are such intricate creations, just like the rivers that flow into streams and flowers that bloom.

Making a painting reveals something new to me every time, and through the vivid colors and my bodily subject matter, I want to let the viewer dream while revealing something new to them, too. My subjects often connect and intersect through energy sources and appear to assimilate or morph into one another to create new and exciting still lifes that are alive in surreal painted spaces.

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SAM

WEINBERGER www.bigsampaints.com @bigsampaints

Vibration, 2021. Acrylic on canvas. 30 × 20 in.

Peace Love n Joy, 2021. Acrylic on stretched canvas. 60 × 60 in.

Covid Connection, 2021. Acrylic on stretched canvas. 60 × 60 in.

I use bright and saturated colors in my artwork, with an attention to warm and cool color relationships on a large scale. My work is often image-based, but abstract within the lines. I often utilize hatch-like mark-making techniques and color harmonies to create this sense of positive and inspiring vibration throughout my artwork. My paintings are created like a dance or music and typically speak to the current events that are happening around us. I’m often inspired by artists like Kandinsky, Escher, Van Gogh, Picasso, Basquiat, and Kiptoe, to name a few.

I find that my best work comes when my body is moving with the paint.

Getting outside my comfort zone, trying new things, and being in the world of the unknown is a big part of my practice.

My paintings often transcend a larger world than just the paintings themselves. This is done by creating paintings on the bustling streets or on public walls, as well as producing movies of the process of my paintings from start to finish. I am always inspired by street art, guerrilla marketing, and the typical person walking to work. My work often speaks to current events and popular culture coupled with my own vibration and style.

I love to problem solve and critically think about what being an artist means to me. My soul, heart, and connection to the viewer are what consistently drive my practice and visual language.

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MEGHAN YOUNG @meghanyoungart

Steady, 2020. Oil on wood panel. 14 × 11 in.

Quietly Angry, 2021. Charcoal and Conté crayon on paper. 24 × 18 in.

Reverberation, 2021. Oil on canvas and Styrofoam. 44 × 30 in.

I began obsessively creating sphere-like structures one year ago, unsure of what they were and why I was making them. Subsequently, my current practice is in constant pursuit of this shape’s meaning, striving to reveal the pulse behind my compulsion to represent and construct them. This evasive shape that I call the “Core” is a vessel constantly changing, powerful, illusionistic, ambiguous in size, and existing in multiple dimensions. Every artwork introduces me to a new version of the Core, as I push and alter its different elements and characteristics, working toward a deeper understanding of its potential.

The idea of interior versus exterior spaces and the myriad depths they can encompass is another driving factor in my practice, taking from the Op Art movement. My interest in creating dichotomous spaces to house the Core lends itself to the Core’s ambiguous scale, which I explore by making works ranging from handheld size to just beyond my own body’s limit.

Through material and technical experimentation, I confront the differences between drawing and painting, and how each serves as a different tool in pursuit of uncovering the Core. Charcoal allows me to utilize expressive marks and engage physically and emotionally with my drawings.

They result from an intuitive process that capitalizes on the workability of charcoal—adding, erasing, and building off of each individual move. In painting, I prefer to harness the slow accumulation of paint to diligently re-create images that have been festering and growing in my mind. Through a multitude of thin layers and glazes, I am able to make subtle shifts in light, render specific textures, and create vibrant colors not possible in charcoal. In both mediums I render spaces punctured by depth, exposed by mysterious light, and balanced by the gravity of the Core.

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SCULPTURE

Elizabeth Klayman Go Eun Lee

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ELIZABETH KLAYMAN

Play with Light, 2020. Spotlights, and various colored plastic. Dimensions variable.

Untitled, 2018. Wax. Dimensions variable.

Untitled, 2019. Disco balls and spotlights. Dimensions variable.

As a student of sculpture, I engage with ideas of participation, use value, form, interiority and exteriority, light, and the displacement of space. As my practice developed, I moved away from traditional precedents of sculptural form to focus on ideas of fragmentation, complexity of structure, chaos, and chance. My work blurs the line between categories of “high” and “low” cultural forms to create my own version of expression. I do this through the juxtaposition of store-bought materials and handmade components, borrowing simultaneously from a range of art-historical movements such as Minimalism, Dada, and abstraction. I take inspiration from artists such as Duchamp and Turrell, who have shown that work does not need to be materially complicated or skillfully rendered in order to be considered art.

Risk-taking and vulnerability are both central to my process. I am engaged with ideas of chance—with the notion that my practice functions as a gamble—with “success” determined by a viewer’s activation of the space through direct and indirect participation. The risk I am willing to take entails the possibility of being “called out,” my work being declared “insufficient” or “not art.” What I stand to gain from this gamble is the possibility of offering a novel and unconstrained way of understanding space.

The primary motivation of my work is to consider the position of the viewer. My work asks for both encounter and confrontation, and it functions as a surrogate for my voice. My goal is to directly address the viewer, to complicate the viewer’s understanding and perception of their physical environment and of the space of art itself.

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GO EUN LEE

Cell Dance, 2020. Chicken wire, plaster, acrylic, silicone, expanding foam, and clay. 31 × 50 × 24 in.

Children are expressive, emotional, and colorful, and as they grow older and confront broader society, they become self-conscious. During this transitional phase of my childhood, I found myself hiding my true emotions in front of others. I would find myself running away from the rapidly changing and fiercely competitive contemporary society.

I have come to view my creative work as a means to rediscover my emotional self and the hidden beauty within a vertiginous reality. My artwork is an opportunity to take a step back, unearth my long-buried feelings, and challenge my perception of the world and who I am within it.

My work draws on my childhood memories as an inspiration for my creative process. My ambition is to explore everyday objects that we take for granted through the lens of a child, revealing any hidden perspectives or ideas that are not immediately apparent. By remembering and reliving the curiosity and spontaneity of a child, I am able to tap into a new source of imagination.

Through intuitively chosen colors, the plasticity and overall visual activity reflect my own emotional state, which is in flux and always changing. The resulting form is an imaginative distortion of both my childhood memories and the actual appearance of objects. I am interested in preserving the contrasting colors and fundamental characteristics of familiar objects, although the overall form of the work and its particular textures, colors, and variegated surfaces create a sense of ambiguity. My process both reveals and conceals the true nature of the object, creating doubts as to its point of origin.

I want to provoke a feeling of alienation from what we think is familiar, so that we can not only rediscover the inner beauty of the object but also find new interpretations of that which is “ordinary.”

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✨ PRINTMAKING

✨✨ Emily Bowen Camryn Connolly Olivia Holdsworth Henry Louris Manon Michel Mai-Hân Tru o ng Nguyêñ

EMILY

BOWEN www.emily-bowen.com @emmbowen_

Contrapposto 1, 2019. Screen print. 14.5 × 11.5 in.

Columns, 2020. Monotype. 9 × 8 in.

Float, 2020. Etching. 11.75 × 8.5 in.

“The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.”

—Auguste Rodin My body of work comes from a very personal place: from my deep connection to my family, from the comfort I find in all places I call home, and from my need to capture and honor the memories of my past. I am drawn to art-making as a way to express my gratitude for what I hold precious. The work I create is inspired by the beauty and comfort I have found around me throughout my life.

When I began printmaking, I found that it was the perfect medium to translate these themes into physical images. I start with photos that represent family, or home, or memory, and either build on or re-create them.

Through the lengthy process of printing, I spend a lot of time with an image. This allows me to build meaningful relationships with each work.

I have mainly been working in screen printing and monotype. Screen printing allows me to depict fine detail, which in turn helps me capture moments with great clarity. The process of monotype, on the other hand, involves more collaboration with the press. I am able to paint the image in my own style and then let the press impact the outcome and atmosphere in its own way. In this way, I combine my own artistic language with the language of printing.

Through the use of printmaking, I honor the past by re-creation, and distill the gratitude and joy for the life I have led into images and artifacts of beauty.

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CAMRYN

CONNOLLY www.camrynconnolly.com @camrynscollections

Reflection, 2021. Monotype, hand colored. 18 × 16 in.

Unnatural, 2021, Monotype, hand colored. 10 × 24 in.

For as long as I can remember, the ocean has fascinated me. It is vast, it is beautiful, and it carries so many enticing secrets, inspiration bubbling right beneath the surface. My work is an effort to emphasize the beauty of this underappreciated world. My work focuses on series, sometimes relating to the material I use to create my prints or to an exploration of a specific subject matter. I am currently focusing on the exploration of fish in confinement, repeating the fish tank imagery and using goldfish as a nostalgic motif to draw the viewer into a familiar place. My process plays with the decision-making that comes into focus when using color, material, different paper, and the printing press. By combining new media with traditional printmaking, I am experimenting to see what kind of spaces I can develop in my works. Through memory and imagination, I create compositions exploring the basic forms of this natural space. My prints are primarily monoprints, which I first print through the press, and then paint with oils, building on the print surface using fluid marks and organic imagery to mimic the quality of this underwater world.

The imagery transports me back to my childhood. Drawn to the life happening within a fish tank, I would find myself pressed up against the glass, observing all that existed behind it. I always longed for more, intrigued by the idea of this natural world isolated, boxed up, and placed in our domestic spaces—therefore becoming unnatural. We imprison this beauty within boxes, trying to capture this natural phenomenon for our own personal pleasure, forgetting how fragile the creatures and their delicate ecosystem really are. Through recognizable imagery and nostalgia, I am working to capture surreal moments in these mini-worlds that are so quickly forgotten.

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OLIVIA

HOLDSWORTH www.oliviaholdsworth.myportfolio.com @art.livsh

44 AK, 2021. Monotype. 26.5 × 21.5 in.

Mt. Auburn Trio, 2021. Digital print and monotype. 26 × 38.25 in.

There’s an idea in some spiritual circles that energy lingers in certain places and things even long after we’re gone, because all things someone once held sacred can cling to a little bit of the energy and preciousness we put into them. My work, in both subject matter and process, addresses themes of transience, preciousness, permanence, and the question of letting go. For my imagery, I’m drawn to strongly contrasting images of people, places, and other items of personal significance.

With these pieces, I use vivid digital grounds to convey the residual energy in these objects left by the people they were once connected to.

The touch I use with each monotype overlayer also reflects this emotional weight—each image I create is centered around something or someone that is or once was precious to someone else, living or otherwise. These places and things are important not because of some grand contribution to history, but because once upon a time someone loved them, and now I do.

Print is the best medium for these works for a number of reasons. The digital print allows me to enlarge small details and tweak my textural monotypes to create the perfect underlayer for each reductive monotype layer over it. Energy is released through physical acts of using a heavy brayer and wiping away large swaths of ink in an almost meditative ritual; there is also a sense of achievement in retaining enough patience to follow the print to completion. Each step involves a lot of trust in my abilities as a printmaker, as each monotype is a unique print and therefore I only have one shot to print each one. This hard-earned trust has ultimately transformed my ability to create work I’m not only proud of, but happy making.

PRINTMAKING

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HENRY

LOURIS www.henrylouris.com @henrylouris

Titanomachy, 2021. Etching. 14 × 20 in.

Untitled, 2020. Etching. 18 × 24 in.

My work contemplates infinite states in which not only all possibilities occur at once, but all things are both opposite and equal. This is a cyclical scenario in which boundaries between things dissolve into one before splitting and starting again. I engage in this moment of transition between unification and separation by depicting the confluence of different artistic genres and historical methods. By engaging in something that is both monolith and multitude, my work alludes to both my metaphysical and art-historical involvements.

I’m interested in a constant back and forth between formation and dissolution. This manifests itself in my work through perpetual erasing and redrawing, building a structure of residue and continuing to pull more images out of it. I often begin with an allover gesture drawing and destroy it in some fashion, working out of the remnants with images; the result is semi-body parts and humanoid landscapes. I continue this process of destroying and rebuilding the image until I have something that’s in between dissolving and forming. Through etching, I am able to continually pull forms in and out to achieve this effect.

Working this way leaves some room for chance in the building of the image. I look for a state in which the piece has taken on a life of its own and hopefully reveals a subconscious aspect of myself that renders the artistic process a means of self-discovery. When developing a project, I generate ideas that I could never access otherwise. Therefore, printmaking helps me realize that I have no sense of my intellectual limits and spiritual boundaries, and I continually open myself to new personal and artistic discoveries.

PRINTMAKING

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MANON

MICHEL www.michelmmanon.wixsite.com/manonmichel @artbymanonm

Tolland, 2020. Gouache painting. 8 × 6 in.

Walk, 2020. Etching. 12 × 8 in.

Greenhouses—and plants in general—have always harbored comfort for me. When I was a sophomore in high school, I discovered the local greenhouse at my state’s university. Spending time there took me out of my anxious mindset; I would physically relax when I entered that room. Tension would leave my body, and I’d gaze up in wonder at the canopy above my head. Maybe it was the humid, lush climate inside, or being surrounded by greenery in the dead of New England January—but something about those moments felt so incredibly light.

As I moved into my college life, greenery followed me. It spread its roots into my work—the observational process of tree drawings from life, slow etchings of leafy still lifes set up in my printmaking studio. Even the process of using the materials, like the slow erosion of metal from acid baths and the careful process of carving away wood, felt organic to me. The work had a mind of its own, and I served as a medium for the work to express itself through the final image. The process was just as important as what was created.

These plants have been therapeutic for me. They gave me a sense of belonging and calm that I was always looking for outside of myself, but realized I have been growing within myself all along. They now seem to serve as markers of personal development, as tools for helping me manage my mental health, and as beacons of calm and stability. Even if the day is gray, this greenhouse is proof that I can overcome whatever is in front of me, and I can do it gently, slowly, and with as much kindness as possible. Growth, even through the hardest of times, is achievable.

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MAI-HÂN

TRUONG NGUYÊÑ @nah_iam

Bàn Người Lớn, 2021. Multiple-block woodcut. 59.5 × 38 in.

The Drinking Table, 2021. Lithograph. 9.5 × 16 in.

This body of work is a visual documentation of my efforts to reconcile my American identity with memories of my traditional Vietnamese upbringing in a low-income immigrant household. Growing up as Vietnamese-American, I felt detached from the identifiers attached to my name since labels are abstract and intangible. Verbal attempts to convey my frustrations felt imbalanced because I am more proficient in English than in Vietnamese; however, as images, the components of my identity are equal. I decided to view my identity as a collection of image-making tools to make tangible my abstract anxieties.

The physicality of printmaking and the print matrix allow me to pull together cross-cultural motifs and visual marks; my multi-block woodcut Bàn Người Lớn (The Adult Table) encourages the merging process to occur through carving and collaging. Originally, the figures in both the photo and the print were nameless; however, as I superimposed my memories onto the image, I recognized my uncles’ faces in the forms of the unfamiliar figures.

I remember graduating to the adult table in my first year of college and understanding only a fraction of their conversation; in prioritizing higher education, I had lost my proficiency in Vietnamese. On the surface of a print, I give equal value to the parts of my identity in which I have pride and those in which I have shame; the richness of my family history and my clumsy Vietnamese handwriting become compositional tools. By turning my identifiers into visual motifs and marks, I can confront and mend the separation between my Vietnamese and American heritages. These works are my efforts to document a greater awareness of identity and a confrontation of the judgments I held against myself.

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☀

Lucy Baik Natalie Bolton Gregory Bond Emily Bowen Angela Dong Juan Estela Abby Fenn Kendall Gregory Eun Kyo Hong Lena Johnson Jaesuk Kim Steve Kim Emily Knobloch Emerson Lawton Jay Li Angela Lian Miao Liu

GRAPHIC DESIGN

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Morgan Moscinski Shannon Neff Noelle No Chinwe Oparaji Lucia Pabon Morgan Recker Ivan Reyes Eleanor Schiltz Ashley Smalley Mariana Velasquez Rachel Wui Yi Yang Anni Qingyang Yu Shuyang Yu Fei Ping Zhao Irina Zhikh

LUCY BAIK

www.lucybaik.com

Rice Utensils, 2021. Poster. 24 × 18 in.

Stage, 2021. Photography. Dimensions variable.

“You are what you eat.”

This adage originated from French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin whose quote translated to, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.”

Food can define culture and shape an individual’s identity. The acts of preparing, serving, sharing, and consuming food all vary between countries depending on geographical, cultural, political, and religious factors.

Although the simple act of eating food may be considered a means of survival and a source of energy, food also brings people together. Dining tables are often called family tables, as the act of eating and the conversations we have around the table hold not only our family stories but also our culture.

Growing up as a Korean-American, rice was a staple dish that has always been on my dining table. Therefore, a bowl of rice was a type of food that identified my culture, who I am, and where I come from. The interactions and conversations that I had with my family while eating at the dining table ultimately became my culture and built my identity.

In my thesis, I use rice directly and indirectly to introduce, communicate, and educate people about different types of rice, as well as cultural practices surrounding food consumption and how they interweave to symbolize a culture. I provide a space for audiences to experience and interact with rice beyond consuming it as a food—it is a means to express unique stories.

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NATALIE

BOLTON www.natalie-bolton.com @nattattie

Hot Girls Magazine, 2020. Editorial design. 11 × 8.5 in.

Soft Serve, 2021. Font design.

Soft Serve When I was young, I danced around my room in hot pink tutus and tiaras on a daily basis. Where does this energy go as we grow older? In my own experience, I felt shame toward the typical “girly-girl” aesthetic. There is a massive shift in traditional feminine themes during a girl’s life. As we grow older, pink, sequins, and glitter become considered frivolous, and therefore unnecessary.

My goal is to draw back the curtain on the misogynistic view that hyperfeminine aesthetics in art, design, and culture lack depth, seriousness, or complexity of meaning. My goal is to carve out the feminine space in design within an increasingly masculine world. I want to look at graphic design as Sofia Coppola looks at film. As explained by i-D magazine, “Sofia’s talent as director stretches beyond mere visual fantasy and beauty, because she uses her aesthetic world as a way of exploring the complexities of girlhood.”

For my thesis, I will reclaim my own pink, glittery, and downright girly aesthetic. The aesthetic I am portraying is by no means universal, but it connects my personal experience as a permanent Y2K teenage girl and graphic designer. Through a body of work, I will validate my own female authorship while promoting other feminine works and the femme people behind them.

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GREGORY BOND www.gregbond.art @gregbond.art

Common Culture, 2021, Board Game. 17 x 17 in.

Two Sides of One Line, 2020. Accordion book. 11 × 8.5 in.

I Walk the Line, 2021. Poster. 36 × 24 in.

Two Sides of One Line | 저는 선을 걸어요 Being half-Asian biracial is like walking on two sides of one line. You always have one foot on either side of the line––either side of two cultures. It feels like you don’t necessarily fit in with either community; furthermore, either community can label you as the opposite. This situation leaves half-Asian individuals, or Hapas,1 struggling with their culture and identity, ultimately making them feel “othered.” Two Sides of One Line explores the experiences and narratives of these “others” through the vehicle of graphic design. By working with the stories of half-Asian people, this thesis creates an emulative experience to educate non-biracial people about the unique struggle of being partially Asian. This body of work also serves to provide solace to other Hapas, functioning as a collection for individuals to learn about and sympathize with experiences similar to their own.

Two Sides of One Line synthesizes both professional research and individual anecdotes into a visual body consisting of a variety of media. Exploring the themes of documentation, emulation, and balance, this thesis attempts to impact Hapa people, functioning as a beacon for self-acceptance. Deriving from the experiences of Hapa individuals and those close to them, these projects translate narratives into graphic design pieces, exploring how both moving and static images can convey a story. This database of material is not complete; rather, it functions as a project in process, as there is no real conclusion or answer to the identity crisis Hapa individuals face. Instead, Two Sides of One Line continues to collect and emulate, helping us learn from each other’s stories, find common ground, and come to our own answer of self-acceptance.

1. Hapa (n): a Hawaiian word used to refer to a person who is partially of Asian or Pacific Islander descent.

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EMILY

BOWEN www.emily-bowen.com @emmbowen_

Blueprint 1, 2021. Blueprint. 17 × 14 in.

Map of Me, 2021. Pencil on vellum. 11 × 17 in.

Maps have been used for centuries in all manners as methods for organizing plans and directions in physical space. Historical maps of geographical locations contain information about geopolitics through the ages, and give us a glimpse into lives led in the past. Their purpose, like all manifestations of graphic design, is to convey information to the viewer about a specific topic.

Cartographers and architects are designers in their own way—designing the physical space around them in order to organize it for their audience. My thesis makes use of the idea of the designer as mapmaker by pushing the known form of the map in many directions.

Atlas Vitae consists of a body of maps based on my memories. This research into my past has allowed me to organize and analyze my life as I prepare for transition. Using different methods of mapping, I reflected on my memories and created an archive that is a physical embodiment of my person. I built a home of work that allows the audience a glimpse inside my head.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

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ANGELA DONG @angeladongdesign @angelaydong

Borders, 2020. Print. 11 × 8.5 in.

Mapping Figure Skating, 2019. Poster. 22.5 × 15 in.

1.20 to 3.6.20, 2020. Digital file. 5.5 × 7.75 in.

Health Is Wealth combines ideas and practices within graphic design, Chinese traditional medicine (also known as Eastern medicine), and Western medicine to educate, inform, and provoke its audience. It inserts conversation via perspective, commentary, and education on the need for more intersection and collaboration between Western and Chinese traditional medical practices. Health Is Wealth is a collection of interviews, research, and anecdotes that will take the form of a print book and a website centered around the concept of a store.

The title, Health Is Wealth, speaks to the multiple interpretations of wealth. It can be either a direct commentary on the cost of healthcare in the United States or a metaphor for those who believe a “wealthy” life is one spent in optimal health above all else. This thesis is dedicated to questioning why we, as a Western society, put so much trust into our system, and to voicing the concern and disconnect between the different practices within our healthcare. It begs the questions, “What can we learn from other cultures’ medical practices?”, “Are there more holistic approaches to our current healthcare practices?”, and “How can we take more control over addressing our own health?”

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JUAN

ESTELA www.juanestela.media

June (I Resist, I Exist), 2019. Risograph print. 11 × 8.5 in.

Effort and Venture, 2019. Printed sticker. 2 × 4 in.

Advocacy permeates my work, seizing the opportunity that design offers to inspire an audience. However, rarely do I ask, “How can I use design to inspire and advocate for myself?” The Words I Couldn’t Say aims to activate a more introspective part of my brain in my design practice and invites an external audience to engage with my revelations.

My reflection begins with two axes: an axis between suppression and expression, and an axis between trauma and healing. I define suppression and expression as tools of manifestation that either assert or challenge my perception of reality. I define trauma and healing as states of internalization of lived experiences.

Relative to these axes, I hypothesize that a lack of internalization prompts thoughts and behaviors that inhibit my ability to thrive. This lack of internalization—denial as the suppression of healing—asserts an inaccurate reality and comes in many forms, including a misconstrued perception of normalcy or the downplaying of a lived experience. Internalization on a superficial and isolated level—shame as the suppression of trauma—prompts me to understand the inaccuracy of my reality, but its comfort drives me to perpetuate an inauthentic version of myself.

The Words I Couldn’t Say is an expression of trauma, symbolizing my desire to truthfully accept and internalize past and present through design.

By quantifying and qualifying my perceptions through exercises such as reflective writing and data visualization, my hope is to develop a system that allows me to present a vulnerable but genuine version of myself. In doing so, I aim to head toward a path of self-actualization—a form of expression and healing—defined as the ownership of thought and active cognizance of behaviors.

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ABBY

FENN www.abbyfenn.myportfolio.com @afenn_art

Found Compositions, 2021. Digital photo collage. 9 × 10 in.

Creating Resistance, 2020. Book. 10 × 8 in.

Grown Type: First Test, 2021. E. coli on agar plate. Diameter 3.5 in.

Growing the Sublime is a collection of research, experiments, processes, and projects that explores the feelings of awe, wonder, and maybe even disgust that occur when we experience the unknown and strangely beautiful. In this thesis, I step into the role of bio-artist and work collaboratively with scientists in order to explore the complexity and aesthetics of bacteria through the creation of art and design work.

Historically, the sublime is described as a quality of greatness and beauty that elicits a sense of fear, wonder, and reflection in an individual.

It typically refers to large and extreme elements of nature, such as oceans, storms, mountains, and the vastness of the universe. But why can’t the sublime be found in the small? What if the sublime was grown starting at a microscopic level?

Through sharing the process and results of working artistically in a lab environment, Growing the Sublime will illustrate the sense of awe and wonder that is created through play and experimentation. It will demonstrate that the sublime can be found not only in the vast unknown, but also in simply unique forms and experiences.

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KENDALL

GREGORY www.kendalllynngregory.com @kend.art

Cardigan, 2020. Cut paper, gouache. 6 × 8 in.

Fly by Night, 2021. Mixed media set design.

Genzillenial Installation, 2020. Mixed media installation.

Within the structure of musical theater, there exists a harmony of moving pieces. Color, sound, movement, architecture, perspective, and physicality of form combine to create transcendent moments within a constructed reality.

To properly experience this construction, the audience must suspend disbelief and become immersed in the narrative. This experience is deeply rooted in design: design of space, design of narrative, design of movement, tied together through co-creation and collaboration. Thus, musical theater and design inform each other.

This thesis aims to break down the pieces of these constructed realities, diving into those harmonious moments in musicals that make our hearts soar—and dissecting them through a visual and design-based lens to understand them more thoroughly. I will experiment with and examine the process behind building a transdisciplinary composition, a living medium that can only be achieved through collecting experiences—visual, performative, auditory, and architectural—and placing them together in cohesion and harmony.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

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EUN KYO HONG

www.eunkyoekhong.cargo.site @ekhong98

Documentation book, 2019.

Broadside booklet, 2019.

Sticker design, 2020.

What does taste look like?

Our olfactory and gustatory systems are greatly linked to our emotions and memories. More specifically, certain tastes and smells generate a particular emotional response from our brains. Mandoo, which is a traditional Korean dumpling that I eat every new year, gives off a strong smell of spicy bulgogi, scallions, and rice cake. The taste and smell of it evoke a feeling of love and affection in me, and remind me of the times I spent with my family every year.

The emotional role that taste plays makes it essential to consider forming a deeper connection between the gastronomic world and the field of design. To most people, the understanding of taste is largely based on the five categories of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. For my thesis project, I want to integrate design and taste. What does taste look like? What does “sweet” look like? Is there a way to visually translate a certain taste? What is the relationship between taste and graphic design?

A combination of objective characteristics and personal associations with each taste will influence my work. According to studies, people tend to associate gustatory shapes with visual shapes and colors in a non-random manner. For example, round shapes and the color pink are associated with the sweet taste, while angular shapes and the color yellow are associated with the sour taste. Using the relationship between taste and graphic elements, I will be creating a visual system.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☼ 85

LENA

JOHNSON www.lenarose.myportfolio.com @lena_rose_art

Headspace, 2020. Manipulated photograph.

Hypnotic, 2020. Illustration.

Deus ex machina is a plot device wherein a situation becomes so dire that only a bizarre act of chance can possibly save the day. In Latin, it translates to “god from the machine,” encapsulating the concept of introducing an unexpected power that ends up salvaging the story line. Horror movies tend to use this technique, along with many other devices, in a series of predictable variables that come together to write the very formula that dictates the horror genre as a whole.

Ironically, humans have always used scary stories as a sort of comfort, offering us an inflated sense of control over the dangers of our world.

Despite portraying difficult imagery and subjects, horror movies tend to abide by a specific set of rules that create an oddly comfortable environment for the viewer by offering insight into the next plot point. The formula used to tell these tales becomes the means by which people feel control when watching horror movies. It is the job of designers and filmmakers alike to manipulate these variables in order to affect the audience as intended, creating a cycle of creation and co-creation as the art is perceived by the viewer.

Through a series of explorations analyzing the structure and tropes of horror movies, I intend to unveil the metadata beneath the genre and use it to further understand how and why people are so entranced with scary stories.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

✨ 87

JAES (JAE SUK) KIM @jaes17gd

Forgotten, 2020. String and paper.

Corks, 2020. Digital photograph.

LDF, 2020. Poster.

What is Minimal Impact? I started to think about environmental matters when I read about the book No Impact Man by Colin Beavan. The book is mainly about a man living in New York City who, along with his wife and daughter, try not to create any waste in order to lessen their impact on the environment.

The book influenced me to think that an individual needs to act on their own in order to contribute to environmental sustainability. In some ways, I as a graphic designer have been affecting sustainability in the real world and the online one.

In fact, we as designers imply the way a project is created, which endorses either a positive or negative environmental result. However, the visual signage of showing the carbon footprint or the environmental impact of a project is not present. My work seeks to help viewers to understand the process of sustainability.

Minimal Impact will visualize the ways that graphic designers have affected the environment throughout the process of building concepts. The process will be represented by organizing the data and incorporating ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) criteria, commonly used as an investment tool. Although ESG is an investment tool, it could be utilized to present environmental impact. The immense process will be mapped out in systemic order with limited lines and colors.

By presenting Minimal Impact, I want to raise awareness of how the graphic design process can have consequences on environmental sustainability.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☂ 89

STEVE KIM @steve_k15

Meanwhile in Hong Kong, 2019. Poster. 17 × 11 in.

Low-Key, 2020. Book. 8.5 × 5.5 in.

Women talk too much and make meetings “drag on too long.” In February 2021, the Tokyo Olympics chief’s sexist remarks triggered an international backlash. Although he was forced to resign from his position after this incident, it was enough to accelerate the gender equality movement in Japan.

The increased public attention to this issue is affecting companies’ brand strategies. More people are starting to let go of brands that do not support gender equality, and companies are no longer able to stay silent in regard to this issue. In contemporary Japanese society, socially conscious advertising and branding are becoming crucial in order for brands to grow and achieve their corporate social responsibilities.

Creative Activism proposes an advertising campaign for Netflix Japan that confronts gender inequality. The goal is to break gender stereotypes through thought-provoking advertisements featuring various Netflix original series and movies. Consisting of outdoor ads, print ads, and digital ads, the campaign aims to build a positive brand image and promotes gender equality to a wide audience.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

⛈ 91

EMILY

KNOBLOCH www.emilyknobloch.com @the_emilyedition

Reframe, 2021. Risograph animation contact sheet. 17 × 11 in.

Interrogation, 2020. Risograph print installation. Dimensions variable.

Collaboration with Juan Estela, Shannon Neff, and Irina Zhikh.

The Bigger Picture: Reframing Dyslexia Through Design Shapes, fonts, patterns, hierarchy, and color are elements that belong to a formalized system of visual language that communicates with an audience.

However, a barrier in communication can hinder an individual from confidently moving forward, as I have learned from my own experience with dyslexia.

I feel a sense of impending doom when receiving a text to read; it takes hours for me to work my way through it, and my writing usually contains multiple grammar mistakes. I start questioning my competence, which is something I am still trying to overcome. This thesis serves as an examination of how one can reframe dyslexia as an advantage rather than a “disability.”

The exhibition presents a range of narratives and experiences from leading dyslexic individuals from different disciplines, serving as a forum for varying perspectives on learning differences. It spotlights a topic that people don’t feel comfortable talking about. The research study involved different methods of communication: personal interviews with professionals, deep research on dyslexia, and self-created letters that take the form of a physical installation. This installation, as well as my thesis book, will be based on the process and acceptance of the language barrier through typography and visual arrangements, presenting how someone with dyslexia views a piece of text.

The thesis dives into the relationship between language and design as well as the success story of people with dyslexia, ultimately reframing this challenge as something positive. It is not something you fix, but rather something that you make yours and build upon. The explorations demonstrate how I gained a greater understanding of how I am turning dyslexia into an advantage through design. More importantly, it gives access to someone’s story, offers connection, and closes the knowledge gap.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☀ 93

EMERSON LAWTON www.emelawton.cargo.site @eme.studios

Entombment, 2021. Resin and clay. Approx. 2 × 2 × 2 in.

THIS IS NOT A KEEPSAKE, 2020. India ink on newsprint. 24 × 18 in.

Emanifesto, 2021. Handbound zine and stickers. 6 × 5 in.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. decimated the Italian city of Pompeii, creating a literal, architectural, and cultural graveyard to be discovered hundreds of years later. Growing up, my obsession with volcanoes led me to become immersed in research about this eruption and its aftermath, fueling a desire to explore the site and get my hands in the dirt. At 20 years old, within a week of leaving the U.S. for the first time, I got on a train to Naples and found myself standing in the ruins I’d spent my whole life chasing.

The experience was surreal and nothing like I’d expected—simultaneously under- and- overwhelming as I was yelled at by Italian men in kiosks trying to sell me coasters and swept up in crowds of tourists. In a moment away from the hordes of people, I sat on an ancient curb in silence and watched Vesuvius looming over the ruins, a now-silent time bomb. In that moment, the space felt sacred.

The paradox of stands selling tacky souvenirs at the entrance of a city buried by a volcanic eruption feels exploitative, but archeological tourism financially supports preservation of the site. These cheap knickknacks are a contemporary interpretation of site documentation, while the ruins themselves are a raw, frozen record of one moment in this ancient city. My thesis recontextualizes methods and ethics of preservation and explores how they relate to sacred spaces through the lens of archaeology and the analysis of a natural disaster. By exploring physical artifacts, type, photography, and other narratives, I will dig deep into these themes and unearth new perspectives on why and how we protect and conserve knowledge.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

⛈ 95

JAY LI

www.jay-li.org @jayyyyli

Fig. Vol-1, 2020. Book. 10 × 8 in.

Margins, 2020. Newsprint brochure. 11 × 8.5 in.

Mise En Place, 2020. Photograph printed on metallic paper.

Syllabi convey expectations, map out success, and check attitudes. Without attention, the syllabus becomes an arbitrary, one-off “taskmaster,” passing students on to singular paths. Fatigued by the copy-paste nature of academic curricula, I’d rather conceive them as workshops, fictions, decimation, or even drowning. Elizabeth Leeper wrote, “A syllabus is a creative document that gives shape to a shared experience.” Can a poetic gaze for syllabi offer alternate education modes—outfitting a nebulous environment formed by students’ unique contexts and pain points?

Educators can serve students by showing the seams of our collective pedagogy. In the book This Little Art, Kate Briggs wrote,“The translator is the writer of new sentences on the close basis of others . . . a producer of relations.” I firmly believe the design student’s care for others’ participation can reconcile systems we build and operate in, and that we can learn to generously engage that as far as our educators can dream.

My dream syllabus? A menu. As someone attuned to food as both a portrait and landscape of community, I know that what I cook every day reflects my tastes and influences. Depending on how they curate their menus, chefs can elevate or subjugate whole cultures, evaluating choices for patrons’ experiences. Menus are dynamic documents speaking to seasonal ingredients and sociological forces. Syllabus as Menu is a pedagogical experiment subverting power dynamics between student and instructor. For me, it will outline a design elective course executing multiple projects, guiding my practice of new tools under the guise of the translator.

Menus aren’t about producing isolated courses or experiences, but about actually marking and redrawing connections with what’s already there.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☀ 97

ANGELA LIAN

www.angelalian.cargo.site @alian_archives

MoMaMo Manifesto, 2021. Video. 2 min., 3 sec.

Collect Release, 2021. Video. 1 min., 36 sec.

Back and Forth, 2021. Video. 2 min., 29 sec.

Moving Making Moving Even structure begins with improvisation. Movement is the mental and physical state of feeling both free and in control of one’s body. This body language can inform how we think and how we make, becoming a channel for identity expression. This thesis seeks to explore how the fluidity of graphic design and dance as familiar identities can help me navigate my cultural identity. I use design to create conceptual relationships, and I want to use improvisation and chance as opportunities to form these new relationships.

In my graphic design practice, I utilize physical language to produce visual language, showing that movement informs form-making in a methodology of three stages: 1. Movement as mental and physical state: What does movement mean beyond dance?

2. Chance as conditional freedom: How can chance and randomness be used as creative tools?

3. Gestalt as composing parts as a whole: How do we perceive and form compositions?

Moving Making Moving reflects my personal cultural awakening as a Chinese-Taiwanese American, graphic designer, and dancer. I seek to bridge the gap between these identities using the flux of movement to bend and build my sensibility of self. Through viewing movement as methods—such as improvisation, collaboration, communication, and craft as a process— I perform and document a range of experiments that weave identity research with multidisciplinary processes. By starting with what I can control most, the body and language, my methodology provides a space to observe movement and design as a freeing act. In turn, this freedom to express becomes an invitation to rebuild myself and my practice, and it invites the viewer to consider movement as a facilitator for identity exploration.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☼ 99

MIAO LIU

www.miaoliu.art @miaollll

Reaching for Hope, 2021. Fabric and thread. 12 × 14 in.

See Through, 2021. Digital photograph.

Lightweight, spongy, delicate, crystalline, and glassy, every piece of fabric has its own “personality,” and each one speaks a different language. The process of sewing fabric together is like human beings making new friends.

A group of friends with different personalities will tell fascinating stories. In order to find each piece of fabric a perfect partner, we need to listen carefully to their voices.

Recently, one of my best friends’ experiences of being bullied in the workplace evoked my memories of being bullied in middle school. When we think of bullying, most people might think of a group of kids isolating someone at school. However, bullying is not only a problem among kids or teenagers.

In recent years, adult bullies or office bullies have attracted more and more attention from the mainstream media. According to an online survey of 2,000 adults conducted by the American Osteopathic Association, 31% of Americans have been bullied as an adult and as many as 43% say the behavior has become more accepted nowadays. What’s even scarier is that adult bullying can’t easily be resolved with the same methods used for younger kids, such as getting support from family or telling teachers. More often than not, there is little you can do about an adult bully. Sometimes even reporting the abuse to a supervisor or HR won’t work.

As a fashion designer who played with all sorts of fabrics in different forms, I believe that fabric has a soul and can tell a story. My personal experience of being bullied inspired me to use fabric art to raise awareness. By cutting, sewing, and pleating fabrics with other materials in different forms, I want to bring attention to the dangers of adult bullying and get people to take initiative to help those around them who have suffered from bullying.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☔ 101

MORGAN

MOSCINSKI www.morganmoscinski.com @morganmoart

Foregrounded, 2021. Mixed media. 5 × 4 in.

The Last Bit of Change in My Pocket, 2021. Extra button bags, risograph print, collected rock, acrylic letters, old photograph, buttons, metal clip, safety pins, broken binder clip, and backless earring. 11 x 8.5 in.

Pieces of the past tether themselves to physical objects, which then carry this association with them throughout their existence. Once this marriage of the abstract and the tangible is established, the bond becomes unbreakable.

This relationship is the crux of our tendency to collect. When we pick up an object and store it in a vessel such as a jar, photo album, or box, we assign it a home. It lives in a contained space outside of its original context, but it is still tied to its piece of the past. New conversations form between the objects that are housed together, and the accompanying ephemeral spirits settle into new narratives. The container becomes a time capsule, a unit in which fragments of curated experiences are sealed. Details from time and space are fossilized in this unit, allowing the collector to revisit moments from the past in an externalized museum. When all the collections collide, a personal archive forms. Time dissolves, and past and present dance together to create a cabinet of curiosities in which fractured bits of time and space exist as one.

The act of collecting grounds me in my physical space. I am always conscious of the small details in my surroundings and constantly search for new additions to my various collections. Seeing all of my possessions from the past few years fossilized on my shelf brings me comfort and creates a space where I can recollect the experiences they represent. Miscellanea visualizes my memories and experiences as they are preserved through collection.

Curation and exhibition allow my belongings to speak for themselves, giving them a voice to narrate my story as well as their own.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

⛈ 103

SHANNON NEFF

www.shannonneff.com @sneff_design

Creative Juices, 2020. Bottle branding.

Finestre di Venezia, 2019. Book. 8 × 5 in.

Sniff by Sneff “It is clear that ol­faction is a robust material experience; it tells us something about the world—something about people, places, and materials. The sense of smell provides us with vital signals about the invisible core of things.”

—A. S. Barwich, Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind The sense of smell is very powerful. Scents can transport us back in time, evoke emotions, and aid in our survival. It is arguably one of the most important senses that we have. However, the study of olfaction has been largely overlooked due to its lack of tangibility and visibility. We, as humans, find it incredibly difficult to describe scents because the part of the brain that interprets smell is quite distant from the area that processes language.

Smells can seduce or repel us, but we can not comprehend how the human brain gives them meaning. Although we process scents similarly, depending on varying personal experiences, everyone will have a slightly different reaction. It is for this reason that I chose to explore the mind map behind the sense of smell.

Throughout my life, I have always had such visceral reactions to smells, good or bad. In my thesis, I recall the smells that have stuck with me and analyze the memories and feelings associated with them. As designers, we seldom consider the sense of smell as a design tool, but I believe that it can be useful. Scents have the ability to trigger certain emotions, which influences our way of thinking and creating. By focusing on how the sense of smell has impacted my life thus far and acknowledging it in the present, I will explore how scents can become a tool for design.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☂ 105

NOELLE NO

www.noelleno.cargo.site @noellefarts

Milena, 2020. Photograph with digital Illustration. 19.5 × 13 in.

The Park Adventures, 2020. Book. 11 × 8.5 in.

Gamsung Duluth, 2019. Print. 17 × 11 in.

Isolating oneself from the presence of people and technology is the first step to becoming a more self-aware person. Philosophers such as Batchelor, Odell, and Montaigne have their own opinions on the benefits of solitude.

Montaigne claims you have to be alone to develop self-sufficiency, Batchelor claims you have to be alone to communicate authentically with others, and Odell claims you have to be alone in order to give back to the world.

After a rough period of being lost in the shadows of others, I was frustrated at my lack of self-awareness and struggled to accept myself. My lack of solitude has affected how I carried myself, how I communicated with others, and how I generated work––all directly affecting me as an individual, artist, and designer.

During my time in solitude, I found myself in awe of my single silhouette in the shadow during sunset. I noticed that shadow and solitude both require two elements: space and time. By capturing physical space and time through video and other design media, I want to marry the concepts of shadow and solitude to visualize the story of someone who finds herself throughout the process.

I know I will never fully understand all of myself, but just as the sun sets and comes back the next day, I know I have another chance, another day to see my shadow and experience the journey of learning a little more of myself every day.

I’ve learned through this process that growth is not linear, and some milestones I have experienced are self-reflection, independence, self-love, passion, authentic expression, and productivity. My thesis reflects my journey in solitude as a designer who is learning to translate these experiences through visual systems and storytelling. I want to create a space that invites my viewer to spend time experiencing a simulation of my personal time alone, encouraging other creatives who may struggle with communicating and creating in solitude.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

⛈ 107

CHINWE

OPARAJI www.sparxs.me

Communion, 2019. Woodblock print. 11 × 8.5 in.

The Information Is Crucial but Not to Be Paraded, It Takes Simplicity, 2021. Book. 11 × 5.5 in.

Why be so faithless? Just think of the beauty of love. Not the silly emotional love, but the love that leads you to give up your own wants for the good of another. Can we not see the beauty of God in this? This is an irrational thing that simply cannot be explained, although its benefits are overanalyzed. This is, I believe, what God is. God is love. A constant desire for us to have happiness, despite the fact that we do not want it ourselves fully.

He has set a Holy Catholic Church for our salvation, yes, but what He truly wants is for us to love Him in return. A love that ponders Him willingly and says, “I will die for You,” with no tears or movements of passion but rather with a straight face of determination. And I am unable to do this. Fortunately, the saints (and non-saints) have written extensively about how to struggle for this interior love. Their simple truths are reminiscent of the well-defined structure I know in computer programming. Algorithms have always been a tool for my practice, and thus I find myself wanting to use the context of what I know to focus my eyes on where I want to be.

My thesis centers around the journey to format some of these philosophies on the interior life as game-theoretical algorithms. For myself, mainly, I do this in an attempt to bring Him into my seemingly secular career of computer science. And to you, I can only urge you to accompany me in this passage to show that God is loving and is with the Church but also with science and design. Let me then interrupt the usual drudgery of work in this world and shout, “With love, to God and BVM* do I present my thesis.” * Blessed Virgin Mary

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☂ 109

LUCIA

PABON

Covid Emotions Poster, 2020. Poster. 24 × 18 in.

Ultrasubjective Space, 2021. Poster. 24 × 18 in.

Perspective is rooted in social context and upbringing. Race, gender, and class impact societal and cultural influences, which then determine how individuals consciously perceive themselves. People don’t always acknowledge the extent to which their environment controls their own perspectives.

Their curation of aesthetic interests, for example, is a direct result of external factors. Similarly, graphic design is a holistic medium that is attributed to its social and cultural context. The result in both cases is a range of ideas and perspectives that reveal underlying social themes.

My thesis will examine how and why people select their aesthetic interests, and the behavior that determines how these interests overlap and intersect with one another. Examples include art, fashion, and film. After reflecting on my own interests from my daily life, I began to wonder what had influenced me to have them. Subjects such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology, and works by artists associated with these subjects, inform my design approach and will be relevant to my research. The intent of my thesis is to allow people to both reflect on why certain things appeal to them and analyze the way in which society influences them. The project will ultimately draw attention to the process of defining one’s “individuality” and its positive and negative qualities.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☁ 111

MORGAN RECKER www. morganrecker.com

LOVE, 2020. Spray paint on Whole Foods bag. 11 × 8.5 in.

Circles, 2020. Book. 11 × 8.5 in.

Laura King, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia, studied life and death from an economical perspective, as stocks. Her research showed that death represents the scarcity of life, and understanding life as a rare commodity enhances existence. After having been deeply compelled by a death and immortality course I took last spring, I became interested in having my thesis encourage its audience to appreciate their existence.

Many religions celebrate death through the process of elaborate rituals that honor one’s passing. After learning about these diverse rituals, I became interested in creating rituals of my own through artistic practices that are incredibly precise and time consuming, similar to those practiced during funerals.

Street art is an unofficial, independent, and temporary visual art created in public locations for public visibility. For me, it is an accessible art form that combines typography, collage, illustration, and color theory without boundaries, fueling a raw creativity unique to its practice.

I find street art and death to be synonymous in their ephemerality and anonymity, for both exist temporarily and become anonymous after their decay. I am also fascinated by the permanence of the physical objects that are left behind in the wake of death that directly contrast the temporary nature of mortality.

In order to examine these relationships, I will explore design in death and how people choose to be remembered through what they leave behind.

This includes the examination of gravestones, funeral practices, clothes designed to be buried in, and examples of memento mori. I will then respond to these more permanent physical symbols of death through the precise practice of printmaking inspired by the temporary visual language of street art, comparing and contrasting the dichotomy of permanence and evanescence following a ritual-based process.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

✨ 113

IVAN

REYES www.ivan-reyes.com

Identity Tee, 2021. Apparel.

Unity, 2020. Digital flag.

Every graphic T-shirt tells its own story, whether it’s through the history of the logo used or the graphic being created with a clear message to deliver.

My passion for graphic design started through my desire to design my own apparel, so I believe it is fitting for me to use apparel as the platform to tell the story of my personal journey as a graphic designer. I aim to challenge myself to reflect on my personal experiences and gather four clear messages I want my audience to see through the content that results from the project. I want the messages to be sourced from my personal experiences, but be bigger than just myself and be messages that a wider audience of designers and students who may have had similar experiences can relate to. I realize that as a Latino first-generation graphic design student who is passionate about graphic design and streetwear, I have a unique point of view not only on design but on social issues that the world deals with as well.

The research section of my project will consist of me looking into sources that dive deeper into how apparel can be used to tell a story, how colors and type can be used to connect with people’s emotions, and how I can turn my personal experiences with certain social issues into dynamic graphics that work well on clothing as well as in print. The content section will consist of a capsule of pieces designed and screen printed by me, accompanied by a magazine telling the stories of each piece in a more detailed format through type, photography, and visuals.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☀ 115

ELEANOR SCHILTZ

www.eleanorschiltzdesign.cargo.site

Swan, 2020. Digital illustration. 6 × 6 in.

Machine Girl Poster, 2021. Digital poster. 11 × 8.5 in.

I’m in Love with All of My Friends, 2019. Booklet. 11 × 8.5 in.

The threat of climate change pervades our psyches in ways we can’t yet comprehend.

It is associated with an anxiety that feels existential, looming, and hopeless, a growing sensation in the pits of our stomachs that something is just off. We are no longer the masters of our own domain; the projected future of our existence as a human species is determined by the wills of a powerful few, rather than the will of the many. The constraints of our lived experiences are paradoxically expanded and contracted by digital globalization, in an effort to simplify the incomprehensible thought that there exist almost eight billion others like us. Our ability to empathize has lessened as a means of self-preservation. In this era of information overload and staunch individualism, it is easy to forget simple, beautiful facts: we all exist under the same sky and atop the same earth.

My thesis explores methods of healing our personal relationships with the earth, and therefore each other, through immersions of sound, imagery, and writing. I present collectivism as the next step in understanding how to combat the current dull state of radical environmentalism. Just as the quaking aspen tree appears as an individual but is in actuality a colony bound by hidden root systems, so too are we connected to the rest of humanity by common needs and desires.

Through the organization and creation of a design system, I wish to present these ideas in compact, accessible ways that can be shared through both digital and analog mediums. This project exists as an organism that will only thrive and (hopefully) grow under collective care.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

⛈ 117

ASHLEY

SMALLEY @asmalleyart

Time Heals, 2018. Poster. 48 × 36 in.

Disoriented, 2019. Book. 7.25 × 6.25 in.

Game One, 2021. Monotype. 14 × 12 in.

I’ve always been interested in how the human body relates to the transition or change of a physical space, specifically through navigation and signage.

This idea came from my time abroad in Venice, Italy, and learning how to navigate the maze-like streets with the help of inconsistent directional signs. COVID-19 has also changed how our bodies interact with space, since spaces have been modified to fit the world’s current situation. I want to examine how this new navigational signage has changed our physical behavior and navigation patterns. I also want to document and explore how a person’s body adapts and forms new muscle memory to adapt to its changing environment.

Lines and mark-making have always been my favorite ways to make impactful imagery. I aim to explore how our new navigational signs and patterns create unique paths or lines that I can explore visually to express the human body’s physical interaction with a modified space. Because everyone has to follow the same path, to some extent, I want to document and investigate the wear and tear that the repeated steps of the body have on the ground or other materials. I will document this through photography, tracking my own walking movements and patterns, observing when I choose to follow the signage and when I choose to ignore it. I want to make my viewers think about how their bodies interact with a space and how they adapt their movements to a new or modified space.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

☁ 119

MARIANA

VELASQUEZ www.mvelasquezsosa.com @mvelasquezsosa

New Norm, 2020. Book. 9 × 5 in.

27-1024, 2020. Risograph prints. 17 × 11 in.

We live in a world where design makes a lot of decisions for us. Whether we notice it or not, branding, marketing, and culture influence the way we live our lives—the way we decorate our homes, the way we dress, what we eat, our hobbies, and the way we interact with each other. Every individual constructs an identity through the lens of culture and experience. Why is it that our identity and values often change due to the environment of our communities?

Significant events throughout history have altered the identities and values of individuals and cultures. Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history. This concept has variously been applied to the overall history of the world, to repetitive patterns in the history of societies, and to events that share striking similarities. It is no surprise that the COVID-19 pandemic has been often compared to the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918.

After the Spanish influenza came the Roaring Twenties, which gave birth to the bootleggers and flappers, sports greats, Hollywood stars, Wall Street, and the rhythms of jazz.

Throughout this project I will study the history of the Spanish influenza and culture after the 1918 pandemic. Then I will collect and study data to further understand how the events of the past year have affected the way consumers relate to brands and communities. Through the lenses of data visualization, fashion, and technology, I will predict a business model that aligns with post-COVID-19 consumer needs and values.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

✨ 121

RACHEL WUI

Book 3, 2020. Book. 8 × 6 in.

Barebones, 2020. GIF. Dimensions variable.

Nursery Rhyme, 2018. Poster. 24 × 18 in.

Illuminated manuscripts are handmade books that usually have a secular purpose. They are filled with detailed, colorful, illustrative designs, and each glance at a page evokes a sense of wonder and brings something new for the eyes to feast on. These books, however, are not just a vehicle for decorative and written text; they can also tell us what life was like during the creation of the book from the illustrations and comments scattered throughout the margins of the pages. The visual and written language of the illuminated manuscript can be broken into several categories: • • • • • •

Art related to text Art for art’s sake Unsettling images to grab attention (satirical, pop culture, jokes, upside-down world) Memory aid (puns, wordplay) Gloss (annotations, corrections, translations, commentary, complaints) Meditative patterns

Through this thesis, I will be investigating how a graphic design language can transform the content of an illuminated manuscript into different forms.

By exploring and creating new arrangements, this thesis will show that illuminated manuscripts are not only found in the past but can be found in new forms of interpretation.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

⛈ 123

YI

YANG

Window, 2019. Ink. 5 × 6 × 6 in.

City, 2010. Ink. 18 × 36 × 8 in.

Implied Worlds Design is a medium capable of changing the world, but how well can it build a world from scratch? Throughout my practice, I am fascinated with the natural world and the development of culture and civilization, historical or fantastical.

I realized that what interested me most was the development and evolution of worlds themselves. So, if I am so interested in worlds, why not create them through design?

The works in this series attempt to document and illustrate a small slice of a believable world unto themselves. On display are its creatures, its cities, and its civilizations, presented through overlapping, immersive techniques— such as dimension, sound, projection, and conventional illustration—that give these works life.

The goal of these projects is not to tell a story, but rather to offer viewers the skeleton of one. The meat and bones, the deeper content of the narrative, is left open for the audience to extrapolate. These projects present viewers with a setting rather than a narrative. How intricate, how engaging, and how immersive these works are will determine my success. Above all, it is important to distinguish that none of these worlds are meant to be my self-made utopia; it is not my role as a designer to present my view of an idealized world.

What these projects are meant to be are a series of fantastical Petri dishes that I offer to my audience; any point or narrative derived from my works will come from the audience observing them in their small, self-contained environments.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

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ANNI QINGYANG YU

@anni_artfolder

My Universe, 2019. Poster. 18 × 24 in.

9/12 PM, 2021. Book. 8.5 × 5.5 in.

Sameness, 2019. Book. 8.5 × 5.5 in.

The definition of “bye-lingual” is when a bilingual individual speaks two languages but starts losing vocabulary in both of them. This unconscious action occurs when people are forced to use only one language. The natural reaction to this situation is for bilingual individuals to reflect and make a decision on the language or culture that they belong to. This thesis investigates the possibility of the bye-lingual speaker through the use of deconstruction, examining the tension created by the bye-lingual phenomenon. Discussing the mechanism between bye-lingual situations and bilingual experiences, this thesis aims to understand how two or more languages move together and pull apart in one’s mind. Utilizing graphic design as a platform, my goal is to explore language as a living system and experiment with materials, sounds, and photography.

The underlying tension between the bye-lingual phenomenon and the bilingual experience is defined by each person. My methodology will present a conversation with audiences who have been dealing with bye-lingual situations. This thesis will become a way of acknowledging how memory, stereotypes, conformity, and illusion lie in language. My conversation aims to explore the tangibility of the bye-lingual phenomenon in relation to deconstruction. It will treat bye-lingualism as a power structure that shapes one’s identity. The ultimate goal is to unveil the struggle or unknowing of language losses between two cultures.

This thesis presents a series of visual, spatial, and sound-based works, which act as interaction, platform, and documentation to show a broad audience about the impact of language on one’s identity.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

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SHUYANG YU

@shushuzi233

Self-Portrait, 2019. Digital photograph. 28 × 18 in.

Surveillance Flag, 2019. Printed fabric. 36 × 60 in.

Fragmented Visions and Voices in the Digital Age In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag elaborates an idea that “Reality is summed up in an array of casual fragments—an endlessly alluring, poignantly reductive way of dealing with the world.”

A fragment usually represents things that are separated into small parts.

In the digital age, what we see and the information we perceive are heavily fragmented and influenced by technology. Communication, including visual communication online, is compressed in order to fit into our fragmented times and create quick conversations. Our social media transformed from blogs into Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok just in the last 15 years. Many pieces of information that we perceive are fragmented; we type keywords into the search bar, and web crawlers do all the data collection. Our voices are also fragmented in the digital environment, where people are seeking more efficient ways to communicate key messages through broken language.

Letterforms in languages are imbued with new meanings—QR codes, hyperlinks, passcodes, etc., are all formed by broken letterforms.

In this thesis, I would like to explore and examine the existence of those fragmented visions and voices in the digital age, and how our lives are influenced by digital fragments. I will look into visual fragments, information fragments, and communication fragments, and present them in visual form.

I want to create an experience for my audience to visualize and interact with digital fragments.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

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FEI PING ZHAO @drk_cirkls247

Digital Identity, 2019. Digital image. 36 × 24 in.

Racism..., 2020. Book. 6 × 5.5 in.

For many of us who shop at well-known beauty stores, we know that those products are not something we can afford on a daily basis. The cosmetics industry has been growing exponentially, and luxury brands are selling overpriced lipsticks that do not even suit the customer. Each person has their own unique skin tone and texture, and most of the time name brands sell their lipsticks and neglect that the product is not one size fits all. That is why this project, Lips Express, experiments with the basics and formulations of lipsticks that are suitable for everyone at an affordable price and made of ingredients you can find in your own home. Ultimately, we ask, what if we can make personalized lipstick at home, knowing what the exact ingredients are and formulas that suit our skin? More importantly, how can we include everyone in the cosmetics world?

The concept of Lips Express comes from my interest in collecting lipstick. Throughout my collection of lipsticks, I realized that my $5 drugstore lipsticks work better than my $30 products. My lipsticks vary in shape, color, and finish, but not all of them are compatible with my lips. With just a layer of color, lipsticks can change a person’s personality and their confidence. The goal of this project is not only to make our own lipstick, but to show that each person is unique and deserves equal treatment in beauty. In this project, my formulations have a wide range of finishes and skincare elements. Each person can make their own affordable, personal, and clean lipstick product. In Lips Express, you can follow simple DIY steps and be creative to customize your lipsticks with a designed experience made for everyone.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

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IRINA

ZHIKH www.izhikh.com

Beauty Poster, 2019. Laser print. 36 × 24 in.

Andy Warhol, 2020. Pamphlet. 5 × 5 in.

What do we know about multisensory experience? How will developing technologies push graphic design in new realms? How can multisensory elements be implemented in design practice? Often, people take their senses for granted and do not realize how different senses work together to provide different types of information about our immediate environment.

The most vivid and memorable experiences that we have are almost always multisensory. We often have great memories and associations related to visual imagery, touch, sound, smell, and taste. Graphic design is everywhere around us, and it is used in every area of our life; still, for the most part, it only stimulates visual perception. However, in some cases, in addition to visual imagery, audio is used to increase the comprehension of information.

For the most part, the user experience depends only on those two stimuli.

My thesis research investigates the connection between visual and audio experiences and explores ways of combining both cues to create a more dynamic and immersive user experience in different environments.

It also examines possible solutions for implementing a multisensory practice to enhance perception of design work—since it can add significantly to narrative, emotion, and rhythm in ways design alone can’t capture.

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About Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts

The School of Visual Arts at Boston University College of Fine Arts prepares students to think seriously, to see critically, to make intensely, and to act with creative agency in the contemporary world.

Established in 1954 to combine the intensive studio education of an art school with the opportunities of a large urban university, Boston University School of Visual Arts is committed to educating the eye, hand, and mind of the artist.

We believe that students become visual artists when education, practice, and awareness of historical and contemporary context enable them to think critically and imaginatively, and to express those ideas with skill and conviction. The professional artists and educators that make up our faculty lead small classes of highly motivated students.

The Foundation program is the bedrock of our undergraduate program, and emphasizes a mastery of traditional skills and visual problem-solving.

All BFA freshmen begin with drawing courses and continue foundation studies in painting and sculpture before they choose a studio major. MFA programs in Art Education, Graphic Design, Painting, and Sculpture focus and elaborate professional studies. Studio electives expand and enrich all graduate and undergraduate Visual Arts major programs.

Courses in studio art, art history, and the liberal arts and sciences taught by the nationally and internationally recognized faculties of the University’s 17 schools and colleges provide the intellectual framework for our curriculum. University-sponsored international study programs broaden the Boston campus experience and encourage global awareness.

Boston provides a rich cultural resource for our School. The city’s renowned museums and musical organizations, art galleries, theaters, libraries, and other universities, colleges, and schools offer exhibitions, concerts, theatrical performances, and lectures of the highest quality.

Special thanks ✨

Faculty Lynne Allen Felice Amato Rebecca Bourgault Dana Clancy Liza Clement Kristen Coogan Deborah Cornell Christopher Field Greg Gomez James Grady Jill Grimes Diana Hampe Meena Hasan Zach Horn Jaya Howey Breehan James Jesse Kaminsky Paul Karasik Lucy Kim Won Ju Lim Kristen Mallia Nick Mancini Jeffrey Nowlin Hugh O’Donnell Yael Ort-Dinoor Toni Pepe Nicole Pond Richard Raiselis Nicholas Rock Jessie Rubenstein Richard Ryan Danielle Sauve Marc Schepens Christopher Sleboda David Snyder Ed Stitt Mary Yang

Staff Julianna Augustine Josh Brennan Jessica Caccamo Brandon Cohen Gus Wheeler Beth Zerega Logen Zimmerman

A note about the branding

It is impossible to ignore how the pandemic and online learning have played significant roles in the way we learned, worked, and created this year.

Although we have been placed in unfortunate situations, we have persevered and have become stronger because of it.

This year’s BFA thesis branding is a homage to online learning and the efforts each artist and professor have made to adapt and succeed in our new reality. When Ernest Hemingway was young, he wrote a story about “coming back from the war, but there was no mention of the war in it.”

Hemingway’s theory was that “you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and that the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.” With the same purpose, Breaking Out does not mention Zoom, the pandemic or the loss that we feel from this last year. Instead, this year’s identity focuses on the strength and perseverance of the artists. In the words of Graphic Design Professor Nicholas Rock, “We are still artists, we are still here. Even after the worst is over, we are still going to create.”

Throughout the identity of Breaking Out, rainy-day glyphs are used as imagery to portray the idea that even though today could be seen as a rainy day, brighter days are close ahead. Iridescent and holographic styles are used to represent the cloud’s silver lining and pixelated fonts are used as a subtle nod to the digitalization of our senior year.

The branding design of this year’s BFA thesis serves as a frame to unite the students of the School of Visual Arts at Boston University and most importantly, emphasize the individuality of each artist.

Breaking Out BFA Thesis Show May 6–14, 2021 Boston University Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery Commonwealth Gallery Painting Graphic Design Printmaking Sculpture Type Neue Montreal, NeueBit, Mondwest Donated by Pangram Pangram Foundry Design Natalie Bolton, Lena Johnson, Morgan Recker, Mariana Velasquez Faculty Advisor Mary Yang Editor Madeline Kloss Johnson Printing Kirkwood, Boston, MA ©2021 BU CFA School of Visual Arts 855 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA 02215 bu.edu/cfa/visual-arts (617) 353-3371

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