MASTER OF FINE ARTS

James William Blake Master of Fine Art

The absurd has always had the power to capture our attention but in this saturated world, it remains one of our best tools to hook the viewer and inspire thought. My work expresses thoughts on sustainability, the internal conflict between Artist and Maker, and the relative accessibility of interactive works.

Art for Art #5: Coloring book, wraps into one work my adoration for museums and space for comfortable reflection. As with fine furniture, it facilitates visual and physical comfort.

Dana Blume Master of Fine Art

Dana Blume’s work depicts a human adjacent reality where personal and collective human anxieties, hopes, and absurdities are personified through unnameable creatures and awkward bodily forms. Some of his works depict specific narratives that serve as cautionary tales, where these creatures engage in compulsively destructive behaviors that result in comedically tragic outcomes. His hopes are that difficult feelings can live inside an image and prolonged material engagement with those images can lead to a clarity about personal and collective fears. The depictions of these destructive behaviors enacted by the protagonists of his work are never explicitly violent and are in fact quite light hearted, with hopes that if viewers could relate to the plight of these creatures, their hijinks could inspire levity, empathy, and self acceptance. These works serve as a framework to investigate the cultural function of myth making and the monster as a receptacle for societal anxieties. In his more formally driven work, he investigates the connection between painting and paradeolia, our innately human desire and ability to see symbols, patterns, and images in abstract phenomenon. He hopes to convince viewers that images are inherently abstract and that our ability to see images is not dissimilar to our childlike capability of seeing “rabbits in the clouds.”

Dana Blume was born and raised in San Diego, California. He earned his BFA in drawing and painting from California State University of Long Beach in 2019 and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington.

Opposite: Dana Blume, Hard Thinker, 2022. Tempera, acrylic and ink on paper. Below: Imagining a World Without Daisies, 2023. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

Kayla Cochran Master of Fine Art

This project is an extension of my longstanding interest in visual storytelling through domestic still life. In an attempt to discover these stories, I rely heavily on the practice of collecting and investigating evidence of existence. In search of human paraphernalia that hold some anonymous history, I find artifacts that, together, evoke new narratives and place value in moments and items that were once discarded. This project has developed into a series of interdisciplinary set-ups that collapse expectations of reality and dimensionality. It disorients through uncanny familiarity and illusion, communicating a sense of both nostalgia and anxiety. The work weaves together personal stories of growing up in Massachusetts with those of anonymous figures and fictional characters. There is a human presence that transcends the body and grants subjectivity to inanimate paraphernalia. I encourage viewers to step into this mirror world, reminiscent of a dream, in search of a feeling, an answer, or a memory.

Kayla Cochran is a Massachusetts-born artist currently living and working in Seattle, Washington. She received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from Montserrat College of Art in 2015, where she received both the Montserrat Painting Award and the Montserrat Art Education Award. Since then, she has been teaching middle school, high school, and undergraduate level art courses. She is currently an MFA candidate at University of Washington for 2023.

Ruby Henrickson Master of Fine Art

Empathy and compassion are generative forces in my practice: in concept, form, process, and the act of creation amidst loss. Lots of the visual vocabulary in my work comes from an interpretation of the body’s senses. The senses are an equalizer: a flower is nourished by the sun, just as a turtle feels the same heat upon its shell, and even the rock this turtle lays on. My senses are united and empathize with the flower, turtle, rock, and sun. I make art for the same reason I visit bodies of water for clarity. The same reason I collect stones, sticks, and feathers. The reason a beaver builds their dam, or a spider their web. The reason, also, does not have to be called by any one name, but I often return to “love.”

Ruby Henrickson is an artist from Michigan living and working in Seattle, WA. She earned her BFA in painting in 2021 at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, and is a 2023 MFA candidate in Painting and Drawing at the University of Washington. She received the 2020 Gordon Art Fellowship at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute for Environmental Studies for research on art and the environment. Recent work comes from interests in posthumanism, environmentalism, phenomenology, and philosophies on love. She strives for her art/life practice to be fluid, forgiving, and regenerative.

Lucas Latimer

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My body of recent work has explored the use and meaning of ceramic materials unfired, un-petrification. The main historical body of ceramics mostly explores clay that has gone under the proper firing process, allowing the ceramic objects to last millennia. My work uses clay in its unfired, green form. The clay is used by the artist to capture a moment, then once the moment is gone the same clay is broken down and reused again for another moment. The clay lives on ever-changing with its environment, unlike its fired form. Also, acknowledging what has been labeled as prehistoric use of clay that was never fired yet exhibited.

Lucas Latimer (b. 1996, Dallas) studied studio ceramics and art history at the Kansas City Art Institute, and graduated with his BFA in 2019. Lucas is a current second-year graduate student at the University of Washington’s 3D4M program in Seattle with a focus in ceramics. Lucas sculpts clay into bodily forms in the abstract with features altered, malformed, erased, or hidden. His sculptures are the amalgamation of the turmoil, hesitate, fear, and insecurities felt by human consciousness, giving them body in order to receive scrutiny and compassion.

Master of Fine Art

“Waiting is something you get used to when you’re a Native American.” (Bruchac, 170)

This studio centers waiting.

Waiting for the artist.

Waiting for the viewer.

Waiting for the gallery.

Waiting for the future.

Waiting for the past.

Waiting for clemency.

Waiting for the check to come in.

Waiting to see South Dakota again.

Waiting for the print to develop.

Waiting for the performance to start.

Waiting for the theory.

Waiting for the court’s ruling.

Waiting for the pipeline to burst.

Waiting for the rocks to erode.

Waiting for the beginning.

Waiting for the end.

This studio centers waiting.

Cypress Quickbear-Stalder is an artist from Judah, Indiana. They graduated in 2021 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital Media from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. They are a 2023 Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Washington’s Photo/Media program. Their first solo show debuted at Das Schaufenster in March of 2023.