Pratt Fine Arts MFA 2023

Oh, beloved MFA class of 2023, we have been through so much! Through rain and snow and gloom of Brooklyn night, through leaks and blackouts and uncertainty of pandemic proportions, we’ve made it through— together! Congratulations to each and every one of you for putting in the work and being so gracious, friendly, and talented. It is truly an honor to be part of this cohort, and we can’t help but blush thinking about how much these past two years have meant to us.

And we couldn’t have done this alone! A special thank you to the Fine Arts department Faculty and Staff for all of their support over these past two years. To Qiaosen Yang, whose incredible design work on this publication brought our work to life. To Dina Weiss, whose watchful eye steadied our course as we sailed through the years together. To Christopher Verstegen, thank you for your generosity with your time and your smile that greets everyone who walks through our studio doors. To Federico Savini, whose incredible photographs and technical knowledge supported us all throughout our studies. To Lisa Banke-Humann, whose attentiveness and care has kept our department running smoothly. To Jane South, whose energy and advocacy has helped motivate us all. And to all of our countless family, friends, colleagues, and greater New York community who have believed in our artistic endeavors despite the odds: we thank you!

We can’t wait to see what the class of 2023 is going to do next <3

All our best, Pratt Artists’ League Co-Coordinators

Grace Einfeld & Daniel Pravit Fethke

MFA Class of 2023

U Tong Ao Ieong

Victoria Arthur

Jenna Arvelo

Jimin Baek

Alexander Brewington

Cameron Burgoyne

Yu Cheng

Note Davis-Barney

Grace Einfeld

Daniel Pravit Fethke

Michelle Frick

Mengyu Han

Shaun Haugen

Noormah Jamal

Jimi Kabela

Tim Kastelijns

Niousha Kiarashi

Moss Y. Loke O'Connor

Kate McElhiney

Longyuan Miao

Griffin Miller

Gonzalo Miñano Paz

Sonja Petermann

Blair Tyler Peters

Miranda Ratner

Lauren Rauber

Will Richmond

Merlin Sabal

Monica Srivastava

Rodrigo Tafur

Ethan Tasa

Olivia Terian

nikki slota-terry

Joe Turpin

Thomas Tustin

Sarah Wang

Samuel Waxman

Jo Xu

Qiaosen Yang

Shiyu Zhang

Sara Zielinski

For this year's Fine Arts MFA thesis exhibition, Pratt has invited curator and BFA'12 Pratt alumn Sofía Shaula Reeser del Rio to curate the 2023 programs cohort comprised of 41 intergenerational and intercultural individuals. As the curator, she will curate a two-part show, and two public programs with a curatorial proposal framed under the question and lens of how one engages with pedagogies of curating and with care to allow for the diverse ecosystems of each artist’s practice and their crossings with others to be highlighted in their thesis exhibitions. After meeting all artists and thesis faculty, Sofía's proposal rests on the idea that as makers, despite the academic formalities and potential silo it can create, this student body's thesis proposals are working towards making [a] place for their questions and ideas in an environment far beyond the studio walls.

ABOUT THE CURATOR:

Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio (b. 1989) is a Puerto Rican scholar, independent curator, multidisciplinary artist, and educator. Her practice is based between Puerto Rico, Madrid, and NYC. She has organized and produced several major exhibitions with a special focus on Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean artists, particularly supporting LGBTQ and self-identified female artists from Puerto Rico. Her artistic practice explores themes of memory, ecology, sustainability, new modes of economic/social production, and pedagogy.

As part of her curatorial tenure (2012-2017) at El Museo del Barrio in New York, she coordinated and organized over thirty exhibitions and numerous public programs, artists’ projects, site-specific installations, and off-site special projects. Some notable ones include NKAME: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (2017), Antonio Lopez: Future Funk Fashion (2016), Illusive Eye (2016), Marisol (2015), Pa'Lante: Young Lords in New York (2015), PLAYING WITH FIRE: Political Interventions, Dissident Acts, and Mischievous Actions (2014), Museum Starter Kit: Open with Care (2013), La Bienal (2013), Caribbean Crossroads of the World (2012). She also oversaw the development, and management of the Artists in Residency, Lucky Sevens Art Salon, and the Portfolio Reviews, programs that reimagined contemporary artists’ roles and their relationships with the Museum.

Sofía has an MFA from the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, and a BFA from the Pratt Institute. She is also a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico, where she took courses with renowned Puerto Rican visual artists, educators, and academics that shaped and informed her practices. She is a member of the community-based organization Mujeres de Islas, Inc, a Culebra, PR's NGO, and a certified postnatal Doula and an Ashtanga and prenatal Yoga Teacher.

Pratt Institute MFA Fine Arts presents a two-part exhibition, Making Place. The forty-one artists in this exhibition are culture makers. Through their practice and work, they are delving into making a place for their collective and individual histories and the human spirit and mind. Working in a pandemic world, making place becomes a metaphor and an action, a constant realization of one's societal agency. Through their works, many of the artists examine its effect on the world as we know it, the environmental and economic crisis, some through abstraction and found objects. In contrast, through painting, some decide to rewrite history, and through sculptures, installations, and performances, some expose the body's vulnerability and spirit. And a few chose to wander outside their studios and engage with the community through alternative economic and social order and value systems. The works in the exhibition derive through a multitude of experiences, texts, and visual culture critically to examine the impression and effect ideas from different cultural perspectives.

Inevitably, some art incites conversations that address ethical bio-cultural practices, political ecology, and the issues in representing the landscape, the body, and its histories. Others put to the forefront of their work the conversations around correctional facilities' morality, treatment of our bodies, and navigating oppression and trauma, asking us to put into question the systems in place for more accountability and healing. They approach these through action-based works, sculptures, paintings, and installations. More subtle conversations about object making and what is to take space and make space for them, us, in a saturated world of excess. Some artists create a vortex into which one can momentarily exist in a digital world, or is it, in fact, the state we are inhabiting? In contrast, others imbue their work by exploring light as their subject, bringing awareness to the subtle shifts in time, space, and the self.

Frantz Fanon forewarns in The Wretched of the Earth, each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. That’s what this intercultural and intergenerational group of artists in both exhibitions, making place: part I Histories and Heritage, and making place: part II Politics and the Body, continue unearthing its opaque mission with clarity within their practices, developing cultural images that will define our generation. Their works will make other images and alternate places that create the universes many of us and generations to come will experience. To gain selfrepresentation, as they navigate questions such as who don't I see?, the personal becomes political, the psychological becomes political, and the existence of their works continues making places.

– Curator, Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio

U TONG AO IEONG

I am enthralled by the use of movement to articulate objects in space. As a creator, the making of my work is a process of reordering forms of materials such as plaster, wood, metal and cement. The process of completing and restructuring materials, enables the object to appear. My observation of physical things takes form as a misconception of ideas and understandings of my surrounding. As a result, this analysis of observing fuels the creativity and motivate the making of my work.

VICTORIA ARTHUR

Web : vickiarthurart.com

IG : @vickiarthurart

I combine my knowledge and experiences as a field biologist and conservation educator with memory and imagination. This series of paintings and ceramics explores creative interpretations of today’s forests and the natural world. My work expresses a deeply felt connection to nature. Loving nature comes with sadness and concern for our lack of this connection and stewardship. My artwork is meant to inspire a relationship with nature and a shared concern for the urgent need to change course.

Through flowing, bold and energetic brush strokes, movement, light and color portray an enrapturing natural world of our times with clues of distress.

JENNA ARVELO

In this body of work, I use self portraiture as a vessel that represents and explores symbolic, archetypal and iconographic visual languages and recognition. This act of self portraiture directly relates to the innate multiplicity of selfhood while also reflecting on Jung’s hypothesis of the ‘collective unconscious mind.’ My interests lie in how we as a collective, build symbolic sight and how this connects us to forgotten pasts, current events and an unfolding future. Building from the scattered stories of my familial heritage, it’s through this work that I can begin to piece together an erased historical epistemology.

JIMIN BAEK

Idling Conversations is the pitiful fruit of our constraints. It is only the constraint that facilitates the ever-failing, yet ever-shifting, Idling Conversations.

The Axis of Repetition 2022 Oil on canvas 130.3 cm x 162.2 cm

ALEXANDER BREWINGTON

Throughout history mythologies were made for the common people to better deal with complicated issues. As a painter I am creating a new mythology to deal with many complex themes, specifically death, violence and grief. I will push the limits between the classical themes, contemporary spaces and characters combined with fantastical elements. These paintings are also an exploration of materiality. The work in this realm is embodied by the handling of the paint. I’m interested in a world where the marks of the paintings are as expressive and chaotic as the new mythos I’m creating. I am reclaiming the classical ideas of mythology that have been used by the west to see what they look like in the space we inhabit today, to tell the stories of today.

CAMERON BURGOYNE

From ideation to decay, my work is both prompted by and pointing to curiosity and transformation. Regardless of medium, I am equal parts obsessive and spontaneous, carefully crafting opportunities for wandering. The objective is not a finished piece, but the process itself.

Through minimalist geometric installations, sculptures, paintings, experiences, and photographs inspired by the work of minimalist sculptors and land work artists, I communicate the temporality of state, the cyclical and curious nature of mind, and the contradictory pleasure and pain of growth. I intentionally practice this change and inquisitiveness in my studio, to lessen the fear of my own evolution as a human. As the work continuously finds new form, I push myself to do so as well, learning and progressing and surrendering to what is.

YU CHENG

I am a painter, working with oil, acrylic, and photographs. I distort images by looking through a transparent object and use bright colors to express my perception of things related to me from both the objective world and the spiritual world. When I stare at an object, the image in my mind is clear. When I close my eyes, the image will gradually blur and deform, and the fuzzy residual shadow is the perception state I want to express. My works are about forming a comprehensive perception of things through information accumulation and expressing my perceptual state through spiritual communication.

NOTE DAVIS-BARNEY

Web : notesgallo.com / onedrop.world

IG : @notes.gallo / @onedrop.world

In rooting myself within the weave of the African Diaspora, I create mixedmedia paintings that examine the relationship between my body and the structures that make up the systems around me. This practice involves observing and investigating the effects of colonialism and industrialization on the subjected throughout time. Employing the aesthetics of an alternative history, one that encompasses a lineage of oral tradition allowing for complex ideas to be passed on in the form of storytelling by indigenous cultures throughout the world, I locate cultural kinships by using Hip-Hop as the lens to an expansive and developing narrative. This aforementioned narrative positions these oral traditions as having evolved into Hip-Hop, a space or world unto itself that acts as both an influence on contemporary pop culture and as a culture in and of itself.

GRACE EINFELD

My work is focused on my curiosity and questions about inner life– both of my own and of others. Emotional containment, externalization, fluctuation, and processing are all topics I grapple with. By exploring these topics, I bring to light the nuances and complexities of these internal experiences we do not often see. My work manifests primarily in sculpture and time based performance, with ephemerality and process being key to the conceptual framework. I use various tactile materials, such as beeswax, plaster, and raw canvas, to create a space for a contemplative and emotive encounter with the work and the self.

Talk to Me 2022

Plaster and beeswax 1 feet x 3 feet

Untitled 2022 Beeswax on canvas 16 inch x 20 inch

Untitled 2022 Beeswax 4 feet x 6 feet

DANIEL PRAVIT FETHKE

Social Practice Art Soup: A Recipe

1: Bring a pot of pandemic precarity to a boil. Once hot, add in two years of mutual aid cooking practice.

2: Add ten years of filmmaking experience and a pinch of performance art. Stir vigorously.

3: Once the aromatics have bloomed, build a mobile food cart and serve it up to passers-by on the street outside your studio. Use the soup as a way into larger conversations about art, Brooklyn, and gentrification.

4: Repeat this process in different locations, changing up the dish and the questioning to be site and time-specific.

Title: Ox-Bow Pad Thai

2022

Duration: 2 Hours

Form: Site-specific Workshop/Salon

Materials: Pad Thai ingredients, Wok, Propane, Tables, Chairs, ToGo Containers

Title: Cannon Café

2022

Duration: 1 Hour

Form: Culinary Performance

Materials: Café Bustelo, Moka Pot, Wooden Sign, Microphone, Custom Tabletop

Title: Untitled Public Critique (Chicken Soup)

2022

Duration: 30 Minutes

Form: Culinary Performance

Materials: Chicken Soup, CRT Television playing “Cannon Café” video, Recipes, Photographs, Ephemera

MICHELLE FRICK

Web : michellefrick.org

IG : @michellefrickart

My sculptures have an otherworldly presence. Though I make them from silicone, resin, paper and plaster, it looks as though I have not constructed the human-scale forms but discovered them. They are formidable–almost wild and animal-like as if protecting their young. Equipped with mirrors and multiple viewing holes, the sculptures feel like organic devices or appliances. They could be incubating and preserving lifeforms, such as amphibians and birds–their maternal instincts spawning a tension between the viewer and themselves.

Silicone, plaster, copper, gampi paper, mirror, stainless steel, fabric, light, sound. 79 inch x 58 inch x 42 inch

MENGYU HAN

My works represent my interior and exterior as a half-machine. Using videos, images, texts, metal parts, and mechanical devices, I create myself and my works as a symbiotic mechanical creature in the form of interconnected translations of information.

By translating the original “file” of my life, the misinterpretation in my works helps me form a shelter of feelings by creating digital aliases of myself, concealing me from the fragility as a human being, exploring the experience of emotional elimination brought about by machinery. Meanwhile, the metal installations help me create a harmless eternal environment for living, and peace of mind as well.

SHAUN HAUGEN

Madness and its associated hallucinations are embodied by color, abstraction, graphics, text and assemblage. I form an idiosyncratic language by tapping into the romanticized experiences of an altered mental state. Often the composition vibrates or morphs resonating within the eye of the viewer. The paintings then become a type of portal where the viewer peers into them as a divine vision, ethereal reveal, or emotional euphoria.

Champagne Supernova 2021 Acrylic, oil, spray, and collage on cotton 62 inch x 47 inch x 1.5 inch

I Dream of Genie 2022 Acrylic, oil, and toy assemblage on cotton 62 inch x47 inch x 1.5 inch

My suicidal dream 2021 Acrylic and spray on cotton 62 inch x 47 inch x 1.5 inch

NOORMAH JAMAL

My multidisciplinary practice explores themes of identity, representation, and the personal baggage that people carry. It is deeply rooted in my Pukhtoon heritage and upbringing.Through a variety of media including painting, drawing, and ceramics, I create works that challenge dominant narratives and representations of South Asians and Muslims. I challenge the notion that these communities should be confined to narrow, stereotypical representations, and instead portray them as complex and fully realized individuals. I use my art as a means of creating space for dialogue and amplifying the voices of those who are often silenced or overlooked and routinely forgotten.Overall, my art calls for action for greater representation and inclusivity. I encourage viewers to think critically about how identity is constructed and represented.

masharan (elders) Oil pastel on arches paper 12 inch x 16 inch

Manzil kareeb( destination is close) Acrylic on linen 56 inch x 60 inch

Salat Acrylic on ceramic 10 inch x 5 inch

JIMI KABELA

I use remnants of traditional African textiles and other items to express the Congolese and African roots of my birthplace. The exuberant, daring, and colorful patterns worn by the men and women of the Congo are reminders of my ancestors, language, and origins. My exploration of abstract painting balances geometry and process informed by my American experiences, too. I grew up in Dallas, Texas. In my artistic work, I depict the complexity, positive rhythms, and energies of both African and American cultural influences. It is through collaging and abstraction of both the paint medium and the remnants of African textiles that allow me to depict this duality of culture.

potpourri

Oil, acrylic, and fabric material on canvas

71 inch x 59 inch

TIM KASTELIJNS

As someone who doesn't remember a time before digital culture, I've become fascinated with the split digital-physical world that we live in. I investigate our experiences and recollection of the digital realm as it informs and controls our physical lives. The questions I investigate often are about digital identities and bodies, how the self is broadcasted on the web and how we experience our multitude of identities as a whole. Our intimate connection to this nonphysical world and the need for an online presence or connection are at the center of my work. I answer these questions by using emergent technologies as the translators of our experiences. The processes I use often cultivate into displaying my work as video, photography, performance and sculpture.

NIOUSHA KIARASHI

I’m concentrating on concentration. How we learn and absorb information from our surroundings on earth to feel. How we feel. How we discover emotions. How we identify emotions and live with them until they become us. By this I mean we become the emotions we receive and own them and let them own us too. How I experience them inside me and the way everything outside in the world acts as other factors of how these emotions evoke and have impacts on my physical body and mind. But we, humans, might be sometimes ignorant and unaware about how this process really happens and how it changes everything in our perceptions. How can I learn from the process by practicing to learn and unlearn these emotions by projecting them out of my imagination to drawings, video, sound and multimedia installations to communicate with them? Wandering around in this liminal space with its citizens who are creatures made out of growing knowledge about emotions and feelings. I try to visualize the characteristics of emotions and how they grow as organisms, in that liminal world beyond everything that has been called reality. Their microscopic presence in the macrocosm of our understanding. How emotions invade, and become part of you. How you communicate to the world around you with them attached to you affects how you exist and behave. Influenced by the magic that appears in every organism facing life on earth, I juxtapose nature to imaginary worlds of senses and emotions.

MOSS YING LOKE O’CONNOR

Web : moss-yloc.com

IG : @moss.yloc

My practice is an exploration into manhood. Notably, how masculinity can be cross-pollinated through a second adolescence. Highlighting the tensions that arise as one walks through puberty. Awkward wooden structures are conjoined to fabric panels that feature felted wool and embroidery, foregrounding the importance of the single strand. I am dismantling culturally defined structures that are perceived to have evolved naturally but are inherently artificial. Birthing an allegorical realm that centres the complexities of queer worldbuilding as a euphoric act of creation. Where internal growing pains grapple with the callous external experience. Photographic prints are housed within the work, bringing forth the Maleman as a central recurring figure. Portals open into contemplative sites, where the possibilities for ways of being are reimagined through generous acts of care. An indecipherable oddness is achieved through architecture that burrows into and out of spaces, where inharmonious elements are brought together in symbiosis.

Fabric, ink, wool, thread, wood, archival inkjet print

Maleman 2022

Fabric, ink, wool, thread, wood, archival inkjet print

33 inch x 11.5 inch x 42 inch

Rocky 2022

Fabric, ink, wool, thread, wood

50 inch x 1.75 inch x 42 inch

KATE McELHINEY

Web : katemcelhiney.com

IG : @katemcelhiney__studio

I am interested in the philosophical and psychological effects of light, texture, and color within a space. My work depicts various interior conditions, imagined and observed, semi-abstracted and representational, and asks the viewer to dive into their own memories, harboring a moment of selfreflection. In portraying transient moments in time, the small pieces evoke feelings of nostalgia, loneliness, and solitude, emotions that often co-exist yet contradict one another. I prefer to use transparent media such as watercolor, egg tempera, and gouache, which allow me to create a calm solemnity while maintaining a vibrant color palette, a visual embodiment of the contradictions nostalgia can conjure.

Noguchi Midnight 2021

Egg Tempera on AquaBoard

6 inch x6 inch

January Bath 2021

Egg Tempera on Clayboard

6 inch x6 inch

LONGYUAN MIAO

I am a multidisciplinary artist who uses paint and other materials and methods. Using symbolism is important to my practice.

A key idea in my work is the spiritual shackle—“paper shackle”, which is produced from a Chinese movie "Mei Lanfang". It depicts a shackle that looks like it can be broken easily, but people cannot break it subjectively or objectively because of responsibility, other people’s perspectives, social environment and other factors.

Based on the concept, my works explore it attached to females. I tried to visualize these female’s paper shackles and feelings to arouse some resonance and a reverse self-examination to make changes.

GRIFFIN MILLER

My work is centered around a curiosity and obsession with materials. Many of these materials relate to my anxieties about the Anthropocene: plastics, refuse, and everyday globalized commodities, natural and found objects, clay and concrete.

I use the vessel as a carrier of meaning, and my work is in dialogue with tradition even as it is irreverent and humorous. My sculptures have complex surfaces which balance attraction/repulsion, cutesy/nasty and elegant/abject.

GONZALO MINANO PAZ

I’m intrigued by the portrayal of divine power in mythological / religious imagery, and I’m summoning that presence to claim it for the queers. Through my practice, I’m studying the figure as a symbol of energetic flow, and its role in the collective identity. With this in mind, my pieces are created while reflecting on subjects like death, or the existence of being beyond the body.

SONJA PETERMANN

Recently, I have been entirely immersed in this concept: water’s incredible ability to dissolve substances literally transformed the Earth. Carving out space for itself. Unintentionally creating an environment that can sustain life. I imagine water creeping across the rocky terrain. Its erosive power emanates from patience, from its trust in gravity and in time.

Ceaselessly softening surface. Wearing it away. Grinding. Gnawing. This is a practice of becoming. Birth, death, rebirth, redeath.

Maybe it is the water within us that fuels the need… not necessarily to find space for ourselves, for our lives… but make it. It is the water within me instigating this erosive process, subtle, improvisational… collaborating with the weight of my body, and defined by time.

I utilize printmaking, drawing, and dance to explore, and better understand, how the psychological effect of local memory intersects with the sociological impacts of the global ongoing water crisis.

BLAIR TYLER PETERS

Web : blairtylerpeters.com

IG : @blairtylerpeters

Through a research-based practice of painting and ceramics, I discover shapes and forms that denote the experience of women throughout time. My work commemorates women and their lives and voices which have historically been excluded from documented western history. I’m interested in the 1970’s Women’s Art Movement. These feminist artists were acutely aware of the artificiality and repressive power of the societal construct of gender and worked to find an authentic voice to serve as a basis for a new and liberated female identity. Using acrylic paint and various mediums, I develop a surface that gives form to rhetoric with shapes that allude to a silenced language of women and consider the multitude of ways language can be made and interpreted. The forms and compositions are inspired by various historic sources ranging from ancient relics and hieroglyphics to traditions historically associated with women’s crafts such as quilt making, sewing and pottery. My ceramic work expands this investigation and considers themes of ritual and embodiment using the female form which is intricately connected to my experience as a woman.

ceramic objects, velvet paper on wood panel

What I Want to Say 2022

Acrylic, Mixed Media on Canvas

72 inch x 64 inch

MIRANDA RATNER

Web : Mirandaratner.com

IG : @mirandaratnerheart

Flowering from my creative consciousness and exploding passion, my art expresses and employs procreative growth and vital life sustaining energy. I study and regenerate repeated patterns in nature, both microcosmic and macrocosmic, exploring and exposing the interconnectedness of everything.

I engage in craft mediums and mixed-media textile, tapping into the majesty and expansive nature of feminine creation and reproductive labor. My use of color, pattern, and spiritual intention reveals cross-cultural connecting threads of artistic ritual, and devotion. I upcycle discarded materials, embodying transformation, conservation, and consideration of environmental impact. Through my practice I grapple with climate anxiety, while deepening my relationship to the transformative organic beauty of natural forms. I’m continually exploring the fabric of life, oscillating between polarities in search of balance. My creative process is one of discovery and self realization; of rewilding my self expression and my connection to the world.

LAUREN RAUBER

Web :laurenrauber.com

IG : @laurenrauber

Using oil paint, I use the language of abstraction to create a playful vocabulary with markmaking and color. The work marries spontaneity and control; I see the relationship between these two elements as an organizing principle. I work to obtain a thoughtful cohesiveness within the painting that embraces a sense of “control” married to the sensations and emotions that can be linked to vibrant color.

The struggle among elements in my work reflects my experience and understanding of bipolar disorder-chiefly that emotion exists within and is evoked by colors. The work of the Chicago, Imagists-particularly their vibrant palette-is a primary influence in my practice.

Boarded

WILL RICHMOND

My sculptural practice highlights the deceptions of reality through use of rudimentary geometric forms and seriality. Using familiar materials such as glass and wood, I lull viewers into a false sense of understanding. As viewers engage the work, elements of illusion and deception fast become metaphors for their own lives. Through precise manipulation and assembly of materials, I conceal areas that would otherwise reveal the magic behind a work’s creation. Certain properties of these sculptures await to be realized while others deny comprehension. Suspicion and curiosity compete in discovery of the truth.

Disappearing Act 2022 Glass, plywood, epoxy 1.5 inch x 90 inch x 9 inch

When One Door Closes… 2022 Glass, plywood, pine, acrylic 86 inch x 48 inch x 30 inch

MERLIN SABAL

As a disabled artist, my work is informed by the struggle to navigate, personally and politically, what it means to have a body. Working across a variety of mediums, including sculpture, wearable and performance art, I aim to make visceral again things that have been cast as abstract political issues within American conversation, and provoke reflection about the politics of witnessing, embodiment and memory.

White pedestal, borosilicate slime, dye, ink, acrylic beads

Shirt worn during the performance of the piece The Health and Safety of Those in Our Custody is Paramount 2022 Cotton Shirt, heat transfer print, blood 28 inch x 24 inch

MONICA SRIVASTAVA

As a child of Indian immigrants, I have always felt torn between my identity as an Indian and my identity as an American. This negotiation of belonging is the main conflict throughout my work. I will always be seen as a tourist in my own country. In America, I am seen as foreign because of the color of my skin. In India, I am seen as an outsider because I was not raised in India. I am neither foreign nor assimilated.

I use textiles as a symbol for identity, culture, and family by exploring what it means to be connected, to be part of the “fabric” of something. I am the reference for my paintings, and I make work in the context of my life and family history. By making this work, I am carving out a space for my existence within a South Asian, Indian-American experience.

Veiled II 2022 Oil on canvas 30 inch x 30 inch

Six Figures 2022 Oil on canvas 32 inch x 32 inch each (total 63 in x 95 in)

RODRIGO TAFUR

TRICKSTERS, GHOSTS, SWORDS, RATS, TABLES, UMBRELLAS, DRESSES, BATHTUBS, SPEARS, HATS, SHOES, CIGARRETES, VESSELS, BEDS, BOATS, LADDERS, FLAGS, CANES, LAMPS, BRIDGES, PIPES, BEDROOMS, WIZARDS, DOGS, CATS, BATHROOMS, WINDOWS, LABYRINTHS, CHAIRS, PUPPETS, MONSTERS…

My paintings are composed of illustrative characters, objects, and spaces. These relationships generate dream-making narratives loaded with symbolism, iconography, and allegory, creating an immersive and disorienting experience using oil, acrylic, graphite, and pastels. Concerning myths, literature, memory, and theatre, the Tragic/Comic and the Absurd are central themes in my practice. Color acts as a psychological conversation in which form, space, silhouette, and transparency behave according to contrast and texture, alluding to drama in a dark and playful stage. The work finds itself between the results and processes of drawing and painting, abstraction and representation, magic and politics, reality and fiction; it defines itself as an in-between… inbetween worlds, countries, perspectives, villains, and heroes.

ETHAN TASA

My work reconciles the conflicting emotions I have for my home in South Dakota by showing harm done to my own image, objects, or animals, often parakeets who act as stand-ins for myself. These figures inhabit split and compartmentalized land that is cold and vast. The landscape I once viewed as safe and nurturing becomes oppressive over the figures who remain centered in the composition unaware of the danger the viewer sees or of their tragic fate.

An Earring 2021 Acrylic and Oil on canvas

OLIVIA TERIAN

Through my art practice, I can both confront my own climate anxiety and investigate contemporary urban society’s relationships to consumerism and nature. I make abstract sculptures and assemblages by weaving and connecting both new and used materials. The colossal woven works of Sheila Hicks and Ernesto Neto provide inspiration for material concern, and the biologic explorations of Yuji Agematsu and Kelly Jazvac propose a framework for intuitive, conceptual activity in relation to the natural world. The sculptures function as collaged records of my discoveries in art making practices and my concerns around abundance and excess, promoting environmental reflection. The work is about material. The variation in scale across different projects is meant to conjure up a feeling of relativity between your own body and what is being presented in front of you. One way of considering my work is as a series of experimental interventions in space that demand attention to their material compositions. This relationship between the human body and its immediate environment is important when we begin to think about our impacts, or footprints, on both the natural and built worlds in which we live.

My Microcostics project is a series of tiny amalgamations of detritus from both my studio and those of my peers. The tactile, finger-made quality of the rolled up clay, combined with pops of color from shreds of acrylic paint and plastic candy wrappers alike, allude to the idea of preciousness and how little attention we normally pay to these particles of our lives.

nikki slota-terry

Web : nikkiterry.com

IG : @ nikkiterryartist

nikki terry is a native Baltimorian, Brooklyn, NY based artist whose oil paintings embody abstract and expressionist content. Individuals are encouraged to consider what they are feeling in order to possibly redefine what is known about themselves without judgment. nikki’s practice of mark-making, color choices, and negative space on the canvas are all influenced by her wish for people to stop and think: where in this painting has the artist captured my pain, and ‘the thing’ I’m too insecure to say out loud? nikki’s creative process is deeply rooted in her belief that art gives us a landscape to feel with our bodies. She believes, “Sometimes paying attention to the outside, we get lost in the noise of what others think about us. I love creating negative spaces in my work because they give a person time to stand uninterrupted in a binary thought: being afraid and brave.”

JOE TURPIN

As an artist, using archival research, I select and choose narratives, allegories and symbols from the stories from history - these stories that are related to themes of identity; migration; persecution; politics and events of history itself existing, and are charged with inherent meaning and influence my current focus on paintings and mixed media installations. I question how these narratives that reflect the past and present, also resonate within a wider social context. The iconography of my works come from my own history’s narratives, specifically that of Jewish and African meeting points, symbolism and stories. I am making new images with them. I am relating them to the world. My practice is one of generational confrontation.

Where Are You, My Darling? 2022 Oil stick, aerosol, oil on canvas 1500 mm x 2000 mm

Sitting With Chagall 2021 Oil stick, oil on canvas 762 mm x 813 mm

Dire Straits (Crossing The Frozen Lagoon) 2022 Oil stick, oil on canvas 1066mm x 965mm

THOMAS TUSTIN

I paint large scale figurative oil paintings. My work explores the way we commodify our flesh. Taking inspiration from the history of figurative painting, my works are representations of the disembodied and distorted way we experience flesh in our lives both physically and digitally. The interplay between the physical and the illusionary aspects of oil paint, using both historical and contemporary techniques, becomes a metaphor for flesh itself.

Web

SARAH WANG

Sarah Wang is a mixed-race artist raised in London and currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores her half-Chinese heritage, the concept of losing or having a ‘mother tongue’, and the impossibility of returning home. Her prints, large scale drawings and paintings are based on passed-down stories and play around what is unsayable: if someone is ‘illiterate in their mother tongue’, how do they communicate their heritage? Recently she has been expanding into performance and installation work, writing broken calligraphy and painting over her own work to show a confusion and erasure of personal identity.

Tomorrow’s Fortune 2022

Crayon and Paper on Canvas Paint on Wall

SAMUEL WAXMAN

Through a multidisciplinary practice focused in photography, sculpture, and installation, I am engaged in an obsessive process of cinematic visual world-building. These visual worlds consist of fractured pieces of my own experience, utilizing familiar and nostalgic tropes which borrow from the banal, the everyday, and center them as sites of violence, discrimination, and painful self-discovery. Nude figures in plaster and steel make unexpected incursions in familiar spaces; meticulously fabricated photographic compositions show the cracks in their construction; mechanical sculptures make mundane tasks out of violent and sexual actions. I am mining the destructive emotionality of my own youth as well as those in my community, and their manifestations in adulthood. I pull from my own experience as much as from a rich well of buried queer narratives in art history where I find longstanding traditions of marginalized artists using dark, nihilistic wit and humor as a response to their own displacement. I am exhuming these narratives as necessary pieces in a larger, fractured history of our existence, as well as to understand and stake out my own place in a world which historically and cyclically insists on queer erasure.

My inspiration was born from my ethnic background which made me experienced overwhelming stimulation and reactions as an observer. Words as the first information I encounter poked my fragile nerves repeatedly until they became numb ， creating the absurd values of my teenage years.

Then as now the absurdity continues, words continue to numb. For me the act of poking into and drawing on skin is a strong muscle memory, as eating and driving; it’s addictive.

Subtitle cannot express my vulnerable feelings that flesh designed for me, so I started working on it. Flesh, smell, and time are the hinges of my work.

QIAOSEN YANG

Web : qiaosenstudio.com

IG : @qiaosenstudio

The beliefs of my cultural origins and my personal experience merge to construct my perspective about the overall environment and myself, resulting in a body of work that is both industrial and natural simultaneously. I desire to create sculptures applying traditional craft skills as both preservations of the culture and experimenting with objects as a summative symbol of time. My intensive labor is motivated by my spontaneous emotional response regarding my observation of the environment as a synergistic entirety. I explore boundaries between articles of utility and fine art sculpture to define the reasons for objects by structural composition.

ANOTHER END IN THE LOOPING | 2022

Forged Steel ,Marble ,Wood 14 inch x 28 inch x 59 inch

SHIYU ZHANG

Bruce Shiyu Zhang is an oil painter who obtained his BFA in Fine Art Painting from Academy of Art of University, and MFA from Pratt Institute. He is a member of Oil Painter of America since 2017. Zhang had many successful exhibitions in the past few years both in America and Europe. His practice of painting found photographs creates a ritual-like aura that reflects on history, commemorative experiences, and traumatic events. The subject matters and photographs he refers in his works aim for revealing the complex sentiments for people to connect with. They usually have a mixture of surreal and psychological aspects in them, such as fear, isolation, obscurity, confusion, and sometimes even humor. Through his interpretation of the historical photographs in conjunction with the fusion of feelings and emotions in his work, the instantaneous photographic record is sublimated into something monumental and profound that transcends time and space.

Dancer with Mask 2022 Oil on canvas 36 inch x 24 inch

Boatmen 2022 Oil on canvas 24 inch x 30 inch

Soldier on Horse/Toy Soldier 2022 Oil on canvas 40 inch x 30 inch

SARA ZIELINSKI

Web : sarazielinski.com

IG : @sarazielinskistudio

Sara Zielinski is an artist and activist based in Brooklyn. She holds a BA from Barnard College and is expected to receive her MFA in Integrated Practices from Pratt Institute in 2023. Zielinski incorporates printmaking, drawing, text, video, and sewing into her work, often combining several techniques to create immersive environments. She has organized projects with artists in Chicago and New York and interviewed artists for The Huffington Post from 2015 to 2017. Zielinski has created installations at the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia in Tbilisi, Georgia, Ink Miami Art Fair in Miami, FL, Sapar Contemporary in New York, NY, and Pantocrátor Gallery in Suzhou, China, among others.

In Situ (installation shot) 2022

Wood, metal, sheetrock, video projection, dress, Xacto blades, debris, dimensions variable

In Situ (detail) 2022

Wood, metal, sheetrock, video projection, dress, Xacto blades, debris, dimensions variable.