2024 Intersections, Tyler School of Art and Architecture
Graduate Faculty
Mariola Alvarez
Stephen Anderson
Kate Benisek
Mauricio Bertet
Philip Betancourt
Sonja Bijelic
Gerard F. Brown
Douglas Bucci
Susan E. Cahan
Joshua Caplan
Tracy E. Cooper
Mia Culbertson
Chad D. Curtis
Matt Curtius
Delaney DeMott
Ryan Devlin
Therese Dolan
Jeffrey Doshna
Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver
Linda Earle
Sasha Eisenman
Amze J. Emmons
Jane DeRose Evans
Clifton R. Fordham
Mark Thomas Gibson
Philip Glahn
Abby Ryan Guido
Marcia B. Hall
Sally W. Harrison
Jesse Harrod
John Hatfield
Nathan M. Heavers
David Herman Jr.
Kelly A. Holohan
Pauline Hurley-Kurtz
Renee E. Jackson
C.T. Jasper
Simona Josan
Jessica J. Julius
Lisa Kay
Nichola Kinch
Joseph R. Kopta
Robert T. Kuper
Baldev S. Lamba
Scott R. Laserow
Roberto Lugo
Dermot MacCormack
Lynn A. Mandarano
Christopher McAdams
Pablo Meninato
Rebecca Michaels
Leah Modigliani
Taryn Mudge
Dona R. Nelson
Jeffrey Nesbit
Emily Neumeier
Odili Odita
Karyn Olivier
Michael Olszewski
Sharyn A. O’Mara
Eric W. Oskey
Pepón Osorio
Alpesh Kantilal Patel
Erin Pauwels
Andrea Ray
Jeffrey Richards
Fauzia Sadiq Garcia
Lauren Sandler
Bryan Martin Satalino
Paul E. Sheriff
Mark Shetabi
Robert Z. Shuman Jr.
Gerald Silk
Samantha Simpson
Hester Stinnett
Alexandra Strada
Kim D. Strommen
Corinne Teed
Ulysses S. Vance III
Jessica Vaughn
Jeremy Voorhees
Na Wei
Ashley D. West
Mallory Weston
M. Katherine Wingert-Playdon
Andrew John Wit
Byron Wolfe
William Yalowitz
Nathan William Young
It is a privilege to present the 12th annual edition of the Tyler School of Art and Architecture’s graduate catalog, featuring the work of our 2024 MFA graduates as illuminated by essays by our art history master’s and doctoral students. This longstanding collaboration across Tyler’s disciplines highlights the connections among our community.
As you will see in the pages that follow, Tyler’s MFA Class of 2024 and our art history graduate students are grappling with Time (past, present and future) and Space (here and there) to convey the social and ethical complexities of our era. The artists address the legacies of colonialism, the personal impacts of structural inequality, the trauma of war, the reclamation and reinvention of identity, and the repudiation of repressive value systems. Their works bridge personal and social histories in non-linear ways to resist, repair, and reimagine.
Many of the artists use materials to bring place and history directly into the gallery: soil and rocks, industrial tarps, cotton, and recycled glass. Some draw on figural imagery to evoke and confound identities. Still others turn to playful explorations that embrace humor to create new symbols of joy. Each of these remarkable artists demonstrates the transformative potential for art to inspire connection, encourage reflection, and shift perspectives.
Complementing and enhancing the images, Tyler’s art history students have deeply engaged with the artists and their works. In tone, language, and structure, their essays embody something essential about the artists’ intentions while enabling us to consider the work in new ways.
am sincerely grateful for the dedication and the creative and scholarly work that went into this collaboration. It serves as a reflection of the strength, diversity, and community at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the faculty and students who provided leadership in the production of this catalog. For their mentorship and guidance, extend my sincere gratitude to Philip Glahn, associate professor of aesthetics and critical studies; Sharyn O’Mara, associate professor, program head of sculpture, and graduate program director in the Art Department; Alpesh Kantilal Patel, associate professor of global contemporary art and LGBTQIA theory; and Ashley West, associate professor of northern renaissance and baroque art. Erin Rose Boyle, assistant director of academic enrichment programs and a faculty member in foundations, and Sean Starowitz (MFA ‘23), education support specialist, skillfully managed the production of the publication. I warmly acknowledge our faculty and staff editors: Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Philip Glahn, Wanda Motley Odom, Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Erin Pauwels, and Ashley West. Special thanks to the catalog design team, Matt Bouloutian (BFA ’99) and Emma Lindsay (BFA '18) of Modern Good, and Dani Goldman (BFA '25). Finally, I am especially grateful to the art historian and artist who led this project: Liam Maher (PhD candidate) and Ramon Antonio Vega (MFA '24).
In this volatile time of war, climate crisis, and political division, I am proud to be a member of a community in which faculty and students embrace the role of artists and scholars as civic leaders.
Susan E. Cahan
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania November 14, 2024
Alessandra Puglisi
Written by Moe Marte
Alessandra Puglisi’s Carrion is an exhibition that brings memories of the past and the reality of the present in conversation with each other. Puglisi utilizes weathered objects and nostalgic media such as old tables, ornate rugs, flour, and family photos that create a tie to her ancestral line in Sicily. Her art conveys the desire for reconnection and coming together when faced with obstacles of the incorruptible body, the process of decomposition and the disheveled mind.
Puglisi’s work brings up questions around permanence, and the body as an archive of knowledge. As she adorns tables with desiccated fruits, baked mafalda, broken glass and life casts of herself, it acts as an attempt to escape the crude grasp of mortality. Creating altars featuring relics of her loved ones’ imprints, Puglisi mythizes her own family in the works, breathing life back into their existence. At the center of the exhibition, a suspended bag filled with fermenting dough looms over an elaborate rug. As the dough rises, it spills down the rug from miniscule holes. A double hourglass, the fermented dough marks time doubly; both by rising and flowing down. Puglisi’s work searches for the dualistic state of being where memories of the past and moments of the present can simultaneously exist.
Metamorphosed with her own logic, Puglisi is able to embody her life story in these works, creating a familial map of material language that links her to past lives. Through evoking other places and multiple temporalities, Puglisi’s work invites its audience to meditate over being here and now over the hypnotizing sight of dripping dough.
Anna Bockrath
Written by Rachel Vorsanger
What happens if the message printed upon a strip of cloth becomes illegible when that cloth takes on a different form? Or if the weave of a net is so open it cannot capture or contain anything? What happens if encasing something in a paper façade makes it impossible to discern the weight of that object? Asking “what if” of her materials, and of herself, is the starting point of and impetus behind Anna Bockrath’s artistic practice.
Bockrath is a fiber artist who combines weaving and printmaking to create modular forms that explore and express states of liminality: loss, failure, hope, longing, and connection, among others. Interlocking strips of fabric become a vast network of netted pathways that cascade downward from ceiling to floor. Tracing paper takes on mass and sharp edges when folded into rectangular brick-like prisms and stacked upon one another. The potential energy that courses through Bockrath’s works – the net could continue to expand; the stack of bricks could continue to grow – implies their state of “becoming.”
For during their construction, Bockrath does not fight the tendencies of her materials but rather leads them to their various potentialities.
Such moments of precarity and possibility abound in Bockrath’s invented forms. Yet the fulcrum upon which these outcomes balance shifts depending not only on the materials of each work, but on how the bodies of the viewers experience them. Draped over a hanging piece of wood is an ombre-dyed rectangular cloth imprinted with a ladder pattern that presents viewers with both a structure that is impossible to climb and a gap through which they could walk. Doing so is entirely up to the viewer, but it is Bockrath who presents this pathway and defines space and dimension from within and without her works. Just as liquid takes the form of the vessel in which it is held, so too does the viewer’s body adapt to Bockrath's creations.
Anne Inniyang Adams
Written by Srđan Tunić
In her poetic interpretation of the ancient Nigerian Nok culture – considered to be a precursor of many later West African cultures – Anne Inniyang Adams decides to creatively intervene in the troublesome colonial and postcolonial heritage of West Africa.
The exhibition In-between Being features, according to Adams, “hybrid tales” [1] of clay sculptures and a video which explores posthumanist ideas of the interconnectedness of all living things.
The large- and small-scale glazed clay pieces are made with the traditional coil method, as anthropomorphic forms meshing abstract and figural, human and animal, into an animated whole adorned by jewelry (like oyster shells, handmade beads, pearls, coffee beans, and raffia straws). Some of them are soaked in pools with shells, mirrors, and drawings with chalk that activate the work, creating an environment that exists as a third, liminal space. Here the artist takes cues from the famous terracotta sculptures from the area of Kaduna (also the artist’s hometown), made during the Bronze and Iron Ages, whose use is still enigmatic and open to interpretation.[3] In the video, Adams frames the sculptures in a wider whole. She introduces us to the imaginary protagonist Kuyet – an alter ego of Adams – who relies on the mythical discourse to position the artist vis-a-vis the Nok culture, who engages in a “transformation of stories into tangible forms.”
The poetic approach opens possibilities to reimagine the heritage as something reactivated through storytelling: “Kuyet moved as one who heard whispers of secrets, secrets from a time when gods and humans danced together, birthing beings of clay and spirit.”
The artist aims to reinvigorate tradition and advocate for continuity after the colonial disruption wrought by the British on Nigeria. Yet, she does not try to return to a pre-colonial “purity.” By expanding the traditional pottery into a conceptual (and non-utilitarian) realm, Adams is free to experiment with this amalgamation between old and new and face the specters of colonial disruption.[3] The Nok culture itself is a point of projection and speculative identification, a contemporary mirror for imagining possible futures. The artworks are positioned in this liminal, in-between space, both an homage to the past and exploration of potential hybridity of identities beyond clear borders.
[1] All quotes from the artist’s video.
[2] Gert Chesi and Gerhard Merzeder (eds.), ”The Nok Culture: Art in Nigeria 2,500 Years Ago” (Munich: Prestel, 2006).
[3] Jonathan E. Okewu, “Adaptation of Practice Styles of Nigerian Ceramic Art Proponents for Developing Conceptual Ceramic Forms,” IRORO: A Journal of Arts, Volume 18, Numbers 1 & 2 (2019): 210-226; Onyema Offoedu-Okeke (ed.), Artists of Nigeria (Milan: The Ford Foundation, 2012).
There are so many ways to fall in love again (BOTTOM LEFT)
Ceramics and ceramic beads. Photo Credit: Neighboring States
“Hello, seeker! Have you recently bloomed a third ear?”
Welcome to Metaformia! The phrase above, written in the artist’s zines and on the wall, succinctly evokes the surreal and playful world the interdisciplinary artist Blithe Ophelia Grey creates. Her work materially engages with metaformic theory, which examines how modern material culture and spirituality are rooted in early menstruation rituals, myths and stories. Through a complex system of characters and symbols that are featured on quilt work and in text-based images and materials, Grey evokes – often through a girlish and low-brow camp-aesthetic – early digital spaces in which she explores this spiritual cycle anchored in the cycles of life and death that originate from menstruation. She renders an environment in which the viewer experiences a multiplicity of realities that embodies both reality and fiction, one that continually becomes real through the viewer’s interaction with her work.
Blithe Ophelia Grey
Written by Emily L. Dugan
In her work, Grey uses a system of signs through the distinctive avatars – fawn girl and dykonoclast – that she transforms into goddess-icons, externalizing the metaformic world and the spirituality that derives from it. As the viewer moves through Metaformia!, Grey is able to engage one’s implicated-ness in this larger, foundational narrative of the metaform through her varied means of storytelling. We become first-person players that make this mutually constructed space a reality. Each of us participates with her work and brings our own identities and beliefs to it while simultaneously encountering the slippages from a collective understanding of recognizable symbols. In the merging of the analog and the digital, Grey aims to deconstruct the very thresholds between these realities that have been socio-culturally affirmed with the aim to center, in the words of the artist, “the body as its own wellspring for knowledge, history (a clitstory) and spirituality.”
Quilted ms paint window made with multiple metaformic materials, braided blood jewels, and ancient ancestral tunes.
40” x 54”.
Photo credit: Neighboring States Photo.
lunar rainbow limbo lair (TOP LEFT)
Quilted inventory screen made with rainbow-textiles, rainbow-fur, rainbowlife-string, long-rainbow-cord-thatdescends, rainbow-dew-drops, and plush-lunar-batting.
40” x 54”.
Photo credit: Neighboring States Photo.
the long monologue (TOP RIGHT)
Installation view.
Shaped with words scried from the spiral of sister seekers.
336” x 120”.
Photo credit: Neighboring States Photo.
METAFORMIA (BOTTOM CENTER)
Installation view.
Deminsions variable.
Photo Credit: Neighboring States Photo.
Bradford Davis
Written by Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie
To consider Bradford Davis’ Self Portrait, an unglazed amphora riddled with holes burst from its interior, is to be invited into the artist’s intimate process of coping and transformation. The work is a response to Davis’ experience with physical trauma as a veteran of the Afghanistan War, and the subsequent mental trauma discovered during his healing process. As an analogue to the artist’s body, the work acts on Davis’ behalf to externalize the intensely personal, internal, and iterative struggle to reconstruct a self after a harrowing experience has made it unfamiliar.
Davis collaborates with what Jane Bennett calls the “vital materiality” of clay, that is, its power as an inanimate material to animate, to produce effects in the world irreducible to the contexts in which humans expect them.[1] The artist cites his re-engagement with clay as a catalyst in his process of recovery, its intervention in his life inextricable from his interventions in its form. And his choice of form is deliberate: amphorae were designed and made to be durable, to be strong. Equating the body of the vessel to his own, Davis asks what happens when something expected to be strong, to withstand any stressor, meets a serious threat to its physical integrity – and his works, like the bursting form of Input, Output answers.
These responses include the process and labor of making as much as they consist of finished artwork. What sociologist Richard Sennet says of the craftsperson is true of Davis: he is “engaged [in process]… dedicated to good work for its own sake,” and in actively responding to the repetitive physical action required by clay.[2] Making amphorae well is to make them durable. Amphorae were designed to maintain strength over time, lending Davis’ breaking and rebuilding of them emotional weight. It is parallel to the painstaking mental process of healing trauma. Though they no longer fulfill their expected function – to hold liquid and survive intact – each of Davis’ broken, manipulated amphorae make their functions anew.[3] Actualizing the labor of healing through the iterative, laborious cycle of making, breaking, and mending, Davis’ works destabilize our understandings of the line between mind and body, head and hand; between human and nonhuman material, and between maker and made artwork.
[1] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
[2] Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 20.
[3] “a vital materiality can never really be thrown away, for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted commodity.” Bennett, Vibrant Matter 6.
Catalyst (detail) (ABOVE)
Installation, ceramic stoneware, 550 cord, iron shackle and plate.
76” x 36” x 80”.
Photo: Neighboring States Catalyst (TOP LEFT)
Installation, ceramic stoneware, 550 cord, iron shackle and plate.
76” x 36” x 80”.
Photo: Neighboring States Blood, Sweat, and Tears (TOP RIGHT)
Through a combination of bioplastic, gelatin, resin, petrochemicals, and algae, Brendan O’Shaughnessy’s sculptures imagine a new ecology in the face of climate crisis. By mixing organic and inorganic matter, he creates sculptures that serve as a metaphor for humankind’s interaction with (and consequential disruption of) the natural world.
His experimentation with new materials includes pairing bioplastic – an entirely organic material – with resins that are chemically inorganic and toxically hazardous if left in unstable forms. The materiality of O’Shaughnessy’s sculptures hints at the aesthetic and quotidian materials that may become more ubiquitous as the climate crisis continues. By manipulating bioplastic as it solidifies from a liquid to a solid state, he creates sculptural forms that take on the aesthetics of bleached coral, jellyfish blooms, anemones, internal organs, sausage casings, parasites and hair follicles – imagery that is at once intriguing and perversely beautiful. For example, in implant bloom/ jelly ridge, a collection of over a dozen gelatin and wax sculptures are arranged on a sheet of pleated satin fabric, as if they were a synchronized swarm of beached jellyfish. The title refers to the sculpture’s resemblance in form to breast implants, one of the many bizarre types of internal adornment present in contemporary culture. His use of satin and steel references both haute couture aesthetics and industrial livestock production, two topics that bring up questions of the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of ethics.
To create a full sensorial experience, visitors to O’Shaughnessy’s exhibition are encouraged to ingest the edible materials used in host as well as implant bloom/ jelly ridge which are displayed on an elaborate table-scape. The consumptive action is playfully reminiscent of the eucharistic ceremonial practice of transubstantiation in Roman Catholicism. Furthermore, many of the sculptures are cloaked with a musky cologne, adding an osmic component to the installation.
To that end, his sculptures blur the lines between human and nonhuman, nature and artifice. O’Shaughnessy’s multi-sensory works ruminate on the emerging ecology of our troubling future.
In the history of art, the horse has been used, misused, and abused for varying purposes: proof of power, a symbol of conquest and expansionism, and a marker of civilization, just to name a few. The dignity the horse gives is never the horse’s own, nor is its labor that grants that power acknowledged. This is the unfortunate dialectic of the horse: when out of work, the horse has no purpose. As the Industrial Revolution replaced the animal with machines – the horse with horsepower, if you will – humans have become disconnected from the means of production.
While the horse is the central subject of Claire HarnEnz’s paintings, it is not reduced to the typical tropes of equestrian painting and sculpture. Her paintings return the dignity, individuality, and beauty to the horses she depicts with care: absent is the human figure, as HarnEnz’s horses do not need to be put to work to be worthy of appreciation.
At the same time, she doesn't present a utopia. The horses are still constrained by the frame: what is the escape? Any possibility seems an idealized fiction, as painting often is. Moreover, the horse’s individuality is upset by its serial repetition, as in the painting Inside You There Are Two Horses Indeed, according to Marx, the ultimate condition of production is the reproduction of its conditions. Indeed, inside of us, there are two horses, which is the title of the show: the one that wants to upend the system, and the other that is forced to live within it.
In Behold a Red Horse, the intense, deep red used by HarnEnz and the insertion of non-descript, blank commercial space of middle America avoids the total verisimilitude that her naturalistic stroke lends itself to, simultaneously questioning the work of representational painting and the promise of the American dream. After all, if this is what we are working so hard for, the time might as well be spent making a beautiful painting.
Let Us Build a City[1] is a call to rethink our relationship and engage with the queer built environment. Inspired by brutalist aesthetic, masculinity and architecture, and the gay club culture, Daniel Cappello mashes sculpture and music into an interactive whole. The artist, who has been working in gay clubs for years, did not want to reproduce one, nor let us just peek in. We are left outside, as if in a backyard or hallway, faced with pulsing, almost industrial-like infrastructure made from ductwork, scaffolding, induction speakers, hypnotic electronic beats, and field recordings of club chatter. The vibrating sound of the imaginary interior is coupled with charcoal abstract drawings titled feedback loops.
Cappello comments how the setting is a playful abstraction and recontextualization of the giver/receiver dynamics, an analogue energy transfer. As David J. Getsy asks, what shall we do with the artists who “refuse to present the human form but demand that their sculptures be seen as related to human bodies and persons”? Getsy proposes a “transgender capacity” model where we are moving away from pre-inscribing gender to artworks, but still acknowledge a plurality of body responses to abstract and non-referential artworks. [2]
At the same time, Cappello cites Joel Sunders and his edited book STUD: Architectures of Masculinity as a major inspiration. From a queer theory’s perspective, Sunders approaches “the built environment as composed of an ensemble of elements... that facilitate the performance of identity.”[3] Queer spaces are often pre-existing spaces appropriated for queer use. At the same time, they are “unmediated and unfettered,” affirmative and supportive to their communities, but also veiled in secrecy and ephemerality.[4] Cappello respects the integrity of both spaces and communities and their right to opacity. Imposing a position of outsideness, we are left with a daydream-like “concrete utopia,” a place to imagine queerness which is not yet here.[5] According to the artist: “It [the installation] is a network of sensations that blurs the line between dance music and liturgical atmosphere, a city of the future built as a refuge from the crush of urbanism.”[6]
[1] Reference to: The Chemical Brothers, “Let Us Build a City,” Born in the Echoes Virgin EMI, 2015.
[2] David J, Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. xi-xvii, 34-36.
[3] Joel Sunders, “Preface to 2021 Reissue,” in STUD: Architectures of Masculinity (New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 2021), p. 6.
[4] Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell, “Introduction,” in Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories (London: RIBA Publishing, 2022), pp. x-xi.
[5] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NYU Press, 2009), p. 3.
[6] Daniel Cappello, “Artist Statement,” Tyler School of Art and Architecture, n.d., https:// tyler.temple.edu/daniel-cappello-mfa-2024.
Exemplified by the large canvas propped up in the corner showcasing bodies bisected, recombined and even set on fire, the various amalgamations of flesh in Elliot Engles’ works turn a viewer toward an understanding of (trans) identity as an ever-changing, never-ending process. This encapsulation of what it means to be constantly “in progress” extends to the smallest details of Trans(de)substantiation, both in its incorporation of Engles’ experiences as a trans-identified artist and through the intentional choice to leave many aspects of the exhibition in various stages of their making.
In one’s trans-becoming (rather than becoming trans), the body never reaches a stage of finality in some semblance of its “truest” form; in fact, the act of transitioning never reaches a conclusion as there is no designated beginning, middle, or end. The collaged elements of Engles’ work (including, but not limited to, pornography magazines and religious paraphernalia) alongside composite, biblically inspired bodies made of hands, feet, genitals, wings, and all sorts of other disembodied parts, challenge us to contemplate the act of perceiving and being perceived while in a constant state of transition.
This show complicates the idea of what it means to see and be seen as a trans body navigating a world increasingly pervaded with constant surveillance. It is here that the artist’s work extends beyond their own self and directly implicates our role in the space as viewer/voyeur. In some cases, the viewer’s gaze is reflected upon themselves through the use of mirrors; in another case, the viewer/viewed dichotomy is muddied through the incorporation of actualized bodily presence, where one is beckoned forth to sit in a pew-styled bench situated directly in front of Engles’ painted trinity of flesh-colored angels. With each situated on top of their own toilet, their dramatic lighting and amalgamated forms remind us that being trans means being in a constant state of reconfiguration, redefinition, undoing, redoing, and becoming.
Drawing upon her upbringing in Vietnam and her exploration of queer identity, Ha Tran employs a healthy dose of compassion to create designs for social good. A multidisciplinary designer and graphic artist, Tran creates diverse pieces that range from interactive websites to branding campaigns and book projects, all with themes of belonging. By infusing her work with humor, Tran softens messaging around what can often be challenging content for the user. Her designs gently navigate puzzling questions of transition and selfhood, including mortality and sexual and cultural identity. Ultimately, Tran’s works are generous tools for insight, as if a dear friend were guiding you through a self-reflection process – simultaneously frank, laughter-inducing, and nurturing.
Ha Tran
Written by Robin Morris
Tran’s multilingual sensibilities serve as a pillar in her work. Language is an expansive tool, one that makes cross-cultural connections, invites lightness through playful word association, and serves to create evocative imagery. Within her Queer Asian Film Festival project Monsoon, Tran’s title choice signifies the geography of the region, while also suggesting the artistic saturation the festival will provide. In her activity book project, users are invited to take a deep dive into their sexual identity with the title Deep Dyke: Am I Lesbian Enough? Linguistic ingenuity is exhibited within word choice as well as texts’ physical arrangement. In her book project which spotlights the modest visual language within graphic design from Vietnam’s economically frugal Subsidy Period, Tran overlaps Vietnamese and English types, referencing both Eastern and Western printing materials. The book investigates how languages can coexist and imbricate by experimenting with the way the two languages obstruct one another. She challenges the default position that English often assumes by giving both languages equal visual emphasis.
Tran addresses themes of identity within her sensitive, witty, and information-dense designs. Heavily researched, her work acts as an educational tool for the user. By overlapping, stretching, combining, and slicing type, Tran provides a visceral reading sensation echoing the relationship of intersectional identities.
Heather Annette Phillips
Written by Miray Eroglu
In her collection In Between the Light and the Darkness, Heather Annette Phillips creates multilayered circular glass works housed in light boxes using enamel, fused powder, and pate de verre techniques on bullseye glass made by fusing sheet glass. The fusion of these elements is achieved by the materiality of the self-illuminated glass, which creates illusionistic surfaces reminiscent of nature and the cosmos. The luminous round glass surfaces invite personal reflection and cosmic contemplation. While colored lit glass as an architectural element is often associated with religious settings – such as stained-glass windows in churches and chapels – Phillips’ glass compositions transfer and make abstract the spiritual element into secular settings, existing somewhere “in between light and darkness,” a phrase that came to her in a dream.
Do you see lava, dark matter, or an ancient star? Lava appears to go beyond the surface and exudes a soothing, hypnotic beauty. The glass circles can thus function as portals for individual transcendence, with each glasswork forming its own focal points. Repeating patterns, such as fractals and geometric designs, appear in many of the works. Phillips crafts patterns using natural processes, including soap bubbles, and integrates dried ginkgo and maple leaves and poppy flowers pressed between two sheets of glass. Slowly burning out the middle to transfer traces of the foliage remains creates fossil-like skeletal outlines from the ash that form the veins of the flower and leaves. Maple leaves, symbolic of her childhood and Canadian heritage, feature prominently in one of her glassworks, enlivening autumnal memories of falling leaves. Butterfly in a Storm is evocative of finding a calm center, mirroring processes of metamorphosis fused into the glass surface, and prompts us to embrace the cycles of life. The Blue Hour refers to the time of day when most of the world is asleep, drawing us into the Zen stillness of twilight.
Meditation, transcendence, and personal spirituality are at the core of Phillips’ works, inspired by the universe’s patterns found in nature and in ourselves. The circle’s meditative shape is paramount, evoking mandalas, planets, and ocular forms. Circles revolve around a center, and their curves offer a sense of wholeness, infiniteness, and symbolic meaning. This is spatially evoked in the exhibition by Phillips’ choice to have round seating furniture so visitors can curate their own view. The smooth, still glass surfaces project an ethereal, celestial energy through patterns that upon close inspection appear moving, replicating the tangible and intangible forces extending from our bodies to the cosmos.
What kind of schmuck gets eaten by a whale? Jonah, that’s who. Almost everyone knows of Jonah and the whale, but what is told is only half the story. Let’s be real, Jonah is a jerk who only wants salvation for his people. When commanded by God to go to Nineveh and convert its “wicked” people, he would rather flee and be eaten by a whale than do his damn job. His God is merciful, and Jonah doesn’t believe the Ninevites deserve that mercy. Even when he finally gives in, and is spectacularly successful by the way, he’s annoyed at his God’s generosity.
This story of the stubborn prophet is at the heart of Selfish Prophet Syndrome In his installation, and practice in general, Henry David Rosenberg takes stories we think we know and exaggerates them to the point of caricature. Rooted in the history of print as a tool to spread communication, Rosenberg combines etchings with complementary media to examine and accentuate the story’s relationship to the world today.
Henry Rosenberg
Written by Jackie Streker
In Selfish Prophet Syndrome etchings depict the lesser-known parts of Jonah’s spiel and represent the institutional story. As a society, we tend to trust the printed word or image above all. Rosenberg questions this belief by flipping the script. Drawings usually pushed to the edges become oversized grotesques that encroach on the official story by holding up the prints and sometimes physically pulling along the narrative. Ceramics emerge on the wall and begin to cross the physical barrier between viewer and image; perhaps the world in these prints is not as dissimilar from ours as we would like to think. No longer is this religious story stuck in the past, as Rosenberg’s multi-media doodles puncture the illusion of time and reflect the role of oral tradition in creating formal narratives.
Selfish Prophet Syndrome is about more than the story of Jonah and the whale; it’s also about how tales are told. In his installation, Rosenberg makes visible the performance of storytelling and by embracing humor and wit encourages the viewer to reflect on the stories we perpetuate.
Jake Lahah
Written by Gillian Yee
Built by Popular Demand (detail) (ABOVE)
Installation, latex print on vinyl, spray painted die-cut Coroplast, garden stakes, glue, zip ties, Home Depot and Lowes buckets, synthetic and dying plants, concrete, colored paint, screen-printed foam board, screen-printed wood, quilted moving blankets with adhesive vinyl, bleached fabric, blown glass vessels, and lighting systems.
Dimensions variable.
Photo credit: Sam Fritch
Growing up in the small tourist town of Wildwood, NJ, Jake Lahah seeks in Built by Popular Demand to dive past the perfectly curated front of pseudo-tropical tourist destinations in the U.S. in considering how they operate as carefully built sites of cultural production. That is, in these simulated pockets of paradise where one can leave their troubles behind for some wellneeded fun in the sun, palm trees and their accompanying “tropical” aesthetics cater to a predominantly Western perspective of utopia.
Lahah specifically homes in on the palm tree as a continuing symbol of utopia and the meticulous curation of spaces as lush and luxurious. Accompanied by brightly colored fake plants covered in concrete, the palm trees of Lahah’s installed facsimile of paradise in one corner of the exhibition are made of garden stakes and corrugated plastic, the latter being a material that is informed by the artist’s experience in the signage industry. This, in turn, implores us to look past these environments’ refined surfaces and consider what lies beyond – or what tends to be swept under the rug.
Behind the perfect, fantasy-esque facade that their presence provides, the literal uprooting of palm trees from their native habitats to the United States has resulted in extensive environmental destruction in other parts of the world. This can be seen, for example, in the several prints throughout the exhibition that study the deforested land resulting from this uprooting. Other works, such as those on Lahah’s worktable, point toward how this plant is also used in the manufacturing of palm oil – widely used for fuel, food, and various beauty products –through the incorporation of advertisement imagery. With a delicate, interconnected web of glass sitting on top of these prints, the palm tree encompasses an integral space in producing specific ideals of perfection and utopia just by its sheer presence. In the interplay of the fake and the real, Lahah emphasizes the carefully constructed aesthetics that build upon a specific idea of what paradise is and what it should look like.
Built by Popular Demand (TOP CENTER)
Installation, latex print on vinyl, spray painted die-cut Coroplast, garden stakes, glue, zip ties, Home Depot and Lowes buckets, synthetic and dying plants, concrete, colored paint, screen-printed foam board, screen-printed wood, quilted moving blankets with adhesive vinyl, bleached fabric, blown glass vessels, and lighting systems.
Dimensions variable.
Photo credit: Sam Fritch
Changing Time (BOTTOM LEFT)
Screen print on drafting Mylar, dead and synthetic palm frond. 36” x 36”. Photo credit: Sam Fritch
Expanding the Network (BOTTOM RIGHT)
Installation view.
Screen print on pink insulation foam, found map, blown glass, flameworked borosilicate glass, sawhorses. 96” x 35” x 29”.
Photo credit: Sam Fritch
John Erwin Dillard
Written by Rachel Vorsanger
Imagine the Earth at the beginning of its existence: searing temperatures meant that it was covered in molten magma that bubbled and crystallized as it moved and spurted into the air, while the craggy rock surface was the only substance that could withstand the heat of the sun. It was an inhospitable and unrecognizable environment. Or so we hypothesize. We are certain that oceans appeared a few hundred million years after the planet began to cool[1] , and that a few hundred million years after that, John Erwin Dillard created the works in his thesis show.
Dillard is a sculptor whose practice incites us to imagine such sweeping timelines and speculate about our own – or perhaps another world’s – primordial existence. Using our natural world as a point of departure, Dillard has wielded glass and silicone to invent imposing forms, some standing several feet tall and others several feet wide, that seemingly defy our rules of physics and logic. Elongated tendrils extend impossibly far outward from their respective central structures, whose perceived precarity in turn challenge the laws of gravity; vessels, orbs, and petals have seemingly sprung up from within one another to present as weightless stacked appendages that could grow ad infinitum; and whether black, lavender, pink, or blue, the colors in each work are mischievous and mercurial as they change tone and hue depending on the viewer’s vantage point. In Dillard's world, even recognizable elements of nature like the wings of a butterfly deviate from our expectations, for the glass in which they are rendered makes them useless for flight and is not derived organically but rather constructed by Dillard himself.
These sculptures are sites of contemplation that not only evoke a past we never knew, but cast us into a future we will never see. Glass is a material that takes up to one million years to decompose,[2] a fact of which Dillard is aware and embraces as a means to extend his thoughts beyond his own lifetime.[3] The future that these works will see is just as inconceivable as our primordial past.
[1] “Formation of Earth,” n.d. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/formation-earth/.
[2] “The Decomposition Clock,” n.d. https://www.roadrunnerwm.com/blog/decomposition-clock.
[3] Author’s conversation with the artist
Juhyung Park
Written by Liam Maher
Appearances can be, and often are, deceptive in Juhyung Park’s work. Sleek, razor-sharp, and uniformly crafted, Park’s work appears mass-produced, and it is surprising to realize each object is intimately assembled by the artist’s own hands. He uses digital design programs to create his unique forms, which he then assembles with machine-like precision. This union of digital and human processes is critical to Park’s practice, which examines the hidden labor of people within systems of modernity, namely capitalism.
Park sees craft as an opportunity to extend art into our daily lives. He transforms objects of utility into contemplative exercises on critical issues. His Convergence series, for example, casts intersecting forms in metal sheets, resembling a soft embrace or perhaps an arduous tectonic grinding. Primarily used for vessels and lampshades, Convergence speaks to the artist’s experience seeing firsthand the tensions between North and South Korea, as well as his time serving in a combat police unit. The normalized tension between North and South inspired Park to contemplate this reality through visual forms. Convergence objects require careful fitting of two irregular forms, which, when cut by hand, demand countless hours of attention. The resulting transformation of the two forms produces an object with expanded functionality, a metaphor for Park’s hope of fruitful conflict resolution.
Park has elaborated on this theme with A Façade which more pointedly critiques capitalism’s violent resource consumption. This series of brooches, sculptures, and lamps uses aluminum, a resource acquired through intense environmental degradation. In addition to its potent environmental impact, aluminum is the second lightest metal on Earth, despite its heavy and solid appearance. Park expertly exploits this juxtaposition of appearance and weight, crafting bulky, cubist forms through his hybrid digital-manual process. A Façade is dependent on this union of digital and human design; the aluminum he uses is too thin to cut with a machine, as the heat of the machine warps the metal. These impossibly light works are tactile façades, revealing how easily our senses can be manipulated by social norms and how quickly we can reorient ourselves through physical engagement with these practices.
“Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks.”
This is the opening line to a poem by A.E. Stallings called “Fairy-tale Logic.” Katharine Suchan is inspired by the logic of fairy tales, but unlike the story posited by Stallings, what she asks of the viewer is far from impossible. Through paintings of imagined and obscured landscapes, Suchan encourages the viewer to envision their own narrative. Traveling around the scene, discovering monuments like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, flora and fauna, unicorns, and skeletons, a story is revealed, but it is not one which Suchan created. Rather she makes visible the unassumed and invites the viewer to become lost in the work.
Katharine Suchan
Written by Jackie Streker
Suchan skillfully plays with perspective and scale. Using collage methodology, she simultaneously flattens a multi-dimensional landscape to a single plane and at the same time acknowledges that it expands far beyond the boundaries of her canvas. Paintings like have considered the lilies and gateway to the isle of horns are portals to a new world. But these portals aren’t easy to enter. Employing analogous color palettes, Suchan suggests a lens between painting and viewer. These lenses color our perception and remind us that we must traverse time and space to embody her world.
Suchan’s choice of spatial construction and colored environments from green to pink considers the traditional “blue of distance” and imbues each painting with a different emotion. We are invited into her world, but Suchan reminds us that we come with our own baggage. Our prejudices, like the color she applies, tint the landscape and therefore our story. We begin to question what we bring to the table versus what Suchan has offered us and examine the credibility of our story and our memory.
Maxwell Davis
Written by Liam Maher
Waiting...Bottom Text (ABOVE)
Two Broaches on a denim quilt Powder coated cooper, acrylic, collage, denim, nylon, astroturf, zinc findings.
Photo credit: Sam Fritch
Maxwell Davis’ work imagines a world where Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto was penned in AOL chat rooms and spoken across Unisonic translucent plastic landlines. Explosions of neon and sensuously tactile materials transform familiar icons into a landscape of techno-sexual exploration. Davis’ Y2K aesthetic augments complex sculptural works that, even without vibrant hues and busy patterns, show the artist’s prowess as a jewelry- maker, sculptor, and conceptual artist. With his work, Davis critiques the twisted rituals of repressed men whose internalized homophobia compels a hypermasculine performance. In rendering staples of masculinity in the aesthetics of the Cybernet, Davis playfully foregrounds the homoeroticism of hypermasculine culture.
Davis’ “skeuomorphs” – which can be clipped onto belts, worn as necklaces, or hung against the wall – are exemplary of his approach. Davis describes these as “desktop icons come to life,” literal queer icons imbued with protective powers. These objects represent both AFK and online concepts: squirt emojis, peaches, and gloryholes to name a few.[1] Neon green, hot pink, electric blue, and ultraviolet plastics give these charms a toy-like appearance juxtaposed against their industrial-grade design. The construction-grade quality of these works stands in contrast to their apparent lack of utility; they are built to last, but for what purpose? Davis creates a space of unlimited potential, inviting viewers to participate in the creation of a whimsical utopia queered to reflect their personal desires and sexual fantasies.
Ride at Your Own Risk! the pinnacle of Davis’ thesis show, takes this mixture of child’s play and adult themes to the edge. The work consists of a rideable stuffed eggplant attached to the legs of an Eames rocking chair. The taut body of the eggplant, covered in satin-finish purple fabric, has the feel of an enormous, condom-sheathed penis comically tossing the rider about as they rock back and forth. It is impossible not to giggle and feel somewhat sensual with this work, or any other work by Davis. To encounter Davis’ work is to risk a playful encounter with one’s own sexual fantasies. In the artist’s masterful vision, this space of psycho-sexual discovery remains inviting, joyous, and exciting, just as it should be.
[1] For an in-depth theorization of “AFK” (“Away From Keyboard”) versus “online,” see Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism
(BOTTOM RIGHT) Installation view. Silicone, plastic capsules. 1” x 1” x 1”. (each)
Photo credit: Sam Fritch
MeiLi Carling
Written by Liam Maher
How can design create a solution to this problem?
This is the guiding question of MeiLi Carling’s graphic design practice. They wear many hats; as a designer, illustrator, musician, labor organizer, and educator, Carling’s knowledge stems from a life of creative thinking, education, and innovative problem solving. Their projects reflect this attunement through uncovering overlooked real-world dilemmas and delivering tailored solutions based on user research.
Carling’s award-winning concept for Exhale, a size-inclusive clinic, epitomizes their ability to maximize design’s potential to challenge cultural biases. After collecting data from self-identifying plus-size/fat individuals, they identified key disparities and biases in the healthcare industry and developed a service that addresses these issues through design. Through their research, they found that many plus-size/fat individuals received a lower quality of care due to discrimination, which in turn sowed distrust toward healthcare providers. Exhale responds to this with a clinic tailored to these needs. Carling’s portfolio balances the authoritative aesthetics of the healthcare industry with an invitational, friendly schema that affirms the clinic as a new approach. They intentionally source photographs of fat bodies to emphasize that at Exhale all body types are respected and treated with care.
Carling’s passion for creating intersectional spaces of healing and wellbeing extends to another project: Freehand, a brand of accessible art supplies meant for people with limited hand mobility. Every detail – from the aesthetics through the packaging materials – is crafted with the needs of potential users in mind. The logos and brand patterns incorporate various calligraphic strokes and a variety of hand designs to emphasize the inclusive aims of Freehand The boxes for pens require minimal grip strength and finger dexterity to open; they use magnetic closures and easy-grip handles for easy access and transportation. Individual pens come in a variety of ergonomic shapes, catering to various needs of those with limited hand mobility.
Be it a healthcare clinic or an art supply brand, Carling’s work demonstrates an attunement to the needs of everyday people. Simply solving a problem is not enough for them, though. They work to transform the conventions and priorities of the design world to better serve underrepresented individuals.
In a world that can often feel reductive and isolating, Mike Ray’s designs promote connectivity between humans. With a previous career in the private sector, he brings decades of experience and a sense of mentorship to his projects, shaping his focus on the individual. It is the bond between people, whether a long engagement or a short exchange, that makes for a successful business, a cup-filling social event, or a profound conversation.
Mike Ray
Written by Robin Morris
Take, for example, his projects that address introversion. Quiet Force, a workbook tailored to the introverted individual, honors their unique traits of observation and listening, and offers methods for turning nervous anxiety into exciting potential. As an introvert himself, Ray reflects, “While we are not the loudest people in a group dynamic, we often provide some of the most powerful contributions.” Similarly, Ray’s app F*ck Small Talk is designed to convert awkward and dead airtime into meaningful conversation. What began as a project for introverts developed into a guide for uncovering vast overlaps between people existing below the surface. In our post-pandemic world, the need to gather remains. Give and Taste is a dinner party toolkit supplying thematically guided prompts catered to a range of audiences. A graphic symbol mirroring both an infinity sign and a heart decorates decks of “conversation cards.” By providing a loose structure of engaging activities, Give and Taste embraces conversations’ ebb and flow, creating an emotionally nourishing event.
Ray’s designs empower people to know and celebrate themselves. His subtle color and pattern choices create playful aesthetics for projects that encourage joyful expression. His experimental pinup book, Sek-See, celebrates the diversity of the queer body, ideal in non-typical ways. Flashes of bright color, bold black and white photos, and hand-sketched elements produce an unapologetic embrace of authenticity and confidence.
Diverse individuals are the subjects of Ray’s projects. Through careful aesthetic choices and gentle instructions, he coaxes users to develop personal and group practices that engender self-celebration, unfolding conversations, and genuine interplay.
Emanating from a crucible of salvaged automotive mirrors nestled on an uneven platform made of lustrous asphalt, pools of silvery light glint and flicker across the gallery’s walls. Molly Burt-Westvig’s monumental video sculpture To Trace a Sunbeam is activated by a pair of short-throw projectors that are positioned just above the amalgamation of mirrored glass and solidified oil. These projectors emit a video of water bubbling on the surface of a highway. The combination of projections thus transforms the gallery into an aquatic environment.
The familiar phrase “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” appears several times throughout the exhibition. It serves as a reminder to viewers to slow down and look closely as they make their way through the space. For example, the wall-mounted video sculpture Sleight of Hand, Feint of Heart appears to sway in the breeze, as though caught by the gust of a passerby. On the floor nearby, another short-throw projector casts a video of a figure onto the roughly textured bricks of Closer Than They Appear This moving silhouette evokes the familiar sight of someone unwittingly blocking a screen.
Molly Burt-Westvig
Written by Molly Mapstone
To create these innovative video sculptures, Burt-Westvig draws from materials found near her studio and home in Philadelphia. A major theme of this body of work is the relationship between the digital and physical. In combining the matter of the city with video, photography, printmaking and sculpture, Burt-Westvig creates work that invites viewers to connect with their own sense of scale, space, and time. In doing so, these works demonstrate that through sustained engagement, sublime, arresting beauty can be found in everyday sites and experiences.
Belonging is an undercurrent in Nghi To’s projects using design to communicate inclusive narratives and provide space to connect, feel, and explore. Whether food, community, or emotional labor, To’s work engages its audience in processes of cultural production and forms of agency. Mâm a traditional Vietnamese food meal kit service designed by To, is inspired by the dishes from her hometown Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and invites people to participate in cooking a Vietnamese meal, gather at their own Vietnamese Dinner Party, and share the tastes of her childhood. Alongside cultural identity, To’s work draws on her queer identity. Revolt! explores the typography of the Queer Revolution through an interactive, virtual display of posters and zines from the 1970s and 1980s and invites audiences to respond to the (imaginative) exhibition by creating their own sharable protest poster using an online platform by manipulating archival materials.
Additionally, To collaborated with the MFA Graphic Design cohort to create a thoughtful branding system that reflects the goals of Science& a non-profit organization focused on uplifting traditionally underrepresented scientists through skill-sharing workshops.
Written by Miray Eroglu
Using graphic design, color, and illustration, To’s projects emphasize self-care, compassion, and empathy. The restorative act of tending to a garden and planting seeds, motivated Rooted an idea for a gardening service to offer hope in hard times. Learning to feel at home with oneself and the environment encompasses Don’t Be Scared To’s interactive children’s book spotlighting difficult emotions such as fear, anger, loneliness, and disappointment by visualizing how these feelings manifest in our bodies, influence our moods, modeling how emotions offer possibilities for empathy and connection. By moving the pop-up emotional creatures, readers can learn emotional literacy and make friends with these characters, recognizing them in their own lives and realizing the positive impact of acceptance. Me Time To’s vibrant, moving acrylic clock, featuring magnetic inserts for each hour, reminds us of the importance of setting aside time for ourselves, our daily outlets, and adding fun moments to our routines to create a positive view of time: What if our hours were marked not by deadlines and tasks, but activities such as jumping for joy?
Nilou Kazemzadeh
Written by Emily L. Dugan
In a world full of chaos and noise, Nilou Kazemzadeh seeks to find quiet connections to nature as a place of family, solace, and joyful revolt. While walking along the banks of a small tributary to the Potomac River, Kazemzadeh borrows the earth, collecting stones and sediment that transform into her artwork. The experience is meditative for her – the gathering, the creation, and the transformation of these materials into mineral pigments and ceramic. The striations of rock and earth – layers of red, yellow and blue – show her the slow changes of the earth. Their compression and metamorphosis are marked in geology – and her work reflects these natural processes through a re-making, as she transmutes rock and clay through erosion and firing into etchings, vessels and natural forms.
Kazemzadeh looks to the temporality of nature to find both resilience and connection. Her work embodies the inherent transformations of the natural world as a continuum of reciprocity and acceptance to resist “isolating and harmful power systems built on politically motivated agendas” from governing bodies such as the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States. Kazemzadeh’s multimedia work spans printmaking and ceramics, collaboration, and intimacy. Her works, in this process of becoming, are portals to Kazemzadeh’s roots – relics of the people and places that shaped her as much as she can shape the gifts they give. At once, meaning and material are combined, and ground both artist and viewer in the cycles of the earth. Kazemzadeh asks us to consider how connecting to our lineage and environment can create a space of joy and healing by showing us how to consider a future that honors our “bonds with the world around us and, ultimately, with ourselves.”
Noa Hagiladi
Written by Rachael Reynolds
Glass artist Noa Hagiladi was raised in Israel on the values of peace in a land marred with endless conflict. In Search of Hope explores her healing, mental health, perseverance, and vulnerability as her connection to the soil and the life it propagates is uprooted by her distance from her home. Just as glass is fragile and capable of great strength, Hagiladi poetically balances the duality of the fractured landscape and the personal impact on those who call it home and have, for decades, lived through waves of conflict.
Representing a tapestry greater than any individual identity, Hagiladi’s most significant piece is a monochromatic glass sculpture that spans a wall that creates a composite landscape modeled from a photograph she took two years ago. The image represents a graveyard of fallen trees that lie uprooted and immovable. The transparent glass landscape of fallen trees requires the viewer to look beyond the image to the centuries past. Hagiladi’s glass panels hold the personal fractures she attempts to heal through making this work.
Hagiladi's work is a hopeful plea for peace and reconciliation through the lens of personal restoration and the push and pull of past and present, absence and presence, and desire and longing. She fills the gallery with glass branches and fused glass panels that panoramically reveal a fissured desert. Finally, in conversation with the still glass sculptures, a video piece depicts the artist walking across the dry earth. Her bare feet walking across the dry and audibly crunching desert represent sedulous progress, embodying a hopeful persistence.
For me, and any audience in this present moment, it is unavoidable to relate Hagiladi’s work to the loss, displacement, fracture, and trauma caused by the senseless violence across state-drawn lines and the fragile hope for peace that hangs by a thread. Hagiladi reminds us to preserve humanity and individual healing by sharing her emotional fractures and choosing hope. Her art is a powerful reminder of the urgent need for an end to violence.
Ollie Goss
Written by Danielle Degon Rhodes
Ollie Goss’s Goose Song transforms the gallery space into a captivating spectacle reminiscent of an amusement park, with its own set of rules and regulations. Visitors are guided along pathways marked by arrows on the floor, leading them through the immersive installation in a single direction. The journey begins at a video viewing area where they are shown a montage of geese navigating bodies of water, interspersed with a town hall debate about land access and surreal performances featuring the artist embodying the spirit of a goose.
A “swan song” refers to the rare, pleasing melody of the otherwise quiet animal as it approaches death. By contrast, the relentless shriek of the goose reminds us of the enduring spirit of resistance embodied by these often-overlooked creatures: Vocal in their dissent, they are elevated to emblematic figures within Goss’s creation, and the notion of a "goose song" emerges as a potent metaphor for resistance.
Upon completion of the video experience, viewers are directed to join a queue that leads to the entrance of a makeshift tram ride shaped like a goose. Waiting in line beside stanchions, viewers are urged to engage in dialogue with fellow attendees. Thought-provoking questions adorn the stanchions, fostering discussions on rule-breaking, regret, and the societal implications of adherence to or defiance of rules.
Once aboard the single-rider goose-shaped vehicle, participants embark on a fleeting, yet exhilarating 15-second journey around the curving track. As they manipulate an acceleration lever, the goose tram swiftly maneuvers through simulated waters, mimicking the unpredictable trajectories of the avian protagonist depicted in the video. The rider is faced with the conundrum of the goose and questions of their own adherence to the rules of the installation. Goss ingeniously coerces viewers into an act of conformity with which they must now come to terms. After riding within the form of the goose, viewers must confront their own role within the law and ultimately ask themselves, “how can I be more like the goose?”
Palimpsests are at the heart of Ramon Antonio Vega’s painting practice. Born in Puerto Rico and immersed in the metropolitan landscape of New York City, Vega has developed a keen eye for the parallel lives of postmodernism across varying cultural contexts. Vega uses painting to interrogate how modern materials and forms impact human relationships with the environment. Using construction techniques with industrial materials, he crafts expansive, environmental paintings that immerse the viewer in a wash of archived motions that document a body at work.
Vega’s primary medium is acrylic on poly tarp, a union of materials typically at odds with one another. Poly tarp, resistant to paint and staining, demands thorough preparation prior to its use as a canvas. Vega sands down the surfaces of his tarps to expose unvarnished fibers that bond with painted pigments, a meticulous process that requires skill to prevent shredding and structural weakening. After preparing his ground, Vega grids each tarp and applies paint with a variety of tools, layering colors and methods over each other to create dense fields of abstract forms.
Ramon Antonio Vega
Written by Liam Maher
Sin Titulo a large-scale 2022 painting Vega produced shortly after commencing his studies, speaks to Vega’s abilities as an abstractionist. Using a minimal color palette of blue, teal, orange, and white, Vega paints across, over, and within the gridded lines of tarp folds. Towering over the viewer, this 10-by-10-foot work feels like an expansive bird’seye view of ocean waves, or perhaps a tattered stucco wall covered in fragmented wheat paste posters, or a sonic visualization of club music. Vega’s work moves beyond the visual to resonate within the viewer, calling to mind a multitude of places and experiences that link these ubiquitous materials with memories that are simultaneously universal and singular.
There is something to be said as well about Vega’s aesthetic use of the tarp, a common sight in contemporary Puerto Rico. Post-Hurricane María, poly tarp rooflines are still part of the island’s architectural jargon. As cosmopolitan as Vega’s works are, they remain specific to Puerto Rico and the palimpsestic spaces that first formed and continue to impact Vega’s worldview.
Calle Bahia (ABOVE)
Ryan Scails
Written by Robin Morris
The politics of sheltering the body sit at the core of Ryan Scails’s fiber sculptures. Through careful consideration of raw materials and their use-history, Scails creates works that tell stories of systems of domination and reconstitutes materials to offer constructions that shield and empower today’s Black bodies.
The artist’s work is often directed by textiles that possess violent pasts. Take, for example, how he employs cotton, including his own, well-worn clothing within his creations. Such use of cotton in relation to garments for the Black body invokes the crop’s history of exploitation, a tool of colonization and slavery. Within his sculpture Lichen, Scails proposes a mutable garment system, made of canvas (a cotton fabric). He uses a simple triangular pattern and an exposed seam to sew cone forms, which he has coined “AEU’s (anti-exposure units).” The cones vary in dimension and easily build upon one another, illustrating their iterative possibilities, thus inviting the viewer to engage in the processes of production. By choosing cotton, weighted with oppressive associations, to create a sculpture that tests construction methods for sheltering the very bodies the material was once used to subjugate, the artist redistributes power and offers agency to the oppressed.
Scails’s work simultaneously offers restorative solutions while complicating material and treatment. Stack is a pyramid-shaped sculpture inspired by militaries’ wartime practice of airdropping equipment. These drops contain dual possibilities: the matter inside can be used to adhere to prevailing systems of power, or to trouble the systems at play, depending on the contents and the recipient. While airdrops can deliver war supplies, they can also offer aid to innocent civilians. Scails’s Stack reconstitutes Kevlar, a fabric used in bulletproof vests for the protection of those in power, to create a package symbolically filled with survival supplies.
Looking beyond materiality to process and manipulation, Scails’s sculptures inform us of the plural purposes inherent in a material, whose potential for oppression or liberation is unlocked by a user’s intentions.
Theophilus Annor
Written by Jackie Streker
For Theophilus Annor, the canvas is not a stagnant surface that hangs on the wall. Instead, it is the human body. His jewelry pieces are meant to be worn, and when worn by other members of the African diaspora, boundaries between art and life begin to blur. They are no longer disembodied objects but become one with the wearer and make statements on their behalf by celebrating and honoring the individual’s roots.
Annor started as a metal artisan inspired by local metal workers in his hometown of Asamankese, Ghana. The concept of home is integral to Annor’s practice, as evidenced in the title of the piece Home With Me. Coming from Ghana to Philadelphia to study at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Annor contemplated how he could travel home without leaving campus. His answer was symbols. Adinkra symbols – traditional representations of proverbs and philosophical concepts –are transformed using 3D-printing technology, finding new homes in the contemporary medium as Annor has found a new world in Philly. Initially drawn to metal because of its ability to fluctuate between material states (i.e. liquid and solid), this same interest affects his approach to 3D-printing. The malleability of the material is embraced to create a sense of mutation. The agyinduwura symbol is shrunk and repeated to create a textile-like pattern. Close looking is rewarded when the small-scale symbol reveals itself to the viewer, and combined with cultural knowledge the complete meaning is understood. But only to those who can read it.
When speaking about Ghana, Annor recalls the sheer amount of color seen every day on the street. For his work to truly transport his wearer home, Annor dyes some pieces in colors pulled from Kente cloth, a traditional style of weaving found all over Ghana. Like the adinkra symbols, every color in Kente has a specific meaning that represents the history and values of the wearer. The English saying may be “to wear your heart on your sleeve,” but Annor wants his audience to wear their heritage, their culture, and their identity on their chest.
William Toney
Written by Rachael Reynolds
Blackness, Queerness, and Techno.
Representing Black Queer Techno counterculture, photographer Will Toney highlights the erasure of the Black roots of techno and its reclaimed history by Black Queer spaces. Toney’s installation is a sensorial guide that allows the onlooker to step into the anonymous silhouetted figures in raving light and experience Black ideas of how sound, light, and space mute or disrupt the mental or physical violence toward the Black Queer community.
The materials with which Toney thoughtfully constructs his images provide immersive haptics to the installation. Using projected media, audio, tiled composite photographs, and constructed speaker panels with sound materials, Toney stations his images as a looking glass through which a club environment can be imagined. Toney joins a long history of Black use of silhouette by only offering depictions of figures devoid of personal identity. By removing individual specificity, the figure represents the Black experience rather than personal subjectivity. Particularly for a Black Queer viewer, Toney visually invites the audience to immerse themselves within the atmosphere he creates and the haven it provides.
Techno culture is a mechanism of expression that protects the anonymity, agency, and safety of community. Like house music, ballroom, and disco before it, the development of EDM and Techno provided spaces for the Black and Queer communities to flourish without resistance. Toney’s work rejects the commodification of Black culture by reclaiming these histories and suggesting Queer as oppositional to the norm and synonymous with authentic progress. Queer rave spaces provide a cathartic and disembodied site for experimentation and anonymity among the crowd on a fog-filled dance floor. It allows the rave-goer to blend into the environment and community, creating a sense of belonging that disappears outside the rave doors.
As I draft this essay in February 2024, Palestine’s Ministry of Health reports that at least 29,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s army since October the year prior.[1] Of these confirmed casualties, 10,000 are children.[2] Just last month, the daily death rate in Gaza rose higher than any major conflict of the 21st century.[3] Despite univocal calls worldwide for Israel to end this brutal invasion of Palestine, the United States continues to provide capital to Israel’s military, such as the $14 billion USD earmarked by the U.S. Senate one week before I write these words.[4]
These numbers are incomprehensible, and by the time this catalog is printed they will be severely outdated. This impossible speed and scale of violence against Palestinians has become a focal point for artist Yaqeen Alyamani, herself a Palestinian. Born in Jericho, educated in media studies and film, and accepted to Tyler to study photography, Alyamani has devoted her thesis year to processing life as a Palestinian living in the United States.
Yaqeen Alyamani
Written by Liam Maher
Those who love you, will peel you a pomegranate (still) (TOP LEFT)
Video. 00:23
Photo credit: Shaina Nasrin
Alyamani balances “rage with acts of care,” as she describes it, to mediate her grief. She counters the violent erasure of her history with recuperative works that insist themselves upon those blind to the pain of Palestine and all who resist colonial regimes. In Alyamani’s work, emotions are metered through the refined aesthetics of minimalist conceptualism. Pulling from both personal experience and archival materials to illustrate the many decades of Palestine’s occupation, Alyamani contemplates myth, storytelling, and oral history as methods for coping with loss.
Alyamani’s Checking In, for example, utilizes microaggressions received via email, printing quotations on mirrored glossy paper to implicate the viewer in how they might commit such acts in their own life. In another untitled series of cyanotypes on linen, Alyamani uses photographs of Palestine she purchased online, one of which includes her grandparents’ home. She embroiders missing parts of shelled buildings and incomplete vistas as an intimate act of recollection. Alyamani’s quiet works simmer with a pain that presses against the cool uniformity of their presentation.
[1] Wafaa Shurafa and Samy Magdy, “More than 29,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war, Gaza Health Ministry Says” in Associated Press February 19, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-02-19-2024-81c2d362340b611a98e4b929b4b5d0a4.
[2] OCHA, “Gaza: 10,000 children killed in nearly 100 days of war.” January 11, 2024. https:// reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/gaza-10000-children-killed-nearly100-days-war.
[3] Oxfam International, “Daily death rate in Gaza higher than any other major 21st-Century conflict.” January 11, 2024. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rategaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam.
[4] “US Senate passes long-delayed $95bn bill for aid to Ukraine and Israel” in Al Jazeera February 13, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/13/us-senate-passes-longdelayed-bill-for-aid-to-ukraine-and-israel.
Checking In (TOP RIGHT) Inkjet prints. 8.5” x 11”. (each)
Photo credit: Shaina Nasrin
Disclaimers prevent me from showing work here (BOTTOM CENTER)
Vinyl text.
Photo credit: Shaina Nasrin
Credit: Shaina Nasrin
Contributing Authors
Danielle Degon Rhodes
Danielle Degon Rhodes is an artist and curator who creates exhibitions and public projects through collaboration. She co-runs AUTOMAT Collective in Philadelphia and is currently pursuing an MA in Art History with a concentration in Arts Management. Her artistic and curatorial practice focuses on topics surrounding labor and material extraction – which she has further researched through residencies at the Salzburg Academy of Fine Arts in Austria and Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong.
Emily L. Dugan
Emily L. Dugan is a PhD student who specializes in 17th century Dutch artists working in England, with a particular emphasis on portraiture. Her research considers ideas surrounding memory and absence, representations of women, and the multifaceted interrelationships between object and viewer. Emily received her BA in Art History from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and her MA in Art History from Syracuse University.
Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie
Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie is a PhD student whose work considers artisanal bodily knowledge within the Holy Roman Empire. They earned degrees in History of Science and Technology from the University of Kings College, Halifax and Decorative Arts, Design, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, New York. They come to Tyler from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they held a curatorial research position in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Art.
Miray Eroglu
Miray Eroglu is a PhD student concentrating on Ottoman art and architecture and holds an MA in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and a BA from McGill University’s Faculty of Arts. She has held internships in the Islamic Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at Artam Antik Auction house in Istanbul. She also worked as a gallery assistant at The Winter Show Art Fair in New York and editorial assistant and copy editor at the Istanbul Research Institute and Pera Museum.
Contributing Authors
Emma P. Holter
Emma P. Holter is a PhD candidate whose research focuses on drawings and prints from Renaissance Venice. She earned degrees in art history from New York University and The Courtauld Institute of Art and has held curatorial and research positions at The Courtauld Gallery, Sotheby’s, and The Frick Collection. She has co-curated exhibitions at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College and the Special Collections Research Center at Temple University’s Charles Library.
Liam Maher
Liam Maher is a PhD candidate & Temple University Fellow. His dissertation focuses on Queerness, Catholicism, and anti-colonialism in 20th century and 21st century Latin American/Latinx art. His writing has appeared in Accomplice, Art & About PDX, and The National Catholic Reporter He currently teaches art history at Moore College of Art & Design.
Molly Mapstone
Molly Mapstone (she/her) is a PhD candidate whose dissertation investigates the recent history of American installation art with an emphasis on media created by the viewing public. This work addresses how the viewing public negotiated and shaped works of art during a historical period marked by collaborations between institutions and artists. She earned her MA from the Winterthur Program in Material Culture in 2021 and her BA from the University of WisconsinMadison in 2019.
Moe Marte
Moe Marte (They/Them) is a second-year MA student on the research track focusing on ancestral memory, dance, movement, and Queerness from regions in the Middle East and the Caribbean. They are interested in the ways in which our bodies hold not only knowledge but also trauma in figuring out ways of collective healing. They held previous positions at the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, and are currently working in the field of art installation.
Robin Morris
Robin Morris is a MA candidate whose research interests include anti-authoritarian youth culture in 20th-century Spanish visual art and the agency of sexual desire. Morris holds a bachelor's in art education from Towson University and a masters in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her research is strengthened by her educational sensibilities and personal art-making practice.
Noah Randolph
Noah Randolph is a PhD candidate whose current research focuses on the intersections of monuments and public art with issues of memory, race, and politics. His publications include articles in Ruckus Journal, Arts and Journal of Historical Geography
Rachael Reynolds
Rachael Reynolds (she/her) is a PhD student who specializes in the history of photography and other works on paper. Her work focuses on the performativity of photographic processes from capture to darkroom, particularly those of photographers whose work centers on gender, nature, and mysticism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Viewing photography as a creative practice and history of both art and science, Reynolds has pursued the medium artistically and academically – fostering a special interest in alternative processes and materiality.
Jackie Streker
Jackie Streker (she/they) is a PhD student focusing on print culture in the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire, and cross-cultural exchange through print at the beginning of the 16th century. They earned degrees in art history from the University of Maine and George Washington University. Before attending Tyler School of Art and Architecture, she worked as Curator of the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum.
Contributing Authors
Srđan Tunić
Srđan Tunić is a PhD student, freelance curator and cultural manager. He specializes in contemporary art, with a current research focus on street art, graffiti, murals and public art, and their intersections with gender and Queer theories, transculturality, and political activism. He is a member of Street Art Belgrade and the Not afraid of the ruins writing project. He graduated with degrees from the University of California, Davis (2023), The University of Arts in Belgrade (2017) and The University of Belgrade, Serbia (2008).
Rachel Vorsanger
Rachel Vorsanger (she/her) studies modern art from Europe and the United States. Her research examines the role of gender and displacement in the works of women abstract artists with a focus on Madrid, Barcelona, and New York City as sites of international art making from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries.
Gillian Yee
Gillian Yee (they/she) is a first-year PhD student studying modern and contemporary art history. They earned an MA in Art History from Georgia State University in 2022; their research is concerned with Queer identity and activism since the late 20th century, focusing on artwork made in response to navigating what it means to be “Queer” during times of crisis.
