Master in Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Visual Arts Theses Exhibitions
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Item I Miss You More Than I Remember YouSam, Sopheak (2025-05)This thesis seeks to supplement and constellate various nodes of research within my exhibition, constituting an assemblage of material, sensorial, and theoretical formulations. 'I Miss You More Than I Remember You' is an invocation of memory and longing, unfolding as a sensuous installation that “doubles” as a funerary procession. International remembrance observing fifty years since the Cambodian genocide on April 17, 1975, reignited discourse over narratives of historical trauma, diasporic memory, and U.S. militarism in mainland Southeast Asia. Reflecting on personal and familial experiences of displacement and resettlement, I reframe the temporal and atmospheric poetics of Theravāda Buddhism to analogize the spatial sociality of Cambodian American refugees as stuck between “insider” and “outsider.” I posit this spatial intervention as counter-memorial, resisting the historicity of archives and gesturing towards the material ephemerality of Theravāda Buddhism, particularly by appropriating Khmer funerary cloth. The exhibition title—'I Miss You More Than I Remember You'—is itself a procession of words, sensations, and intimacies, taken from a quote by Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong—further articulating the abstraction, dilution, spectrality, and attempt at replicating that which is felt. By de-historicizing mourning and grief through the affective surfaces of Buddhism, this processional installation of objects and media distills postwar intimacies to forestall futurity and renegotiate diasporic belonging.Item NEVEREVENAguilera, Adrian (2025)NEVEREVEN unfolds as an immersive exploration of the dynamic and often volatile terrain of contact zones—those in-between spaces where cultures, identities, and histories collide, intermingle, and inevitably transform one another. This idea manifests as a orchestrated three-channel video, image, text, timestamp, color (RGB), and sound installation, enveloping viewers in a multi-sensory environment. Through the interplay of fleeting movements, resonant textures, and evocative visual languages, NEVEREVEN seeks to articulate the intricate complexities inherent in moments of connection and the inevitable tensions of discord arising from cultural confluence. Extending beyond the projected screens, the installation actively solicits audience participation in a choreography of perception. It invites you into a physical and conceptual navigation of fluid perspectives and unfixed territories where established meanings dissolve and are perpetually contested and redefined. The installation invites audiences to navigate shifting perspectives and in-betweenness spaces where meaning is continually negotiatedItem Morphic ResidenceAnsary, Elina Marie (2025-05-19)Morphic Residence, investigates the House as a conceptual framework for recounting familial myth through perceptual experience. The House is simultaneously a body sheltering individual consciousness, the storehouse for ancestral memory, and the architecture of collective consciousnesses. The exhibition unfolded around the true story of a house that no longer exists. Morphic Residence casts the House as multiple characters enacting parallel dramas, presenting the underlying narrative as a mystery to unravel.Item It's not over when he comesLi, Andy Nicholas (2025-05-16)It’s not over when he comes. Or is it? The adult confronts his uneasy transformation: the aging child stares into the mirror and restructures the possibilities for who he was and will become. It’s not over when he comes is the thesis exhibition of Andy Nicholas Li (M.F.A. '25). Arranging images and sculpture in multiple scales and materials, Andy examines symbols and fantasies of masculinity where race, animality, selfhood, and sexuality demand questions on our innate sense of what is true. A boy shoots an arrow. A tower stands, a stud of horses. A muscular white man expects something from you. Internalized in our collective psyche as individual fears and desires, these mechanisms reveal where the categories of man, boy, queer, and gay perpetuate and play with power. With drawings, paintings, sculpture, video, and arrangements of the artist’s possessions, Andy installs a poetic probing inside conflict: meeting the perimeters of care and violence, toy and weapon, lust and loss. In the following essay, Andy pulls together the theoretical and personal threads for this body of work.Item Bones Between AirPark, Hyunjin (2025-05-20)Hyunjin Park's thesis show, Bones Between Air (2025), held at Tjaden Gallery in Ithaca, New York, presents her artistic practice and research on the relationships between animals and humans, life and death, grief, and feelings of displacement and longing. Through sculpture, video, installation, drawing, and photography, Park explores the boundaries of travel, migration, movement, life, and memory by focusing on the forms of living creatures like birds, dogs, and fish, as well as airplanes. These beings move across the sky, land, and water, their presence revealing both a sense of estrangement and connection and the ephemeral traces left behind during passage. In Bones Between Air, the airplane—a recurring motif throughout Park's work—transforms from a mere means of transportation into a vessel that carries memory and bridges time and space. It comes to represent the deep human longing for movement. By connecting the primordial urge to migrate with abstracted forms of animals and aircraft, the exhibition invites reflection on what movement means in an age of hyper-connectivity, where physical and digital journeys constantly intersect.Item The Nightflowers ClockfiguresTatro, Emily (2024-05-22)This document compiles poems, stories, images, and a statement relating to Emily Tatro's April 2024 thesis exhibition, The Nightflower's Clockfigures. The poems express the psychological and imaginal ground from which the works emerge, and contextualize the works as creative and expressive rather than critical. The statement is a more linear expression of the show's themes and concepts. It explicates notions of circular or spiral time, earthly life cycles, decay and growth. It relates to psychological experiences, the multiplicity of selves, and relationship between self, culture, and the more-than-human world.Item Back SpaceKnox, Annamariah (2023)Annamariah Knox presents her MFA Thesis Exhibition, Back Space, at the Olive Tjaden Experimental Gallery in Ithaca, New York. The body of work explores the relationship between perception of the corporeal body, forces that shape that perception, and the moving body as a site of extra-linguistic communication and meaning. Theatrical performance, dance, and staging are investigated through an immersive, mixed-media kaleidoscope of moving figures projected onto sculptural textile installations. The work centers modes of kinetic expression and improvisational movement, moments of chance and surprise, and the dynamic engagements of opposing pairs light and dark, revelation and obscurity, and corporeal and perceived experiences, to illuminate the life of the back space: that unseen and vulnerable column directly behind the body.