Class of 2021
Lindsey Caputo
My work has fluctuated as literal and figurative knots unable to be untangled. 2020 was the big bang for my current studio habits, already acquainted with the alienating atmospheres of the uncanny, I forged my way through another unfamiliar terrain which allowed me to translate my experience of the world into what I am calling a “hauntology”. The ideas behind my work are just as important to me as the work itself and at times, function as invisible sculptures only I can perceive. The most challenging aspect of this process is that I am limited by lostness in translation, which then creates interesting parameters for me to grapple with. I enjoy a good puzzle.
Joe Corcoran
I am interested in the ways we live together, and how we interact. I attempt to
show these interactions through my work in blown glass and neon. My forms are a direct result of the process of blowing glass in the way glass moves and behaves as a liquid when heated. Glass is a natural material, and the forms become personified into something dynamic that is seemingly moving and alive. I arrange the forms into a network that represents us collectively. Each element is then part of a larger existence that not only represents a community but also a place. I choose to emphasize these connections that reference our interactions with each other and with our environment. These interactions form our identities through lived experiences.
Nancy Edelstein
Since I was a young girl, noticing and observing light has been my way of daydreaming, and doodling, and disappearing. My interest in light is always a part of my work, exploring its visual qualities and properties.
This installation has challenged me to create a space activated by artifacts of lightʼs presence. Linear aluminum volumes mark transient moments of light that land on surfaces within the space, and extend into three dimensional expressions. Streaming light continues to engage with the shapes over time as they interrupt and cast shadows.
These unique volumes offer challenges to both perception and space. Activated by the movement of the viewer and the light, the experience of being in the space becomes one of engagement and participation.
As seasons change, these forms become a reference to both past and future moments of light. At times they are no longer punctuated directly by the light that had once reached inside the space to source them. Light is now marking only a narrow path along the edge of the floor.
My efforts to hold onto light renews an awareness of its fleeting and ephemeral presence as light continuously weaves through the many spaces, and moments, of our lives.
Denese King-Ashley
A significant focus in my current body of artwork is an exploration of beauty, personal and witnessed trauma, and resiliency. My paintings of family members and friends set against an intangible (placeless) background of serene color represents the humanity of my subjects, despite trauma, as they return the spectator’s gaze. Growing up in the West Indies, I was inspired by the natural beauty of the landscape and the rich palette of bright and vibrant hues on the houses. Having the freedom to explore in gardens filled with bountiful foliage was when I began drawing lines, organic shapes and forms that developed intuitively through memories. Drawing is my language of interior expression, a coded non-verbal language of mark making. I pay homage to the imagined growth, evolution, and unplanned possibilities of my subjects and compositions, as a form of unbounded storytelling.
Mathilda Lazelle Moore
Mathilda’s Universe is a site of fabulation grounded in extrapolative critique. Subjectivity, mythology, theoretical physics and sensuality all play critical roles in the fabric of this umbrella. Influenced by her life and cultural context on earth, Mathilda’s work is a nebuleic collage in active evolution.
Vestigial Orbit is a video work just under 13 minutes in length. Best experienced within a sculptural viewing booth, it is best understood as a rotation of particles pulled by a force of intimate isolation. Textural vignettes and abstract entities explore systems, rhythms, and scale.
Vian Nguyen
As someone living between two cultures, I have become observant of social and cultural differences within gender and race. Through my perspective as a second generation female Asian American, my work is an examination of growing up in the suburbs. With the current racial politics, I and many others have become confronted everyday with the systemic racism in our country. With this, I am reminded of the pressures that my immigrant parents placed on my siblings and myself, to conform to the social norms, to not stand out, seem more different then we already were from our community. I question the societal norms and ideals that my parents hoped we could assimilate to. So we might live the American Dream.
Leslie Renn
In the essay “Approaches to What?”, French writer Georges Perec calls on readers to “question [their] bricks, concrete, glass, [their] table manners … To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish ...” This sort of exercise in reflexiveness is fundamental to presentness, and through such meditations, it becomes easier to resist the ideologies that attempt to define our existence.To be present is to exist, but presentness is transcendence: moments are suspended in time; meanings shift; and the ordinary becomes the sublime. This shift in consciousness occurs through close observation - existing in the moments when it seems as if nothing is happening. In my own life, a state of presentness materializes just below the surface of the chaos and overwhelm, found in the unremarkable ordinary events of daily life: in the screeching brakes of the school bus; in the puffs of dust gliding across the floor; and in the vibration of a slamming door. I take note of these prosaic moments and build an archive of ephemera. The sounds, images, and objects that once seemed arbitrary now have the potential to become source material in my art practice. Rearranged and layered, these fragments disrupt the inertia and project the liminality of being.
David Salgado
n my thesis installation, "No dejes para mañana lo que puedas hacer hoy." I explore aesthetics and value through the use of color and materials. I explore the aesthetics of home through the child of the immigrant experience, noticing the differences during the time living back and forth from my home in Mexico to the one in the States. I use every day and construction objects to talk about value through the way we build our homes and think about our homes. What is valued and what is not? I use different materials and paint to allow the viewer to first engage with the beauty of the work. Then, go into noticing the differences and similarities. To see what culture is and begin questioning the value system that society and culture can impose on us. This body of work becomes a tool kit that adapts to new environments, becoming a constantly changing installation that conforms or reacts to its new location.
Wendy Tribulski
My work is composed of texts – texts that exist not only as words but also as images and gestures that can be “read.” The text and the words themselves derive from gestures – the gestures of writing: someone somewhere at some time typing, drawing a pencil across paper, dragging chalk across a blackboard, or delivering a speech. By erasing, altering, or recontextualizing a variety of texts I change the way they are read. My gesture of erasure is
not so much destructive as transformative - creating a new mark that combines what was with what is.
Cindy Vojnovic
Warp and weft / Walking along the river is horizontal / Mind and spirit are vertical / At any given moment, I am where the two cross / The farm where my family lived for generations has 8 water sources that flow into the Delaware River. I walk along that river day in and day out / There’s something primal about spinning, like walking with ancestors. The dye pot is one part laundry, one part cooking and another part painting. Practice makes for beautiful imperfections. A space is set apart / Walking along the river is life, the horizontal, the lifeline. It seems circular, as the seasons rotate endlessly, and I walk back and forth, and yet it is inexorably linear, the river ends somewhere, as will I / Making art is on the vertical axis, which rises from the earth. The vertical is dynamic, it doesn’t work without tension between the poles. / I walk and make art because I still can.
