smoke, signals, space: MFA21 Thesis Exhibition Catalog

Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

smoke, signals, space 21

Washington University in St. Louis

Thesis Exhibition

MFA in Visual Art

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smoke, signals, space

MFA in Visual Art Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis is a leader in architecture, art, and design education. We are advancing our fields through innovative research and creative practice, excellence in teaching, a world-class university art museum, and a deep commitment to addressing the social and environmental challenges of our time. Through the work of our students, faculty, and alumni, we are striving to create a more just, sustainable, humane, and beautiful world.

MFA in Visual Art Faculty Jamie Adams Michael Byron Meghan Kirkwood Richard Krueger Arny Nadler Patricia Olynyk Tim Portlock Jack Risley Denise Ward-Brown Cheryl Wassenaar Monika Weiss

Program Leadership Lisa Bulawsky

2021 MFA in Visual Art Students

Professor & Chair, MFA in Visual Art Director, Island Press

Amy Hauft Director, College of Art and Graduate School of Art Jane Reuter Hitzeman and Herbert F. Hitzeman, Jr. Professor of Art

Carmon Colangelo Ralph J. Nagel Dean, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts

Jessica Bremehr Amanda Casarez Ryan Erickson Adrian Gonzalez Maddie Grotewiel Younser (Seri) Lee Gaoyuan Pan Takura Suzuki Alexa Velez

Essays Gretchen Wagner Gretchen L. Wagner is a curator, art historian, and writer. She has completed curatorial projects and publications for the Saint Louis Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, and the International Print Center New York, among others.

Editors Stephanie Schlaifer Katherine Welsch Photographer Richard Sprengeler Designer James Walker Publisher Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts ©2021 Washington University in St. Louis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher.

Foreword

“The message coloured through time is not lack, but abundance. Not silence but many voices. Art, all art, is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die.”

Jeannette Winterson, Art Objects, 1995

A great MFA education depends on opportunities for the cross-pollination of ideas in, around, and between disciplines, in a dynamic, collaborative setting. We grow and learn exponentially from our encounters and deep engagement with others, so that the message of many voices weaves a cord of connection, empathy, rigor, and spirit. But what happens if and when a global pandemic disrupts this prospect?

Out of the evolving list of words and phrases that have come into common usage since March 2020, the word remote seems to best capture the fact and feeling of our acutely altered world, both physically and psychologically.

The nine artists in smoke, signals, space: 2021 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition know this fact and feeling all too well; they could not avoid or ignore the disruption of being remote. Yet they responded to this predicament with passion and verve, commitment and dedication—all of which is powerfully apparent in their artwork, showcased in this catalog. These artists have flourished—as individuals and as a community—making, learning, and communicating remotely, through screens and face masks, across (six-foot and greater) distances.

Titled by the exhibiting artists, smoke, signals, space acknowledges these distances between them and their studios, their facilities, their faculty, and each other. But it also acclaims the hopeful, even triumphant assertion that communication through artmaking can and does break through, and it sustains us by providing openings to each other as well as to things we often cannot fathom or describe.

The artists ask us to look out and see the forming, billowing cloud they see, to receive its dispatch, to imagine it as our own. They tell us: There is space for the emergence of forms and the forming of smoke; for the imprinting of matter and the matter of signals. They tell us: The oldest form of communication is also the future of communication.

The works in this catalog reflect the outcome of many voices engaged in critical conversation, interdisciplinary investigations, and diverse practices over the artists’ two years in the MFA in Visual Art program. They invoke critical issues of our times, positing new ways of seeing and new forms of transmission. They are testaments to the power and persistence of art and the irrepressible drive of artmaking. I wholeheartedly applaud these artists, a new generation emerging vibrantly in this time of extraordinary global challenge.

Acknowledgments

My most sincere thanks go to Gretchen Wagner, who wrote the essays in this catalog with remarkable clarity, sensitivity, and insight into each artist’s work. Thanks also to Stephanie Schlaifer, who served as expert copy editor, and to James Walker for the superb catalog design. Much appreciation to Richard Sprengeler for his photographic documentation of the exhibition. This catalog would not have been possible without the unflagging assistance of Katherine Welsch, Audrey Westcott, and Melissa Whitwam. And special thanks go to Amy Hauft, Director of the College of Art and Graduate School of Art, who was a steady force of inspiration and support.

Gratitude to everyone at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum who helped make smoke, signals, space: 2021 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition possible: Leslie Markle, who served as curator, and also Kristin Good, Erica Buss, Ida McCall, Mark Ryan, and director Sabine Eckmann for all of their efforts and support in celebrating the work of the MFA in Visual Art candidates this year, and each and every year.

On behalf of the MFA in Visual Art program in the Sam Fox School, I’d like to extend extra thanks to Patricia Olynyk, who led the program from 2007–2020 with vision and vigor, and to all of the faculty of the Graduate School of Art, whose investment in teaching, mentoring, and supporting MFA artists is inspired and unwavering. In addition, the artists benefited significantly from the critical guidance of Dana Levy and Jess T. Dugan, Freund Teaching Fellows in the MFA in Visual Art program for 2020 and 2021 respectively.

Lisa Bulawsky Professor & Chair, MFA in Visual Art Director, Island Press

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This exhibition reflects the critical conversations, interdisciplinary investigations, collective visions, and diverse practices of this distinctive group of artists. Their works are testaments to the power and persistence of art and the irrepressible drive MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION

of art making. The students, faculty, and staff of the MFA in Visual Art program in the Sam Fox School invite you to celebrate the work of this new generation of artists, surfacing in this time of such extraordinary global and national change, poised to impact the future.

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Jessica Bremehr 4 Amanda Casarez 8 Ryan Erickson 12 Adrian Gonzalez 16 Maddie Grotewiel 20 Younser (Seri) Lee 24 Gaoyuan Pan 28 Takura Suzuki 32 Alexa Velez 36

Jessica Bremehr

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In her paintings and installations, Jessica Bremehr offers viewers an escape into a fantastical world where science fiction, environmentalism, and the wellness industry intersect. To weave together these disparate realms, she accesses her daydreams and excursions into the “weirder part of the brain,” as Bremehr describes the mental journeys responsible for her art. Her bizarre combinations are made even more strange thanks to the flamboyant visual style of her images and the immersive environments, which vibrate with color and pattern. She intends her groovy, repetitive designs to prompt meditative states—a visual effect informed

by Yayoi Kusama’s infinite dot fields and the hypnotic patterns of psychedelic art.

She blends figural representation with surrealistic invention and attributes her pictures’ loud graphic qualities, in part, to her childhood fascination with cartoons on the Nickelodeon channel as well as her later discovery of the Chicago Imagists.

Speculative scientific illustration is another inspiration for her approach.

Gardens serve as subject matter for recent work. They are places meant for the enjoyment of nature and quiet contemplation, while also having ancient associations with pleasure and escape. In her installation The Garden of Extraterrestrial DeeeLites, visitors are invited to enter a geodesic dome filled with unusual, plant-like objects bathed in a warm glow and an ambient soundtrack. A computer-generated voice recites a mantra that swings from thoughts about office memos and smoothies to ruminations about biological life cycles. The sculptures pull between two poles, incorporating found synthetic whatnot—Tupperware lids, fake hair, doll parts—and organic paper accumulations, the two appearing to grow into each other. All surfaces are painted brightly with motifs resembling cellular forms and amoeboid shapes, giving Bremehr’s objects a familiar yet otherworldly status.

It is a carnivalesque, yet soothing, setting—a combination Bremehr hopes will induce meditation on the mysterious wonders of nature and harmonious human interconnectedness with those phenomena.

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The Garden of Extraterrestrial Deee-Lites, 2021 Mixed-media installation 108 x 156 x 156" overall

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Jessica Bremehr

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Amanda Casarez

Suture...Harm and Remedy, 2021 Cotton voile, gesso, and thread on three canvases

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96 x 60" each

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Amanda Casarez is driven by a creative mission to heal through her art. She is deeply moved by individual and societal trauma inflicted throughout history—on both interpersonal and global levels—which imparts profound harm on bodies, minds, and memory. The concept of “postmemory,” a term introduced by scholar Marianne Hirsch to describe trauma experienced intergenerationally, is an idea Casarez incorporates into her thinking to create her objects, which she hopes will heighten awareness of mental and physical injury, as well as its repair.

Technically trained in garment construction, Casarez uses cloth, especially as it relates to the body, to represent processes of violence and recovery. Fabric that is worn as a protective or concealing layer is a central motif in her work, and exploration of its material qualities presents numerous lines of inquiry. Clothing retains physical imprints of those who wear the items, and according to textile theorist Pennina Barnett, it provides an index of memory in its creases, stains, and tears. Casarez builds on Barnett’s proposals and submits cloth to numerous manipulations that each leave their trace. She drapes herself in cloth, folds it, knots it, cuts it, and sews it back together in a journey from procedural destruction to recuperation. Lines of whip- and cross-stitches define her pieces, and she considers these seams the ultimate symbol of repair.

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Casarez’s recent projects, including Suture…Harm and Remedy, combine methods from photography, drawing, painting, and textile work in a sequence of processes that culminate in abstract, wall-mounted compositions. Although these objects cannot be worn like some of her earlier “wearables,” as she calls them, the shape and volume of the body remain present. She photographs herself in poses associated with prayer and, using the images as guides, sketches on the cloth. The drawings serve as patterns, and she tailors the fabric to approximate monumental figures. Her cuts replaced with mends leave reminders of Casarez’s actions and memorials to trauma and healing.

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Amanda Casarez

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Ryan Erickson For Ryan Erickson, art is a very funny business conducted with a straight face. Using humor—both ludicrously goofy and dry as a bone—as a critical tool, Erickson “takes being silly very seriously,” as he puts it. To produce his projects, he combines strict earnestness with constructive comedic roast. Ranging in format from interactive installations to text-based drawings, his works are materially diverse but share a purpose. Through them, Erickson deploys absurdity packaged in rational thought as a vehicle to question the accepted systems and structures that define our lives. With humor disguised as reason, he flushes blockages to creativity, communication, and understanding stopped up by the rigid rules of language and social institutions.

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To shape his theoretical and methodological framework, Erickson partnered with linguist and musician Jon Lindeman to formulate The Foamalist Manifesto, a diligently light-hearted mission statement for “the discovery of transcendent artistic meaning.”

Articulated with tongue firmly planted in cheek and skillful wordplay, Foamalism and its lofty goals jab at the idealistic treatises of the early-twentieth-century avantgarde, and the formalists and conceptualists who followed, while reverentially borrowing their refined mode of delivery. According to Erickson, Foamalism informs his recent series Instruments of Logic and The Shape of Language, each made up of playful, idea-driven works.

The installation Fruit Study Field Kit is one example of his Instruments of Logic.

Consisting of a portable wood case resembling research equipment, the work is designed for the simple purpose of weighing fruit. Oranges or apples placed on a scale trigger a random sequence of statements on a small screen. “The dog is a noodle.”

“Sometimes cats smell like water.” “Clouds are not fire extinguishers.” The sentences are absurd and irrelevant, yet matter-of-fact in tone, typifying Erickson’s pursuit of irrational rationality. His large-scale wall works from The Shape of Language, including Big Bummer’s monumentalized slang, explore language’s elasticity and provide open-ended punchlines that push Erickson’s subversive silliness even further.

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Big Bummer, 2021

Fruit Study Field Kit, 2021

Latex paint

Computer, scale, wood, stand,

96 x 168"

and faux fruit 55 x 27 1/2 x 15 1/2" overall

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Ryan Erickson

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Adrian Gonzalez As an artist who lives at the intersection of cultures, Adrian Gonzalez describes being caught between two languages: Spanish and English. His experiences as a boy of Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian descent growing up in Florida made for a protean existence navigating the linguistic crossroads of Latinx life. Ultimately, bilingualism became a lens through which he not only considers language but all forms of communication, including art.

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Spanglish—a hybrid dialect that Gonzalez speaks—is a starting point for borrowed fragments of language. Spanglish presents a distinct style of expression with original vocabularies. Gonzalez associates the combinative, improvisatory creation of words with the artistic methods he uses in the studio to make his collage and assemblage objects built from a variety of drawn, printed, painted, sculpted, and found elements.

Resistant to traditional labels such as “painting” or “sculpture,” he sometimes appropriates Spanish and Spanglish expressions to describe his work. Manchita is one term he uses frequently. Loosely translated to “small stain” in English, it is his name for one of the many disparate material fragments he collects to fashion his freestanding and wall-hung constructions. His playful yet provocative phrasing is meant to spark new thinking. It shares affinities with Dada’s disruptive word strategies while also exploring cross-cultural communication and its generative misunderstandings.

Although Gonzalez’s works are predominantly abstract, he refuses to let go of the figure, which appears in a variety of forms as an autobiographical reference. The dimensions of his objects match his body’s measurements, and, more directly, a comitragic puppet named Bizzaro—Gonzalez’s double born of paper and tape— is positioned among his assemblages. Resembling a manigote—a likeness burnt in effigy to leave behind the past and welcome the future—Bizzaro signifies the passage of biography, meaning, and materials through time. By intertwining identity and abstraction, Gonzalez summons images to reflect the cultural interaction and fragmentation that underlies our contemporary moment.

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2 1 Bloque, 2021

Colored paper, acrylic, gesso,

Tacos de Cabeza, 2021

Mixed-media assemblage

cut and collaged drawings,

Acrylic, tape, paper,

in wood frame

canvas, pine, screen printing

and mirrors

73 3/4 x 74 x 21"

film, confetti, and inkjet

12 x 8 x 8"

prints in wood frame Cabeza, 2021

82 x 86 x 2 1/2"½”

Acrylic, tape, paper, and towel 8 x 7 x 6"”

The Yarda, 2021 Colored paper, acrylic, gesso,

Open Window (Humid Summer

graphite, inkjet prints on Yupo,

Night in St. Louis), 2021

pine, screen printing film, and

Two Mozquitos, 2020

Mixed-media assemblage

crayon in wood frame

Spray paint, acrylic, and inkjet

in wood frame

82 x 86 x 2 1/2"”

on Yupo mounted on panel

73 3/4 x 74 x 23 1/2" ½”

12 x 9"” Mozquito, 2021 Non-Imaginary Friend (Bizarro),

Towel, acrylic, mirror, and

2020

graphite on panel

Paper, tape, acrylic, jeans,

12 x 9"

and shirt 67 x 18 x 8"” Chances to Chequear, 2020

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Adrian Gonzalez

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snagged, 2020

folding into myself, 2021

too much, not enough, 2021

Liquid latex, my used lace

Liquid latex, nylon spandex,

Liquid latex, nylon spandex,

bra, gouache, acrylic, and nail

stool an ex bought me for my

bedroom rug I used for seven

9 1/2 x 40 x 11"

birthday last year, polyester

years, my used lace thong,

fiberfill, galvanized steel

polyester fiberfill, gouache,

deflowered, 2021

wire, gouache, acrylic, my

acrylic, glitter, wool felt, my

Liquid latex, nylon spandex,

great-grandmother’s string,

great-grandmother’s string,

used headboard, polyester

used sheet remnant, and

and used sheet remnant

fiberfill, dryer sheets,

copper wire

5 x 49 x 35 1/2"

gouache, acrylic, galvanized

45 x 21 x 20"

steel wire, wool felt, used sheets, fraternity shirt remnants, and my greatgrandmother’s string 51 x 61 x 14"

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Maddie Grotewiel

The experience of sexual trauma and its aftermath is the focus of Maddie Grotewiel’s sculptural objects and written texts. Refusing silence, Grotewiel is upfront about her personal history as a survivor of sexual trauma and directly addresses the social and individual consequences that result from these experiences. She avoids glossing over frightening and complicated realities and accepts the range of emotional registers triggered by transgression, from shame and compassion to healing humor.

Guided by pioneering female artists that came before her, her impulse to address violations against women—in their full complexity—contributes to an important history of challenging work. Ana Mendieta and Yoko Ono’s photos and performances confronting rape, Nancy Spero’s collage treatments of crimes and assaults on women, and Louise Bourgeois’ psychologically charged drawings and prints all supply a frame of reference to consider Grotewiel’s work.

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Grotewiel’s materials command full attention and are the result of a long process of experimentation. She considers them the expression of her experiences and explores ways they can replicate the body’s appearance, feel, and behavior, yet remain alien to us. A concoction of latex, nylon, fiberfill, and gouache yields pink, puffy masses that cling to everyday objects, including bedroom furniture and undergarments, overwhelming and distorting them. Often these items come with stories and connections to people and spaces close to her, and she hints at these private narratives within her object descriptions. On one hand, the sculptures are aberrant things, and on the other, they are familiar friends, suggesting the disturbing contradictions inherent to moments of violated intimacy. Gradually, text and written word have become more prominent in her projects. Beginning as thought boards in her workspace, collections of short statements and categorized lists, which blur distinction between studio notes and diaristic reflections, become another material with which she works. They reveal how her experiences translate to form in a deeply meaningful way.

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Maddie Grotewiel

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Younser (Seri) Lee Younser (Seri) Lee creates meaningful connections between the artist and viewer by producing multimedia installations that highlight emotional care. Her works nurture compassionate concern for the well-being of the individual. She is especially interested in the way art and design can be deployed to cope with universal human conditions of loss and anxiety. She aims, by using conceptual, performance, and relational art strategies, to create zones of comfort where persons can contemplate these states with empathy.

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Drawing from autobiography, Lee recognizes moments in her own life when she has faced painful feelings, and she mines these experiences to prepare many of her pieces. Moments when she has been most emotionally and mentally vulnerable—at the passing of a close relative or during struggles with bouts of insomnia—are points of departure for her creative process. She distills her thoughts and sensations and oftentimes seeks out ubiquitous manufactured objects, such as alarm clocks and hand soap, to convey these ideas simply, arguing that everyone can easily relate to familiar objects and, therefore, more readily engage with her installations.

Recently, time has become a prominent theme in Lee’s work. She is particularly fascinated with time as a social construct and its impact on individual well-being. Lee is wary of today’s expectations to maintain an accelerated pace throughout one’s personal and professional activities. For her, compressed timelines, especially those employed to measure success, are artificial and misaligned with unique individual needs, thereby resulting in undue trauma. Her interactive sculpture To Dream —To Realize creates a space for the viewer to pause and meditate on this reality. Ten clocks with their numbers replaced by short texts evoking states of action and inertia line the wall. By stepping on a small platform, the viewer can silence a soundtrack of a ticking timer. Through participatory encounters with her work, Lee hopes to heighten awareness around one’s relationship to time and the emotional consequences of its demands.

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To Dream—To Realize, 2021 Alarm clocks, Arduino, pressure sensor, wood box, electric cables, speaker, and MP3 player

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Overall dimensions variable

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Younser (Seri) Lee

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Gaoyuan Pan

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Gaoyuan Pan uses photography as a visual tool to promote animal rights. His concern for the planet’s wildlife drives his projects, and he is especially aggrieved by the misrepresentation and anthropomorphism inflicted by cultural institutions ranging from natural history museums to nature documentaries and Disney cartoons.

For Pan, the prioritization of human perspectives perpetuates a power imbalance that jeopardizes animal well-being, and he hopes to transform this dynamic by investigating pressing topics such as the human desire to tame wild habitats. His exploration of these themes in his art is, in part, inspired by post-humanist thought around trans-species communication. As an artist raised in China, he is also intrigued by the differences separating Western and Eastern frameworks and their intellectual and spiritual treatment of animals.

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Black-and-white photography is Pan’s primary medium, which he admires for its unique combination of unflinching visual documentation and refined aesthetic qualities capable of influencing powerful shifts in popular opinion and political policy. Tapping the medium’s weighty impact and serene beauty, Pan looks to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic explorations of landscapes and dioramas, among works by other photographers, while also gravitating to the hard-hitting messages of printmaker and illustrator Sue Coe, whose projects are often graphic accounts of animal victimization. Psychological Wilderness is Pan’s recent series where he photographs artificial environments, including zoos, parks, and laboratories, built by humans to contain nature. Pan often takes photos during long walks at night when he feels the animals regain their dominance in these spaces. Many of the resulting pictures present views of the birds, mammals, fish, and amphibians he encounters, and within his large-format prints, he includes subtle, yet poignant, details—bits of man-made litter, a glass zoo barrier, a falcon’s leash—as reminders of human influence and control. His images encourage people to rethink the position of animals in the world and pursue balanced and sustainable relationships.

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Headless Seal, 2021

Deer in Distance, 2021

Ravens, 2021

Koi Fish and "Made in USA," 2021

Snake on Glass, 2021

Jamaican Iguana, 2021

Raccoon behind Branches, 2021

Falcon Take Off, 2021 Inkjet prints 14 x 20"

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Gaoyuan Pan

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Takura Suzuki Takura Suzuki combines painting with computational art to investigate the consequences of the digital age. Often organized by intersecting grids, his compositions are a nod to both modern painting as well as computer modeling interfaces. His images teeter between reality and artificiality, resembling landscapes merged with the hyper real scenes found in design software and gaming platforms. Tree branches levitate in interior rooms, cloud formations climb stairwells, and patches of grass and flowers spring forth from tile floors. The relative scale of the elements is disjointed, and here and there a figure appears, partially pixelated. His canvases blend representations of organic and synthetic space in illogical and surreal ways.

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Attentive to technology’s invasive creep, Suzuki characterizes his life as one split between digital and physical worlds. He transfers this state of being to his art through his materials. On canvas, he merges computer-generated prints with hand-painted elements, the latter executed in a manner almost indistinguishable from the digital portions. The result melds the artist’s bodily manipulation of paint with machine output. Increasingly, he has grown fascinated with the bionic fusion of technology and human skill, especially as witnessed with artificial intelligence, or AI, and its extraordinary advances in recent years. Suzuki harnesses the power of AI algorithms to produce his compositions, joining artists such as Agnieszka Kurant, Ian Cheng, and Trevor Paglen, who also use AI as a tool. Datasets of nature photographs, including pictures of flowers, trees, and leaves, are fed into deep learning models to generate new images, which he incorporates into his canvases. Intrigued by the creative potential in error, he seeks out irregularities or “mutants,” as he calls them, within these collections. For him, these anomalies mark the limits of machine learning where mistakes emerge. Recognizing both technology’s triumphs and downfalls equally, Suzuki uses his art to reflect upon this contradictory reality, which defines the contemporary digital era.

MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION

But They Are Not Real, 2021

A RoombaCat, Not a Cat, 2021

Inkjet print and oil on canvas

Inkjet print and oil on canvas

45 x 38"

45 x 30"

I Fed My Tree Pixels, 2021

A Tree Back Then I, 2021

Inkjet print and oil on canvas

Inkjet print and oil on canvas

45 x 30"

36 x 24"

A Tree Back Then II, 2021 Inkjet print and oil on canvas 36 x 24"

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Takura Suzuki

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Of the Air, 2021 Single-channel video, 4:30 min.

Alexa Velez

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Alexa Velez melds film, sound, and movement to create cinematic narratives propelled by motion and music. An eco-centric view guides her approach to her visual storytelling, which she hopes will restore a connection between humans and the natural world. Her films are poetic explorations of nature’s fundamental elements, such as water and wind. Rather than representing these elements directly, she prompts our imagination through choreography, using her body to suggest their invisible presence. She hopes this will convey the physical, intellectual, and emotional reactions the natural entities elicit when experienced.

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With a background in creative writing, Velez appreciates the power of storytelling and uses dance—another longtime passion—as a narrative device, finding inspiration in a range of sources, from Maya Deren’s films to the modern dance company Pilobolus. Sound accompanies her choreography, incorporating a mix of field recordings and instrumental pieces she composes during post-production in response to her movements. For her, carefully considered audio design engages the audience on yet another sensory dimension and underscores sonic similarities created in nature and the recording studio, bridging the two realms.

Of the Air, one of two recent and related films, features Velez performing in a small kitchen, her body framed by a door, a window, and—most importantly—a wall air conditioning unit, which acts as her collaborator. The scene opens with a radio broadcast advising listeners to conserve power during a heat wave. As she considers the warning, Velez leans close to the air conditioning unit which suddenly gives out, its electricity cut. Gradually, whooshing noises paired with piano music prompt a sequence of moves that carry her around the space as if picked up by an air current. Having studied avian locomotion, she embodies the graceful dynamics of bird flight and combines this motion with more vigorous gestures suggesting aggressive winds. Elegantly combining human gesture and environmental forces, she hopes to heighten our emotional investment in the state of the planet.

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Alexa Velez

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