2022 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition NINE WAYS FROM SUNDAY Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis 2022 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition
SUNDAYFROMWAYSNINE
MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Installation view, Nine Ways from Sunday: 2022 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 2022.
SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22
The MFA in Visual Art program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis educates artists who will define and change the future of their disciplines—in small, medium, and extra-large ways.
Washington University in St. Louis
Program Leadership Lisa Bulawsky 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
The program is located within a tier-one research institution and is proud of its location in St. Louis, which serves as both an extension of the studio and site of engagement for art and artists.
It instills students with the agency and resiliency that will be essential to the next generation of artists. Led by professor and chair Lisa Bulawsky, the program is home to an inclusive, close-knit community of renegade makers and thinkers and offers students a site of rigorous inquiry, humanity, and intellectual generosity.
The MFA in Visual Art professionally prepares students for a diversified approach to the field of contemporary art that nurtures sustained, lifelong engagement while recognizing multiple pathways and definitions for a career in the arts and culture. Learn more about the MFA in Visual Art program at samfoxschool.wustl.edu/mfa-va.
E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts Visual Art
Faculty Jamie MonikaCherylDeniseJackTimPatriciaArnyRichardMeghanMichaelAdamsByronKirkwoodKruegerNadlerOlynykPortlockRisleyWard-BrownWassenaarWeiss 2022 MFA in Visual Art Students Karina Arreola-Gutierrez Quinn Antonio Briceño Joseph Canizales Noah Greene-Lowe Erin LiviaCarlosSamMartinJohnstonLammertModderSalazar-LermontXandersmith
MFA in
MFA in Visual Art
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
Essays Jenny Wu Jenny Wu is an art historian, writer, and independent curator. She holds an MA in art history and an MFA in fiction writing, both from Washington University in St. Louis. She has written for BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, the Millions, and Ploughshares and organized exhibitions in St. Louis and New York. Editor Kat Vendetti Photographers Richard Sprengeler and Whitney Curtis Designer James Walker Exhibition Organizer Leslie Markle Curator for Public Art, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Printer Advertiser’s Printing Publisher Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts © 2022 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. Cover Image: Livia Xandersmith, A Comedy of Agency (detail), 2022. Oil paint, canvas, wood, metal, vinyl, and motor, 90 x 203 x 66".
The spirit of rigor—as well as an orientation toward possibility— is alive in the work of the nine artists in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts featured in the 2022 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. These artists have, for two years preceding the exhibit, thoroughly examined their chosen mediums from multiple angles. Letting their materials guide them, the way Erin Johnston, for example, lets colors from lichens and mushrooms bleed and blend into the paper pulp with which she sculpts, or the way Joseph Canizales studies the physical qualities of limestone and concrete in order to create 3D-printed simulacra of these rock specimens, these artists have made keen observations about the natural and human world that ordinarily go unremarked. In many ways, these artists have proven to be as, if not more, thorough in their investigative approaches than other professionals and researchers. Take, for instance, policy makers and city developers, who often let the well-being of entire groups of people fall through the cracks of the system. Redressing this void in representation and care are works like Sam Modder’s largescale digital prints of Black women claiming space and enacting narratives of self-reckoning in public settings and Noah GreeneLowe’s sculptural indictments of mobility infrastructures that have displaced marginalized communities in their insatiable quest for expansion.
The exhibition Nine Ways from Sunday takes its title from the highly variable phrase “six ways to Sunday,” which is rumored to have been coined under the Roman papacy in the second half of the twelfth century to describe a weekly cycle of punishments meted out to heretics. The saying means roughly “in every way possible” and is used to describe having done something thoroughly but to no avail. Throughout the expression’s nebulous history, the number of “ways” has varied from six to a thousand, and the preposition “to” has been replaced, at times, by “for” and “from.”
“From moment to moment as we look we see what we see. At another moment in looking we might see differently. At any one moment one can’t see all the possibilities. And one proceeds as one proceeds, one does something and then one does something else.”
Jasper Johns (1965)
Foreword
“Thorough” doesn’t necessarily mean neat and tidy. In fact, it would seem the more thorough investigations often yield perplexing and unruly results. Take, for instance, Livia Xandersmith’s panorama of our toxic, media-saturated, and sublimely heterogeneous present. Sometimes the messiness of the process is the heart of the matter, and evidence of unruliness, as one can see in Martin Lammert’s shifty, perpetually in-progress installations, attests to the unwavering sincerity behind the project of seeing beyond present impossibilities.
Jenny Wu Writer & Independent Curator
At the end of two years of MFA work—in the studio, in the classroom, in museums and galleries, in the community—it seems fitting to think about the many ways to and from Sunday each artist has traveled to get to this point. Some would say an MFA education is itself a cycle of trials, the degree being proof of one’s rigor and diligence in the face of obstacles. Yet as thoroughly exhaustive and exhausting as an MFA may be, it is not an end but a beginning. After spending time with the seventeen works in the exhibition, one may come away convinced, as I was, that the phrase “nine ways from Sunday” refers not to nine perspectives converging on one problem, but rather to nine vectors radiating outward from a common point of departure.
Other works in the exhibition are thoroughly kept records of time and place, assembled from photographs, memories, artifacts, satellite imagery, and crowdsourced testimonies. This is evident in Karina Arreola-Gutierrez’s tapestries and altars, decorated with embroidery by women in the artist’s family who have preserved their crafts and rituals over generations and across national borders; in Quinn Antonio Briceño’s paintings of distant cities and abstracted figures within the blended guisado of our globalized world; and in Carlos Salazar-Lermont’s multidisciplinary practice that honors the material traces and traditions of Venezuelan exiles.
MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02
SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Installation view, Nine Ways from Sunday: 2022 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 2022.
Karina Arreola-Gutierrez 6 Quinn Antonio Briceño 10 Joseph Canizales 14 Noah Greene-Lowe 18 Erin Johnston 22 Martin Lammert 26 Sam Modder 30 Carlos Salazar-Lermont 34 Livia Xandersmith 38
On a platform in front of the tapestry is a work titled Mis Memorias y Extrañándote (2021), a wooden chair that the artist made into an altar to her late grandfather and painted blue-green, his favorite color. On the seat of the chair are four tortilla covers on which the deceased’s name and lines from his favorite song are embroidered. Inside these tortilla covers are pieces of paper containing stories about grief. Written by the artist and other participants, the stories are presented as ofrendas to the deceased. Like artists such as the Los Angeles–based “altarista” Consuelo Flores, who are devoted to everyday displays of community, Arreola-Gutierrez chose a modest chair as an altar, because, in her words, “Altars can be any surface.”
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Karina Arreola-Gutierrez
Karina Arreola-Gutierrez learned embroidery at a young age from her mother and honed the traditional Mexican craft while growing up in Washington state. Now she makes embroideries and altars that call attention to social issues in the Latinx community, as well as to family history. Her artistic practice is an extension of her devotion to tradition and to what she terms “generational passing”—an inheritance of skills and traits that transcend time and borders.
A recent work titled El Amor de Mi Familia (2022) is a translucent voile tapestry hand-embroidered by Arreola-Gutierrez, her mother, and her maternal grandmother. For context, a single-channel video nearby titled Generación en Generación (2022) shows the women’s hands embroidering the white voile. The three registers of the finished piece represent the three generations that worked on it, though each woman had a hand in each register, and their stitching is visually indistinguishable. Behind the translucent tapestry are relief prints of evergreen trees, which are abundant in Washington state. Through this juxtaposition, the work alludes to a sense of political agency that exists in continuous action. Against the conventional notion that activism must involve a cataclysmic break from tradition, Arreola-Gutierrez celebrates the persistence of embroidery across geopolitical borders as an act of resistance in itself.
7SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Karina Arreola-Gutierrez, Mis Memorias y Extrañándote, 2021. Thread, manta fabric, wooden chair, candles, wax, and paint, 34 x 17 x 17"; El Amor de Mi Familia (detail), 2022. Handmade embroidery, voile fabric, thread, relief prints, steel rod, wood, and steel brackets, 102 x 120 x 48".
8 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Karina Arreola-Gutierrez Karina Arreola-Gutierrez, Mis Memorias y Extrañándote (detail), 2021. Thread, manta fabric, wooden chair, candles, wax, and paint, 34 x 17 x 17".
9SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 ↓ Karina Arreola-Gutierrez, El Amor de Mi Familia (detail), 2022. Handmade embroidery, voile fabric, thread, relief prints, steel rod, wood, and steel brackets, 102 x 120 x 48". → Karina Arreola-Gutierrez, Generación en Generación, 2022. Single-channel video with sound, approx. 20 min.; El Amor de Mi Familia, 2022. Handmade embroidery, voile fabric, thread, relief prints, steel rod, wood, and steel brackets, 102 x 120 x 48"; Mis Memorias y Extrañándote, 2021. Thread, manta fabric, wooden chair, candles, wax, and paint, 34 x 17 x 17".
10 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Quinn Antonio Briceño
Such ciphers occur in his most recent work, a diptych of streets in San Marcos, Carazo, Nicaragua, titled Allí (2022) and Allá (2022). The street views were extrapolated from Google Earth, which the artist scoured for images that are imperfectly aligned or prematurely cropped—for example, a car missing half its carriage. Allí depicts the street where his abuelito’s house still stands, and, in Allá, the town’s residents sit at a public intersection through which bicyclists pass. The people captured by Google’s camera are made into ciphers by the prints and photographs collaged over their identifying features. On one hand, these ciphers are individuals whose identities have been flattened into the urban landscape; on the other hand, their unknowability speaks to the experience of the onlooker separated from one of his homes by thousands of miles and attempting to engage it using available
↑ Quinn Antonio Briceño, Allá, 2022. Acrylic, packing stickers, found prints, foil, paper, and transferred photographs on canvas, 60 x 96".
Translatedtechnologies.fromSpanish, “allí” and “allá” mean, respectively, “there” and “over there.” Briceño’s titles allude to the distance between the artist’s current home in St. Louis and his family’s home in Nicaragua. The tension in Briceño’s brightly colored canvases lies in this linguistic nuance: the scenes they depict are partially imagined, possibly inaccessible, never “here” but someplace farther away.
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↓ Quinn Antonio Briceño, Allí, 2022. Acrylic, packing stickers, found prints, foil, paper, and transferred photographs on canvas, 60 x 96".
Quinn Antonio Briceño is a painter who depicts working-class lives and the effects of cultural and geographic distance on identity formation. He uses acrylic paint to produce warped and richly saturated pictorial spaces, replicating encaustic tile patterns made popular in Latin America as a result of long histories of globalization. Often, he adds collage elements such as photo transfers, packing stickers, foil, and found text onto his canvases. In the past, these have included lotto tickets—which evoke, for many marginalized communities, an impossible “American dream”—and “Made in the USA” stickers, to draw attention to the unrecognized labor that migrant workers provide. At times, Briceño lets his collage elements stand in for figures’ clothing and facial features, turning them into what he terms “ciphers.”
12 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Quinn Antonio Briceño Quinn Antonio Briceño, Allí, 2022; Allá, 2022. Acrylic, packing stickers, found prints, foil, paper, and transferred photographs on canvas, each 60 x 96".
13SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Quinn Antonio Briceño, Allí (detail), 2022. Acrylic, packing stickers, found prints, foil, paper, and transferred photographs on canvas, 60 x 96". Quinn Antonio Briceño, Allá (detail), 2022. Acrylic, packing stickers, found prints, foil, paper, and transferred photographs on canvas, 60 x 96".
Joseph Canizales
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Joseph Canizales works at the intersection of land art and digital technology. Using 3D scanning technology, he creates simulacra of rock formations he terms “echoed sites,” drawing from Rosalind Krauss’ 1979 essay on sculpture in the expanded field. He also represents geologic time through transmutations in sculptural forms. Starting, for instance, with a brick of modern concrete and a specimen of Roman concrete, he 3D-printed a spectrum of hybrid bricks representing concrete’s change over time, from 600 BCE to the present. An early interest in the history of concrete led Canizales to research limestone, one of its key ingredients. By incorporating limestone into his practice, the artist produced a new set of works that speak to humanity’s complex relationship with natural and recycled resources. Titled Entropic Limestone (2021), Extruded Limestone Quarry (Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, MO) (2022), and Eroded Limestone (2022), these works serve as meditations on extraction and geomorphology. Entropic Limestone is a pillar made from natural and cast limestone. Surrounding its base is a ring of artificial limestone powder and natural seashells, which together frustrate the viewer’s assumptions of what was found and fabricated. Extruded Limestone Quarry is a 3D scan of an extractive site that the artist inverted to look like a terraced hill stretching into infinite blue skies, surfacing that which was conveniently hidden underground. Eroded Limestone consists of six biodegradable plastic “rocks” arranged in a semicircle on the floor. Read clockwise, the sculptural elements become increasingly pyramidal and processed; read in the opposite direction, the rock is seen reconstituting itself. In Canizales’ body of work, limestone stands in as a case study for the natural world—how humans have analyzed its properties and maximized its utility and yet are caught off guard when faced with the extent to which their actions have changed it.
15SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22Joseph Canizales, Eroded Limestone, 2022. Biodegradable plastic, limestone sand, and paint, 21 x 132 x 120" overall; Extruded Limestone Quarry (Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, MO), 2022. Inkjet print on canvas, wood, and sand from Jefferson Barracks Quarry, 50 x 90 x 7"; Entropic Limestone, 2021. Limestone, 62 1/2 x 19 1/4 x 13 1/4". Joseph Canizales, Extruded Limestone Quarry (Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, MO), 2022. Inkjet print on canvas, wood, and sand from Jefferson Barracks Quarry, 50 x 90 x 7"; Entropic Limestone, 2021. Limestone, 62 1/2 x 19 1/4 x 13 1/4".
16 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Joseph Canizales ↓ Joseph Canizales, Extruded Limestone Quarry (Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, MO), 2022. Inkjet print on canvas, wood, and sand from Jefferson Barracks Quarry, 50 x 90 x 7". ↑ Joseph Canizales, Eroded Limestone (detail), 2022. Biodegradable plastic, limestone sand, and paint, 21 x 132 x 120" overall.
17SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Joseph Canizales, Entropic Limestone, 2021. Limestone, 62 1/2 x 19 1/4 x 13 1/4".
I’ll Fly Away (2022) is a recent sculpture made from ceramic tiles. Isolated in a grid on the floor, this seemingly mundane material—common in suburban homes and hardware stores—evokes vague and uncanny landforms. In the center of the grid are broken tiles fused together in an imperfect mound, reminiscent of Yeesookyung’s Translated Vase sculptures (2002–). Playing with scale, Greene-Lowe tricks the viewer into seeing each tile as a parcel of land, creating an eerie sense of placelessness as the eye travels over the stone-colored expanse. Adding to the sense of displacement, concavities where tiles are missing contain fragments of a ceramic bird and inkjet-printed satellite images of neighborhoods in Missouri and California where people of color have been displaced in the name of development. Two other works in the exhibition examine sites of displacement. In Location,location,location,location,locationlocalocatocatiotion! (2022), GreeneLowe juxtaposes aerial photographs of Kinloch and Mill Creek Valley, Missouri, and Little Manila, Stockton, California—where mobility infrastructures, both built and proposed, have uprooted Black and Filipino communities—on orthogonally fused segments of decorative molding. In St. Louis Landscape (Facing West) (2022), the artist printed a landscape by Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)—a German-American painter often associated with the concept of Manifest Destiny—on an unraveling tapestry. Weighed down with lumps of asphalt collected from the streets of St. Louis and attached to its many loose threads, the work figuratively unravels the ideas of expansion, order, and domination over land and people. Noah Greene-Lowe
Noah Greene-Lowe grew up in a cohousing community in Atlanta, Georgia, an experience that prompted him to think deeply about lived environments. Following his interests in landscape imagery, histories of displacement, mobility infrastructure, and suburban kitsch, he makes three-dimensional artworks that reveal the constructed nature of human geographies. Through research and travel, he has found and highlighted connections between controversial development practices across the United States.
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19SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Noah Greene-Lowe, St. Louis Landscape (Facing West) (detail), 2022. Curtain rod, found asphalt, and jacquard woven blanket with a section of Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, approx. 70 x 72 x 36".
20 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Noah Greene-Lowe Noah Greene-Lowe, St. Louis Landscape (Facing West), 2022. Curtain rod, found asphalt, and jacquard woven blanket with a section of Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, approx. 70 x 72 x 36". Noah Greene-Lowe, I’ll Fly Away (detail), 2022. Ceramic floor tile, grout, wood, ceramic figurines, and inkjet-printed satellite images from sites of displacement: Kinloch and Mill Creek Valley, MO, and Little Manila, Stockton, CA, 12 x 60 x 60".
21SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Noah Greene-Lowe, Location, location, location,location,locationlocalocatocatiotion!, 2022. Secondhand building materials, concrete debris, caulk, and inkjet-printed satellite images from sites of displacement: Kinloch and Mill Creek Valley, MO, and Little Manila, Stockton, CA, 36 x 27 x 23".
22 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Erin Johnston, Untitled, from the Quadruped Series, 2022. Paper, charcoal, and pigment, overall dimensions variable, 17 x 38 x 38" installed; Study Skins, 2021–22. Paper and natural pigment, overall dimensions variable, 60 1/2 x 179" installed.
Erin Johnston creates paper casts that preserve traces of everyday objects: a handheld massager, a ’50s hair dryer, a therapeutic neck pillow, a chair discarded in a St. Louis alley. Drawing from a background in field biology and ornithology, she arranges the casts for display like a plate in a field guide, gesturing toward an expansive taxonomy of manufactured goods. The palpable sense of absence exuded by her works puts them in conversation with sculptors like Do Ho Suh (b. 1962) who use replicas to memorialize and reconstruct elements of daily life.
Johnston’s thesis project consists of two sets of paper casts, one of which is titled Study Skins (2021–22). In this series, the artist explores the lifespan of objects humans have made in the past century to ameliorate various bodily ailments and discomforts.
In some cases, Johnston casts malleable materials like wool and tin foil, and often she soaks the paper pulp in organic materials such as lichens, soil, flowers, and avocado skins to create subtle variations in the finished cast’s color. The organicity of these works speaks to Johnston’s overall interest in preservation: everyday objects are invented to preserve the body against pain and atrophy, only to be preserved by curious researchers once they become fragments of the past.
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To make the casts, the artist covers found or thrifted objects with a paper pulp bath that is lifted once dry—sometimes in pieces—and presented in place of the original.
For the second work, Untitled, from a series titled Quadrupeds (2022), the artist cast two paper lambs with their limbs folded under them, as if at rest in a natural environment. This work grew out of Johnston’s decade-long fascination with the stone lambs that adorn headstones in cemeteries. The lamb, often associated with innocence and domesticity and carved in pairs on headstones, serves here as a metaphor for humanity. By relying on the therapeutic objects that Johnston cast into Study Skins, humans have, in a way, rendered themselves incapable of surviving in the wild.
Erin Johnston
24 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Erin Johnston
→ Erin Johnston, Untitled, from the Quadruped Series (detail), 2022. Paper pulp, charcoal, and pigment, overall dimensions variable, 17 x 38 x 38" installed.
↑ Erin Johnston, Untitled, from the Quadruped Series, 2022. Paper pulp, charcoal, and pigment, overall dimensions variable, 17 x 38 x 38" installed.
25SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Erin Johnston, Study Skins (detail), 2021–22. Paper and natural pigment, overall dimensions variable, 60 1/2 x 179" installed.
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Martin Lammert’s interest in ancient ruins, like those found in eighteenth-century Romantic landscape paintings, lies at the core of his process-based work. Here, household items like bath towels are subjected to outdoor weather, cigarette and fireplace ash, and the artist’s spit; ephemera such as pieces of paper are taped and worn on the bottom of the artist’s shoe. The idea of ruination is present, both visually and conceptually, in the weathering of form over time, and throughout Lammert’s body of work, one traces an effort to organize seemingly random assortments of mass-produced objects, to wrangle their naturally surplussed state, and to reverse entropy—an endeavor that leaves a residual mess.
A recent mixed-media installation, Untitled (Stage1) (2022), takes the form of a wooden stage with three trap doors. Hiding in and below the stage are containers of hydrochloric acid, Ice Mountain and Pure Life water, hydrogen peroxide, and LA’s Totally Awesome bleach, as well as six boxes of aluminum foil, a modified table, and a storage bin full of trash. On this large octagonal stage, Lammert explores the theatricality of bulk items, which take on lives of their own like a silent entourage. In a manner reminiscent of West Coast artist Jason Rhoades (1956–2006) and the aesthetics of the “scatter art” movement, Lammert’s bottled water and cleaning solutions are accompanied by a formally incongruous foam sculpture: a Brancusian appendage in Philip Guston pink, placed on a white foam base that the artist salvaged from a dumpster. On a video monitor set up beside the sculpture, blue gloved hands make water by releasing hydrogen and oxygen gasses into a bottle in a backyard laboratory. The difference between this and a conventional laboratory is the former’s lack of procedural cleanliness and intellectual remove; rather, the process—like Lammert’s body of work thus far—abides by a messy, slack sincerity.
Martin Lammert
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27SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Martin Lammert, Untitled (Stage1), 2022. Mixed-media installation with singlechannel video with sound, 5 min.; approx. 108 x 120 x 120".
28 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Martin Lammert ↑ Martin Lammert, Untitled (Stage1) (detail), 2022. Mixed-media installation with single-channel video with sound, 5 min.; approx. 108 x 120 x 120". → Martin Lammert, Untitled (Stage1) (detail), 2022. Mixed-media installation with singlechannel video with sound, 5 min.; approx. 108 x 120 x 120".
29SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Martin Lammert, Untitled (Stage1) (detail), 2022. Mixed-media installation with single-channel video with sound, 5 min.; approx. 108 x 120 x 120".
Sam Modder’s background in engineering, mural making, and public-facing design informs her artistic interest in scale and architectural presence. Growing up as part of the only Black family in her Sri Lankan neighborhood, she felt like an outsider looking in and, at the same time, sensed that others were quick to put her in a box. This tension and these spatial metaphors later found their form in public artworks: a window display Modder designed in a St. Louis gallery in 2020 showed Black women reacting to their confinement in the window frame—one wielded a baseball bat, ready to break out, while another read a book, as if to arm herself with knowledge.
For her thesis project, Source of All Hair, Wearer of All Socks (2022), she used large-scale digital prints to present an allegory of late-capitalist society. While in isolation during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist imagined an alternate universe in which a Black woman finds only copies of herself, her hair, and her socks. Abandoned to her adventures in this universe, the main character must contend with the troubles of the real world through dreamlike metaphors of the self. The story, rendered first in ballpoint pen, then digitally warped and collaged and printed as wallpaper, expands into a multivalent universe. In this universe, socks and hair function as two motifs of power: the socks represent extractive labor systems, the hair a potential force of change.
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Generally, Modder prefers to work in digital media because it is amenable to edits and reproduction.
In her work, Modder engages with the concept of the Black spatial imaginary, a speculative framework—put forth in the 1990s by cultural critic Mark Dery—that centers Black dreams and fantasy. Modder was influenced by the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985) and her interpretation of the Black spatial imaginary in a series of drawings depicting Black queer women wielding power over male laborers. Modder argues through her thesis project that no one who comes in contact with power remains innocent like, for instance, Alice adventuring in Wonderland. Instead, everyone—even the sole occupant of an allegorical universe—is complicit in the absurd contradictions of contemporary society. Sam Modder
31SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Sam Modder, Source of All Hair, Wearer of All Socks (detail), 2022. Installation of digital prints on adhesive paper, and ballpoint pen, 144 x 240 x 144" Sam Modder, Source of All Hair, Wearer of All Socks (detail), 2022. Installation of digital prints on adhesive paper, and ballpoint pen, 144 x 240 x 144".
32 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Sam Modder Sam Modder, Source of All Hair, Wearer of All Socks (detail), 2022. Installation of digital prints on adhesive paper, and ballpoint pen, 144 x 240 x 144".
33SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Sam Modder, Source of All Hair, Wearer of All Socks (detail), 2022. Installation of digital prints on adhesive paper, and ballpoint pen, 144 x 240 x 144".
Carlos Salazar-Lermont’s artistic practice spans performance, video, sculpture, photography, and socially engaged practices. He explores cultural and religious systems by reprising and reconfiguring a set of symbols across media. These symbols, used as parts of large-scale sculptures and as collage elements, include corn flour mix and Mylar emergency blankets. The crisp blue logo of P.A.N. corn flour is connected to the artist’s Venezuelan background, as the product is widely used for making arepas. Likewise, the reflective metallic sheen of emergency blankets has come to be associated with migration from Latin American countries. Other symbols present in the artist’s works are bunk beds, reminiscent of childhood, and the halo of Catholic saints, appropriated with tongue-in-cheek humor.
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Throughout his body of work, Salazar-Lermont’s goal is to depict experiences and relationships with unflinching honesty. But he does so with ample ornamentation. In fact, many of his works can be described as baroque in their visual presentation. One such work is Sanctuary (2022), a three-channel video installation that shows three Venezuelan asylees, who responded to an open call shared with the support of the Association of Venezuelans in Missouri, making arepas in slow motion. Surrounding the video monitors are wooden frames whose shapes reference Venezuelan Baroque church architecture and whose surfaces are covered with emergency blankets, plastic wrap, and gold leaf. The religious and political connotations of the word “sanctuary” coexist uneasily in the video installation, which highlights the ritual gestures of preparing food, the sense of community built around culinary affinities, and the intimate handmade quality of the arepa itself. By pairing Catholic references with videos of everyday people in their kitchens, Salazar-Lermont draws out the thorny convergences of faith and flesh.
Carlos Salazar-Lermont
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35SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Carlos Salazar-Lermont, Sanctuary: San Francisco, 2022. Video installation with sound (approx. 45 min.), LCD TV screen, Mylar emergency blankets, plastic wrappings donated by Venezuelan immigrants, gold leaf, acrylic, ink, and glue on wood, 108 x 58 x 5".
36 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Carlos Salazar-Lermont ↑ Carlos Salazar-Lermont, Sanctuary, 2022. Three-channel video installation with sound (approx. 45 min.), 3 LCD TV screens, Mylar emergency blankets, plastic wrappings donated by Venezuelan immigrants, gold leaf, acrylic, ink, and glue on wood; Petare: 108 x 60 1/2 x 5", San Francisco: 108 x 58 x 5", Altagracia: 108 x 60 1/2 x 5". → Carlos Salazar-Lermont, Sanctuary: San Francisco (detail), 2022. Video installation with sound (approx. 45 min.), LCD TV screen, Mylar emergency blankets, plastic wrappings donated by Venezuelan immigrants, gold leaf, acrylic, ink, and glue on wood, 108 x 58 x 5".
37SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 ← Carlos Salazar-Lermont, Sanctuary: Altagracia (detail), 2022. Video installation with sound (approx. 45 min.), LCD TV screen, Mylar emergency blankets, plastic wrappings donated by Venezuelan immigrants, gold leaf, acrylic, ink, and glue on wood, 108 x 60 1/2 x 5". ↓ Carlos Salazar-Lermont, Sanctuary: Altagracia, 2022. Video installation with sound (approx. 45 min.), LCD TV screen, Mylar emergency blankets, plastic wrappings donated by Venezuelan immigrants, gold leaf, acrylic, ink, and glue on wood, 108 x 60 1/2 x 5".
Livia Xandersmith
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Xandersmith’s thesis work is an eighteen-foot panorama on canvas made using oil paint, digital printing, and screen printing. The panorama, titled A Comedy of Agency (2022), proclaims in bold colors and meticulous detail the chaos of social life in the early 2020s. In it, one can find a decapitated nuclear family posing beside a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous symbol of the unattainable American dream from the ’20s of the previous century: a green light seen across a dark lake. One can also find a lush, red curtain that calls to mind the dramatic draperies of Caravaggio (1571–1610). Xandersmith stages the scene as if placing actors in front of a set, emphasizing what she terms the “performance of the everyday” and the complicity of each “actor” who reacts to and reproduces the backdrop over time. To amplify the inherent theatrics of social relations, she employs dramaturgical motifs such as curtains, portrait studio sets, Vaudeville hooks, and the manos dei—the small hand of God found in early Christian art. As a panorama that revels in its internal contradictions and startling contrasts, A Comedy of Agency calls attention to its own sublime artifice.
38 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION
Livia Xandersmith’s maximal, surrealist painting style grew from an initial interest in figurative forms and social issues. Upon reflecting on pop culture and nostalgia during the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist turned her attention to traces of what she terms “candy-coated danger” in popular and personal imagery. She juxtaposes, for example, sensuous renderings of fabric and clouds with images of the atom bomb and decapitated figures from old family photos, immersing viewers in scenes of disaster from which they cannot look away. The effect is a reckoning with society’s addiction to digital media and with the illusionistic medium of painting itself.
39SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Livia Xandersmith, A Comedy of Agency, 2022. Oil paint, canvas, wood, metal, vinyl, and motor, 90 x 203 x 66".
40 MFA IN VISUAL ART THESIS EXHIBITION 02 Livia Xandersmith ↑ Livia Xandersmith, A Comedy of Agency (detail), 2022. Oil paint, canvas, wood, metal, vinyl, and motor, 90 x 203 x 66". → Livia Xandersmith, A Comedy of Agency (detail), 2022. Oil paint, canvas, wood, metal, vinyl, and motor, 90 x 203 x 66".
41SAM FOX SCHOOL OF DESIGN & VISUAL ARTS 22 Livia Xandersmith, A Comedy of Agency (detail), 2022. Oil paint, canvas, wood, metal, vinyl, and motor, 90 x 203 x 66".
