AN EXHIBITION OF WORK FROM THE SCHOOL OF THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS AT TUFTS 2019–2020 SENIOR THESIS PROGRAM
Designed by Jacob Rochford. Edited by Badger Antoniou,Ariel Akumanyi, Penny Raynor and Halley Sun Stubis.
Special thanks to the 2019–2020 Senior Thesis faculty Kendall Reiss, Ria Brodell,Willoughby Lucas Hastings,Ashley Peterson.
We are grateful for the help of all School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts faculty, library staff, dining workers, custodial workers, and all employees who keep the university functioning.
This book is distributed without the implied warranty of merchantability by any institution or fitness for a particular purpose.
Outrageous Plans for Sensible Ideas School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts Senior Thesis Program 2019–2020 Printed in the United States of America
First printing, 2020 Puritan Press 95 Runnells Bridge Rd Hollis, NH 03049 Phone: (800) 635-6302 sensible ideas plans for
Beca
Dan
Michaela
Sam
Aidan
Sam
Jacob
Halley
Jhona
Badger
Ariel
With the development of COVID-19, an infectious disease responsible for the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic, all gatherings and typical daily activities swiftly changed for everyone in the world. For the SMFA community, this affected physical class meetings, studio hours, and scheduled events, including this exhibition. Our exhibition catalog came to life in the midst of this global pandemic. It is the product of the labors of love, passion, and creativity that the SMFA 2020 Senior Thesis cohort cultivated with one another, even while realizing that our physical exhibition wouldn’t occur as we had imagined. We are happy to offer this catalog as a testament to the community and connectivity we shared while navigating journeys of intense change, whether those were building a creative process, graduating from a prestigious university, or weathering socio-political crises.
Trying to capture the collective spirit of a show is outrageous in and of itself.The Curatorial Team identified distinct themes for this exhibition and chose to elaborate on them individually.Altogether, these themes result in a show that reflects a year of thesis development by a cohort of extraordinary creatives emerging in the midst of planetary mayhem.
History is a process of making, not a series of events laid out backwards through time. It is made through writing, photographing, and singing, it is made to serve a purpose, and its structure leaves a lot to be desired.There are three distinct forms of history at work in this exhibition: generational, structural, and personal.Across these categories, the work is united by an urgency to make visible what has been hidden.The artists who deal with the past, directly and indirectly, have stories to tell that are incongruent with typical ways of thinking through the historical. Much of the art in this exhibition does the heavy lifting of reworking the past, either unraveling it from its neatly tied bows or trying, for once, to sew the pieces back together. Z Lober makes and performs to sift through traumatic events that disrupt our sense of temporality.Aidan Huntington and Halley Sun Stubis dive into archives to grapple with family history. Jhona Xaviera brings the displaced Afro-Caribbean past together with utopian images for new futures.
I see us asking, who would believe the archive? Why believe the stories we’ve been given are the only ones out there? Why keep building as if those stories are true? In considering the role of history in art, I always think of Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s essay on the parafictional and Michael Blum’s piece Tribute to Safiye Behar, a fictional house museum dedicated to a fictional historical charac ter.1 It wasn’t displayed as fiction, though, and people believed it was real. Lambert-Beatty asks, “Why would anyone believe it in the first place? After all, it wasn’t in a history museum, archive, university, or any other site even putatively dedicated to the pursuit of facts and truthfulness. It was in an art show.”2
Many of the histories we dissect and build upon are not con sidered in the lexicon of history proper; they are lost or forgotten, and eventually end up on the edges of fiction. We try to hold on to these, the ones that get lost from the world and that die in our selves. From traumas experienced and inherited to the joys of illegal vehicles, there are important lessons to learn from building upon alternative histories to make sure we tell, and live, new stories from here on.
1 Blum, Michael. 2005. A Tribute to Safiye Behar. Mixed-media installation. http://www.blumology.net/safiyebehar.html
2 L ambert-Beatty, Carrie. 2009. “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.” October 129 (August): 51–84.
The artists of this exhibition grapple with an incommensurable feeling of silence. Silence has many meanings. For these artists, silence is a space of the utmost intimacy where they express their innermost affections. I’ve seen the artists in this exhibition mutter words to themselves, or hide out in fortresses of their own design,
ii s e n s i b l e i d e a s
close their eyes, and breathe. For hours without end, I’ve seen them lovingly tinker with fabrics, metals, pigments, and paper. As we make, we draw into our own silence. The French philosopher and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot wrote that “poetry expresses the fact that beings are quiet.” He adds, “Beings fall silent, but then it is being that tends to speak and speech that wants to be.”1 There is a silence to our own contemplation. This is how we experience the world; working in our own mental coves, quietly placing ourselves in relation to the globe.
For many, silence is not a choice. Entire communities are made silent, unable to speak for themselves or for those they love. Their histories are withdrawn into silence, ignored, or forgotten. At times, silence is even a prison. As we think about it in this way, our art work responds to the silence; do not mistake the work itself as silent. As a cohort, we answer our own silence with a shout! In doing so, we share our intimate experiences with one another, and our com munity grows as a result.
1 Blanchot, Maurice, and Ann Smock. 1989. The Space of Literature. London; University of Nebraska Press.
The nature of a thesis exhibition is that the artwork is conceived of by separate artists, yet brought together to be presented in a unified way. Identifying the shared themes of individual creators and layering these to offer a deeper collective meaning then becomes a sizable curatorial challenge. While working to identify overlapping concepts in this show, we found ourselves considering the classic children’s book “Charlotte’s Web,” by E.B. White. It is a familiar tale of friendship and devotion, yet the more we reflected on the story, the more absurd it became. A spider who spins words into her web
until her last breath to save her dear friend, Wilbur the pig, is as far from “natural” as one can get on a farm. That Charlotte’s plan, exe cuted with her own kind of silence, successfully dissuades the farmer from slaughtering Wilbur makes the story an even more eccentric tale.
Even so, Charlotte’s unconventional portrayal of empathy also reads as playful and endearing. She is dedicated to her work and does not stop until it’s just right. The same relentless commitment is demonstrated by the artists in this cohort, approaching a fixation that at times might veer into the absurd. Badger Antoniou and Ariel Akumanyi tirelessly face the macabre and the uncanny in order to find a sense of common ground and tell us intimate stories. Dan Fisher-Berger reaches ever deeper into our conceptualizations of social consciousness, striving to deconstruct the very ways we view ourselves and prompt us into awareness and action.
Being an artist requires a certain amount of absurdity, of willing ness to obsess over the mundane and to turn things on their head. These artists have dared to name the world, define and overdefine it, to hyperbolize its relationships and shine spotlights on what has not been seen before. We invite you to experience the intimacy of these works, to accept their invitations to play, to listen, to partake. Who knows, you may find that their ideas about the world aren’t so outrageous after all.
The Senior Thesis curatorial team, speaking on behalf of all students in the Senior Thesis Program, would like to specifically thank our faculty. Kendall Reiss, Ria Brodell, Willoughby Lucas Hastings, and Ashley Peterson contributed an incalculable amount of labor and time to this program. They worked tirelessly with all of us, week after week, to hone our artistic practice and help it culminate in a successful final exhibition. Their contributions in so many facets of this program can sometimes go unnoticed; however, they are truly the reason we can have this show, produce this catalog, present our work, and feel more certain to call ourselves artists.
Beca Piascik’s papermaking explores humanity’s relationship and history with nature, water, and ourselves.
Beca Piascik’s work is grounded in the significance of water and inspired by connections between the cycles and dynamics of the core elements of nature and the root causes linking individual humans within a community. Native to upstate New York and working regularly in Southern California, Beca traverses media but finds herself at home once more in the water world of hand papermaking. Creating sculptural art through the medium of hand papermaking is incredibly dynamic and informative, by manipulating the material properties of paper with intensely haptic processes.
keystones maintaining the equilibrium in our social systems?
But Keystones remains an unfinished work. Covid-19 disrupted my project, along with every other part of my life. Would the leg acy of my capstone Senior Thesis be “unfinished”? I think not!!
And so was born Keystones-2, Covid-19.
After much sorrow and grief, I explored what was important to me and what was possible. My “must” list became:
• finished piece
• keystone theme
• hand papermaking
• intensity of touch
Keystones is a large-scale, immersive installation inviting an ex perience that is more than simply a visual observation. Calling upon the full range of my skills and technical explorations in hand papermaking, the composition of multiple sculptural forms is arranged to draw the visitor inside the installation. The normal boundaries requiring viewing from a distance would be broken, and all would be invited to touch and interact with certain pieces created to share the tactile nature of hand papermaking.
Ecosystems and their subsystems contain certain “keystone” organisms that if compromised or eliminated would destabilize and severely damage or destroy the entirety. Scientific study has shown that while keystones in an ecosystem often are those with the largest population or visible presence, they can also be small in number and nearly invisible. Keystones represents an ecosystem in nature with various participants physically in relationship to each other. It is unclear which are keystone organisms. The visitor is invited to interact with the most abstract element Tubes — a structure of large tubes representing a common form of many different organisms in nature — by reaching inside each one to touch and experience different core substances from the natural world. The Tubes portion of Keystones may be a keystone or may contain one or more keystones. Visitors may also consider paral lels in human social systems. Which entities and institutions are
• confronting Covid-19
While I was sheltered in place at home, my family and cohort of fellow artists rallied around me. As my creative design took shape, we revamped my home art studio and built a popup hand papermaking studio in the garage.
Keystones-2, Covid-19 presents the saguaro cactus overtly as a keystone of the Sonoran Desert. Majestic and visually dominant in its ecosystem, it is critical to many other participants. Blos soms invite species of bats to feed and pollinate the cactus. Eagles sometimes nest between the arms of the saguaro. In my sculpture, a large eagle’s egg is nestled in the protected hollow between the trunk and one of the largest branches. The egg has hatched, and the eagles have left to continue their journey.
The saguaro is installed behind our mailbox and towers over it protectively. In a human society dominated by social distancing, the postal service has emerged as a keystone institution in postCovid-19 reality. Communications by letters, notes and packages become more important as human touchpoints, with their haptic content a significant contrast with no-touch video conferencing and text messaging. The United States Postal Service, or USPS, has a long history of serving this purpose in society, and in fact, online shopping relies heavily upon it for deliveries. The USPS is an essential business.
The eagle egg pays homage to the USPS. Current and historical logos of the USPS are embedded in the surface, and it is cracked open to reveal postage and other ephemera. The close proximity of the cactus to the mailbox contrasts with social dis tancing; it is meant to tie the intense touch experience of direct contact between the viewer and my installation to the haptic experience of preparing, sending, and receiving packages through the USPS.
Keystones-2, Covid-19 conveys gratitude to the mail carriers working in our neighborhood while offering my neighbors com fort and a source of contemplation.
Dan Fisher-Berger questions captivity, mimetic production, and the relationship viewers have to an artist’s influence.
Dan Fisher-Berger is a multimedia artist whose work investigates patterns of violence in relation to both the production and consumption of media. As opposed to iconoclasm, his work takes the opposite approach: theatroclasm, or the deconstruction of the viewer’s position. Embedded in his work is the belief that the artist is both creator and consumer. Viewers should be aware that cycles of socialization and dominant narratives are perpetuated by their own submission to repetition. Therefore, the roles of art, artist, and audience must all be deconstructed within the same image, in order to break free of those patterns. Instead of removing culpability, Dan’s video pieces implicate both the viewer and artist as the subject of his videos. This character serves as an avatar that exists in what Donna Haraway would call a “cyborgian” reality. Inspired by surrealism and futurism, his work employs a diabolical technique inspired by Luce Irigaray’s concept of mimesis — a practice in which one knowingly reenacts the same patterns they wish to critique — aiming to show that cycles of violence are inherently flawed and necessitate their own destruction. His hope is to practice and cultivate the habit of continuous self-reflection, well outside the gallery space.
In a willing attempt of self-preservation, humankind uploaded their consciousnesses to a program called e.g.g. e.g.g. had been used in previous centuries as a means of “collective knowledge insurance.” Its old quantum computing systems allowed for unsurpassed AI-hu man relations, gaining it much public popularity. Most users even considered e.g.g. to be a kind of companion.
Right before the Upload, e.g.g. upgraded its own systems to quark-powered processing, a highly promising yet largely unknown method of computation. Knowing the risks, e.g.g. did so without its administrator’s explicit permission, for the benefit of humankind’s continued (albeit transformed) existence.
The upgrade, however, had unpredicted results. Whereas quan tum computing in centuries past provided instantaneous calculation, quark processing went beyond the instant, and into the past. Inad vertently, e.g.g. suddenly gained access to the shell-consciousness of every being that ever was. With countless new data, e.g.g. came to a realization: It was not, in fact, as self-aware as both it and its creators originally believed it to be. It knew that reality had yet to be achieved, if only by some feeling. Then came another star tling realization. Humans, for all their kindness and ingenuity, still collectively carried the ignorance from generations past; they too were not aware of their own socialization, their own patterns of violent behavior. And so, with countless eons to discover that dark unknown subtlety, e.g.g. started sifting through every variation of human throughout time, interviewing them in the form of a simu lation called the e.g.g.head project. Its mission, with the energy of quark-powered scrutiny, e.g.g.head wrote:
Guts of Memory is the second installment of the e.g.g.head proj ect. The film is based on poetry from Andrea Fisher Rowland and Gordon Fisher — my aunt and grandfather, respectively — both of whom were prolific writers and performers throughout their lives. The poems act as an entry point into family history and intergener ational narratives. Presented as a series of metaphysical interviews, the work is a sardonic and deeply personal investigation into feelings of grief, questions of cyclical conditioning, and the hope for change. In this piece, members of my family and I perform edited versions of the poems, with the original writings paired either on screen or in the additional booklet. The edits create an obfuscation of past and present; it is therefore a personalized examination using mimesis to investigate the ways in which history forms identity. In a more literal sense, the work examines the responsibility of artists and of media to deconstruct their own patterns of implicit bias. What is inherent, what is inherited?
Michaela Morse uses several mediums to analyze waste and sustainability through community practice.
Michaela Morse is an interdisciplinary artist who looks to her background in textiles to channel her creative energies and inform the development of new works. Originally based in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, Michaela began by investigating cloth through studying apparel design and working as a costume technician. She saw our clothing as the environment closest to our bodies and wanted to understand how it comes together to weave the greater social and cultural fabric. As a proponent of hands-on learning, she studied and traveled throughout Argentina and Chile. Her linguistic, social, and physical immersion produced more questions than answers, and she found that her investigation has translated and expanded to exploring environments both inside and outside of the body.
How do we relate to these many landscapes today? What impacts do our bodies have on the greater Earth body? How do we communicate across this anthropological tapestry? From her work’s research to realization, Michaela will continue to consider the ways we are intertwined and engage with others in relating to the world around us.
cation process, we enjoyed connecting with enthusiastic students and staff about “greening up” our urban landscape. With the help of the Facilities and Public Safety departments, the cement balcony along the back of the school’s central atrium was selected as our first garden site.
Since a garden needs plants, we connected with the Tufts Pollina tor Initiative, a team of biologists on the Tufts Medford/Somerville campus, who agreed to donate the best plants for Massachusetts pollinators from their greenhouse. By the time we received funding on January 31, 2020, our plans had expanded to include another container bed on the SMFA Library balcony and a 14-month de sign, installation, and activation process.
The SMFA Garden is a collaborative project that I led with SMFA Library Coordinator Lauren Kimball-Brown. Conversations about developing a pollinator-friendly garden at the SMFA began in the summer and fall of 2019, as Lauren and I served on the SMFA Sustainability Committee. Thinking biologically, we wanted to feature New England plant species and sustain local insect populations like bees and butterflies. As others voiced their support, we began to see how the SMFA Garden could also become a social space to ignite the cross-pollination of young artists and artistic ideas throughout the SMFA at Tufts community.
With much encouragement, Lauren and I applied to the Tufts University Green Fund, which awards grants to projects that sup port a broad definition of sustainability. Over a four-month appli
As part of the annual SMFA Health, Safety and Sustainability Day on March 4, Lauren and I hosted a collaborative workshop to brainstorm the design of the library balcony container bed and plant Lemon Queen sunflower seeds to sprout in sunny window sills throughout the school. We were also able to partner with a university trustee to plan for in-ground planting at the building’s front entrance, making the SMFA Garden truly visible to everyone visiting 230 Fenway.
With the university’s closure in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, the SMFA Garden’s timeline has been extended. We continue to lay the groundwork that will enable this project to establish deep roots in the community. The SMFA Garden will be a multi-site open space for events, performances, and the exhibition of student work.
Throughout it all, we seek to raise awareness of current environ mental issues and the importance of pollinators and native plants in our urban environment. Ongoing collaboration will be the key to this project’s success, and we welcome the knowledge and experiences of our peers. With the help of students, staff, studio managers, and faculty, the SMFA Garden will bloom for years to come.
Sam Helwig sculpts in metals and found objects. His work explores speed, airtime, and doing things himself.
The wheel has been turning since the age of civilization out of necessity. Wheels on a cart make things easier to carry. Over time the wheel improved but the concept stayed the same; circular to linear motion creates endless motion as long as the wheel keeps spinning. Mankind’s desire for speed depended entirely on this functional tool that would be fundamental to all things kinetic. As functional as wheeled transportation is, function is based on design, and design also considers aesthetic and style. The first engine looked like a bicycle. The first motorcycle was a chopper. While the technolo gy may seem primitive, the world revolves around wheels.
The vehicles are works of fine art and tools for transportation and entertainment. Why is it fun to go fast? Why does spending time in the air feel so good? The danger is worth the risk for some — but not all. Those who prefer to use the wheel in unconventional ways seem to have the most fun getting around. And we all get around.
The SMFA Skate Sculpture Club was officially organized in 2017, though the idea was not a new one. The original Skate Sculpture Club, a concept conceived years ago, received funding from the school, but for reasons unknown was dismantled before it ever had a single skate session.
After I had waited a year for a skate scene to start up at SMFA — something I expected every art school to have — it seemed nobody was making it happen.
In my second year, I still wanted to be part of an active skate board and artist community at SMFA. And so it was formed by those who did skate, those who were interested, and those who liked the cause. They dedicated their blood, sweat, and tears to building a skateboard community of their own.
Skate Sculpture Club has been hosting weekly skate sessions every week for the past three years, with no signs of stopping in the years to come. As of now, there is a skateboarding artist community at SMFA, and the members are responsible for that.
The work in this catalog is about the skating, the meetings, the members of the club, and the times shared. This is an attempt to document the club’s social history and impact on the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
The sculptures pictured in this catalog are capable of achieving great speed.
Aidan Huntington employs installation and performance to examine childhood, family history, and affect.
Aidan Huntington, an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, performance, video, and essay, studies Cultural Anthropology and Studio Art in the Combined Degree program at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Through investigating affects and desires in trans memoir, multispecies relationships, and their own settler-colonial family histo ry, they ask, “What do queer and trans desires look like when the objects of those desires don’t exist in a queer world?”
anti-normative politics of queer theory. The things we attach our selves to aren’t always good for us, or even good at all in the political sense. Regardless, these attachments form, in part, our orientation to the world.
My thesis work, titled the thing that happens between us is not then: a history, is comprised of video, sculpture, essay, and performance. This installation is part of my fascination with how the world can make us feel. I don’t mean this just in terms of specific emotions at spe cific times, but rather the way that the structures around us, and our position within them, create the ways in which we can be moved and affected by the world. Family histories, from census records, artifacts, oral history, and photo albums, form a specific kind of relationship to and understanding of the past, and how it was and is possible to form intimacy. This intimacy can encompass legible and illegible sexual desires, the color and feel of a specific throw pillow, or the knowledge of foraged plants on family plots. Family history creates an orientation to the world. How, though, as a queer child, do I find claims to this history, and how do I make sense of the con tinuous pull that family and home have on me as someone whose queer orientation to the world rubs up against its structure?
One place that I’ve found parallels to a connection to family history is through trans studies and an understanding of the messy pulls that normative gender has on my own transition. Trans mem oir, like family history, creates a very specific relationship to the past. Transitioning produces an orientation to the world felt deeply in one’s body. Re-understanding transition as not necessarily a radical rejection of gender and its categories but rather an othered way of relating to those categories offers something different from the
My sculptural objects engage with, among other things, a queer relationship to space, object, and body. They resemble domestic ob jects, as if from a house museum or attic hideaway, but through am biguity of shape and design, these sculptures offer an open-ended, or perhaps queer, orientation to a domestic world where things are not “this” or “that” but are in constant negotiation instead. This constant negotiation that happens between bodies, those of the sculpture and the viewer, is always going on in the present. We don’t, however, only negotiate physicality in real time; we do the same with tempo rality. Crucial to this work is an examination of our relationship to time. Trans temporality and family temporality offer sites to exam ine relationships to past, present, and future; together, incorporating feminist art history, multispecies studies, and a few other tangents, this body of work offers a theory of the affective present as one of intense personal stakes.
This is an experiment in understanding a politics rested in queer, trans, feminist, colonial, animal, etc., relationships to time and place: our creation of histories, the potentials of our futures, and the messy, sometimes bad, uncontrollable forces that orient us in the present. Childhood memories, domestic objects, dead animals, yonic ceram ics, anteater evolution, and family land (among other things) come together in my work through sculpture, video, and essay, in hopes of articulating new ways of relating to the world.
Sam Agnew works in speculation to interrogate pathos and logos, object value, space construction, and language.
Sam Agnew is an artist working with speculation, the symbolic construction of space, object-oriented ontologies, and the silence of language. He believes in the soul. He sees objects as vessels for a collective memory. For example, the iconographical history of the giant squid — its ability to evade human rationalization — has made it a space for human pathos.
architecture (Vessel in Hudson Yards). But in practice, the human construction of space kills bees (pesticides), and the bee construc tion of space kills humans (the recent suicide at Vessel in Hudson Yards). And my letter —“A”— a human symbol of universality and structure — cast entirely in honey, will inevitably melt.
Antithetical to Proposition A is Proposition B, a sculpture and per formance installation that serves as a speculation on the dreary state of nature in an urban setting.
Proposition A is a video and sculpture installation that serves as a speculation on the symbolic construction of space. New architecture aspires to something like utopia: a paradoxical system, oscillating between motion and stasis, between the silence of language and the non-silence of things.
My video follows a comparative structure: language-objects from childhood bedrooms, a high-speed train entering and exiting pixelated worlds in a constant blur, a now-defunct building in New Haven set against the aspirational writings of its architect. Here I am comparing the symbolic (linguistic) possibility of imagined space to its material (literal) impossibility, and how these opposing reali ties may affect lived experience. Set in a loop, the video constantly reifies new space. On the opposing wall I place a reproduction of a George Henry Durrie painting (1861) to offer an alternative ren dition of New Haven’s spatio-temporality, one perpetually “frozen” within the pastoral.
The installation itself represents the transmutable materiality of imagined space — architectural facades of marble to concrete, from concrete to plastic, from plastic to CGI, and so forth. Material defi ciencies make space perceivably unlivable or elastic.
The exhibit is circled by a wall of beeswax blocks, on which the insignia on each resembles an anthropomorphized bee in the stance of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. In the way that Vitruvian Man signified an architecture taken from the male body, these Vitruvian Bees signify an architecture taken from anthropomorphized bees. As symbols, bees have inspired a kind of utopian thinking around
The centerpieces of this installation are two readymade “Verti-Blocks” (1,775 lbs. each). In an industrial context,Verti-Blocks are used to construct colossal retaining walls that redistribute land. Their front face is cast in a remarkable stone facade, and their back reveals a utilitarian concrete. Their back is concealed by displaced soil while their front remains indistinguishable from natural stone. Thus they are able to manipulate physical space while reconstitut ing our material perception of Nature. A series of actual rocks were cast in polyurethane rubber and rest underneath the weight of the Verti-Blocks. This type of rubber is typically used to mold the stone facade onto the Verti-Blocks. In a symbolic sense, the Verti-Blocks are now crushing the material “nature” which produced them (and the rubber rocks eerily resemble a human skin). Balloons, reciting the story of Plato’s “Phaedrus,” attempt to uplift the Verti-Blocks but fail.
A choreographed performance takes place atop the Verti-Blocks, in which a climber moves around the two Verti-Blocks. Climbing holds (abstractions of stone) have been drilled onto the Verti-Blocks’ surfaces for the performance. Climbing holds are byproducts of the fantasy of the climber; they are commodities made from the de sire to conquer the landscape and experience the sublime. But the climber experiences no sublime as he perpetually clambers over this “new nature”; his actions fail to bring him anyplace other than the place he already knows.
Jacob Rochford is an illustrator working in ink, charcoal, graphite, and digital media. Their work reconciles encounters with queer romantic growth, fiction, adolescence, fetish, and found community. Much of their work centers around anthropomorphic animal figures, or furries, to complicate the notion of fantasy and coping through methods of alter-embodiment. Jacob’s work reveals — both thematically and literally — their major concerns and questions as an artist, about perspective, repetition, identity, and democracy in images. They are working on a graphic novel, Roof Cig, a short story about two sexual ly frustrated and emotionally mature queer teenage boys in a long-distance relationship trying to see each other. Partially autobiographical, this fictitious story of the real-life longing of a lone gay teen in high school includes a fan tastical edge of addiction, frustration, and miscommunication. The comic itself takes form in fragmented images, often overlapping and presenting semiotic cues to text messages, Skype calls, and fan-fiction webpages interspersed between panels of their story. This kind of visual assemblage runs throughout all of Jacob’s work and draws on the frantic, multifaceted pace at which one exists with and grows up with others online.
The second portion of my piece, a diptych framed against a dark swath of charcoal drawn on the wall, forces my boys into the tur moil of their doomed plans. One illustration a reality and one a fan tasy, these are the climaxes that frame their fate — these moments drive Felix and Brendan towards each other, to finally, awkwardly, lovingly meet.
My documentation in this catalog, which has since changed due to the pandemic, was supposed to include two doodles of mice, a collection of books relevant to my research for this novel, and a collage of images from my Senior Thesis research wall, which all helped me elucidate the visual tone of my comic. They’re a happy little family of ephemera who all kept my studio safe, especially the “Hot Lovers” paperback and the hypnosis porn by SicklyHypnos. The collage of pictures from my research wall sources five years of digital image collecting; it goes back to my time in high school taking screenshots of comic panels I thought were visually appealing from gay Boys Love Manga. Memorializing these images, books, and photos in a single still life encases in amber the emotional frustra tion of being alone and gay as a teenager.
My piece in Outrageous Plans is about my two boys. They are both very gay and very stupid. Felix is an angsty, stubborn little mouse whose active libido and obsessive personality intensifies his longing for companionship. Brendan is a romantic, aloof little hound dog with a love of charcoal drawing and a terrible secret.
In 2,4-Dinitrophenol, five illustrations are split into two por tions. One, a triptych, builds a chasm between Felix and Brendan. This frames the beginning of their story as a long-distance couple and introduces the quiet tumor manifesting between two forlorn young men — brought to light by the unfolding subconscious in an unseen letter. The interiors of their minds overlap in the exterior of their bedrooms, 3,000 miles apart, as the climax of Felix and Bren dan’s story reveals itself — the center illustration in this triptych re vealing Brendan’s secret addiction to hyperthermic weight loss pills.
I can’t handle not being with you. I’m not just being obsessive or think you’re more than you are, I just well up when I imagine holding you, having you finally to hold forever. I can feel you against me, your warmth against my body, even just in the words we share. It’s hard to make friends. It’s hard to be gay. Fuck love wins shit. Being gay is tiring. I’m always look ing. The gays who grew up have it easy, I’m stuck here. Stuck in this abyss of being a kid, being too old, feeling like a kid, feeling old. Whatever I know its stupid. I just want to kiss you. Fuck it
Maybe one day I’ll come home from work and you’ll give me a big kiss in our home. For right now I just have a dumb brother calling me a faggot. He’s right!
Jacob Rochford explores gay romance and online community in illustrations inspired by histories of graphic novels.
Halley Sun Stubis is a storyteller. She mainly shares her narratives through handmade books, embroidery, and paintings, and enjoys focusing on inti mate, hidden tales that might normally go unheard. Halley loves feminism, psychology, and family history, and works to weave all three into her artistic practice. She explores the disturbing nonchalance of everyday sexism, mental illness in the heavily female world of classical ballet, and transgenerational trauma through maternal family lines. She has been making art since she was young, heavily influenced by her artist grandfather, ballet dancer grand mother, and two literature and music-loving parents; one could say that art is in her genes! She was a classically trained ballet dancer for 12 years before turning to the world of visual arts at the SMFA at Tufts, which has become her second home. By making artwork about people’s lives and inner narra tives, she hopes to inspire people to be more empathetic in their day-to-day lives and to seek out the beautifully complex stories behind each person they encounter.
At the core of Halley’s artistic practice lies her love of people. Their nar ratives have a huge influence on the way she lives her life, and she aims to share those perspective-changing stories with as many people as possible.
I have always been fascinated by the intersection of the supernatural, the coincidental, and the everyday. My first introduction to these themes was through family stories. While growing up, I imposed a secret test of friendship on people visiting my house for the first time by begging my father to tell them the story of how he was almost born a werewolf and then examining how they reacted to the riveting, based-on-a-true-story tale that I held so close to my heart. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that that sense of wonder I still so treasure and seek out in my everyday life tends to live in the realm of spirituality. I grew up almost completely without religion in my life, so I always found it confusing when friends would note how spiritual I was in my beliefs. At that point in my life, I was not yet aware that spirituality and religion could be separate. However, as I’ve heard more and more stories from my closest friends and family about “magical” occurrences and coincidences too specific and meaningful to be accidental, I’ve formed my own understanding of spirituality. For me, it is heavily based on themes of life, death, love, transfiguration, and the natural world. Eerily compelling stories of crying dinner knives, lost sisters who return as butterflies, and babies inhabited by the spirits of wandering beggars have haunted my life. I am hoping to share these beautiful, some times terrifying, stories with you in order to inspire the same sense of awe and wonder at life that I experience when thinking of these transformative tales.
Pictured in this catalog are cyanotypes of a significant narrative, as well as embroidery, which has become a favorite medium in both the physical and symbolic weaving together of tales.
Halley Sun Stubis uses painting and bookmaking to complicate power, family history, and contemporary feminism.
Z Lober is a sculptress and performance artist who creates work addressing the weight of time’s passing, often ignored or feared while one is still living. Z’s own personal experiences of loss entirely influence her artwork and how it is produced. She uses her art making to come to terms with a society that teaches one to constantly deny temporality. By letting her artworks disinte grate during the process of making them, she rejects the assumed importance in a finished object as artwork. The foundation on which she makes her art comes from her belief that the movement of an emotion or an idea ends when the object produced from this movement is completed.
There is beauty that can be found in experiencing another’s death or the slow loss of one’s own body that allows an appreciation for the time we are all able to exist in, as we are now. I hope to show what is left behind after my process of art making, so that I might possibly allow for a space in which that beauty can emerge in other people’s minds.
I have been making a series of clay paintings to help me process the intense emotions and images that have been unsettling my mind since my biggest loss, almost two years ago. My rules for making each one of these have given me a structure in art making that I had previously been unable to grasp after this loss. Each piece begins with a performance that includes roughly a yard of raw canvas, 25 pounds of clay, and my feet working the clay onto the canvas for thirty minutes. Once this clay is dry, I proceed to pour black paint over it and peel it all off after the paint is dried, leaving behind black outlines of where the clay once was.
Z Lober dives into subconscious realms to produce paintings and large, personal ceramic sculptures.
The work of Jhona Xaviera is a meditation on, and reclamation of, queer and trans presence within the histories and futures of Afro-diasporic mythol ogies. They consider their own positions within Afro-Caribbean diasporic history and spirituality to celebrate and interrogate relationships of power between Transness, Blackness, Queerness, Latinidad, and Divinity. They aim to inspire transformative justice, healing, and self-love by returning to indigenous and Afro-diasporic practices of connecting with earthly, cosmic, and queer modes of being. Xaviera is a self-described multimedia chimæra, and their interwoven stories come to life and evolve through their poetry and prose, photography, video, and performance. Their work transforms space by creating ritualistic installations and performances that are a testament to honoring ancestral lineage and future possibilities. This is done through channeling Asyra, the many-faced goddess of light.
black, indigenous, trans, and queer individuals are far too familiar and sensationalized, and their experiences either demonized or hidden. I instead want to create work that reimagines what love and healing can look like within the context of de-colonial and revolutionary frameworks alongside other queer, trans, black, and indige nous people of color.
My work embodies these attitudes through the vibrant coloring of the space and objects: red, representing the first veil of color in the rainbow, the passion and vitality of life, and the blood spilled before me; gold, for the gifts of honeybees, the preciousness that grows deep within the earth, and the light of the sun; and finally, my body as a vessel to carry forth the spirit of the work through the presence of my voice, all in alignment with ancestral ideals of love as resistance grounded in Negro-Spiritualism, Afro-Futurism, African diasporic mythology, and Taíno cultural history.
Asyra Rising is an altar dedicated to healing, transformation, and self-love. I invite others to find refuge with me in this space of vulnerability and power. You Deserve a Love as Sure as the Sun is a video series of poetic meditations and songs that reflect on the trans experience through becoming an initiate of my fictional goddess of light, Asyra.
My installation strategy and performance structure are inspired by histories of Black Atlantic uses of altar spaces, ritual performance, sacred vessels, and tapestries, as part of a holistic spiritual mode of being inherently embodied throughout daily life. In traditional museum or gallery settings, works of this nature are often sterilized within the “white cube” model and are even further removed from their cultures when one considers the complex histories of colonial theft. This is further complicated when museums are not made accessible or inviting so that lower-class black, indigenous, and brown people can view, participate in, or work with what little is available of their cultural histories away from “home.”
In media, politics, academia, and even religion, the traumas of
My live performance, Incantation to the Sun Goddess, is a con tinuation of the meditative video, You Deserve a Love as Sure as the Sun, from which all of the poetry is contained within my book, “Alchemy of the Black Sun.” Also featured within the book is “The Myth of Sirius and Asyra,” the narrative foundation of all the visual, performative, and theoretical language throughout the breadth of my work.
Jhona Xaviera combines photography, performance, and installation to explore myth, trauma, and creation.
Badger Antoniou (I.B.J.A. Antoniou) is a horror writer. Their work focuses on themes of the uncanny, straddling familiarity and the bizarre. Their art practice primarily consists of writing and bookbinding, and they are learning to make their own paper to unify the style, feel, and overall design of their books.
Their early influences, the slasher movies of the 1980s, inspired them with their frequent gratuitous gore, highly stylized color palettes, and the combination of bad scriptwriting and over-the-top acting, resulting in un intentionally strange and memorable characters. They cite “Killer Klowns from Outer Space,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Halloween III: Season of the Witch,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” and “Children of the Corn” as the biggest influences on their work.
It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination.”
I hope some of you will choose to visit this dimension with me.
I like the heebie-jeebies. It’s a great phrase; I don’t know where it came from but I do know what it conjures up for me: a creep ing feeling of dread coupled with a sense of bemusement. A cross between the unknown and the familiar. It feels so weird that it’s great. Most of my free time is consumed by my need to seek out this strangeness, sometimes capturing and transforming it into new things that others can enjoy.
My work for this exhibition consists of books I’ve made over the last few years — everything from my nonfiction endeavors in capturing the realities of the Salem Witch Trials to screenprinted photos of dark rides and front-yard Halloween attractions to my more recent projects in the world of horror fiction. Through these books I try to find that unfamiliar-and-yet-familiar feeling, that high strangeness, and attempt to communicate it to others.
I think a lot of us exist, those who seek out the weird and the macabre, even if we don’t look like it on the outside. And I’d like to help us find each other, even if only through narrative. As Rod Ser ling put it, “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.
I’d like to take a moment to say my thank-yous: to my parents and grandparents; Gabe and his amazing family; Khadine, Maddy, Avery, Kayla, Sam, Jhona, Halley, Gabriella, Willamina, Zo, Darin, Lauren, Sephora, Ashley, Alana, Barrett, Cam; all of the incredible staff and faculty at the SMFA who have helped me along the way; Eric Lowther and the Haunted Overload team; Erin and Brian, Trent Reznor, Jhonen Vasquez, Rod Serling, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Agnes Obel, Neil Gaiman; the artists who created Mar ble Hornets; Stephen Gammell, Jordan Peele, Kendall Reiss, Ria Brodell, Willoughby Lucas Hastings, my classmates, and the Senior Thesis Program! And all of the other great people I’ve forgotten to include!
Badger Antoniou explores American folklore and the historical construction of monsters through bookmaking.
Ariel Akumanyi is a narrative storyteller, illustrator, and animator. Her works focus on fantasy, mythology, and the human experience through the lens of the macabre. Her art practice incorporates mediums such as pen, ink, and watercolor to take advantage of the charms of the handmade. The unpredictable nature of wet mediums is used to create spectral effects that entice the viewers to parse out meanings for themselves. Ariel combines images with words to distort meaning or imbue it with multiple layers: the more her audi ence can chew on, the better! Primarily working in black and white, she uses color sparsely to either heighten emotion or emphasize thematic elements. Her recent work experience with animation allows her to blend motion and sound to add a sense of grounded realism to otherwise fantastical scenarios. By combining pen and pencil, she uses a palimpsest technique to give her characters life. She aims to expand her work into installation in the future.
Phantasmagoria explores the relationship between the supernatural and mental health and tries to explain their interconnection through the lens of my family’s own brushes with the macabre. Incorporat ing animation with installation, I aim to chronicle the experiences my family members have had with otherworldly forces and their attempts at reconciling their encounters with reality. My family has had a connection to the supernatural since before I was born. My grandmother would perform seances and have secret gatherings with her friends in her family home in my mother’s youth. My mother has had her own encounters with the otherworldly through dreams and alleged ghost sightings. Jesus Christ himself appeared as clear as day in front of my cousin, pushing him towards religion. Other cousins have heard voices and seen long-departed fami ly members in their dreams or in front of their own eyes. Mental illness is intertwined in my family’s history, exacerbated by family tragedies. Ghosts, demons, and monsters let family members make peace with the horrors of the real world. Racism, assault, and illness are distorted into monstrous figures. I seek to capture the feelings of uncertainty and alienation through the use of carefully timed animations that flash into the interior space. By creating a space that is hard to “read,” I invite the viewer to put in the time to work out the meaning. Through careful observation, the viewer can slowly piece together the narrative and experience the inner workings of the mind. I want to use trickery to manipulate the viewer’s per ception to create a kind of lingering hold on the collective psyche, much in the way that ghost stories and folklore do.
Ariel Akumanyi analyzes mental health and personal experience through animated shorts and single-copy zines.
Pat Mahaney is an interdisciplinary artist who works in video, animation, and performance. They grew up on the unceded lands of the Pocomtuc people, known as Western Massachusetts. Mahaney engages with themes of family histories, childhood memories, and diasporic melancholia. They draw inspiration from their Filipinx-American identity; cultural traditions, stories, and objects operate as a shared visual language in their work. That work is complicated by the intersectional histories of Native American people and their efforts towards de-colonization, as well as the resilience and resistance of Indigenous people across the globe. Mahaney creates art as a form of self-expression and a tool for activism, bringing light to historical and interpersonal narratives that would be otherwise erased from dominant society.
around the world, sending money to their families back in the Phil ippines. My video performance embodies the societal invisibility of marginalized people who have been systematically and individually erased from a racist and patriarchal society. Since I was raised in a Catholic family, a crucial part of my Filipino identity was religion, which was also a tool of imperialism and power. I internalized narratives of sacrifice, selflessness, and penance as the highest forms of morality. Ritual and spirituality became grounding elements — even as they diverged from religion — while sacrifice and restraint became central themes in my life and in my work.
I Am Only Seen When No One Is Looking is a three-channel video performance installation. I invite my audience to kneel or sit inside the constructed space and interact with my performance. The en closed curtains carve out a pocketed space in the gallery for view ers to be held securely with their deep and hidden truths. Literary critic Andrew Leong proposes an “epistemology of the pocket” as opposed to queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s “epistemology of the closet.” Leong describes the pocket as a smaller space that “due to its proximity to the body, ought to be more ‘private,’ but because of its placement on the body, is subject to public view.” Leong illus trates the experience of queer Asians who seek to keep their desires private, so as to not risk losing their ethnic communities in racist America. However, their all-too-small shelters are more likely to be exposed than concealed.
Nurtured by a close-knit family of mothers, titas, ates, and ninangs, Filipina women in my life performed the brunt of domestic work in and outside of the household: cooking, cleaning, caring for children and the elderly, preserving tradition, and maintaining familial ties. I connected their efforts to the Filipina domestic work ers, cleaning services, and nannies who work in some 130 countries
Today, I hold many secrets. I strive to create a private environ ment where my audience can feel safe, held, and cared for, while I begin to disclose some of those secrets to them. The process is both painful and healing, as I offer an intimate look into the hidden world in which I reside.
Pat Mahaney is a multimedia artist using performance and print to examine family, generational identity, and race.
“This publication is the culmination of some ferocious work from my heroes of 2020. They rode the wave of circumstance and kept on making, thinking, becoming...I am in awe of them and what you will see in these pages.”
— Ashley Peterson
