This publication accompanies the exhibition Strategic Plan 2025, on view from May 15 through May 19, 2015, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This catalogue is an open edition, with an original run of eighty.

Editor: Chase Carter

Catalog Design: Alex Austin, Chase Carter, Madeleine Kobold, Marie Lopez, and Simon Remiszewski

Cover Design: Simon Remiszewski

3D Scans provided by Marie Lopez and Simon Remiszewski

3D Architectural Model contributed by Nate Grossman

Foreword: Andy Graydon

Executive Summary: William D Ferguson and Christopher Lineberry

Thank You: Chase Carter and Dennissa Young

Printing and Distribution: LighntingSource, La Vergne, TN, USA

2015 by Students and Faculty of the 2015 Senior Thesis Program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without permission. All images are the artists, reproduced with the kind permission of the artists and/or their representatives.

ISBN 978-0-692-43929-6

ForewordExecutive Summary

SaraMarie BottaroChase CarterAnthony DengMegan DonnellyCleo Murphy-GueretteSimon Remiszewski

James DunbarOlexandra SharayaTopher Lineberry

Hannah LuckowerNatalia MillerSophia Lucia Rose

Madeleine KoboldNatasha MorrisKristin Reeder

Duaa AlhammadiEmily StewartLoi Tran

Alex AustinLaura HasanenSam Waxman

Shannon May MackenzieLaura VargasKushala Vora

Sarai Hines

Bianca BroxtonEvan GilbertMax GoodknightKaitlyn Paston

William D FergusonAudrey HsiaCharlotte WampoldDennissa Young

Claudia BatistaMarie LopezWill RussackVictoria Wheeler

Thank You

Contents

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5Foreword

I know that it is traditional on the occasion of a graduation to impart a tiny pearl of wisdom to the graduating class. But with this years Senior Thesis Program exhibition entertaining the notion of the Strategic Plan, a certain rumination on speculation and method seems in order. And so in that spirit I offer this:

Things have a way of taking shape.

Well. Perhaps you are not immediately overwhelmed. But behind the platitude I believe is a statement worth unpacking in the context of our year together in the Senior Thesis Program. Because what appears at first to be a non-declaration on the order of it is what it is also contains a germ of what is so vital and slippery, treacherously straddling the obvious and the tacit, about learning to work independently as an artist.

Let us begin then with the Things. We began our year of studio work with dreams of a clean slate. Newly refurbished floors ready for a new footprint, a fresh start. And likewise many students arrived with a sense of their past work, so very recent, as in some ways already an historical category out of which a new, genuine and original form of the Work would emerge thanks to the clarion lens and elevated platform of the studio space. But a clean slate? No, not really. Things were complicated from the beginning: floors already were full of structures and infrastructures and competing ideas. And they were in need of immediate transformation through retrofitting, accommodation, alteration, rehabilitation, compromise and, well, waiting. Likewise, each of you arrived with your own Thing in tow: your ideals and expectations, developing habits and reflexive responses. In

many cases you didnt know it was your Thing yet; it needed discovering before it could be handled directly. But there it was when you arrived in the studio every day, just as often an obstacle to be overcome as it was a guiding compass or comforting continuity. Both Things, the external space of the studio, and the internal space of each artist, demanded a progress that would only occur through questioning, reconsideration and metamorphosis. It would not happen from scratch.

And so began a process of building, not from the ground up, but from the whatever up, or you might say building from the given up. The open secret is that this is the path of all discovery, all transformation, all progress: it begins in the middle, often of nowhere, and proceeds with what is at hand toward a goal unknown. You as artists insert yourselves into the whatever and you return form; you return meaningful shape to your viewer, your audience, to your world, and most curiously to your self.

This process begins and ends in mess: doubt, un-clarity, dissimulation, more doubt, a maelstrom of whatever. But in walking that path from the given to the form you are manufacturing, there is a skein of sense, of purpose, of belonging and coherence in the world. It is, along this momentary path, a World, a cosmos.

And this then is the Shape I refer to above: the shape of your time, your action and intention, as it conducts through the fabric of your life, and as it etches new grooves into the surface of reality, changing it subtly but substantially. To borrow vocabulary from the writings of Erin Manning

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Executive Summary

Strategic Plan 2025 showcases diverse and plentiful access points, a multitude of possibilities for how artists connect to a landscape of contemporary art, and the world at large. Strategic Plan 2025 encapsulates the time students spent at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, subject to a curriculum which promotes these plural ways of thinking and making. However, Strategic Plan 2025 also speaks to a method of institutional framing, borrowing language from the schools own Strategic Plan - a series of goals to be met over time in order to reach a broader long-term vision. As the first students to experience its direct effects, the class of 2015 is one such defining benchmark for the schools Strategic Plan. Strategic Plan 2025 addresses imminent institutional realities, as well as the long-term goals of the artists themselves: it represents a perpetual negotiation between creative ambition, personal agency, institution, and time. Projecting 10 years into the future, Strategic Plan 2025 marks the artists transition from incubated students to hatched cultural producers, the first official phase of their career.

Strategic Plan 2025 is a launch pad built by students in Senior Thesis, who were required to explore their practice from multiple platforms of academic research and material investigation. The results exemplify a foundation for sustained creative practice, individual to each artists approach to cultural production. A unique function of the exhibition is the transformation of working studios and classrooms into exhibition space, furthering the conversation for how the academy influences bodies of work, and the people who produce them. Internal architectures of the

studios form a physical labyrinth, echoing the students relationship to the school as a puzzle with multiple solutions.

Key points of the exhibitions own strategic plan match each space to a specific objective. Using varied combinations of aesthetics and concepts, each individuals work is incorporated into a holistic schema. Strategic Plan 2025 exemplifies the idiom different ways to skin a cat, evidenced by a plethora of mediums and academic positions, that are simultaneous to each artist and the collective 2015 Senior Thesis class of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

and Brian Massumi, you, your work and your environment are co-composing. In this mode of mutual formation, your action in the studio becomes a thinking-feeling that occurs in a relational field, across works in the making. [] It vibrates. It is not figure or form [] it resonates with all it touches. But it cannot quite be seen. It is a speculative shape, but a shape none the less. Like a line of inflection or a path worn only by repeated walking. (Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, 2014, p.64)

For each of you individually there is a necessary path to walk, and you have just walked it. It seems messy, undisciplined, haphazard, risky, ill-advised, or blindly led, but it is in fact the way of things. This inefficiency is a product of the fertile territory you negotiate: the knowledge not-yet-known, the fields of experience which have not been named, the spaces of culture which have no proper fit, market, or advocate. Yet.

Some of these myriad spaces are reflected directly in the work you have produced over the year and are present in this exhibition. There is the crypto-forest, and the window to a gayer space; the geopageant, and the domain of radical hospitality. There are spaces where science fiction is overwhelmed by the terror of the mundane; where opposites of cultural and personal identification are brought into productive friction, blended without losing their difference. There is the suspended moment of objects-in-process, of trying to apprehend things both in bud and in decay. There are the onrushing vectors of the future already embedded in the material of the present. There are spaces in which only absurdity can counteract the forces of existential

anxiety; and spaces where the everyday and the overlooked become truly redemptive of existence. There are reaches where death walks entwined with life; where disgust and desire, consuming and rejecting, perpetually dance with and excite one another. There are regions that can only function from unknowing, from a refusal to predict the way and a careful cultivation of the reflexive moment; and spaces where memory struggles to find its reality in the present, as trauma, as story, as warning, as promise, or as wish.

Let us pass then finally to the Way. Forward. Not straight, or answered, never resolved, but ever opening further into the shape of the future, like the speculative spaces and the Strategic Plans you invent. This way you might call your practice, your method, your habit, or your work. Indeed it is your art. And I am so proud to have had the chance to share this part of it with you.

On behalf of myself and all of the faculty and fellows of the Senior Thesis Program, congratulations and best wishes.

Andy Graydon

Boston, April 22, 2015

SaraMarie BottaroBio

Originally from San Diego, California, SaraMarie Bottaro is completing a Peace and Justice Studies BA at Tufts University, and a BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is also currently launching a publication house centered on social justice advocacy, Dancing Rabbits Publications. Selected past exhibitions include This Into That: Found Object Art, Assemblage, and Other Transformed Work at Nave Gallery Annex in Somerville, Mostra 1 at Erbaluce in Boston, Altered: Collages, Altered Books, and Mixed Media Works, curated by Jesseca Ferguson at the MFA Bostons WM Hunt Memorial Library.

Artist Statement

Sexual violence is often perceived as a Womens Issue, as if it were something gender specific and easily corralled into one type of lived experience. Instead, it really is a societal issue everyones issue. From the departure point of the ancient myth of vagina dentata present in many cultures, my drawings explore the relationship between the represented/depicted vagina and how it is conceptualized as apart from (instead of a part of) the body as a whole.

Within the text of the vagina dentata myth, the vagina is first pathologised as an intensely dangerous space, due to the presence of teeth, and then subjugated to torturous extraction of those teeth through either phallically induced destruction or plier based ripping out. I see this myth, in all of its forms, as an attempt to justify the violent oppression of women. Through taking away the female bodys power, by ripping out its teeth, there is an excuse to treat the remaining woman as weak. It is my aim in this work to add to the conversation questioning expectations of womens sexual behavior in society, especially in terms of combatting the acceptance of abuse as normative.

Personal memories of violence are hugely motivational in the work and are buttressed by anecdotal disclosures from both close friends and strangers who have shared stories of their trauma with me. Issues of representation in medical literature and practice are brought up in the context of knowledge control and distribution. There is often a confrontational line between the medically relevant and the culturally taboo that directly affects womens health choices and experiences. This manifestation of oppression is reducible to the restrictive cultural attitude that continues to prevail.

Reincorporating teeth into the female genitalia is a way of representing the reclamation of offensive, defensive, and expressive potential that the mythical ripping and knocking out had erased. Discussing issues of sexual violence is difficult, especially in a country founded on puritanical worldviews, but when it is discussed instead of silenced, the issue can begin to be addressed. If more people talked about it, soon no one would have to.

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Chase Carter

Bio

Chase Carter is an artist and activist in his final undergraduate year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. His research-based practice resides within the contexts of institutional critique, social practice, and socially engaged art. With his work, he tries to build platforms and structures for dialogue in spaces and places where there is a lack of opportunity for open discourse. His thesis aims to better understand a series of questions concerning Jewish identity, myth-making, memory, and nationalism.

Artist Statement

Inspired by the aesthetics, procedures, and engagement of political activism, my practice has settled somewhere between activism and art. While art is not always the best method for facilitating social change, I am a true believer in the political potential of art.

My first year in art school, I spent equal time considering my developments as an activist and artist. Besides causing several identity crises, this reflection led me to decide to make art that is: inclusive to more than just the publics of the gallery and museum; within a social, relational, and dialogical framework; participatory; and ultimately striving to be democratic.

Most of the time my work manifests itself through a relational practice within my community, but I also create books, zines, leaflets, and other forms of text with the same purpose in mind. For the past four years, I have been mostly working to develop public dialogues at the Museum School through the use of publications, posters, organized conversations, and other interventions.

Following my enduring interest in the intersection of politics and art, my latest project focuses on Jewish identity and Israel-Palestine. Drawing from theories related to national identity formation and memory studies, this work will primarily materialize as both an artist book and an academic thesis. This project is in fact not so different from my other work I hope to create a platform or structure to encourage open discussion about an issue that is consistently ignored within a community that all too often wont go there.

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Anthony DengBio

Anthony Deng was born in the United States on June 20th on the Gemini/Cancer cusp. His Myers-Briggs type is INTP, and he is an Enneagram type Four. He loves his dog Pepper very much.

Artist Statement

I say no to the commercialization of pedagogy. I say no to the fictions of nostalgia that prevent meaningful change, no to the attenuation of criticality, no to self-sufficiency. I say no to eating meat. No to the importance or necessity of art. No to my own ego, desire, and impulse. Only yes to magnanimity and benevolence, the ends of wisdom.

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Megan DonnellyBio

My name is Megan Donnelly and I am currently a 5th year Senior at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts studying Fine Arts and Anthropology. I am a twenty-three year old artist, traveler, writer, and athlete. I have traveled throughout my life. My fathers job as a U.S. Diplomat meant that our family would relocate to various parts of the world every few years. Throughout my travels I have not only grown as a human in the world but also as an artist, writer and athlete in the world.

Artist Statement

Two strangers go to a bar. They sit next to each other. Order drinks separately. Within a few moments the two engage in conversation; sharing information about their lives with a person whose existence was unknown just moments before. It is these interactions that led my research. Why, as humans, do we have this desire to connect with other humans? Why do we sit at a bar and tell someone we dont know about our life?

Through a series of third person narratives, I explore moments of the human condition as they are lived in everyday life. My work deals with the themes of the human condition, language and storytelling. It takes on the underlying connection between all members of humanity and pins those connections and desires for connections to and in storytelling. These stories also rely heavily on language and its inevitable failure.

The stories I write are my personal encounters in the world. Moments I do not consciously seek out yet always find myself in. They are peoples and stories that have been given to me. They are fractions of lives and beings that have been sacrificed in the interest of human connection. I

view the telling and re-telling of these stories as a ritual. Someone tells me their story, through them telling that story to me we create our own story, and then as a final act of storytelling I write the story of our stories and complete the ritual by putting it out in the world.

I believe that people telling stories is the closest one can get to seeing the world through anothers eyes.

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Cleo Murphy-GueretteBio

Cleo Murphy-Guerette is a photographer and writer, soon to receive her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University. While majoring in Womens Studies, International Relations, and Photography, Cleos art practice has combined imagery and writing to explore alternative methods of story telling. Her work, ranging from documentary photography in Boston, to ethnographic research in Rwanda, follows an attempt to understand the complexity of the human experience. Her most recent projects deal with political silencing, personal narrative, and the reconciling of differing truths in post-genocide Rwanda.

Artist Statement

How does one connect human attributes to a word as overwhelming as genocide? Does our mind allow us the space to consider complexity, emotion something as seemingly microscopic as the impact of parenthood? When we think of how humans act in conflict, do we think about the humans, or the conflict? Are there geographical, political, or cultural boundaries around that which we feel we can relate to? Could a story change your ability to relate to the world? Could it change your life? And ultimately, whom do you trust to tell you these stories? Who do we consider apt to represent the world?

Borrowed Knowing combines personal narrative with a collection of oral histories gathered in Rwanda. Through an entanglement of internal reflection and storytelling, the book attempts to explore the depths of the shared human experience of what it takes to reconcile with the world around you. Intimate tales of identity and survival develop a framework of subjectivity and growth that set the stage for a critical examination of how we see others, how we see ourselves, and what it means to tell a story.

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Simon RemiszewskiBio

Simon Remiszewskis work investigates experience mediated by technologies past, present, and future. His recent work engages 3D scanning within art institutions, the NSA and Greek mythology, and the false promises of big data. Simon grew up in central Massachusetts, and received his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. He currently resides in Boston.

Artist Statement

I am interested in experience.

In the mediation of experience through technological process.

In the metaphors and myths used to construct and direct these technologies.

In promises and ideals, and their associated realities.

I am interested in methods of appropriation and subversion.

In repetition and recontextualization.

I am interested in truth, and in faith.

In the algorithmic and infrastructural processes that inform living in the world.

In recognition of histories, presents, and futures other than my own.

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James DunbarBio

James Dunbar is an American artist born in Long Island, New York. Raised in a Catholic family, James questioned the traditions and ideologies with which he grew up. James realized he could express his frustrations through art, which lead to the extensive body of art that he is working on today. His work focuses on the things he most fears. Whether it be loneliness, early death, rejection etc., what matters to him most is getting those feelings into art form.

Artist Statement

In a society where prescription drugs can change the way you feel in the blink of an eye, and fast food can be delivered to your door, its easy to be gluttonous, but is that wrong? Would I eat salad every day if I knew I would live longer? Im not totally sure. I do know though, that humans are fueled by desire, and our desires shape us into what we are. Although we may desire something, fear may prevent us from pursuing what we desire most. This struggle is what I convey in my art.

Most recently, my work has been focused on the fear of death through unhealthy lifestyles and the desire to do unhealthy things even with the risks. I wonder if I was destined to believe what I believe or if I have free will. I feel that people should question everything and learn from mistakes. We should realize who we are through living and its ok to think what we think. Its ok to say its ok. If we dont, we will be perpetually cursed into never being satisfied. If there is anything to be learned from my art, it is that expressing how shitty you feel can make you feel better.

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Olexandra SharayaBio

Olexandra Sharaya was born in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine in 1994 and moved to the U.S. in 2003 at eight years of age. There she attended Westwood JR/SR High School. She graduated early from high school in 2011 to pursue a degree in the arts. She currently studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University and is on course to receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015.

Artist Statement

I know nothing, do nothing, think nothing. There lives a passive anxiety, confusion and doubt in me. Satisfaction is nonexistent because no effort is good enough theres always room for more: better, faster, smarter. There is a force pushing me and I know I cannot refuse it. As it pushes me (hard) to pursue greatness (whatever that means to you) it also pushes me to forget that it exists at all, it whispers, things are what they are (period). It teaches me that the relief from anxiety, depression, loneliness lies in all the things I love doing: listening to music, watching TV, putting pictures on Instagram, drinking, mingling with friends, drawing (almost any everyday indulgence). That is why I love doing those things. I am constantly looking for happiness in these things, subconsciously trying (hard) to pacify this unsettled, anxious feeling to no avail. I used to think there was no reason for these feelings other than my thought process that was probably flawed, but recently Ive noticed you (just about all of us) feel this too. Depression is not innate, but it has become a commonality among all people and I cannot imagine an escape from it (not even winning the lottery). These issues

and the emotions they elicit have become my source material and my drawings have become my most effective vice. Through them, I reveal my frustrations as well as my unsettled, anxious state of mind.

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Christopher LineberryBio

Born and raised in Greensboro, NC, Christopher Lineberry will receive a BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has shown work nationally, internationally, and on the internet. He has taught at the North Carolina Governors School, worked with the Education Department at the National Toy and Miniature Museum, completed residencies with the Brunswick Rd. Artist Residency, The New York Studio Residency Program, produced work for the Elsewhere Museum, and conducted research for Kulturpark, Berlin and Sissel Tolaas. Lineberry also plays washtub bass in heels as a drag singer for the band, Pleasure Drone.

Artist Statement

Christopher Lineberry is a multidisciplinary research based artist, informed by the geopageant: surfaces of mass public demonstrations, events, sites, and practices in which the cultural imaginary of the global is engineered. His work aspires to reveal how and where this pageant becomes differentiated, localized, retained, and performed from imperial conditioning. As a specific performance of globalism, however, geopageants are mythically reified from festivity controlled political and social disruption, a simultaneous release and regulator. Geopageants are fortified by structures of amusement, pleasure, leisure, and entertainment as expansions of empire. Lineberry points to the geopageant in cultural histories like comic books, toys, disco, pleasure gardens, amusement parks, olympic games, and worlds fairs, to name a few. Many of these forms are nationalized entries or contributions to a veneer of the supranational.

Lineberrys own body has been nationalized in a cultural landscape of the US, situating the primary site of his practice in the intersection of research, experience, and psychic decolonization. Internal

US cultural contingencies suspect contributions to the countrys own projection onto global identity construction are spaces to which he is constantly returning. He studies the ruptures and underlying operations for how individuals and communities relate to culture in the service of nation -b uilding and hegemonic alliance. Ultimately, his work examines how myths of the nation state are performed for a fallible global gaze, and how it might be exposed. Disturbances within this amalgam of cultural -state -s ervice are the most successful failures, and call for unifying alternatives. Lineberry questions personal agency as a complicit performer, empowered producer, and hopeful ideological disruptor. Much of his recent work concerns the geopageant in regards to homonationalism, strategies of the bootleg, and a corporate ethics of s uperhumanism.

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Hannah LuckowerBio

Hannah Luckower was born in New York on March 21st. Her art practice is very process oriented, driven by cathartic self-reflection. Trying to find a voice for where words fall flat. Hannah has found her art practice helpful in trying to reclaim strength and a sense of stability through a visual voice. Although ceramics is her a passion, she finds it too confining to only work in one medium. Her most recent work deals with human disconnection, distortion and social media. She is currently living in Boston in pursuit of a BFA from SMFA and Tufts.

Artist Statement

Hannah Luckower is an artist who works in a myriad of mediums and finds inspiration from trauma to triumph. She is intrigued by how relationships are formed and experienced in our modern age of over-connection, over-exposure and over-stimulation. She wonders if being so connected actually disconnects and skews how we view, experience, and exercise relationships. Social media has created many different roles in peoples lives. For some, it is a way to connect, catch up, or meet. For others, it has become a way to control how we let people view us. And for others still, it is just a means of procrastination. Technology will always be morphing into something newer, faster, and better, leaving many with the sentiment, How did we live before this or that? But the attitude that technology distorts and changes how we live our lives has yet to be dated. Hannahs inspiration for creating art stems from trying to understand and make sense of her surroundings and those who inhabit them. She finds it important to acknowledge the connection one has with a medium and what it means to connect to something that is not digital.

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Natalia MillerBio

Natalia Miller is both an artist and a gamer who works in programs such as Adobe Photoshop to create digital paintings. She was adopted from Paraguay and currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She graduated from the Buckingham Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge in 2011 and is a senior at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Artist Statement

At a glance, my work resembles something out of a fantasy world. I have always been inspired by the worlds created in video games as well as all the artwork that is produced after a games inception. When I create each piece, I first think of a feeling or emotion I want to give the viewer whether it be loneliness, happiness, or fear. After this is established, I then create a character, give that character some sort of story, and place them in an environment or frame that can best portray what I intended to get across. For most of my life, I felt as though my interest in games was unacceptable. My friends, and even my significant others, would label me as a nerd or a freak, titles that I had never seen as derogatory until they were used to put me down and invalidate me as a respectable young woman. Because I felt such a disconnection from the real world, I began to dive deeper and deeper into the world of games. In these virtual worlds I was strong, confident, and nearly invincible. Eventually, I chose to embrace my love for games and let it inspire my artwork.

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Sophia Lucia RoseBio

Sophia Lucia Rose is a multimedia artist raised in southern Arizona. Born 1992, she traveled extensively around the southwestern states before moving to the East Coast in 2011. While achieving her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, Sophia began establishing her art in Los Angeles, California. In the fall of 2013, Sophia created her first collection and launched her West Coast based brand ROSE. Currently Sophia is living bi-coastal, running ROSE while helping with various design, marketing, and publicity work for various other brands.

Artist Statement

Throughout my art career, I discovered that my outside appearance changed as frequently as the paintings and drawings I made of myself. Eventually I came to realize, my search for my own identity was the motivation behind my work. I bring my creations to life by using my body as a canvas, transforming into the portraits from my imagination.

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Madeleine KoboldBio

Madeleine Kobold is a Cape Cod based artist with a focus in painting and video. Her art practice has combined these two mediums to explore a narrative that her work revolves around death. With a consistent palette, mourning and loss have been constant themes across the board. Her work ranges from embroidered photographs, to videos children running through graveyards, to fleshy portraits, all in an attempt to force the viewer to question the role of death. Her pieces are meditative and quiet, with a turbulence underneath. Her most recent projects are exploring concepts of decay, loss and womens work while investigating her place in the world.

Artist Statement

Memories crumble, people come and go. I learned at a young age that loss and death were a common human experience, but was left in a state of constant confusion because it was an experience I had yet to know. My view of the world around me developed with the possibility of loss cast over my relationships. My work is an exploration of my own mortality, through oil portraits of my sister and me. They serve as a portal to a discussion about transient relationships. With faces obscured, I use the panel as a locus for feelings of fear and grief. The figures arent fully realized, disintegrating into their surroundings like an ocean of dark water. The moments I captured are quiet, yet a sense of anxiety pervades. I search to share an ephemeral experience with my audience.

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Natasha MorrisBio

Natasha Morris is a Metalsmith who will receive her BFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Born in Miami, Florida, she designs and creates jewelry and body adornment founded on ideas of preciousness and irony. Her recent projects are greatly inspired by archetypes of jewelry and Cabinets of Curiosities, and incorporate coral as one of the elements in their execution.

Artist Statement

There are expectations about the term jewelry. The term brings to mind images of pearl necklaces, engagement rings, mothers earrings, and grandmothers brooches. I seek to deconstruct and challenge the traditional notions of jewelry. Recently, through the use of humor, my art plays on irony with traditional themes and the exploration of materials. I look to push boundaries of traditional jewelry in order to open up the possibilities of what it could be. I create my work to be different in size and material so that it is more engaging with the body. I want it to open up discussion about the conscious decisions made when choosing what we adorn ourselves with, the social standards, and the creation of the individual we want to become.

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Kristin ReederBio

Kristin Reeder was born in Los Angeles, California in 1993. She moved to Boston in 2011 to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the spring of 2014, she studied abroad at AKI-ARTez Academy, in Enschede, Netherlands. She will receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University and currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.

Artist Statement

I think of my work as the result of everyones leftovers: bits and pieces that are discarded daily. Restaurant dumpsters, backyard compost, and animal entrails are sources for my work. Although my subjects are edible, they are unappetizing and grotesque due to the decomposition process. Through my process of painting, I have created forms by exaggerating color and shape to offer a more fantastical image. Through childlike colors and the use of expressive line, Im abstracting these ordinary foods into something uncanny.

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Duaa AlHammadiBio

Duaa AlHammadi was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1991. Duaa will receive her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in 2015. Her work is predominantly oil on canvas, expressive of her experiences growing up in Iraq. She currently lives in Concord, NH.

Artist Statement

I was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1991. The war of 2003 in Iraq greatly impacted my life and my art practice. My work is about the relationship between violence and beauty and how powerful these are in shaping my own reality. I primarily work in oil on canvas. My most recent work deals with self identity and the breaking away from tradition, both figuratively and metaphorically through non-traditional painting techniques and non-traditional subject matter. I use poems I have written in Arabic as a way of creating visual patterns and allowing language and material to convey how we reveal or unreveal our own emotions.

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Emily StewartBio

Emily Stewart is a multidisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, printmaking, film, and animation. She is from Queensbury, New York and currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She will receive her BFA from Northeastern University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2015. Her work consists of dreamlike drawings, composed of strange, flowing imagery derived mainly from the subconscious.

Artist Statement

I see my artistic process as synonymous with my experience of life it is something mysterious and indecipherable, yet present, and endlessly fascinating. I feel that there are many, many more ways of looking at the world than the ways we have been taught to view it, and I see this work as an exploration of that.

My work is a process-oriented, exploratory journey. I do not set out to create anything in particular; instead my mind is almost entirely blank. I begin working in the abstract, with ink, gouache, or line drawings, and pick out images as they appear to me. The work finishes in a completely different place from where it starts it is a slow building of subconscious imagery that appears out of tangled lines and brush strokes. Its about living without being able to grasp the full picture, but still trusting that in the end, everything will work out okay.

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Loi TranBio

Loi Tran, working in sculpture, drawing, and painting, will receive his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2015. Loi was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts and received his Associates of Arts at Mount Wachusett Community College in 2012. His work looks at personal anxieties and global fears about environmental issues, many that have not progressed significantly. The work then proposes unrealistic solutions achieved with unlikely materials. Lois work is inspired by the aesthetic designs of futuristic armor within video games.

Artist Statement

My work mainly consists of media such as cardboard, glue, paper, and the layering of translucent paper onto detailed drawings based on functional designs. They translate from combinations of simple geometric shapes into 3D renderings of the human form. My text work attempts to map and analyze aspects of the human condition as well as the artists personal psychology.

The work is focused on the task of making sense of our current world issues and the temporary solutions which are often our means of addressing global issues. It is obvious that there is always something bad happening somewhere within the world. My work approaches my obsession with seemingly unobtainable desires: my personal ambitions of striving for a sense of security. The work then attempts unorthodox solutions to unsolvable problems.

My work encompasses numerous personal issues that are a result of the status of our current world. By focusing on environmental issues, I am able to translate my process of coping with what is happening in our world into pieces that deal with

a number of universal issues, which include: fear, uncertainty, instability, insecurity, struggle, survival, and their opposites.

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Alex AustinBio

Alex Austin is a visual artist living in Brookline, MA, originally from the greater New York area. Her work focuses on the uncanny within representations of the human figure. She will receive her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in 2015. She will enter graduate school at Tufts University in 2015 to pursue a Masters of Arts in Teaching with a focus in Art Education.

Artist Statement

My drawings are the products of obsessive and repetitive mark making. I render small figures that reference Kewpie Dolls, an iconic plastic doll dating back to the early 20th century and a favorite childhood toy.

In my experience with dissection back in my high school anatomy and physiology class, I found myself both extremely intrigued and repulsed by the organs of the animals I examined. The organs held profound beauty in their lost ability to sustain life. The body and its organs both sustain life and present its demise with their inevitable failure. The inorganic Kewpie Dolls reference life without experiencing the fear of mortality. These childhood objects of our amusement do not age as we do, but become marked with time by our nostalgic association of them with our youth. Their smooth, breathless, stiff bodies are at once innocent and loaded with mortal dread.

In my work, identical Kewpie figures are layered on top of each other until they form swarms that evoke imagery of organs in various states of decay, decontextualized over the white space of the canvas as objects of a surreal arrangement.

Their nostalgic familiarity is violated as their bodies break apart and the coloring of their plastic skin shifts into that of human bodily decay. The work operates at the intersection of the uncanny and the abject, aiming to combine and conflate the organic and the inorganic, to animate the inanimate, and to freeze and preserve that which will inevitably decay.

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Laura HasanenBio

Laura Hasanen is a mixed media artist who will graduate with her BFA from the School of The Museum of Fine Art in 2015. She was born in Finland and currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts. Laura studied printmaking, drawing, and papermaking during her years as an undergraduate. She is currently making sculptural works out of paper and found materials, all of which relate to the body.

Artist Statement

My sculptures are moments of bodily transgressions. Exploring and challenging the spaces of inner and the outer. I strive to show these moments as intimate experiences something personal, and yet universal. Life, death, memory, loss, intimacy, and connection all play a part in my narrative. Through the use of skin-like paper and found objects relating to the body, I create a feeling of simultaneous seduction and disgust. The forms are strange, but also contain a human familiarity.

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Sam WaxmanBio

Sam Waxman was born and raised in Portland, Maine. Growing up, he practiced analog processes in photography and also took an interest in multimedia and graphic design. During his first semester at SMFA, he discovered an affinity for welding and metalworking while taking an introductory class. Since then, his practice has been split mainly between photography and sculpture, exploring a myriad of themes both personal and universal, which manifest themselves in recurring imagery such as hand-hammered body fragments, repurposed machinery, human figure, and animal remains, to name a few.

Artist Statement

some days wide awakesome days lost

some days alone and perfectsome days lonely and unseeingsome days in touch with Timing

some days clinging to the broken raft in high seassome days brilliant beyond having ever imagined possible

some days a neglected child spinning in irrational misunderstanding some days rememberingsome days able to let go

some days awash in the energetic experience of Unitysome days better than others

some days able to slow down, finally accepting the darker days, allowing it all to unfold peacefully

something that moves withinsomething that is accessed

something in translationsomething in transition

something universalsomething eternal

something that only exists because someone happened to be there listening for ittaking it in

taking it down

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Shannon May MackenzieBio

Shannon May Mackenzie is an interdisciplinary artist that began studying at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts at the age of 16. She received her High School Diploma from UNCSA with a concentration in Visual Arts. She is currently a 2015 BFA candidate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in Medford, MA. Working with ceramics, drawing, and interactive performance, she explores themes of posttraumatic growth and vulnerability through the practice of mark-making.

Artist Statement

When is it okay to use art making as a coping mechanism? This question may pass by with a quick assumption that it is always okay to work through turbulent emotions and experiences of trauma in the process and practice of art making. Upon further investigation, story telling is one of the biggest elements of working through trauma and a powerful part of understanding ones purpose in life. Posttraumatic growth and art making are distinct processes; a person who experiences one may not necessarily experience the other. Through drawing, performance, and installation, my work revolves around themes of posttraumatic growth and the laborious tasks of overcoming trauma. I choose to take on the task of leading awareness by subtly allowing it to open through sharing discourse and illustrating my own vulnerabilities.

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Laura VargasBio

Born in 1990 in Bogota Colombia, Laura Vargas moved to Miami at the age of nine. She will graduate in 2015 from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts with a dual degree in Fine Arts and International Relations. Her work deals with issues of femininity, politics in Latin America, Latino/a identity, and race, combining photographic and painting techniques.

Artist Statement

The patriarchal values in Latin America, deeply informed by religious traditions, have constructed an image of femininity which undermines womens role in society and strips away their innate female power. The dichotomy between Virgin Mary iconography and the stereotypical voluptuous sexy Latina places Latin American women in a specific set of roles ranging from passive motherhood to sexual object.

I was born into a family of six women in which a multi-generational experience of abandonment by fathers, grandfathers, and husbands demonstrate the deeply rooted public reality of gender inequality and injustice towards women in Latin America. Using liquid light photo transfer techniques and oil painting, and using my family as the central focus, I construct images that humanize femininity and contain the complicated nuances of being a woman in Latin America today.

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Kushala VoraBio

Kushala Voras work contemplates and acknowledges the nature of time and reality. Her sculptures and photographs are informed by a constant questioning of the idea of transformation, construction and degradation. Recently, she was awarded the Ali Pratt Grant to travel across India to understand its contemporary art and culture. During the first year of her undergraduate studies she won a competition to make collaborative work for the Master of Japanese Painting exhibition at the Nagoya Museum of Fine Arts, Japan.

Artist Statement

In our attempt to standardize time, we conceive it as a constant and stable factor. However, time is exponentially more complex than a ticking clock or a sundial. As Sanford Kwinter states, Time always presents itself by producing or more precisely by drawing matter into a process of becoming-ever-different. This series juxtaposes our attempt to standardize time with the product of time itself.

The surfaces in the photographs are of Jantar Mantar observatory; a group of structures constructed in the early 1700s to calculate the inclination of the sun, the position of celestial bodies, the altitude of the sun and other complex functions. The scales on these instruments are shown in relation to its eroded surface. While the markings symbolize the regulation of time; the structure cracks, breaks, crumbles and undergoes transformation, not degradation, showing the true nature of time.

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Sarai HinesBio

Sarai Hines was born and raised on the island of Bermuda and now attends the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University where she will graduate in May 2015 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Child Development. Although versed in many forms of art, she prefers the medium of watercolor. She is inspired by the freedom of expressing feelings and emotions through her art, allowing the audience to relate to the message being portrayed. Sarai loves to let the details speak for themselves.

Artist Statement

Home is a place one grows to cherish. As a citizen of Bermuda, I have become so grateful for my island because there is no place just like it. At first glance the place where someone is from goes beyond the obvious cultural or stereotypical signifiers, whether through various standards of living or region it all adds up to create ones overall moral character. Art has always been the mouth of the little voice that is deep down inside of me. It helps me to create the captured moment or memory the only way it can be expressed, visually, as words simply just arent enough. Painting and drawing have always been my art forms, nonetheless the medium of choice for this project is watercolor. The flow and layering of watercolor allows me to show my country in the light that I see, a form of truth.

During my studies here in America, my eyes were opened to the many types of encounters that I never believed could be true. This motivated me to look deeper into the meaning of home. I started to list ideas, capture photos at every moment, whilst talking to other Bermudians along the way, I was keeping a record on hand of what all

of this meant to me. Through my development of history to the now, I started to realize how the reason for the unknown truth, the center of stereotypes, came from the power of posters. The way a country has to uphold their image relates to the knowledge that people think they have of a place. Therefore, my artwork is deconstructing the stereotypes by counteracting the advertisements original functions. It uses contradiction, historical evidence, and humor to create awareness, mimicking the stereotypes about Bermuda to combat it with the truth.

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Bianca BroxtonBio

Bianca Broxton was born and raised in Medford, Massachusetts. Shes from a small family of mainly women, and grew up wanting to be an Egyptologist. When she was a teenager, she fell in love with hip-hop and graffiti, which propelled her to go to art school. She cites Wangechi Mutu, Azar Nafisi, and El-P as her influences. She resides in the Boston area with her cat Ophelia and her love of Vodka and Vodka accessories.

Artist Statement

My work is a physical vessel for my thoughts, fears, and views. The phantasmagorical have served as a place of confrontation, but confrontation that explicitly understands the principles of the sublime. My work is primarily figural and I enjoy the figures possibility to perform narratives in a way that creates a base for ubiquity. My work tends to distort the figure and produce abstract forms that can be categorized as grotesque. I am fascinated with ghost imagery simply because it represents uncertainties and humanity in a simplistic form; even that smallest signifier can represent a persons history.

The indistinctness of ghost imagery also plays into my interest in identity. Hillel Steiners writing on exploitation categorizes the process as those who are exploited, those who exploit, and the rights taken away by the exploiter. Individualism and a sense of identity can easily be eradicated in the process of exploitation. The conquest of capturing identity is such an aggressive act, and its an act we seem to casually accept. The concept of gentrification for example, is the takeover of a location and then the eventual dissolution of

the locations identity to make room for shallow pursuits.

The absence of identity and the act of melding a populace is a violent act. Its something that Ive explored in my work via abstract forms, because the performative nature of abstraction allows me to critique society. My work is just an embellished expression of what has already been manifested in our society. The grotesque nature of these abstracts act as a commentary on societal ideals, as well as generational self-degradation. Hopefully, this allows people to stand away from their egos or, preconceived notions of societal standards. The viewer can physically participate in a commentary about humanity in a way that slowly unveils human fallacies through the principles of the sublime as a catalyst.

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Evan GilbertBio

Evan Gilbert is a multidisciplinary artist born in Miami, Florida. He will receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. With the use of dark absurdist humor, he creates bizarre microcosms depicting the pitfalls of humanitys social, spiritual and political structures. Heavily influenced by artists such as Oyvind Fahlstrom and Mike Kelley, his work ranges from abstraction and illustration to sculpture and installation. Utilizing narrative, diagrams, symbols and interactive environments he hopes to convey the universes incomplete and meaningless nature, and humanitys ability to provide meaning to the meaningless.

Artist Statement

My work is an exploration into the absurdity of the mundane and cosmic. I strive to depict humankinds urge to imply meaning and structure to an endlessly changing and potentially meaningless universe. While we may live in an infinitely shifting cosmos that never reaches a final form of completion, we still have the ability to assign our own meaning and importance to this amorphous landscape. Our collective urge to destroy ourselves allows us to constantly rebuild from the rubble of failure. Occasionally we may find moments of autonomy in the dismantling of past systems possibly sparking a personal resurgence of purpose. We live in a universe defined by fabricated systems of perception, their only purpose in being built is to be torn down and rebuilt. We can stumble ignorantly through the chaos or take transcendent leaps into lifes grand monotony.

With the use of absurd indecipherable schematics paired with grotesque cartoon forms I hope to construct a functionless codex of humanitys attempts at finding order in a universe thats structure is based in chaos.

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Maxwell GoodknightBio

Maxwell Goodknight received his Associates Degree in Science, with a concentration in Fine Arts, from Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, NY, in 2012. He is currently a candidate for a BFA in Fine Arts from the School of The Museum of Fine Arts with a minor in philosophy from Tufts University. His work consists of a variety of materials and objects of the everyday which shape the world around us.

Artist Statement

My current work relies on intuitions, by the use of specific materials, in the exploration of the ruin. I am concerned with the sedimentation of ideal structures, meanings, and forms which we place onto ourselves that are based in the everyday occurrences of these materials. The use of the natural processes in the materials, and their relationship with one another, is a way to investigate the language(s) that occur within the work.

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Kaitlyn PastonBio

Kaitlyn Paston is a multimedia artist pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a Bachelor of Arts in German and Visual Studies from Tufts University. Primarily working in sound and video, her work is about experiences and performances of language.

Artist Statement

My work investigates the relationship between bodies and language where grammatical structures fail. I am interested in the ways that language is seen and felt in the body. The performative works relate the sensory experience of language to the structures of narrative. Sounds organized to communicate meaning are brought into tension with musically constructed rhythms. Inarticulate speech is a source of visual and aural phenomena generated by attempts of a body to communicate outside of the semiotic system of language.

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William D FergusonBio

William D Ferguson is a multidisciplinary artist from the American Southwest. His fascinations with cats and futurity allow him to work through problems with Utopias. William uses photography, sculpture and performance to create forms of visual storytelling. His installations and sculptures investigate ideas of queerness, aesthetic meaning, and the coded object.

Artist Statement

I think of my work as reflections on contemporary dispositions. My photographs act as windows into fictional sites and places. Objects work like stage props awaiting activation or participation, although the rules are not apparent to the viewer.

My work is rooted in romanticized ideas about communities and utopias, focusing on the relationships between queer bodies and their relationship to a fictitious utopian society, which directly points back to contemporary conversations about gender, sexuality, government, academia and queerness.

The installation for the exhibition works to set a stage for reflection. The over-worked room as well as the photographs, put the viewer into a place where they can contemplate their relationship to: the epic anti-narratives they are presented with and their relationship to the environment, and the connection between the people who occupy the position of aesthetic maker and ideas of good taste.

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Audrey HsiaBio

Audrey Hsia was born in Connecticut, but raised in Taiwan and Singapore. She will be receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Northeastern University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts in 2015. Currently, she lives and works out of Boston. Her works are a combination of drawing, painting, printmaking, and digital collage.

Artist Statement

As a primarily process-based artist, my work is constantly in a state of flux. Right now, I am currently exploring the fictional environments we create for ourselves based upon non-fictional habitats. Using different methods and mediums, I recontextualize imagery from science fiction movies, vintage postcards, and 80s to 90s interior decoration magazines. The work aims to create new, confusing environments inhabited in unfamiliar ways.

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Charlotte WampoldBio

Charlotte Wampold makes work of and about pig fat, and other cuts of meat that are often thrown away, in order to facilitate a dialogue examining disgust and desire in the contemporary world. Wampold creates detailed oil paintings of scrap meat, which are then included in larger installations of spaces where fat is actually prepared and consumed. Wampold was raised in New Jersey. She spent a year working as a ceramicists assistant before moving to her current home in Boston. She will receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University.

Artist Statement

My work embodies the coexistence of many opposites. It does not reside in a a doorway between two rooms, rather it is simultaneously at the far ends of both rooms-- alluring and repulsive, nostalgic and totally unfamiliar, rooted in the past with a focus on the present.

Today, the kitchen and dining space are often contained in the same room, but throughout much of history they were located in completely different sections of the home. The dining room, designed to impress and entertain, was the residence of the upper class while the servant class was relegated to the kitchen. In British culture, this divide was described in terms of upstairs and downstairs. Even as recently as the 60s, the beloved chef Julia Child would famously excuse her sloppiness with the line, And as long as it stays in the kitchen, whos to know, sending the clear message that the kitchen is a space that is private from the outside world, where messy mistakes are made. On the other hand, the dining room represents the carefully made-up face that you present to the public. As far as the world at large is concerned, the lovely roast that you place on the table is the only version of that hunk of meat that has ever existed.

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Dennissa YoungBio

Dennissa Young was born in Las Cruces, NM in 1993, but moved every three to four years while growing up. She learned to adapt to changing environments and develop an ability to connect with others quickly and reconcile relationships. Her work uses interpersonal environments, installation, video, performance and all forms of conversational connection. Dennissas spiritual journey and relationship with God has fueled her love for other people. Dennissa hopes to be a catalyst for social change through interconnected, deep, vulnerable relationships.

Artist Statement

My hope is to be a catalyst. I want my creative art practice to be a platform that is activated by people. By curating personal, intimate spaces I have invited others in to participate in performative, interactive happenings that let the viewer take on the art and change it due to how they connect with it. My art creates a time and a space for honesty, questioning and vulnerability. Encouraging dialogue and interpersonal interaction is vital to my practice. The love for interpersonal connection comes from knowing and following Jesus. Jesus, through relationship, shared his life and listened and asked questions of others. Through video performance and relational experiences, I have created work that involves my personal spiritual journey yet invites the audience to insert themselves into the space of the piece. My work has key points and crafted ambiguity. My goal is to open up dialogue about life, spirituality, and connection between people. I want my art practice to cultivate connection, whether it happens within the context of the actual art or outside of it. People coming together is the most important part. Through photography, video, installation, and performative

action, my work speaks openly about valuing deep relationships and letting art be a platform for real friendship to form.

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Claudia BatistaBio

Claudia Batista creates paper and wood cut assemblages of organic and unique shapes based on her photographs of natural environments. She will graduate with a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in May 2015. She currently works as an intern at Danger!Awesome, a team-based organization that works with different creative disciplines and technologies to make customized products. Her current work includes laser-cut wooden shapes, painted and installed as floating forms. She is from San Juan, Puerto Rico and was born on July 5th, 1993. Batista currently lives in Medford, MA.

Artist Statement

My work is based on colored shapes. I use photography that I have taken from the natural environment as source material and focus on one section in each photo. Using an intuitive formal logic, I find individual shapes within sections. I then alter the form by simplifying its edges. In the final version of my pieces, the natural forms are distorted to become new and reshaped. These forms are then used to construct an installation with paper cut outs and wood sculpture that allow the viewer to inhabit a new place. With the use of earth tone colors, I paint the wooden sculptures to portray a natural sense of place within the installation, created by positive and negative space produced by the shapes and their shadows.

This assemblage of forms helps me determine interrelationships between spaces, suggesting fluidity, movement, harmony and growth. What matters in my work are moments in a natural environment, composition, and connections between lines and edges. I draw marks and develop spatial relationships between them in order to locate harmony as well as to uncover new spaces where edges are properly defined.

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Marie LopezBio

My name is Marie Lopez. I went to art school in Boston, Massachusetts. So I live here, now. Im originally from Miami, Florida.Everyone from Florida who left will tell you how glad they are that they left. I have worked many odd jobs but Im a jack of no trade. But I wear many hats (only figuratively). I write, read things out loud, self-publish, book-make, perform, long for a pet and stability. Im a person, a person of color too above all, but maybe now Im an artist too?, an untrained (?) writer and everything that involves the aforementioned.Everything i do is queer and absurd.

Artist Statement

I have an ever-growing enthrallmentwith relationships between sound, performance and video.I have declined decorativeattractivenessand have sought aesthetics inparallel to the process and whatever is functional. RealizingThat imagery stops in time and sound does not has excitinguncharted nuances.Im interested in site specificity, being referential.I have ideas about public intervetion and identity politics.Im okaywith not always knowing the outcome of my work.

My goals are to be intentional and self-awareIm not afraid of underlying humor.I am okay with everything mundane and minimal gestures

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Will RussackBio

Will Russack is a photographer based in Somerville, Massachusetts, currently finishing his BS in Environmental Studies from Tufts University and his BFA in Photography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Drawing on this cross-disciplinary approach, Will examines mankinds relationship with the natural world. He draws attention to the ways in which we attempt to balance our urge to be close to nature with our impulse to control it. Will was selected to be in Undergraduate Photography Now as part of Flash Forward Festival, and has exhibited throughout Boston.

Artist Statement

My photographs illustrate mankinds paradoxical relationship with the natural world. Western society often places humankind outside of nature, drawing a distinction between the natural world and ourselves as if we do not occupy the same space. In my images I draw attention to the conflict that arises as a result of this perceived separation. Both individuals and cultures are constantly trying to balance the fundamental urge to be close to nature with the impulse to control and contain it. I photograph places where this struggle is being played out: on the edges of wilderness regions, the sidewalks of cities, even our front yards. With my work I depict the tension and irony that emerges in these spaces where we attempt to cultivate a connection with nature.

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Victoria WheelerBio

Victoria Wheeler is from Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. She will graduate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in association with Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the spring of 2015. She has a background in papermaking, jewelry making, and printmaking. Her current work, inspired by the natural landscape of Hawaii, uses paper as sculpture in a large-scale installation. Victoria is interested in the struggle between nature and the artificial by reproducing nature using other materials, creating an artificial nature.

Artist Statement

I am interested in the tension between natural environments and artificially created environments, and the way the artificial can easily overtake the natural. In Hawaii, where I am from, nature is integrated into our lifestyle. Growing up, I was surrounded by tropical plants and many types of vegetation. However, I have also been exposed to the tourist-driven, high-consumer society that partially defines the Hawaiian Islands. A fundamental part of the Island culture is the lei, or the tradition of flowers behind the ear. This is just one of the many Hawaiian cultural indicators that has helped fuel my interest of flowers and nature. Hawaii has seen many transitions from the natural to the artificial. For example, the way the tourism industry churns out endless souvenirs based on the natural ecosystem, but represent an artificial imitation of nature.

I look to explore the struggle between organic and inorganic and the imitation of natural material with artificial material through my largescale paper-based installation. Mass-produced or artificial materials, such as glitter and weed wacking wire against handmade paper flowers and plants help

me to convey the tension between nature and its artificial representation by reproducing nature artificially.

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Thank You

Now that we are approaching the final stage of our Senior Thesis experience, we would like to thank everyone who has helped us along the way. First, we would like to take this time to thank our Senior Thesis Program faculty. Jonathan Calm, Andy Graydon, Samara Pearlstein, Allison Cekala, and Kurt Ralkse collectively have been an essential supportive, critical, and guiding force for all of us. Each one of them has brought something different and inspiring to our exhibition, Strategic Plan 2025. We all know this last semester was not easy with the worst recorded winter in Bostons history, but we deeply appreciate their determination to schedule and reschedule after every snowstorm. From the bottom of our hearts, we express our gratitude for all their hard work throughout the program thanks for not giving up on us! Throughout our time here, we have also developed meaningful conversations with faculty across all areas of the school. They have encouraged us, challenged our ideas, and moved us along in our research. They have always been by our side, working through lunch periods and outside of class time. Our amazing instructors and professors truly give this school the character and reputation we are known for. Our staff at are the backbone of our school, from assisting us with financial aid issues to guiding us through the citys largest collection of art books. The caring hand youve lent us over the years warms our hearts. Last, but not least, our fellow peers have stuck with us through the thick and thin of our time here. Together, we have shared intensive critiques and endless overnights. If it werent for each other, and the community weve developed, none of us would be where we are today.

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