About

MAR 30–APR 18, 2021

AT LENGTH: 2021 SENIOR THESIS EXHIBITION

An annual exhibition featuring the work of graduating Studio Art majors, the senior thesis exhibition provides a unique opportunity for these young artists: their first show in a professional art museum.

This year’s presenting artists are Cecelia Bishop, Tri-an Cao, Lena Coletto, Emily Falco, E Daley, Stephanie Lister, Meenakshi Marchione, Lauryn Marshall, Bianca Mead, Claire Mitrisin, Grace Patterson, Sophia Ramirez, Isabela Reyes-Klein, Dio Ruiz, and Emma Sugarbaker. MCAM will be open with timed tickets only.

THE ARTISTS

Cecelia Bishop is a mixed-media artist whose work engages with the body, disability, and trauma. She explores self-portraiture through the mediums of photography and sculpture to create emotional landscapes that are simultaneously strange, uncomfortable, and tender.

Tri-an Cao explores non-binary Asian American identity through the clashing elements of femininity/masculinity and race/nationality. Cao’s paintings and ink illustrations celebrate intersectionality and Asian queer history by portraying gender nonconforming folktale heroes in present-day spaces.

Lena Coletto combines sculpture with site specific installation to create a visceral immersive experience that explores themes of addiction, duality, and the subconscious. In Coletto’s work familiar objects and spaces are made unfamiliar to slow down how we experience, and explore relationships to, memory and identity.

E Daley has imagined a character existing within a future United States polarized by a global agreement to end the use of fossil fuels. They have decorated a living room wall with paintings, sculptures, and video that reflect the decayed the American landscapes and nostalgia associated with oil industry propaganda over the past century.

Emily Falco is a painter who creates works that capture sensory memories of her life. She uses juxtaposition of different styles of painting as a recurring theme in her work to represent how past realities are reconciled.

Stephanie Lister explores the fluidity between art, activism, and facilitation. She inhabits alter egos to experiment with writing narratives and creating artwork. Her practice incorporates video, sculpture, performance, installation, photography, and writing to create pieces that are playful, satirical, and often autobiographical.

Meenakshi Marchione uses sound and video art to challenge the confinement of the body and explore how we process auditory and visual stimuli in the subconscious mind. Her international upbringing has inspired her to employ sound as a geographical marker, helping to ground herself and others during these times of rapid globalization, technological dependence, and a global pandemic.

Lauryn Marshall uses ceramic and painted works to portray different aspects of the Black experience. Emphasizing color, figure and object composition, and fantastical elements, she creates narratives that form connections between aspects of the Black experience in contemporary culture versus their past representations in history.

Bianca Mead is a figurative painter and illustrator. Her work explores memory, intimacy, and the absurd.

Claire Mitrisin takes her role as an artist to be that of an observer and uses the work she creates to reflect on objects and situations that are human-made. Through photography and printmaking, her work demonstrates what can happen when we revel in the coincidental, accidental, and unexpected of our everyday lives.

Grace Patterson is a documentary and experimental filmmaker who works primarily in video and installation. In her most recent work, she uses VHS infomercials from the 1990s as inspiration to create films in which she recasts herself as the protagonist of these tapes in an alternate universe.

Sophia Ramirez uses ceramics and alternative photographic processes to unravel and reconfigure personal histories and an understanding of self. With a guiding hand she experiments with light, time, and chemical reactions as they influence the resting state of her work.

Isabela Reyes-Klein uses multimedia to explore aspects of the human condition in relation to time and memory. In times of separation, icebergs, clean air, a night out, a kiss goodbye, are rewritten and glorified the moment we can no longer choose to dis-engage. Their multi-channel installation features footage from the perspectives of the taken, the taker, and the taking.

Dio Ruiz creates nonfunctional objects, manipulating them into puzzling mirrors of their original forms. Their installation interrogates institutional power in education through the banal materials found in classroom environments.

Emma Sugarbaker explores themes of nostalgia and community building through graphic images. Using digital drawing as a medium, Sugarbaker’s work blurs the lines between Millenials and Gen Z, connecting people through collective memories of pop culture.