APR 6-APR 27, 2025

LANGUAGE OF OUR OWN: 2025 Senior Thesis Exhibition

Featuring the work of graduating studio art majors, the senior thesis exhibition provides a unique opportunity for these artists to present their work in a professional art museum.

This year’s presenting artists are Sophie Gunther, Frankie Keenan-Lee, Eli Meza, and Reed Reed. Experimenting with a range of forms and media from painting and photography to sculpture and video, the artists in Language of Our Own create work to explore themes of trauma, resilience, care, and our complex relationships.

THE ARTISTS

SOPHIE GUNTHER is an interdisciplinary artist whose work exists at the crossroads of care, lesbianism, disability, and radical joy. They work with clay, paper, wood, paint, ink, and fabric to create a place where everyone can rest, catch their breath, and enjoy the beauty around them. They believe in expansive love because it has saved them.

FRANKIE KEENAN-LEE’s artwork uses symbolism alluding to body modification and transformation as a method of self-reclamation, representing the ways in which queer communities assert autonomy and personal narrative through their physical forms. The use of these themes in their work builds a personal language that references trauma, resilience, and learning from the past, inviting viewers to witness both the struggles and joys that come with shaping identity.

Utilizing an intersection of image, sound, and archive, ELI MEZA unravels realms of grief and ritual. With a throughline of connectivity, ancestry, and root work, they explore the colorful yet muted worlds around and within us.

Through double exposure photography and ceramics, REED REED explores the complex relationship between humanity and nature. They create imagery that questions the traditional understanding of “portraits” or “landscapes” by merging the two into a seamless push and pull between the person and the land.