Residue 2025 – MFA Exhibition Online

Residue

The aftermath of events within our environment, our studio practice and ourselves often linger longer than the events themselves. “Residue” is an online exhibition showcasing graduate students from all visual art disciplines, highlighting the ways our experiences shape us and continue to influence our present. This exhibition encourages you to explore what lingers – joy, nostalgia, anxiety, grief, anger, or otherwise – all of which remain embedded in our lives and identities. This exhibition is for MFA and MA student, and is juried by MFA students, peer-to-peer review. It is an excellent opportunity to see works made by your peers and network for the future.

Thank you for all the submissions and enjoy the exhibition – jurors Anil Asakawa, Kyle Kirkpatrick, Yuki Coyle, Colin Martin, Felix Akortse, Lane Chapman

Stay In Or Out by Kevin Hopkins, Virginia Commonwealth University — *'Stay In Or Out' by Kevin Hopkins, Virginia Commonwealth University*
FIRST PLACE

My practice centers on creating effigies that represent Black American individuals, infused with a syncretic magic drawn from Lowcountry mythologies, Black American pop culture, intergenerational Baptist teachings, and Shonen anime. Traditionally used for healing and harm, these figures are crafted as aspirational visions of the world, channeling protection, joy, and connection to their subjects.
I use them to confront a tension within Southern Black American communities: the essential work of safeguarding Blackness can sometimes constrain it by rejecting expressions that deviate from a singular, trauma-centered narrative. By framing the effigy as a site of possibility, I activate its healing potential to affirm the multiplicity of Black identity and speculate on futures where seemingly conflicting pathways for Black American expression nourish one another.
The figures begin as sewn canvas silhouettes, filled with cotton, painted, and then "gifted" clothing and jewelry that retain trace amounts of lived Southern experience. Frayed socks, church earrings, graduation cords—through spiritual transference, these charged objects strengthen the resonance linking the individual to the living collective. The effigies collectively foretell an optimistic Black future that is not a plea, but a legacy owed; here, these objects serve as blueprints for our claiming.

Death Within by Reginald Ayivor, Arizona State University — *'Death Within' by Reginald Ayivor, Arizona State University*
SECOND PLACE

My work delves into the complexities of oppression and the pursuit of emancipation, both deeply personal and broadly cultural. Each piece stands as a testament to the resilience of my spirit and the subtle forces that shape my existence. Through my art, I seek to capture the essence of struggle, exploring how we confront and transcend oppression, limitation, and silence. Emancipation, in all its manifestations, forms the pulse of my creative practice, whether it emerges from historical resistance, social injustice, or my journey toward personal freedom. Ultimately, my work gives voice to the universal longing for liberation and the quiet, enduring hope that lives within us all. With meticulous attention to detail, I create my sculptures through an intricate process of carving and welding, seamlessly merging wood and metal in successive layers. Using machines and tools such as chainsaws, angle grinders, chisels, and gouges, I carefully cut and chip away at blocks of wood, gradually revealing the essence of my sculptural vision. My artistic expression extends beyond form into symbolism, as I craft with metal, sculptural elements like locks, cage-like structures, and lanterns, and integrate Ghanaian traditional beads into body adornments. To complete my works, I employ a distinctive finishing process, combining graphite with shellac and fuel for certain sections, while applying tung oil, walnut ink, and black paint to others, each material chosen to enhance both texture and meaning.

The Waiting Rooms_ by Lily Regalia, Arizona State University — *'The Waiting Rooms' by Lily Regalia, Arizona State University*
THIRD PLACE

My work explores how the process of building and spaces within the home parallel human connection and identity. Having grown up in a family that renovates houses, there is a continued fascination with observing their interiors and how the people within intertwine. In turn, I imbue domestic structures with human appendages, and I use the stages of construction to represent psychological states. Demolition is a metaphor for trauma within the home, while rebuilding mirrors healing. The arrangement of various fixtures and furnishings within my compositions also adheres to my psyche; furniture is a symbol for comfort while living in the discomfort of uncertainty. Domestic spaces become a representation of the body and soul—internal spaces where personal growth and transformation occur. Transformation stems from the impermanence of a rehabbing lifestyle, and the resulting restlessness manifests as movement or disjointed figures in my work. My intimate interiors have a quiet energy, containing quick mark-making and loosely rendered forms which emphasize the lack of stagnancy. Each aspect of my work focuses on the difficulty of finding home and emotional stability in often interminable and incomplete houses, furnishings, and people.

8I Mochila Verde Negro: Leyenda en Color Blanco, “La 4T Se Pinta de Verde,” con Dibujo de un Tucán y la Leyenda Verde by Alejandro Morales, Arizona State University — *'8I Mochila Verde Negro: Leyenda en Color Blanco, “La 4T Se Pinta de Verde,” con Dibujo de un Tucán y la Leyenda Verde' by Alejandro Morales, Arizona State University*
JUROR'S CHOICE

In September 2024, volunteer searchers uncovered human remains and burned belongings at Rancho Izaguirre, Jalisco. Months of conflicting forensic reports followed, between state denial and independent evidence of cremation, revealing how even the material proof of violence can be erased or disputed. From that uncertainty, I turned to the catalog published by the Jalisco Prosecutor’s Office: 1,617 recovered objects, alphabetized from A to Z, then AA, AB, AC… an archive of fragments. For this work, I made one ceramic piece for each lettered group. Clay, like flesh or memory, records heat; every firing becomes an act of endurance against disappearance. The installation reimagines a digital inventory as a physical landscape of residue, what endures after attempts at erasure. Each piece stands in for an object once held by someone, suspended between evidence and remembrance. In the context of Residue, this work asks how we hold what remains when truth itself is unstable. The ashes, the catalog, the ceramics, all persist as traces of both loss and resistance.

"Camera" by Ashley Collins, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa — *'Camera' by Ashley Collins, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa*
JUROR'S CHOICE

As a ceramic artist, I utilize the versatility of the medium to create labor-intensive sculptures that allow for the representation of both physical likeness of an individual as well as spiritual essence. I intertwine the tangible and intangible by creating fully functional ceramic cameras to capture a photographic image and other skillfully rendered forms, such as flowers and beads, to depict the more intangible qualities of the individual. I am also transcribing thoughts and spoken words with clay; utilizing the materiality of the ceramic medium to permanently capture ephemeral moments within physical objects. My art is intended to create a conversation between the past, present, and future, to further emphasize an object’s ability to have a significant impact on the lives of individuals. With my art, I am exploring an object’s capacity to preserve memories and release trauma. The act of making ceramic sculptures allows for the navigation of complex emotion, and engage with the audience and myself, both physically and emotionally. I aim to generate visual contrasts and notions of beauty and the ephemeral nature of time in order to provoke emotional responses in my audience to prompt internal reflections and elicit meaningful dialogues.

Jurors Choice _Flic-Flac_Zag_ by Molly Martin, University of Arkansas — *'Flic-Flac_Zag' by Molly Martin, University of Arkansas*
JUROR'S CHOICE

Everything in the studio carries potential. My work grows from somatic memories of outdoor play and years of gymnastics, physical experiences that shape how I approach material and time. Working across drawing, painting, and sculpture, I explore repetition, movement, and transformation through cycles of cutting, stitching, layering, binding, and recombining. Each decision scaffolds the next, keeping the work responsive and open to change. I use materials that are familiar and close at hand, often gathered from my surroundings. Many come from the hardware store, my studio floor, or my yard like sticks, tape, wire, and scraps. Their accessibility invites discovery. My process is improvisational, a negotiation between material agency, time, and touch. When a material resists, whether a thread snaps, paper tears, or gravity creates imbalance, I let it. These moments of unpredictability guide the work’s next move as much as my intention. I see my practice as a continuous act of reorientation, of finding balance between structure and precarity, between what I build and what the world offers. In gathering, layering, and returning to pieces again and again, I search for ways to remain responsive, to let each work evolve and, even if only for a moment, feel alive.

Jurors Choice _Home_ by Camryn Connolly, Massachusetts College of Art and Design — *'Home' by Camryn Connolly, Massachusetts College of Art and Design Colin Martin*
JUROR'S CHOICE

Our house is a physical framework of our most intimate selves: a container for personal history, a space where family and identity are cultivated. Through exploring the psychology of the home, these pieces become an anthology of domestic life. My work draws equally from spaces of memory and my present surroundings, every room I have ever slept in, every small detail of daily life that has shaped the way I see the world. The domestic spaces I create exist between reality and recollection. As time alters what was once vivid, I explore how fragility and distortion reshape spaces once recalled with clarity. My work reconstructs and reinvents, reflecting the uncanny nature of memory as it bends and slips away. Drawing becomes a meditative process of reinvention, where the familiar home is revealed as both intimate and unsettled. Objects and materials act as vessels of time, carrying histories of use, place, and attachment. A chair, curtain, or window frame becomes a marker of location and residue of life lived. The domestic setting becomes theatrical, staged and curated like a set suggesting both comfort and unease. Each room becomes real and imagined, stable and shifting, familiar and strange.

Jurors Choice _Midsummer Sacrifice of Marzanna_ by Michelle Cieloszczyk, University of Michigan — *'Midsummer Sacrifice of Marzanna' by Michelle Cieloszczyk, University of Michigan*
JUROR'S CHOICE

My artwork reinterprets rituals of purification and sacrifice within ancestral Polish spiritual practices through sculpture, performance, and community events. I am fascinated by the historical worship of wounded and martyred figures, such as the slavic mythological goddess Marzanna (pronounced maj-an-na) who is the embodiment of death, disease and winter. In the pre-Christian ritual of Topienie Marzanny (drowning of Marzanna) decorated straw, fabric, and wood effigies are paraded and drowned in a local body of water on the first day of spring.
The symbolic existence of Marzanna has fulfilled multiple functions culturally: vegetative magic (ensuring a good harvest), contagious magic (expelling plagues), and greeting a seasonal cycle change (death and rebirth of the natural world). Marzanna holds conflicting feminized identities: a bride, a harbinger of fertility, mother-earth, a grim reaper, and old lady winter. Her body is a sponge that soaks up the world’s decay, hence she incites reactions of admiration and loathing. My mother, grandmother, and myself have all performed gendered care labor in our family and simultaneously struggled with our own illnesses making Marzanna’s narrative so relatable to mine. Her myth provokes larger questions about the vilified nature of disability, aging, and mortality as they intersect with gender.

Jurors Choice _The Herons Silent Song_ by Harold Garcia, Columbia University — *"The Herons Silent Song" by Harold Garcia, Columbia University*
JUROR'S CHOICE

My work explores the complex, often uneasy relationship between humans and the animal world—not in a literal sense but as a way to reflect on our own instincts, behaviors, and ethical contradictions. I employ animal imagery as a symbolic language to explore how power, care, and harm coexist, and how our projections onto nonhuman life reveal aspects of ourselves that we may not want to confront. I’m particularly drawn to moments where boundaries blur: excess becomes violence, love enables control, and responsibility is diffused through systems we’re entangled in. These tensions reflect broader questions about survival, complicity, and the evolving moral frameworks that shape our lives—ecologically, socially, and emotionally. Through this lens, I create work that doesn’t seek resolution but holds space for witnessing, questioning, and transformation.

_366.25-1 Pages 1-2_ by Clara Congdon, Concordia University — *'366.25-1 Pages 1-2' by Clara Congdon, Concordia University*

I am interested in the systems that we establish to make meaning from material, immaterial, and digital accumulations. Within my practice, I manipulate fragments of the excess generated by everyday living and by studio work itself to create tactile repositories for thoughts, collections, and chronologies. I use mechanical processes such as quilting, patchwork, appliqué, weaving, knotting, folding, and collage to re-organize byproducts of my relationships and experiences. Through my work, I am contending with my impulse to “make use” of what amasses over time, and exploring ideas of connection, containment, record-keeping, and release. This ongoing work is a recreation of an artist’s book that was lost when a moving trailer containing the entirety of the public art project it was a part of caught fire. 366.25-1, the working title, had been the original book’s call number at the Brooklyn Art Library. Referring to scans of its double-page spreads, I am rebuilding its pages at a larger scale from my old ballet tights, a used dish drying mat, broken jewelry and other accumulated ephemera as I continue to experiment with the generative potential of the offcut. Photo credit: Michael Patten

*'90 Day Haiku' by Shanel Locke, University of Montana, Missoula*

(see game below)
90 Day Haiku is a romantic misadventure told in seventeen syllables at a time. You play as Randy Weston, a loud and overconfident traveler wandering through a pixelated landscape in search of love. Cursed or blessed to speak only in haiku, Randy’s attempts at connection become both performance and punishment, revealing the absurdity of trying to script romance across cultural boundaries. The game satirizes the phenomenon of Americans traveling abroad in search of spouses without realizing that what they truly need is self-work, not salvation. Randy’s poetic constraint reflects his emotional limitation. His words are structured, but his intentions are messy. Players navigate awkward conversations, misguided gifts, and fragile egos, discovering that charm without self-awareness leads only to confusion. No ending offers triumph. Each path reflects the truth that affection cannot be earned through persistence or performance. It must be met with understanding. 90 Day Haiku finds humor in failure, compassion in cringe, and poetry in imperfection. Ultimately, it is a game about romantic delusions, cultural misunderstandings, and the hopeful idea that even bad poetry might still reach someone, if only for a moment.

_At Home in Nature Tea Set_ by Rebecca Stevens, Rhode Island School of Design — *'At Home in Nature Tea Set' by Rebecca Stevens, Rhode Island School of Design*

My studio practice and research explore the relationships between craft, decoration, domesticity, play, and gender. This involves investigation into my own experience and socialization, which have resulted in nuanced and often contradictory feelings around domesticity, decoration, and femininity. I reflect on the ways in which decoration can serve as a powerful form of self-expression and also as a negative stereotype of the feminine. I consider the domestic space as one of both comfort and overwhelming labor, and hospitality as a means of communal connection and gendered service. Working with porcelain and textiles, I create domestic objects (such as tea sets, lamps, dolls, and jewelry) that intentionally utilize materials, methods of making, and aesthetics that have historically been gendered as feminine, with a focus on the labor that goes into crafting these objects by hand. Without shying away from labor, I consider the ways in which craft rejects the pressures imposed on us by capitalist society and offers us a way of being in the world in which efficiency is not the highest value in regards to production and daily living. Hand-craft offers a way of life that blurs the line between labor and play, centered on the human experience.

_Bisected Reality_ by Jacquelyn Walker, Washington State University — *'Bisected Reality' by Jacquelyn Walker, Washington State University*

Below the surface of our skin lies a complex system of tissue that holds the contents of our physical body and perhaps the contents of our memory. In my art practice, I explore the interconnectedness of our memory with the fascial system of the human body as well as how society and the architecture of society has influenced the body and lived experience. As both a 2D and 3D artist, the materials I choose act as metaphors for both the outside shell of the body, as well as the internal tensions and decompressions that we hold. A large part of my practice involves taking a mold and casting or physically sculpting the human figure. The act of casting is not unlike taking a snapshot in time; the details captured, like scars, stretch marks, aged skin and muscle, all speak to a life lived. Casting the figure signifies the outer shell we all have, a shield that deflects and protects. I look to provide the viewer with a glimpse behind that shield and observe the inner world beyond what is shown on the surface. My materials of choice tend to be architectural in nature. Working with concrete, found bricks and other building materials all elicit this idea of memory; concrete with its stress fractures, the deterioration of the aged brick or the frayed edges of industrial rope. I draw comparison with the structures of society and how this ties into our memory and expectations of the body and human experience. I find great inspiration in towns that have long been abandoned as a way to speak to the inherent nature of change and metamorphosis. Places that were once thriving, now abandoned for better opportunities, progress and change. Reminding us that we cannot hang onto what is no longer viable but instead remember where we have been and rebuild.

Brown Bricks, White System by KeyShawn Scott, University of California, Santa Barbara — *'Brown Bricks, White System' by KeyShawn Scott, University of California, Santa Barbara*

My work examines how systems of power shape identity, access, and belonging, particularly in spaces that present themselves as neutral—classrooms, stores, and other everyday environments. Drawing from personal experience as a Black man navigating predominantly white institutions, I use drawing, mixed media, and installation to explore what it means to be visible yet unseen. Repetition and layering play central roles in my process. Bricks, receipts, and test forms become recurring structures that reflect how inequity is enforced through design, language, and measurement. I often combine intuitive mark-making with mechanical processes such as laser cutting, debossing, or stamping to emphasize the tension between individuality and conformity, freedom and regulation. Across works, I aim to create immersive environments that confront viewers with the subtle yet persistent weight of systemic bias. Whether through large-scale installations or works on paper, my practice invites reflection on how inequities linger in memory and material form, while also imagining alternative ways of building, measuring, and belonging.

_Communication 2023_ by Benjamin Dimock, State University of New York at Purchase — *'Communication 2023' by Benjamin Dimock, State University of New York at Purchase*

In my sculptural work, meticulously fabricated apparatus–ball joints, antennas, hinges, plumb lines, levels, telescoping armatures–function as tools for containing, measuring, and re-presenting ‘nature.’ The objects I make are fabricated by cutting, machining, welding, soldering, forging and bending round rods, ball bearings and flat plates of non-corrosive metals like stainless steel, brass and aluminum. The materials I work with are used in precision scientific instruments where accuracy and permanence is required. The instruments I make function as a way to view my relationship to the landscape and extractive systems. Temporary, site-specific installation at abandoned mines, quarries and Hudson River tide pools activates my studio based practice, creating a dialogue between a calibrated, machine system and liminal landscapes. Photo documentation drives the composition and duration of an installation. A record of these interventions exists in a printed photo or digital file. Raw material artifacts from a site are sometimes brought back into the studio and contained, repaired in my sculptures.

_Cullective Joy_ by Mozhdeh Sajadi, University of Victoria — *'Cullective Joy' by Mozhdeh Sajadi, University of Victoria*

When I began painting with the theme of dance, one of my most important choices was color. Because of the high energy in dance, I chose a range of reds to convey excitement. The series includes warm and cool reds—from orange to primary red, magenta, and purple. Magenta, for me, represents more than excitement; it is the color of blood, yet cold, lifeless, and still beautiful, like the body of a woman. Movement is another key element. I let paint spill beyond dancers’ contours, use fluid, unfinished lines, and let drips fall from bodies to the ground, reflecting flow. I repeat lines at short intervals to represent the forward-and-back motion of Kurdish dance. The fabric itself is free and loose, like a flexible sculpture conveying movement. The layered arrangement of paintings reflects motion and emphasizes the performative aspect: each year during Nowruz, people gather to celebrate light, warmth, and spring over darkness, symbolically resisting authoritarian rule. Free-hanging, richly colored fabric restores the woman’s presence and role in shaping culture. When leaders are arrested, gathering and tying parts of the fabric symbolizes that, just as fabric cannot be fully bound, dance and culture cannot be captured or imprisoned.

_Defunding the Future_ by Jax Perry, Maine College of Art & Design — *'Defunding the Future' by Jax Perry, Maine College of Art & Design*

My work moves between realism, data visualization, and resistance, tracing what remains after systems of care are devalued. After three years conducting hematology and oncology research at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard, I have returned to painting to process the residue of that experience and the closure of the laboratory where I worked. This painting portrays that lab, “The Center for Platelet Research Studies” which was permanently shut down after federal research funding was withdrawn. The accompanying graph documents this decline, revealing how a shift in national priorities left lasting marks on both institutions and the people within them. What lingers is more than loss. It is the quiet grief of a vanished space, the memory of shared work, and the persistent belief in discovery despite its dismantling. As the image fades into a sickly green haze, it mirrors the slow spread of neglect. My work asks how care, memory, and resistance endure within what has been erased, and how the remnants of places once devoted to healing continue to shape who we are.

_Dissolving Away III_ by DeAnda Graciela, Minneapolis College of Art and Design — *'Dissolving Away III' by DeAnda Graciela, Minneapolis College of Art and Design*

My practice moves through photography, video, and installation, guided by an interest in transformation, memory, and faith within Latino migrant communities. I work with mordancage, a nineteenth-century photographic process that lifts and veils the silver emulsion of a print, leaving behind soft traces of decay and rebirth. Through this process, I depict the interiors and exteriors of Catholic churches, spaces that hold both devotion and control, sanctuary and silence. The chemical reaction becomes a kind of prayer, one that corrodes and renews. As images dissolve, veils form where clarity once was, echoing the delicate boundaries between belief and doubt, body and spirit. Each surface bears the marks of surrender, revealing how faith can both comfort and confine. Growing up in the Midwest, I formed lasting connections with Latino migrant workers whose faith and labor often exist at the edges of recognition. My collaborations with organizations such as CLUES and HACER deepen this inquiry, grounding my work in shared stories of resilience and belonging. Through mordancage, I seek to materialize what lingers, the residue of devotion, the shimmer of uncertainty, the endurance of spirit. My images become meditations on faith as both vessel and veil.

_Document to Barbarism_ by Igor Arume, University of Missouri — *'Document to Barbarism' by Igor Arume, University of Missouri*

"Every document of civilization is a document of barbarism". My work examines the institutional apparatus—its mechanisms of appropriation, classification, and its dematerialization of bodies and cultures. Having spent over a decade within academic environments, I turn to the overlooked visual grammar that inhabits the margins of printed documents—captions, rulers, backgrounds, and typographic conventions—that linger at the margins of trivial printed documents, books, and archives. This installation exhibition examines the gestures through which this operation manifests itself: the cutting out of artifacts displaced from their original contexts, isolated against the white page; the labeling, categorization, classification, and archiving of material culture in databases. The viewer must crouch to see these elements, reenacting the somatic position that the archaeologist assumes when digging for ruins in the soil. The debris of the archeology department is appropriated to assemble a visual metaphor for this excavation, unearthing a visual vocabulary that exposes the colonial apparatus embedded in the very act of collecting, recording, and preserving knowledge, traces of the structures that shape how we see, read, and classify.

Downbelow by Kim Wednesday, University of Maryland — *'Downbelow'* by Kim Wednesday, University of Maryland

Between silence and text, the pain that resists expression begins to surface. I take this silence, and its echoes, as my testimony. The memory remains a trauma that still surfaces, shrinking me and weighing me down. "down below" emerges from that experience. The figures silent, breathing, fading—visualize the sensations I lived through. The figures do not perform any particular action, they simply exist, breathe, and remain silent. This minimal gesture visualizes the pain of survivors that continues long after the incident has passed. These unspoken pains linger like data traces, holding the possibility of one day being summoned into another form. Several lines of text appearing across the video are excerpts from Leonora Carrington’s memoir Down Below. In this psychiatric account, Carrington persistently documents themes of “the inexpressible” and “the failure of language.”

_Ecstasy_ by Phoebe-Agnès Mills, University of Georgia — *'Ecstasy'* by Phoebe-Agnès Mills, University of Georgia

Straddling the line between a photo and a painting, these works present the photo as a document that is not fixed but mutable. Photos often become synonymous with memories, building a narrative that evolves and morphs over time. After the loss of my father, I turned to photos to study and reconstruct an increasingly elusive vision of my father’s face. Photography became my practice of engaging with the world, as well as my chance to grasp hold of the ever changing tides of life. Trained as a representational painter, I first approached my images as references to paintings. While making a print of a photo, I made a common mistake- I printed on the wrong side of the paper, causing the ink to sit on the surface, fluid and unstable. My instinct was to touch it and treat the ink as though it was paint, moving it around with my body as if re inhabiting or rewriting a memory.In these works, the surface of a print becomes an interface where technology collaborates with the body, past meets present, and the fixed becomes fragile. Through their surface instability and physical intervention, these works reimagine the photograph as a living site of encounter where memory, absence, and material process continually rewrite one another.

_Fun Size_ by Adah Bennion, University of Georgia — *'Fun Size' by Adah Bennion, University of Georgia*

My practice engages embodied processes of traditional craft to form intimate and explorative relationships with materials over protracted lengths of time, through which I explore interweaving threads of temporality, materiality, memory, and value. Compelled by the resourcefulness that comes from limitation, I work exclusively with non-new materials: the discarded, jettisoned, and forgotten; items with which our landscape is bursting at the seams. Like my foremothers, I gather my materials – refuse and abandoned objects – from the community and environs around me. I then dismantle these by hand, slowly becoming acquainted with the tendencies, preferences, and character of each. I manually engage refuse with intention as a practice of preservation and dissidence – carrying on the bodily traditions and rituals of craft in defiance of a culture obsessed with immediacy, convenience, and scrolling. My work considers the speculative potentiality of the scrap pile as it converges with the uncanny vitality of fibercraft processes… The meandering evolutional arcs of synthetic kinships in geologic time – the chimeric ecologies of a post-anthropocentric world which manifest as bizarre, yet appealing, juxtapositions of material and form – provocatively delicate arrangements that are at once familiar and queer. As my hands fall into the incantational motions of craft, I imagine the unmaking and remaking of the landscape – its evolutional adornment – the emergence of craft, slowly growing feral.

_Generational Wealth_ by Pablo Cruz Ayala, University of Utah — *'Generational Wealth' by Pablo Cruz Ayala, University of Utah*

Pablo Cruz-Ayala is a Mexican-born immigrant visual artist raised in Utah. He collaborates with local art, community, and immigrant support groups to enhance support and visibility for the stories of undocumented immigrants. They recently earned their bachelor's degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Studio Art, both with Honors, at the University of Utah. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at the University of Utah College of Fine Arts, after which they hopes to pursue a medical degree. Pablo is an active member of the undocumented immigrant community, serving in community positions with the Salt Lake Arts Council, Artes De Mexico, and the UMFA. They aim to continue nurturing and strengthening professional art and STEM resources in Utah, targeting individuals who have faced similar barriers. Their work as visual artists aims to visually represent the stories and folklore that have developed within marginalized experiences and communities, honoring the unseen labor that has shaped them.

_Grass Will Grow_ by Moyan Wang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil — *'Grass Will Grow' by Moyan Wang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill*

I work with wild clay, fabric, and natural dyes to explore belonging, memory, and identity as a Chinese diasporic artist. I re-create Chinese ritual and funerary traditions but use everyday materials from industrial waste to foraged plants. These intimate materials carry traces of labor, trade, and survival, connecting my surroundings to a wider critique of national identity and Orientalist imagination. My process is slow and repetitive. As an autistic artist, I find rhythm and grounding through touch—kneading clay, layering fiber, and letting color seep into fabric. These gestures offer me sensory grounding draws back to my my grandmother’s quiet religious routines in the Buddhist temple where she grew up. My ceramic forms recall burial containers and domestic vessels, while my paintings use iron oxides and natural dyes to reimagine ancient pigments. I merge human and plant forms into cyborgs to imagine porous identity and growth with imperfection. Across these works, I explore how people find grounding in a precarious world—how materiality, displacement, and neurodivergence challenge national and Orientalist narratives, and create the possibility of remembrance of belonging.

‘How To Safely Handle A Curtain’ by Lilian Evans, Glasgow School of Art — *'How To Safely Handle A Curtain' by Lilian Evans, Glasgow School of Art*

(see video below)
Evans’ practice is rooted in obsession. Desire functions as methodology — restless, uncontainable, oscillating between attraction and repulsion, intimacy and distance. Evans works with industrial remnants: lorry curtains, scaffold cladding, discarded hardware — materials already saturated with histories of labour, consumption, and distribution. These surfaces are never neutral; they are scarred, seductive, and often overpower in scale and resistance. Evans approaches them compulsively. Cutting, chaining, draping, they force the materials into place, only to be dominated in return. This negotiation — between artist and material, between wanting and possessing — is where the work resides. Sculptures and installations become rehearsals of power, lust, and surrender, staging encounters that are both monumental and intimate. Alongside this, Evans works in moving image, sound, and text, where the same obsessions leak out in altered forms. Video montage, field recording, and poetry allow desire to unfold with manic, frenzied rhythm, mirroring the compulsive nature of the practice itself. Works such as How to Safely Handle a Curtain-Sided HGV Trailer expose parasocial, unhinged fixations, folding them into narrative fragments that blur confession and performance.
At its core, Evans’ practice is desire made manifest — obsessive, unstable, and unresolved — inviting audiences to be both seduced and implicated in the intensity of wanting.

_I gotta go to the store_ by Brendon Deasy, Southern Illinois University — *'I gotta go to the store' by Brendon Deasy, Southern Illinois University*

My work examines everyday objects within our society of mass production and comfort in inanimate things, investigating contemporary critiques of American consumer culture. By reconstituting the banal through childlike wonder and a rudimentary approach to exploration, I challenge conventional perceptions of the objects surrounding us. The work uses a humorous tone to express underlying realities of consumption. I've become increasingly fascinated by the intersection of form and function, particularly examining how we perceive and interact with mass-produced items. This curiosity drives me to deconstruct traditional notions of utility, altering familiar objects to provoke viewers into questioning their preconceived assumptions. By manipulating the delicate balance between comfort and disruption, my work creates moments of conceptual tension that unsettle viewers and challenge the narratives of mass production and consumption. These interventions invite reconsideration of our relationship with the material world and the values embedded within it.

_I_m so tired_ by Ryan Walters, University of Washington — *'I'm so tired' by Ryan Walters, University of Washington*

My work explores the collision of digital imagery and contemporary experience, using painting to confront the sense of overload that defines online spaces. I am drawn to the aesthetics of digital media—pixelation, clunky icons, fluorescent palettes—as a way to translate fleeting, disposable content into a slow, tactile process. Pulling from memes, pop culture, and art historical references, I layer and mesh images to evoke the heaps of visual debris that accumulate online. The overlapping and fading of these layers is meant to evoke the afterimage left behind after hours of scrolling, capturing the uncanny ways digital content enters physical life, the campy excess of American pop culture, and the shadowy presence of extremist ideologies online. Operating in a metamodern register, my work swings between irony and sincerity, critiquing digital culture while inhabiting its seductive, overwhelming aesthetics. Through this layering, I invite viewers to experience the unstable, hybrid nature of the contemporary digital landscape.

_Images of the nearest place_ by Guoman Liao, Concordia University — *'Images of the nearest place' by Guoman Liao, Concordia University*

Guoman Liao was born and raised in China and moved to Canada as a young adult. Currently based in Montreal, his wide-ranging interests and dedication to photography have always inspired him to explore the photographic medium's reproductive nature, evidentiary function, and its sensory relationship with text, imagery, and other artistic formats. His work often focuses on the mundane and Chinese cultural connections to the West, weaving together social, economic, and personal histories. His 2018 documentary-style series Protagonists takes place in Xinjiang, a northwest region of China with a Muslim population, responding to mainstream media's one-sided narratives of this complex region. East Wind, West Wind (2020-ongoing) began in Vancouver and later expanded across North America, featuring approximately 100 portraits and handwritten interview transcripts from Chinese international students. The project examines collective identity and the cultural discrepancies between the students and their hosting countries. In his most recent project, Images of the Nearest Place, Guoman traces the process of image-making, delving into the interplay between ritual repetition and consciousness through material engagement. Across his practice, he approaches photography as an expanded research medium that integrates sound and other artistic formats to investigate how images become vessels for memory, identity, and transformation.

Portrait of Polley Sally with a Winged Bonnet by Joseph Hogger, University of Massachusetts, Amherst — *'Portrait of Polley Sally with a Winged Bonnet' by Joseph Hoggar, University of Massachusetts, Amherst*

I am Joseph Kojo Hoggar, a Ghanaian artist exploring identity, mortality, and cultural hybridity through Vanitas-inspired work. Using staged photography, African wax prints, and classical references, my work bridges Western art history and African experience, inviting reflection on life’s transience, material desire, and the shared humanity that binds us.

_Kites and Other Things We Can_t Hold Onto_ by Lainie Ettema, University of Florida — *'Kites and Other Things We Can't Hold Onto' by Lainie Ettema, University of Florida*

When I was four, I found a razor in my aunt’s bathtub and shaved my legs and arms, then ran to my mother to confess. From a young age, I was aware of two things—first, that I must alter my body to be desirable, and second, that exercising agency over my body was shameful. Through the lens of non-traditional self-portraiture, my work reclaims that agency. Using elements of play, absurdity, and the surreal, I examine what it means to inhabit a femme body in the 21st century, often probing the intersection between childhood innocence and adult trauma. Appropriating silicone as a fake “skin,” I blur the line between authenticity and artifice, revealing how bodies are idealized, manipulated, and commodified in contemporary culture, as seen in products like prosthetics, implants, and sex toys. Skin becomes a boundary, a surface that embodies both power and vulnerability, resistance and absorption. Using this language, I investigate how women today occupy a liminal space of ambiguity amid a technologically mediated, pre-Roe society. Through compressed faces, disjointed limbs, and body-object hybrids in states of flux and reconfiguration, I suggest that power may reside not in wholeness, but in the residue of the fragment itself.

_Madre Nuestra_ by Natalia Meléndez Rosa , University of Kansas — *'Madre Nuestra' by Natalia Meléndez Rosa , University of Kansas*

For over 500 years the culture of Borikén - today known as Puerto Rico - has existed under a constant threat of erasure. First under Spanish rule, and now, under the United States. The forceful submission into white supremacy prompts me to re-contextualize the influences I grew up with, primarily European Christian art. Through the use of Renaissance aesthetics, I build frames that speak of the double colonialist history of Puerto Rico. The use of terracotta allows me to critique the hierarchy of material - the hierarchy of culture – and our ideas of what is “impure”, questioning the rhetoric of “civilizing a savage people” that is often used against Puerto Ricans. These frames allow me to re-center “pre-Columbian” mythology, Puerto Rican culture and bring focus to modern struggles regarding our abusive relationship to the United States. Through my work, I reject further erasure of our histories - we will not assimilate.

_Not for the Gaze_ by Benjamin Bio, Florida State University — *'Not for the Gaze' by Benjamin Bio, Florida State University*

My practice explores memory, identity, and the lingering presence of the self through reimagined family and Black historical photographs. I am drawn to what remains after an image fades, the traces, feelings, and silences that continue to shape us. In my paintings, I approach the Black body not as a subject for visibility, but as a divine presence existing beyond the gaze. Growing up in Ghana, the Black body felt ordinary and sacred, free from the pressure to perform or prove its being. In America, that understanding shifts. Through painting, I examine the weight of that visibility and seek moments of rest within it. Using acrylic and synthetic surfaces, I layer, erase, and leave spaces unpainted, gestures that carry both absence and memory. Each figure becomes a site of resonance, a vibration between matter and spirit. Works such as Dear Mama (2024), Moments That Did Not Last Forever (2025), and Not for the Gaze (2025) reflect presence without performance and silence as testimony.

_Ombre-portée_ by Genevieve Dagenais, Concordia Université — *'Ombre-portée' by Genevieve Dagenais, Concordia University*

In this body of work, I translate the fleeting movement of the body into sculptural form. Originating from a video recording of a performative exploration, I isolate still frames that capture moments of contact and entanglement between my arms and hands. These images are reinterpreted as shadows turned into textile patterns—molds that receive casts of clay. What was once soft and flexible turns solid, preserving the memory of a gesture now vanished. Across my sculptural practice, I explore the notions of imprint and transmutation between body and matter. I investigate how gestures, tensions, and affects remain embedded in material form. Influenced by somatic approaches, I consider making as an act of listening to materials in their transitional states: between rigidity and malleability, permanence and ephemerality.My sculptures bear witness to what persists beyond the moment of action: the residue of movement and being. They articulate a tactile archive binding the living body to its sculptural counterpart, presence to disappearance. Through this process, I aim to reveal the subtle continuity between the tangible and the intangible, allowing matter itself to hold what time cannot

_On Pugin_ by Mark Duffy, New Castle University — *'On Pugin' by Mark Duffy, New Castle University*

'On Pugin' closely surveys the ephemera, dirt and deterioration of the carpets of the Houses of Parliament. The series is named after Augustus Pugin, the architect driven mad by his work designing Parliament, whose patterns are still replicated in furnishings today. Linking Pugin with contemporary politics suggests Parliament’s emphatic commitment to preserving ‘fraying’ political heritage is impeding democratic progress in the institution. The work was made quickly, sneaking around the palace on my hands and knees making use of my privileged access in my final days working there. the series comprises of 45 images.
Mark Duffy is an Irish artist based in the UK. Duffy’s artworks explore issues of power and national identity. He uses photography and multi-media installation to build recurring motifs that reveal alternative narratives about political phenomena with absurdity and humour. Having spent his childhood as an illegal immigrant in the USA, Duffy uses his experiences as part of the postcolonial Irish diaspora to interrogate how a sense of place, belonging and national and cultural identity can be constructed, or dismantled. This threads through his work about Ireland and Irishness, as well as his many projects critiquing Brexit and UK Parliament.

_Precarious Environments with Vessels_ by Dylan Quackenbush, University of Montana — *'Precarious Environments with Vessels' by Dylan Quackenbush, University of Montana*

My work examines the relationship between environment and identity, exploring how the spaces we come from shape our sense of self. The wooden structures serve as precarious settings for the vessels, giving them a place to exist while mirroring the instability of my own upbringing. These forms invite the viewer to engage physically and emotionally—as if stepping into a body within an environment. The use of lumber recalls my past as a small-town construction worker, where labor and identity were inseparable. Together, vessel and structure, these pieces embody an awakening to how my rural, working-class background continues to influence not only how I make, but how I understand my place in the world.

_Pupa_ by Mary Duman, California State University, Sacramento — *'Pupa' by Mary Duman, California State University, Sacramento*

My work explores transformation as both a personal and cultural rite of passage. Each piece begins with wandering in the forests near my home and collecting branches, burls, and fragments from forest fires. In the studio, I tinker and listen, letting the materials guide me through touch, intuition, and chance. The process is a meditation, tending to the materials with care and appreciation while rejuvenating them with a new form. It is a conversation with the intelligence of nature and the grief of a changing climate. Through spiraling forms and formation processes, the work reflects cycles of death and rebirth, metamorphosis, and the paradox of immense beauty within horrifying devastation. My practice is an offering of mourning and reverence, a gesture of connection and care, and a small act of hope for a transitory world within an infinite constellation.

_Queen Mothers of Eastern and Western Skies_ by Lux GowHabrich, University of Waterloo — *'Queen Mothers of Eastern and Western Skies' by Lux GowHabrich, University of Waterloo*

My name is Lux Gow-Habrich (星尘), and I am a queer, disabled, multidisciplinary visual artist and support worker of mixed, third-generation Chinese and German heritage. These intersections and roles are immensely interconnected and play important parts in my practice. I grew up disabled, caring for a disabled parent, in a complex household that held multiple contradictory cosmological and cultural nuances. The nature of care, access, interdependence, rupture and repair, agency, identity and especially questions around embodiment, and the ways that disability, gender, race and visibility shape our internal and external social realities, have always been at the core of my research. My interest in cultural objects with their ability to inform and express an identity, commemorative practices to revive and converse with ancestral traditions, and lastly the body as an archive, with its ability to house intergenerational pain and wisdom - examines complex diasporic experiences of loss and belonging and unspoken legacies of disabled, queer grief and empowerment. I work primarily in gestural, craft and creative community practices to redefine our understanding of art and cultural praxis as sacred remedial forces that can deeply transform and mend systems and relationships, challenging colonial divisions between art and life.

_Remedy_ by Eva Foldy, Virginia Commonwealth University — *'Remedy' by Eva Foldy, Virginia Commonwealth University*

I was raised in the Midwest and have since lived in cities across the continental U.S., each leaving its own trace in my paintings. My work glimpses narratives of personal, political, and climate anxiety and the sometimes-fruitful search for hope. In that search, I turn with reverence toward the natural and material worlds of the regular, the overlooked, and the quietly enduring. I’ve been investigating the notion of the apocalyptic: not in a biblical sense of rapture or cataclysm, but as the slow, uneven collapse of totalizing structures like capitalism, democracy, and human domination. Much of my recent work focuses on plants and animals as living subjects - portraits of a kind - re-centered, yet deeply affected by human activity. Nothing in the world ends all at once; this great dying we’re living through unfolds unevenly, scattered across time, geography, species, weather systems, and socioeconomic forces. Through paintings of dream-like, invented scenes and environments, I explore the tension between terror and tenderness - the quiet but urgent desire to connect with one’s surroundings and the vulnerability to threat that connection requires. Violence and grief are often present, yet moments of peace and beauty persist, if we can bear to keep looking.

_Residual Dust_ by Kyle Selley, University of Florida — *'Residual Dust' by Kyle Selley, University of Florida*

I draw with explosive residue. Explosions and their indexical marks are naturally celestial, producing tactile residue that echoes stellar formations. Across scales, I've found patterns of residual dust, energy radiating outward, order surfacing through chaos, and fractals emerging. The combustible material inscribes scale-invariant traces. I guide it, but this medium expands mark-making beyond what my hand can do. There's tension between my control and volatile chance, between what I intend and what the material insists on. Chaos theory and emergence theory describe these principles, which govern supernovae and consumer-grade fireworks alike. The work collapses cosmic distances to human scale, making stellar nebulae accessible for close investigation. Residue as primary content. I reframe the explosion as contemplative echoes rather than spectacle. What was cosmic becomes intimate. The viewer sits inches from what resembles light-years, examining the same dust and patterns that govern stellar birth.

_Roadkill American Robin_ by Caitlin Perrigo, Maine College of Art and Design — *'Roadkill American Robin' by Caitlin Perrigo, Maine College of Art and Design*

Using fabricated birds in states of compromise, tension, and tenderness, my practice investigates the fragile relationship between humans and non-human life. By positioning Maine bird species in visually and conceptually compromised states, I invite viewers into spaces of reflection where sadness, anger, and desensitization converge. These sculpturally painted decoys reveal the complex connections between humans and birds, evoking visceral responses to ecological grief. Birds are rarely encountered in such striking detail; more often, they are fleeting blurs across the sky. It is only in moments of stillness, often marked by vulnerability or death, that their delicate intricacies can be fully observed. My work seeks to render visible the violence that is inherent in the Anthropocene, exploring the tension between creation and destruction, care and harm. In my series Roadkill, carefully sculpted clay birds are destroyed by the weight of my car, leaving behind imprints and fragments that become the residue of violence for viewers to witness. What remains is not the bird itself, but its haunting trace. By recreating these honest depictions of our entanglement with the natural world, my installations ask viewers to bear witness, confront what lingers, and reimagine empathy for non-human life through shared spaces of reflection.

_Silhouette of Subjugation_ by Gracie Klingbeil, Indiana University, Bloomington — *'Silhouette of Subjugation' by Gracie Klingbeil, Indiana University, Bloomington*

My work explores the intersection of couture, activism, and creating sculptural wearables that challenge traditional notions of femininity, power, and the body as a site of both constraint and resilience. Inspired by the historical evolution of corsets and defensive armor, I reimagine these historical forms through the lens of modern art and contemporary struggle of self-preservation. My metal garments and adornments embrace the body as both cage and armor, mirroring our ongoing debates about agency, beauty, and who gets to define them. This is a history reimagined rather than replicated, as echoes of control, defiance, and survival continue to permeate our present. The work channel centuries of unease about the policing of women’s bodies into sculptural armor, translating cultural anxiety into embodied power. Through this work, I aim to provoke reflection on the lingering struggle for bodily autonomy and the ways in which art can function as both a sanctuary and armor in that battle.

_Skeletons are for Closets, Closets for Rooms_ by Colin Day, Michigan State University — *'Skeletons are for Closets, Closets for Rooms' by Colin Day, Michigan State University*

"Every mistake I have ever made has brought me this moment. Every act, thought, decision, and circumstance. Every object and picture that I have seen and held. Every person. These props occupy my interior. This collection of memories, dreams, relationships, fears, and desires is the only thing unique to me" My current work is focused on the spaces between the interior and the exterior, the psychological and the social. The borderlands are center stage, so to speak. This is both literal and metaphorical; the paintings are dioramic and theatrical but are also analogous to my emotional landscapes and how I obscure them from public view through social masking. The theater and landscape architecture serve as points of departure to analyze dream states and subconscious urges, and to form hybridized scenarios where the landscape bleeds onto the stage and architecture dissolves into space. There is also an inventory of generational family trauma surrounding addiction and various forms of repression, both narratives that I am releasing symbolically through the work.

_Somewhere on a Cul-de-sac_ by Hope Hickman, Tulane University — *'Somewhere on a Cul-de-sac' by Hope Hickman, Tulane University*

I’m a ceramic artist and painter working in a kind of magical realism grounded in the visual and emotional language of white Midwestern suburbia. I draw inspiration from my upbringing on a cul-de-sac in Northeast Ohio. My work explores the ways people attempt to create utopias and all the messy, often insidious byproducts that come with that pursuit: segregation, white supremacy, authoritarianism, and rugged American individualism. My work is very edible, very cute. Cuteness, for me, is a serious aesthetic category. It has historically been dismissed in fine art as tasteless, sentimental, or unserious, but I see it as powerful, emotionally charged, and deeply political. Lately, I’ve been drawn to the figure of the putti or cherub in art history, especially the saccharine, utopic, and gaudy excesses of the Rococo putto. In my work, I sculpt small suburban children in states of distress as stand-ins for how culture is projected onto the young. In my recent work, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with the sculpted garden as a space of fantasy, control, and contradiction. The suburban garden with its manicured hedges, ornamental shrubbery, and expansive lawns becomes a sculptural language: exaggerated, textured, and symbolic of utopic desires for order, peace, and safety. The garden, lush and childlike, unfolds as a quiet nightmare, echoing the Christian Garden of Eden: a space that embodies both utopia and exclusion. As authoritarianism and Christofascism gain ground in America, my art confronts the darker visions of the American dream, visions I believe are deeply damaging to the human spirit. At the same time, my practice is a way for me to process what is happening around me, and to understand how those forces connect to the cultural upbringing that taught me how to hate. Through making, I add my voice of resistance and frustration while also reckoning with the complicated legacies of my youth and the ideologies that shaped it.

_Tea time_ by Amy Sanders, University of Nebraska, Lincoln — *'Tea time' by Amy Sanders, University of Nebraska, Lincoln*

My work challenges the assumptions of the everyday pot. These vessels are not intended to cater to instantaneous ease. Rather, their precarity and ambiguity generate an ongoing exploration through use and interaction. The abnormality and abstraction of the work serve as reminders that inconsistency and asymmetry can disrupt the monotony of normativity. Abstraction of form creates space for the user within the work. This openness invites a cognitive flexibility that leads to continual, ungoverned play. As a potter, I consider how this work integrates itself within the domestic space. The modes of framing and display aim to alter how we experience the vessels. I use the wall as a means for the user to visually engage with the objects on a daily basis, thereby fostering a frequent physical interaction. My work encourages its users to reflect on their lingering power of choice within these objects and to reconsider what is truly essential in our lives.

_The road is long but to where_ by Rana Tiba, Iowa State University — *'The road is long but to where' by Rana Tiba, Iowa State University*

War aftermath. Fear never left me. It taught me that violence does not end when the act is over. It lingers in silence and absence. It lives in what is left behind: belongings, shadows, unfinished gestures. These fragments become part of a space where the lost continue to speak through what they leave behind. My work does not attempt to beautify destruction. It seeks to hold memory with weight and dignity, where absence cannot be overlooked and grief is not made quiet. I use painting to create spaces that carry this burden. In these works, loss remains active. It demands that we stay with it.

_Thread_ by Barry Mallory, University of Georgia — *'Thread' by Barry Mallory, University of Georgia*

In this ongoing project, Forensic Pink, I take on the role of forensic scientist to deconstruct specimens often considered abject. From macro to micro, I analyze samples of menstrual blood, body hair, and skin, experimenting with them as sculptural materials. Like most young women, I have been conditioned to reject intrinsic parts of me that mar the ideal Feminine. I feel unsure of my bodily autonomy, stuck. Within a pristine lab, my subjects reveal a beauty and grotesqueness that I previously assumed mutually exclusive.

_Touched by Blue Shaped by Space_ by Shashari Kabuki, Vermont College of Fine Art — *'Touched by Blue Shaped by Space' by Shashari Kabui, Vermont College of Fine Art*

My art practice emerged out of a desire to make sense of the present through exploration of the past. I am a descendant of those who traveled the Transatlantic slave trade, a member of the African Diaspora. My grandmother, who took part in the Great Migration out of the South into the North, in the 1920’s taught me how to draw. I was fascinated with the idea that I could express my imagination with line and color. She took the time to sit with me, conveying love and care as she demonstrated the process of creating figures on paper. Making quilts is also an act of love and care. I create quilts to honor a movement or person who I come into contact through historical research. Just as quilts are made for loved ones, I create them for those who came before us. This work represents my explorations in textiles. I am experimenting with photography, dyeing natural dyes on fabric to tell the story of my ancestors in the South, and their migration north.

'Tri-Fi' by Mikhail Shulga, University of Tennessee
(see video below)
In my installations, I repurpose discarded electronics. Objects imbued with nostalgia and unrealized promise. Once luxurious and cutting-edge, these items now lie abandoned on sidewalks. Many come from the ’90s and ’00s, my childhood years, when such technology symbolized hope for a better future. Yet that promise feels unfulfilled. While our lives have become more convenient, we are left grappling with existential questions: How does technology shape our sense of self and the meaning of human existence? In Tri-Fi (inspired by Hi-Fi) and Froth on a Daydream, I use discarded electronics and obsolete parts to create narratives in which ordinary domestic items, infused with nostalgia, spark curiosity. These works explore how hybrid mediums -- motion, sound, and looped video, engage audiences, immersing them in a sensory dialogue between memory and technology. — *'Tri-Fi' by Mikhail Shulga, University of Tennessee*

(see video below)
In my installations, I repurpose discarded electronics. Objects imbued with nostalgia and unrealized promise. Once luxurious and cutting-edge, these items now lie abandoned on sidewalks. Many come from the ’90s and ’00s, my childhood years, when such technology symbolized hope for a better future. Yet that promise feels unfulfilled. While our lives have become more convenient, we are left grappling with existential questions: How does technology shape our sense of self and the meaning of human existence? In Tri-Fi (inspired by Hi-Fi) and Froth on a Daydream, I use discarded electronics and obsolete parts to create narratives in which ordinary domestic items, infused with nostalgia, spark curiosity. These works explore how hybrid mediums -- motion, sound, and looped video, engage audiences, immersing them in a sensory dialogue between memory and technology.

_Trojan Horse_ by Nasir Young, University of Delaware — *'Trojan Horse' by Nasir Young, University of Delaware*

The landscape that draws me in is one familiarity; spaces, memories,stories can be joined and exited. The work comes from a place of my hyper awareness of my surroundings.I am a person who walks down the street looking at the brick and mortar, the markings on the wall, the trash on the ground wondering about its story.My practice starts with the world around me;guided by the happenstance moments that you would miss if you blink just once. I document the small wonders.these range from shadows dancing around objects, visual clutter that tells a story. These may sit in my sketchbooks for months or years before it is time to use them. Every page of these books evokes memories of moments capturing a story that viewers often can relate too. When I go to bring these creations to life I use observation, studying the tiniest details of information that could be easily overlooked. My landscapes,and buildings are my characters with figures as supporting props. often depicting a drama and story with no figure ever being present.

_We See the Sun_ by Kevin Hopkins, Virginia Commonwealth University — *'We See the Sun' by Kevin Hopkins, Virginia Commonwealth University*

My practice centers on creating effigies that represent Black American individuals, infused with a syncretic magic drawn from Lowcountry mythologies, Black American pop culture, intergenerational Baptist teachings, and Shonen anime. Traditionally used for healing and harm, these figures are crafted as aspirational visions of the world, channeling protection, joy, and connection to their subjects. I use them to confront a tension within Southern Black American communities: the essential work of safeguarding Blackness can sometimes constrain it by rejecting expressions that deviate from a singular, trauma-centered narrative. By framing the effigy as a site of possibility, I activate its healing potential to affirm the multiplicity of Black identity and speculate on futures where seemingly conflicting pathways for Black American expression nourish one another. The figures begin as sewn canvas silhouettes, filled with cotton, painted, and then "gifted" clothing and jewelry that retain trace amounts of lived Southern experience. Frayed socks, church earrings, graduation cords—through spiritual transference, these charged objects strengthen the resonance linking the individual to the living collective. The effigies collectively foretell an optimistic Black future that is not a plea, but a legacy owed; here, these objects serve as blueprints for our claiming.

_Welcome Home_ by Anthony Campos, University of Georgia — *'Welcome Home' by Anthony Campos, University of Georgia*

My work at the moment is subtle and playful, serving as a vehicle to carry my endeavors in material research, surface treatment, and experimentation. The imagery is genuine to me and evolves along with my material exploration and development as a person. Constantly chasing some indescribable amalgamation of all I have thought, dreamed, and created only to be put aside after its completion. Each work fueling the engine to create its successor, always needing to evolve in some way. Ceramics is my primary medium as clay holds onto the energy put into the building process and retains that information throughout its many stages. In all the media I use, texture and surface are always present. Even in my drawings and paintings, there is no erasing or wiping with the intention to hide. All things will reveal themselves at some point so they might as well stand proud. This thing I must feed; we walk hand and hand together and see the world the same. It materializes my human emotions as I manifest it through my work. Continuously creating comes with this constant struggle to fuel this automata with one purpose. Forward.

_Your Frontier_ by Yixiao Zhang, Washington University in St.Louis — *'Your Frontier' by Yixiao Zhang, Washington University in St. Louis*

My creative practice stems from a personal lens, using partial, intentionally blurred visuals to explore memory, identity, and social transformation. It blends classical techniques like glazing with contemporary approaches, forging a visual dialogue between individual memory and era imprints under a magical realist framework. My current work centers on microscopic observation and photographic archive reconstruction, using family photos and personal commemorative images as primary materials. These memory-rich images are reimagined via enlarged close-ups, background replacement, and dynamic blurred brushstrokes. By embedding temporal clues, I compress movement and stillness into one frame, turning traditional documentary imagery into intimate visual gazes. The preserved ambiguity of brushstrokes, paired with contextual dilution and subject obfuscation, creates a space between familiarity and strangeness, letting works transcend specific events to resonate with collective memory. My process balances intuitive spontaneity with material experimentation. Inspiration comes from text fragments, accidental old photos, or hypnagogic insights. I translate 3D sculptures into 2D paintings, and experiments with hand-made coarse canvases and specialized tools add unique tactility, turning flat works into memory-laden visual monuments.

‘How To Safely Handle A Curtain’ by Lilian Evans, Glasgow School of Art

‘Tri-Fi’ by Mikhail Shulga, University of Tennessee

’90 Day Haiku’ by Shanel Locke, University of Montana, Missoula

Juror's choice awards

Anil Asakawa, Montana State University, Bozeman

Jurors Choice: '8I Mochila Verde Negro: Leyenda en Color Blanco, “La 4T Se Pinta de Verde,” con Dibujo de un Tucán y la Leyenda Verde' by Alejandro Morales, Arizona State University

“I was immediately drawn to Alejandro Morales’ work titled 8I Mochila Verde Negro: Leyenda en Color Blanco, “La 4T Se Pinta de Verde,” al Inferior el Dibujo de un Tucán y la Leyenda Verde during the jurying process. The simplicity of the surface draws the viewer in to investigate the details of the impressions. The use of ceramic to capture permanent imprints of evidence left to be forgotten was particularly impactful to me. Morales tells a horrific and sadly recognizable story through these pieces—a story that took the effort of a community to uncover.

It was an honor to be given this opportunity. Being able to see almost 1,000 images of work from all over the world was eye-opening and intimidating at times. Being able to work with my peers at another university also helped me recognize the differences and similarities of our aesthetics. Through hard deliberation we had to come to a consensus about only 50 of the works that we saw. As hard as it was at times, I felt that we were able to find a well-rounded group.”

Anil Asakawa is a third-year graduate student at Montana State University, Bozeman.
@anil_asakawa

Kyle Kirkpatrick, Montana State University, Bozeman

Jurors Choice: 'Camera' by Ashley Collins, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

As an avid enjoyer of utilitarian pottery, seeing a functional ceramic camera immediately caught my attention. The form was well crafted and the sculptural surface appealing. Their work made sense with their artist statement, and the statement related to the show’s theme of, Residue. The artist choosing to have the photos, which the camera took, within the submissions composition, was ultimately why I chose ‘Camera’ by Ashley Collins, as my juror’s choice.

I really enjoyed seeing where all of the submissions came from for this show, and to get a sense of how various programs are engaging with their students on themes within their work. Reading so many statements, and seeing their conceptual interpretations using a plethora of mediums, was creatively inspiring and energizing. I am privileged to have been able to jury this show.

Kyle Kirkpatrick is a third year graduate student at Montana State University, Bozeman

Yuki Coyle, Montana State University, Bozeman

Jurors Choice: 'Flic-Flac_Zag' by Molly Martin, University of Arkansas

“I selected Molly Martin’s “Flic Flac Zag” by Molly Martin as my Juror’s Choice because I was immediately drawn to its sense of energy. The piece feels charged and alive with color, texture, and forms that interact in a dynamic balance. It has a wonderful responsive quality, like it was allowed to breathe, change, and take on its own momentum. I also appreciate the way Molly explores the boundary between sculpture and painting, pulling her work boldly into three- dimensional space using a combination of different media.

Jurying this year’s MFA Online Exhibition was a rewarding experience, and it was exciting to see the wide variety of work being made in many MFA programs around the world. With almost a thousand submissions and only fifty spots, the process was highly competitive, and I was consistently impressed and inspired by the quality of the work. I’m grateful for the opportunity to help celebrate the work of MFA students.

Yuki Coyle is a third year graduate student at Montana State University, Bozeman
yukicoyle.com
@coyle.art

Colin Martin, University of Montana, Missoula

Jurors Choice: 'Home' by Camryn Connolly, Massachusetts College of Art and Design Colin Martin

Camryn Connolly’s piece “Home” stood out to me immediately as I was looking through submissions and stuck with me throughout the entire process. She states “As time alters what was once vivid, I explore how fragility and distortion reshape spaces once recalled with clarity”. Shown in a sort of plan view, the different uses of perspective and the disorganized, flattened layout of the home depicted in this piece illustrate this idea perfectly. This piece really resonated with me in the way that it was able to depict how spaces break down as we move away from them. In our memories of a space, the idea and reality of the home as a structure or built object is almost always left behind and layouts and details often change and warp with the feelings that we associate. I think that Connolly’s work provides a really interesting perspective on the connections that we have with the home and I am very excited to include it in this exhibition.

It was an honor to be a part of the jurying process for this show and to be given a snapshot of what is being made at the graduate level throughout the world. Having seen the selections from the previous iterations of the MFA Online Show, I came into the process with high expectations for the level of work that we were going to see and after intensely reviewing over 900 submissions, I am proud to showcase the 50 selections that we were able to narrow it down to as a team. The work that we have chosen for “Residue” highlights some of the best of what is being made on the graduate level and gives me a lot of excitement for what the future holds in the visual arts.

Colin Martin is a second year post baccalaureate student at the University of Montana, Missoula
colinmartinceramics.com
@colinmartinpottery

Felix Akortse, Montana State University, Bozeman

Jurors Choice: 'Midsummer Sacrifice of Marzanna' by Michelle Cieloszczyk, University of Michigan

I chose Michelle Cieloszczyk’s “Midsummer Sacrifice of Marzanna” for Juror’s Choice because of its immediate visual impact. The artwork’s inherent qualities invite viewers to explore the artist’s statement for deeper insights, and the captivating performance within the scene is something I hope to see continued.

The ‘Residue’ online exhibition was such an engaging experience! Initially, I was concerned about the challenges of curating it and selecting from so many submissions. However, as I began to identify the strongest pieces, it became clear that certain works were destined to be included. This process really highlighted the qualities that make a piece exceptional. Being a juror for this exhibition has given me valuable insights into what to consider when submitting my own work for future competitions.

Felix Akortse is a third year graduate student at Montana State University, Bozeman
@felixakortse_formative

Juror: Lane Chapman, University of Montana, Missoula

Jurors Choice: 'The Herons Silent Song' by Harold Garcia, Columbia University

Harold Garcia’s work, “The Herons Silent Song” almost made it into the top 50, and because it didn’t, I still wanted one of his pieces to be included in the show. I chose The Heron’s Silent Song for my Juror’s Choice. I had a hard time deciding which work to select, but I kept coming back to Garcia’s piece because I was genuinely captivated by it. It felt different, contemporary, and the materials directly refer back to the sculpture’s content in such a smart way. And honestly, I’m a sucker for any work that comments on industries and the environment.

The assemblage of materials reflects the engineered systems that shape development. The materials are stacked and pressed against each other like competing interests made literally structural. Garcia says it best in his own statement about the piece:
“The installation symbolizes the complex and often conflicting relationship between the sugar industry and real estate developers in South Florida, particularly concerning the state’s water management infrastructure. Both industries rely heavily on engineered water systems. Still, their needs differ significantly: the sugar industry requires precise water control for agriculture, while real estate developers seek dry, stable land for their projects. This competition for water resources and varying management priorities often undermines environmental restoration efforts in the Everglades.”

Jurying Residue was intense! There were 998 images that we had to narrow down to just 50—whew! I have truly been inspired by the work submitted for this show. It was such a diverse group of artists and artworks, and I love that we have the opportunity to connect with so many artists around the world. Thank you for sharing your work with us!

Lane Chapman is a third year graduate student at the University of Montana, Missoula
@laneeechapman