The artists exhibiting in MassArt’s 2024 MFA Thesis are diverse in their interests, media, and methods. Some explore personal narratives while others document journeys, interrogate and create identities, question relationships, and peer into the future.

The paintings and sculptures of Magda Leon, Danielle M. Richard, Zo Watts, and Ava Yikun Xu focus heavily on personal accounts and cultural symbols. A woven tapestry of patterned strips of banana leaves is Magda Leon’s offering to the community. Immigrant customs are shared as Leon navigates two worlds while celebrating her peripheral status. Danielle M. Richard builds assemblages inspired by a rural, butch aesthetic. Deconstructed flea market finds joined with junk yard scraps tell a frank story of materiality and identity. Porcelain armadillo, jackalope, roadrunner, snakes, and other Southwestern fauna stand, perch, and lie amongst glittery cacti and kaleidoscopic colors in Zo Watts’s dioramic display. Merging symbols and artmaking processes from their two backgrounds as a transracial adoptee, Watts reimagines an allegory of assimilation and belonging. Ava Yikun Xu examines the portrayal, stereotyping, and objectification of women through popular culture, language, and food in her large-scale paintings. Body shaming and impossible ideals are referenced through evocative foodstuffs such as a wood ear mushroom.

Natalie Brescia, Faith Baum, and Scott Offen each investigate a landscape, place, or interior world. Documenting her travels in the American west, Natalie Brescia creates her non-manipulated analog photographs through multiple exposures shot upside-down, inviting double takes and word play. The deft paintings and prints of Faith Baum map a familiar environ—the residential neighborhood. Transporting the viewer to the suburbs, Baum calls on us to imagine the varied existence of the individuals within. Scott Offen’s photographs are an excerpt from Dream-Tale, a seven-year exploration of an elusive protagonist who embarks on a fantastical journey, only to arrive home. Was it real or imagined?

Davit Botch, Jane Paris, and Amadeo Gjurra are interested in self-awareness and the context within which people, as individuals, as groups, and as humanity find it. Embarking on a journey of self-discovery, the multimedia work of Davit Botch encourages us to pursue knowledge as we attempt to understand our existence. Through rituals and food, Jane Paris explores personal anxieties and the facets of consumption in her sculptural sound and video installations. The performative as a means of release or therapy is also prevalent in Amadeo Gjurra’s activist videos that make visible myriad queer identities.

Yulia Spiridonova, Desdemona Kusi, and Darci Hanna draw our attention to differences and divisions, recognizing where they cause pain, and celebrating when they bring richness and joy. By photographing members of the Russian diaspora in Boston, Yulia Spiridonova reclaims bit by bit the humaneness that was lost when Russia began its “Special Military Operation” (aka war) in Ukraine. The scattershot arrangement her portraits belies the care with which the artist pieces together an exiled community. Investigating womanhood and women’s work, Darci Hanna creates textiles, sculptures, and performances that emphasize female bodily autonomy, and question cultural constructs as well as how the division of labor is valued. Desdemona Kusi pays homage to the Ghanaian American culture in which she was raised. Her joyous experimental film Oba y3 m3 is an ode to new citizens and first generations everywhere, and a call to embrace our differences and origins.  

And finally, Patrick Brennan looks into the uncanny future of the physical world. His sculptures and videos require the viewer to determine where his inscrutable artifacts—products of natural inspiration mixed with AI generation and human ingenuity—will ultimately reside.

— Lisa Tung, Executive Director, MassArt Art Museum | April 2024

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*A concurrent, student-curated exhibition, Emergence, is on view at MassArt’s Patricia Doran Graduate Gallery April 29 – June 7, 2024. The featured graduates will also present public artist talks on Friday, May 10, 2024, at 1:00pm (EST). Join us at the MassArt Design and Media Center Lecture Hall or via ZOOM. MFA talks are free and open to the public, and will be followed by an on-campus gallery reception and theatrical screening of time-based works. REGISTER HERE.