The 2024 MFA Summer Thesis, Meet Me There, curated by Jeffrey Nowlin, features culminating thesis work from six students who are completing their interdisciplnary low residency Master of Fine Arts Program in the summer of 2024.

The six artists featured in Meet Me There approach time, space and reflection in diverse studio practices. Decay and rebirth, ritual and lineage, and technologies both novel and ancient permeate this rich body of work. Temporality functions as a connective thread within this exhibition. Wired into moments and their context, these six artists request we meet them at the nexus of contemplation, craft, and invention. 

Kevin Baldwin arranges an interactive dining experience with offerings of artificially manipulated images. Seeded in these evolving sequences are implications of authorship and questions yet to be fully answered about the use of emerging technologies. Using image modeling tools, Baldwin frames the delights and fears of future methods of image making. 

Taima Dugan invites participants to contemplate cultural mooring through the ancient handcraft, tatriz. This traditional Palestinian stitching maps kinship and records the fraught histories of subjugation and displacement. Dugan’s installation facilitates dialogue around the reclamation of cultural spaces through layering handmade objects and motifs of hope for a liberated future.  

Stacey Gaudet’s patterned fabrics and spiraling weavings infer movement and energy produced by the collision of celestial bodies. Her research into astrophysics and gravitational waves results in immense, complex networks of color and texture. The work demonstrates a tenderness towards the forces which shape the material of the universe. 

Sandrea Lovelock Williams paints her family members with faithful attendance to memory. As she blends narrative with observation and reverence, her paintings and sculpture memorialize the life and legacies of those closest to her. 

Tammy Nohelty interrogates personal history in her large scale collaged paintings. She combines found and rendered imagery as she reckons with complicated family traumas. Employing specific symbols, she positions herself as an inquisitor of the past, where no details are left unexamined. 

Aida Tejada’s  multidisciplinary works include installation, animation, sculpture, and relational aesthetics. Tejada revels in play and discovery with sensual, organic materials, inviting the viewer to explore and wonder at the cycles of decomposition and renewal.

-Jeffrey Nowlin, July 2024