Slow Gardens: 2025 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition

2025 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition

Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Washington University in St. Louis

Installation view, Slow Gardens: 2025 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition, Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis.

MFA

in Visual Art

Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Washington University in St. Louis

The MFA in Visual Art program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis educates artists who will define and change the future.

Led by Associate Professor and Chair Tiffany Calvert, the program is home to an inclusive, close-knit community of makers and thinkers and offers students a site of rigorous inquiry, humanity, and intellectual generosity. Students enjoy access to all the resources a tier-one research institution provides, including making spaces, funding opportunities, and programs that support their diverse and collaborative creativity.

The MFA in Visual Art professionally prepares students for a thoughtful approach to the field of contemporary art that nurtures sustained, lifelong engagement while recognizing myriad pathways and definitions for a career in the arts and culture. Learn more about the MFA in Visual Art program at samfoxschool.washu.edu.

Program Leadership

Tiffany Calvert

Associate Professor

Chair, MFA in Visual Art

Amy Hauft

Director, College of Art and Graduate School of Art

Jane Reuter Hitzeman and Herbert F. Hitzeman Jr. Professor of Art

Carmon Colangelo

Ralph J. Nagel Dean, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts

MFA in Visual Art Faculty

Jamie Adams

Heather Bennett

Lisa Bulawsky

Joe deVera

Amy Hauft

Meghan Kirkwood

Arny Nadler

Patricia Olynyk

Jack Risley

Denise Ward-Brown

Cheryl Wassenaar

Monika Weiss

2025 MFA in Visual Art Students

Eva Agüero

Sam Berger

Catie Cook

Tahia Farhin Haque

Addyson Hoey

Jungsoo Kim

Mu Lan

Carmen Ribaudo

Grace C. Ryder

Roy Uptain

Czesława Wojtkowski

Essay

Gregory Volk

Gregory Volk is a New York-based art writer, freelance curator, and a former associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He writes regularly for Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail, and his articles and reviews have also appeared in many other publications, including Art in America. His book-length essay on German artist Katharina Grosse appears in the monograph Katharina Grosse, published in 2020 by Lund Humphries as part of their Contemporary Painters Series. Among his contributions to exhibition catalogues and books are essays on Joan Jonas (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007); Vito Acconci, in Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973 (Charta, 2007); Turkish artist Ayse Erkmen (Venice Biennale, 2011), and Icelandic artist Ragna Róbertsdóttir, in Ragna Róbertsdóttir Works 1984-2017 (Distanz Verlag, Berlin, 2018). Additionally, he has curated numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. Volk earned his B.A. from Colgate University and his M.A. from Columbia University.

Editor

Caitlin Custer

Photographers

Caitlin Custer and Suzy Gorman

Designer

James Walker

Exhibition Identity Design

Audrey Westcott

Exhibition Organizer

Leslie Markle, Curator for Public Art, Kemper Art Museum

Printer

Advertiser’s Printing

Publisher

Washington University in St. Louis

Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

© 2025 Washington University in St. Louis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher.

1. About Time

Two primary things stand out, for me, about this impressive exhibition, Slow Gardens. In our ultra-fast-paced times, when we are constantly bombarded with information and images, the artists have taken a decidedly against-thegrain approach, slowing things down, even radically so, frequently bringing time, duration, and history into their works as crucial elements. I don’t recall an exhibition by MFA artists—and I’ve experienced many—in which time has been such a prominent and elastic theme.

Grace C. Ryder’s giant-sized ceramic tears (with an accompanying dataset) chronicle a year’s worth of her own crying, while Carmen Ribaudo made plein air drawings, each slightly different, of her stationary car and flora in the same urban site over many days, as thousands of cars whizzed past on Highway 44— deliberate slowness contrasting with rapidity. Tahia Farhin Haque repetitively covered one large, black wall with the handwritten (in white chalk) sentence “Every child is innocent,” in three languages, Bengali, English, and Arabic, evoking the many children killed, wounded, and traumatized in Gaza and elsewhere; the slow accumulation of words heightens their intensity. Mu Lan’s installation of sculptures and a video was inspired by their story, written in Chinese, dealing with transformation, destruction, and rebirth, among others, also by a very old Chinese folk tale. Some of their ceramic and clay sculptures and objects are very contemporary, others seem ancient. Sam Berger’s self-portrait photographs printed on diaphanous fabric with molten, fiery colors situate the changing self in relation to the cosmos and the vast scale of time.

2. No Ideas but in Things

In his great, long poem, Paterson, Williams Carlos Williams wrote, “no ideas but in things,” asserting the importance of fusing ideas with the physical world. His famous declaration suits this exhibition. The artists are keen and creative thinkers, also adept and devoted makers profoundly involved with their chosen materials. They don’t use things to illustrate ideas. Instead, their materials are imbued with driving, often impassioned ideas and emotions.

Addyson Hoey explores the complex relationship between digital and physical space. She has morphed a two-dimensional image on a computer screen into an expansive, textured, three-dimensional sculpture/painting. Eva Agüero’s mini tropical environment (a clay sculpture of a toppled palm tree, a leatherette printed with palm leaves, and three videos that subvert an 1854 colonialist guide to proper behavior in her native Venezuela) addresses deeply felt matters of immigration and colonialism. Roy Uptain’s artful version of a so-called edgelord’s lair, with monitor and smart phone screens, posters, a single bed, rifle, and others, based on social media posts by disaffected men, embodies the escalating prevalence and dire impact of extremist ideologies. Catie Cook’s gorgeous landscape/theater set oil painting obliquely hints at restrictions and expectations placed on girls and women in the American South, while Czesława Wojtkowski celebrates femmes as powerful forces, with photographic images (some decades-old) printed on velvet and adorned with glass beads. Responding to a terrible mass tragedy that she experienced in Seoul, South Korea, Jungsoo Kim’s video with entrancing sound, including from two traditional Korean instruments, is a kinetic memorial addressing memory, trauma, sorrow, and healing.

One final point about Slow Gardens. It seems to me that each artist approached this exhibition with integrity, commitment and risk (this was palpable when I was immersed in the show), trying for not just an accomplished artwork but one that matters, visually (also, in two cases sonically), ideationally, emotionally, and ultimately, humanly. What they, and the curator, arrived at was a nuanced, thoroughly compelling thesis show.

Gregory Volk

Writer and Critic

Eva Agüero 6

Sam Berger 10

Catie Cook 14

Tahia Farhin Haque 18

Addyson Hoey 22

Jungsoo Kim 26

Mu Lan 30

Carmen Ribaudo 34

Grace C. Ryder 38

Roy Uptain 42

Czesława Wojtkowski 46

Eva Agüero

In Eva Agüero’s own terms from her written thesis, “the figure of the migrant... as a complex, evolving, and often misunderstood subject” is at the core of her work. This involves copious research but also direct, often difficult and conflicted, personal experience. Originally from Venezuela, Agüero emigrated to the U.S., fleeing the brutal dictatorship of President Nicolás Maduro. She has experienced loss, upheaval, sadness, alienation, and radical readjustment, and also rising anti-immigrant bias (or worse) in the U.S. Also crucial for her work is the enduring impact of colonialism on her, her homeland, and her adopted country.

In Agüero’s I know more words in Spanish than I do in English (2025), a circular, custom-made leatherette on the floor is printed with gray and green images of both actual and digital palm leaves. Nestled atop is an absolute marvel, a disturbingly dark gray, horizontal palm tree that Agüero sculpted by hand from clay, lavishing attention and care on it (she is both an astute thinker and an adept, sensitive maker). It is a composite palm combining many species, and palm trees abound in tropical Venezuela. This ultra-concise, faux tropical environment evokes her connection to, and painful separation from her home country. It also challenges the stereotypes and tropes that are rampant in the U.S. and elsewhere: palm trees as symbols of the idyllic, carefree tropics, also as kitschy décor.

Being an émigré, sometimes out of step with local mores and codes, Agüero has been inspired to reexamine her past, including how she internalized, when young, a wellknown 1854 book meant to teach Venezuelans (and others in South America) how to properly behave and maintain decorum. Agüero radically, also hilariously, upends this colonialist, Europeanized instruction manual. Ringing the palm tree ensemble are three small monitors, each presenting a serious, yet also playful and absurdist, video of miniaturized objects and settings, and surprising activity, directed by her. The book warns about “fiery passions.” In Agüero’s video, an assemblage of melting candles and tiny, fake trees goes up in flames. The book emphasizes cleanliness. In the video, she creates slow havoc with a dollhouse-like living room, splattering dark liquid on an armchair, blotting out a landscape painting with first white then brown paint, and placing brown, tubular forms on the sullied chair which look suspiciously like, well, feces. Table manners are important in the book. In the video, a toy mouse slowly plunges into a glass of what looks like milk. It’s later eyed by a cat (a mask), which Agüero messily feeds, lifting a teacup with mouse-scented liquid to its mouth—an absolute travesty of how to behave at the table.

Agüero’s wonderfully idiosyncratic and distinctive artwork is an ultra-concise version of a whole environment, including nature and domestic spaces. It might also be a miniature Venezuela, made by an obviously talented émigré artist at an especially fraught time.

↑ Eva Agüero, I know more words in Spanish than I do in English, 2025.

Photo: Suzy Gorman.

→ Eva Agüero, I know more words in Spanish than I do in English, 2025 (detail).

Photo: Suzy Gorman.

Sam Berger

Sam Berger is an accomplished and adventurous photographer, interested in light with its many manifestations, the night sky and cosmic bodies, abstraction, the female form and, especially, consciousness altogether, the many layers and mysteries of the ever-changing self. Writing is also an important part of her practice, including poetry, dialogues between images and words. As an undergraduate she studied psychology in addition to photography. All of these converge in her thesis artwork Transmutation of Self (2025), dye sublimation prints on three sizable pieces of diaphanous fabric suspended from the ceiling. The museum label features a poem by Berger.

Several self-portraits, including one of Berger with closed eyes, are vivid yet diffuse and half-apparitional. They are enfolded into a great host of other imagery, including bright streaks and concentrations of pure light. While recognizably abstract, light here is supremely evocative, hinting at cosmic bodies in deep space but also enlarged microscopic forms. Berger lets everything remain ambiguous and multivalent; one can’t be sure about what one is seeing, or its scale. Sepia tones suggest the past and nostalgia (Berger has worked with both recent and past self-portraits) while orange and russet tones are fiery, cosmic, and molten. Multiple selves are in relation to the unfathomable cosmos. “At a certain point,” Berger writes in her thesis, “outer space is incomprehensible.” So, too, can be inner space, the nuances, intricacies, and surprises of one’s own mind and emotions, or those of another person.

In conversation with me, Berger referred to herself as a “light artist” and she uses various tools and methodologies to usher light into her work in addition to cameras, including a telescope, microscope, prism, and multiple exposures. Her Tet ט (Nine), 2025, (not part of this exhibition) is a wraparound series of 49 relatively small (11.5-by8-inch) photographs of light refraction using prisms. The striking, colorful, light and dark images are wonderful, a timeline of shifting light. There is not space here for me to delve into this work’s underpinnings. Suffice it to say that these include Kabbalah numerology. While related (in terms of capturing light) Berger’s thesis work is markedly different. Her complex, composite photographs (Photoshop is important) have come off the wall to inhabit the space, affecting one’s sight, mind, and body. One looks at but also through them. Images of light blend with actual light in the space. One can wend one’s way through this work, interacting with its already interactive imagery. One can discover more with every step, get new perspectives. While relatively compact, Berger’s sophisticated work feels like a voyage.

Catie Cook

Catie Cook’s entrancing, yet startling and provocative oil painting Places, Please! (2025) summons viewers to immerse themselves in an idyllic landscape with flowerstudded hills, elaborately rendered trees and foliage, and a sweeping green valley leading to cloud-dappled mountains in the background. This is, on one level, a 21st century version of the 19th century American sublime, with painters ascribing majesty, wonderment, and spiritual significance to nature. Think of Hudson River School painters like Asher Brown Durand, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and others, and Albert Bierstadt’s (again among others) paintings of the spectacular American West. Cook’s landscape, however, is inspired by her native Georgia, by mountains, vistas, and vegetation that she knows well, and as much as she alludes to a cathartic, naturebased sublime, she also upends it. She has painted not nature per se but a contrived version of it, a spotlit stage set with a floor, a voluptuous blue curtain and, quite unnervingly, a lithe, aggressive Dalmation bounding from the stage toward viewers.

Cook, whose father is a scenic designer, and who grew up immersed in the theater, knows a thing or two about stage sets and performances; she also knows much about the rituals and routines, demands and expectations imposed on girls and women in the South, having to do with the performance of femininity (several of her stage set/ landscape paintings emphasize this by including Southern women in their finery). Which brings me to the Dalmation, a recurring motif in Cook’s work. Dalmations— mainstays of hunting, fire stations, dog shows, and European courts—have been bred and trained over centuries to be obedient and helpful, they are molded and controlled by humans. But Cook’s exquisitely rendered Dalmation (pay attention to its fierce expression, rippling muscles, and pure energy) has got its own wild power and will as it bursts from a realistic yet artificial world. Here, and elsewhere in Cook’s work, the Dalmation is a potent surrogate for Southern women (and other women too, including Cook herself) bursting from contrivances and restriction.

Cook’s brushwork and colors are confident, energetic, exacting, and bold; this painting (also others by her, which are not in the thesis show) has an eye-popping, stop-you-inyour tracks vitality. It is alluring to the extreme—who doesn’t like a colorful, eventful, exquisitely rendered landscape and a wonderful dog? It draws one into its visual, emotional, and political complexity. This landscape is gorgeous but suspicious, a wholly invented environment. This bounding Dalmatian wants to be free.

Tahia Farhin Haque

When she entered the MFA program, Tahia Farhin Haque was already an accomplished photographer, with striking black and white photographs of girls and women (many in Bangladesh) and her four surviving sisters (like her, also immigrants; the fifth is buried in their homeland). She has termed her approach a “female gaze.” While still an adept photographer, as a graduate student she has extended her practice to include performance, objects, and text-based works often addressing various forms of injustice.

Her original plan for her thesis artwork was thoroughly compelling and courageous. She intended to turn her space in the museum into a classroom of sorts, with a large wall transformed into a black chalkboard. She would write the names of 16,000 Palestinian children killed in Gaza during the Israeli-Hamas war. Later, seated in front of the wall, like a teacher conducting a roll call at the beginning of class, she would speak the names of her “students,” marking each as absent when they didn’t respond. This would be a durational performance, accomplished in increments over days, and recorded on video. Ultimately, she would erase the names, leaving only smudges and traces. This “classroom” would be a haunting and powerful, mournful and fierce memorial for these young lives cut short, these inquisitive kids who will not have the opportunity to grow, learn, and thrive.

Haque’s plans changed, while maintaining the classroom and chalkboard motif. This wasn’t because of outright censorship but instead because of the very real threats immigrants, foreigners, and foreign students, like her, are facing in this country, including those singled out and punished for their political views, especially pertaining to Gaza. Haque’s new and highly effective version is more open-ended than her original plan. The handwritten phrase “Every child is innocent” in white chalk covers the chalkboard wall, like a massive writing lesson in school, in three languages: the artist’s native Bengali, along with Arabic and English. The irregular, dense, motionfilled handwriting is urgent; Haque, one feels, channeled her outrage and emotions into chalk and words. Still focused, although now more obliquely, on the Palestinian children who have been killed, this work connects with the many children who have been, and are being, killed in conflicts throughout the world.

Tahia Farhin Haque

→

Addyson Hoey

Growing up in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, a small town of some 20,500, Addyson Hoey had little, if any, exposure to contemporary art but much exposure to computers, smart phones, and the digital world. Here is how she succinctly puts things in her thesis paper, she has had, “a screen in my hand my entire life.” Her familiarity with digital environments and expertise with software, especially Photoshop, have proved crucial for her as an artist, as she makes innovative, hybrid paintings and sculptures that merge digital and physical spaces and employ exceptionally diverse techniques. Hoey is versed in Photoshop blending, image editing, and masking tools, also in the vigorous use of an electric sander. Meticulous work at the computer as she “inhabits” (her term) digital space and rugged, quasi-destructive, hands-on labor in the physical space of her studio are both fundamental for her.

Hoey composes digital collages, often based on a past artwork by her or a small section of one, in Photoshop. She then prints and applies the collage to wood panels via laser toner image transfer (more procedures are involved, including painting, but I am boiling things down). The results are adventurous and dynamic, including how she emphasizes so-called drop shadows, the digital effect that creates the illusion of three-dimensionality on the screen, which Hoey links to the use of cast shadows in High Renaissance and trompe l’oeil painting. Her painting I’ll Just Rest Here (2024), with a pink humanlike form stretching across a welter of abstract imagery, and with a drop shadow in green underneath the figure, seriously scrambles two-dimensional and three-dimensional space.

It is always good, for me, to witness a talented young artist going all out and accepting risks, especially in a thesis exhibition. This is what Hoey has done with MASK (2025), a hybrid of digital and physical space, painting and sculpture. Multiple, sizable, irregular shapes, their dark color tinged with flecks of white, form a cluster; they do not just protrude but seem to be aggressively bursting from the wall into the space. They are based on a single image from a past work by Hoey, transferred from the computer to MDF panels. Hoey has extended, enlarged and twisted that image. A radical new artwork has morphed from the old, its colors and varied textures (made by sanding and other vigorous techniques), and ample physicality so contrasting with a twodimensional image on a screen. MDF, an electric sander, muscle power—this is all such historically masculine stuff. A great decision by Hoey was to make the metal supports for the work powder-coated hot pink, along with a freestanding monolith (also hot pink) into integral, gleefully feminine components.

Jungsoo Kim

Several months before she entered the MFA program, South Korean artist Jungsoo Kim had a shattering experience in Seoul, which she recounts in her thesis. On October 29, 2022, (Halloween), she and some 100,000 others, mostly young people like her, many of them costumed, went to the clubs in the trendy Ittaewon neighborhood for revelry and adventure. According to Kim, Halloween is a big deal in Seoul, a time for letting go and acting out. This was the first time since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that masses of people were allowed to gather.

That night, something horrific occurred in the alley where people congregated. A crowd surge killed 156 people and injured 196. Kim and her friend managed to escape in time, but she witnessed the aftermath. In her written thesis she mentions emergency vehicles, costumed people taking pictures in front of them, “rows of bodies on the cold floor, covered in green or teal cloth,” and ambulance sirens all night long. It’s tough to imagine entering an MFA program after such an experience but, thankfully, she did.

In mediums spanning painting, sound, performance, photography, and video she has addressed her chief themes which are, in her terms, “trauma, memory, and collective grief,” also “healing.” Connections with the tragedy she experienced, while present, are oblique. Also, Kim is interested not in recounting that tragedy but in presenting its emotional and psychological impact. Mostly abstract paintings from 2023 are based on photographs that she took of “the crowd.” Long exposure, self-portrait photographs show her as a somber, blurry, and mournful dark figure.

Kim’s thesis work Deep Abyss: Repository of Echoes (2025), with video, sound, and objects, while still oblique, more directly responds to the tragedy and its enduring impact on her. What she is driving at is a new kind of memorial, fluid not static, and multisensory. The video shows two enigmatic dancers, Kim and another woman, in four different dance movements that she layered together. The dancers are vivid but also, at times, apparitional; their motions are graceful but also contorted, disturbing, and sometimes slowed down. The layered soundtrack features the soft, exquisite, emotive sounds of two traditional Korean instruments, the gayageum and haegeum, mixed with human breathing and ambient noises. Small, geometric, tactile sculptures, made of the traditional Korean paper, hanji, stretched over wood constructions, are meant to be soothing. What transpires is a kinetic memorial that sensitively responds to the tragedy in Seoul, but that also connects with many other tragedies elsewhere.

Mu Lan

Mu Lan has stated that writing is at the core of their artistic endeavors, including their ambitious thesis installation Undefinitive (2025). The artist’s enigmatic and compelling story in Chinese, published in their written thesis, is the impetus for their installation but in a surprising and elliptical way; only small excerpts of it are included, on the museum label. The multipart, immersive installation, featuring decidedly idiosyncratic sculptures (ceramic and clay are chief materials), objects, and a prominent video, doesn’t illustrate the story. Instead, according to Mu Lan, “the story starts to inhabit the objects themselves.”

Several dead tree branches sport white silkworm cocoons; these sculptures are on the floor and atop pedestals. They suggest the possibility of radical transformation—larvae becoming moths—and of new life emerging from death and decay, this from an artist interested, in their own terms, in “the cycle of destruction and rebirth” and very much interested in transformation. Silk moths have been domestically bred for thousands of years in China (their larvae produces silk), and they are typically killed in their pupa stage, before having the chance to fully mature. They are put to use, and their lives are utterly controlled. Control of a young woman by males (her father and a horse) and the importance of obedience for women is also enshrined in the Chinese folk tale “The Silkworm Goddess.” Mu Lan is fiercely engaged with matters of gender and control.

Multicolored ceramic sculptures, while static and heavily physical, seem to be burgeoning and changing, even painfully so, searching for new possibilities. A modestly scaled, primarily red ceramic sculpture features two loosely human-like legs. Atop them, a spiky, even dangerous “torso” is fundamentally abstract, but also suggests plant tendrils and crystals, Mu Lan’s version of a human shedding binaries and a normative body to merge with matter, earth, and other life forms (something very important in the story). Familiar and functional pedestals, outfitted with clay forms, take on fresh and strange identities, as does a small shrine, irregular clay tablets displaying barely decipherable writing (they resemble ancient artifacts), and two sculptures of brains. “I knead my brain in my hands like dough,” the story (in translation) announces. “The brain begins to slowly deform…becoming a mass of unrecognizable matter…my new brain.” Projected at an angle on one wall, and interacting with both sculptures and their shadows is a mesmerizing video of a sunrise and sunset over the sea , among other scenes—pure, endless transformation in an installation animated by, I sense, keen thought and powerful emotions.

With that in mind, I’ll conclude with a quote, from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of a famous poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Move through transformation, out and in. What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.”

Carmen Ribaudo

Carmen Ribaudo’s art takes her out into her hometown of St. Louis, a city that she knows well, where she focuses not on things famous or popular, gorgeous or historically significant, but instead on underdog, easy to ignore, “unscenic” (her term) sites where the built environment and land intersect, also on objects in those sites. Drawing (often plein air) is at the core of her work, adventurous drawing utilizing graphite but then, back in the studio, wood, steel, shadows, clay, thread, seat belts, and others—drawing in the expanded field, to borrow and slightly paraphrase the title of Rosalind Krauss’s famous essay. Time is also key. Ribaudo repeatedly visits sites that most people ignore, for instance when passing by in a car, absorbs their significance, and then lavishes time and attention on them, in her art.

One part of her quadripartite thesis artwork, Rights of Way, features 24 plein air graphite drawings on Tyvek, a synthetic material used to protect houses during construction. Each drawing is of her parked car in relation to vegetation, sometimes outside, sometimes reflected in the car’s mirrors or on its polished body. She frequented a neighborhood site next to I-44, paying attention to the flora thriving in a truncated slip of nature; a neighborhood resident has turned part of this peripheral land into a walkway with native plants and trees. Her energetic drawings, displayed between two supports which are in fact seat belt strapping, are wonderful. In a place where cars are always zooming past, she radically slowed motion down, shifting her position just a bit for each drawing. Her drawings also capture the tenacity of the plants making do in a tough and toxic situation and the often uneasy (to put things mildly) relationship between humans and nature in urban environments. When I-44 was constructed, it had a huge environmental, social, and economic impact, slicing through and decimating whole neighborhoods, often with severe racial implications. Hence the Tyvek. Some houses needed to be protected. Others were demolished.

With Ribaudo’s overall approach, I am reminded of Robert Smithson, specifically The Monuments of Passaic (1967), for which he took photos of what he called “monuments” in a New Jersey industrial landscape, including a set of six massive pipes, a pumping derrick, and a parking lot. Such “monuments” abound in the middle section of Ribaudo’s work. A small sculpture made of thin steel rods evokes a towering industrial structure; the copious shadows that it casts on the wall resemble wires, vines, or simply drawn marks. With a transmission tower topped by two starburst shapes, electrical wires galore, a streetlight, a smattering of exquisitely rendered plants, and other objects, her modestly scaled graphite drawings on the wall seems vast. It evokes the huge, marginal areas in St. Louis, and throughout the Midwest, so easy to ignore from a car, where nature and industry, flora and humans converge. In another part of her thesis work, a wall-mounted sculpture, Ribaudo has laboriously and, as she says, “inefficiently” crafted her version of a connective part of industrial hardware, and employed diverse materials to do so, including paper that she made from the Fortune’s spindle plant, also called wintercreeper, an invasive species that thrives in the sites that she frequents. A fourth, largely orange and yellow part, also featuring the handmade paper, references industrial scaffolding and tree leaves. Its hooks suggest the footholds on electrical towers.

Carmen Ribaudo, Rights of Way, 2025 (detail). Steel, wood, enamel paint, wire, Fortune’s Spindle plant paper, oven-bake clay, papier mâché, seatbelt strapping, thread, Tyvek, graphite, bronze, and flagging tape, approx. 150 x 150 x 25 in. overall.

Photo: Caitlin Custer.

Carmen Ribaudo

Grace C. Ryder

Ceramics and statistics, powerful emotions and clinical data, hands-on making and mathematical exactitude combine in Grace C. Ryder’s impressive two-part installation Go Cry About It! (2025). This unusually durational thesis project started midway through her first year as a graduate student. On January 10, 2024, she cried. That’s not unusual, it happens, for various reasons. What is unusual is that for the rest of the calendar year she registered every time she cried, including the date, location, and reason, entering this data into a spreadsheet, a dataset of tears. She included only so-called psychic tears, not reflex ones caused by an irritant like an onion, wind, or sunlight. The reasons for crying in her system are a marvel of concision but also evocation, among them “Guilt,” “Grandma Sick,” “Overwhelmed,” “Empathy,” “Frustrated,” “Long-Distance,” “Joy,” “Saying Goodbye.” Ryder compresses complex emotions and events into single words, sometimes two words. This is brilliant. During the year she cried 158 times.

A huge question was how to bring all this data and experience into visual and physical form, in short into a thesis artwork? Ryder’s solution is exemplary. Long familiar with ceramics dating to her undergraduate days at Kenyon College (where she also studied mathematics and statistics), she crafted, by hand, twelve unique, teardrop-shaped glazed sculptures (making her own glaze), one for each month, which are arrayed in a row on the wall. Each is precisely calibrated according to her invented system, two inches for each time she cried, so these irregular sculptures are different sizes. In their idiosyncrasies, they also reveal her hand, her personal touch. October was rough. It’s the biggest and the only sculpture in two parts, one on the floor. I thought this might be for political reasons. It was not. Ryder’s exaggerated, physical tears encapsulate outsize emotions.

A great decision was to include a clickety-clacking, old-school, dot matrix printer on the floor, with a tractor feed scrolling out white paper filled with all the tearful information, raw and turbulent human emotions contrasting with the cold and impersonal machine. But as one bends down to read one gets closer not just to the words but also the artist, her psyche and experiences, as one imagines what these are. Ryder also deftly enlists us, especially because she does not elucidate details. All of us have experienced whopping relationship troubles, frustration, grief, financial worries, ecstatic joy. Ryder’s very good and refreshingly unusual thesis project also humanly matters.

Roy Uptain

Roy Uptain’s adventurous, often research-based work spans installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and social media. He interrogates the values, ideologies, myths, and tropes that course through and help define our culture at this exceedingly fractious time, and he has an an unusual background that primes him for doing so. From Wyoming, he grew up in, and is now distanced from, the Institute in Basic Life Principles, an evangelical Christian, patriarchal, and eventually scandal-plagued cult. Later, he was a mass communications specialist for six years in the Army National Guard. He knows a thing or two about the potency and impact of strident messaging and ideologies, also about the many contradictions that abound in the U.S. His Heart Mountain, Wyoming (2024), not part of this exhibition, is a huge shroud of laser-printed copy paper, fencing wire, and crepe paper. Printed on one side is Uptain’s photo of the majestic mountain and on the other side a 1943 photo of it taken by a U.S. soldier; at the time Heart Mountain was one of ten confinement sites for illegally incarcerated Japanese Americans. An America of boundless freedom and individualism (the mythologized West) and of racism and restriction are juxtaposed.

According to Merriam-Webster, an edgelord is “someone who makes wildly dark and exaggerated statements (as on an internet forum) with the intent of shocking others.” Uptain investigated, among others, the Reddit site r/malesurvivingspace, where, in his terms, “hypermasculine, antisocial, chronically online men exist and post photos of their living situations.” For Edgelord Ethnography (2025), he has ushered internet images of their disturbing lairs back into physical form, creating his version of an alienated young man’s room outfitted with masculine encoded objects.

Atop a bare bones mattress with a blanket (this mattress hardly looks inviting or comfy) is an iPhone endlessly scrolling through mostly alt-right TikTok videos, a barrage of propaganda. There is a large PlayStation 5 gaming system, an E-Girl poster, and, disturbingly, an AK-47 propped against the wall. Think of the epidemic of mass shootings in the U.S., many done by young men. There are kettlebells for exercise and crushed cans of Monster Energy drink (both echo one another in their colors and designs; this is a great touch, artistically). A bizarre proJesus poster casually taped to the wall with the words, “There is no greater love” and citing the famous biblical passage John 3:16, features a cross resembling a medieval weapon, and a heart dripping blood. This pro-Jesus poster with a heavy metal aesthetic is downright scary, a Christian Nationalist call to arms.

Uptain is onto something important. Heretofore fringe ideologies are gaining strength and going mainstream. Online persona, memes, aesthetics, and language are having a real-world impact. Edgelords are hardly confined to dark corners of the internet. They are in movies (Joker, 2019) and in in political organizations (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers). President Trump may well be an edgelord. Uptain’s installation is thoroughly compelling and also sounds a major alarm.

Czesława Wojtkowski

Czesława Wojtkowski’s thesis artwork, memorably titled Nose Candy Candy Candy Candy Darling (2025), is a tripartite digital collage with photographs of several striking women printed on velvet, festooned, in parts, with colorful glass beads, and with sharply idiosyncratic videos projected on them. It is insightful how Wojtkowski, a nonbinary individual deeply interested in collage and subversive femininities, links this and many other of their artworks to femmage, the term invented by artists Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer in the 1970s to address mixed media works (including collage and assemblage, among other mediums) made by women and employing traditional female techniques, like beading, sewing, and weaving. Even now, the Museum Picasso declares on its website that “Picasso invented the artistic technique of collage in 1912.” In fact, Schapiro and Meyer well knew that women in many cultures had been making collages for centuries before Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and other male modernists.

For Wojtkowski’s thesis artwork, they collected photos of women from different sources— scantily clad pin-up girls from decades ago, girly magazines, movie magazines, dated advertisements, and more recent photographs—many of which could easily be perceived as abject and exploitative. Wojtkowski radically alters and indeed subverts the original context and messaging. A reclining woman with one leg raised looks frankly bored and disdainful of her presumably male viewers. A smiling woman with brilliant teeth (this is from a 1930 Colgate toothpaste ad) looks wild, perhaps pained, perhaps dangerous. The various femmes collaged here, including Wojtkowski in Lolita gear from a previous work, renowned St. Louis drag queen Dusty Michaels, and 1950s-60s pin-up model Bonnie Logan, among others, are varied and dynamic. Wojtkowski’s technique of printing on marbled velvet works wonders, giving texture to, and emphasizing the tiny dots in, the images. So do the small, colorful sections of sequins and beads, which don’t seem like adornments but instead bedazzling nodes of femme power.

Then there are the videos, Wojtkowski dancing in the studio and Mighty Lady also dancing, dressed in her outrageous spacesuit. She’s the star of campy, early 1980s DIY films (available on YouTube) by the young Japanese director Ichiro Omono. From outer space, she’s come to Earth, where she is sometimes a demure schoolgirl and other times a superhero-like alien with fantastical powers, sometimes a dancer and sometimes a fighter. No wonder that Wojtkowski has called this unique femme their muse. It is my sense that Wojtkowski has not just an aesthetic and political, but also profoundly emotional and personal, connection with their innovatively assembled images and materials, including Mighty Lady.