Tyler MFA 2025 2025 Intersections, Tyler School of Art and Architecture

Intersections

Tyler School of Art and Architecture

Temple University

Ally Messer P. 40

Amanda Crain-Freeland P. 14

Angelique Scott P. 60

Ari Zuaro P. 68

Ben Solo P. 62

Boi Boy P. 10

Charles Jarboe P. 28

Diego Juarez P. 32

Dora Moghaddami P. 42

Esther Park P. 48

Francessca Lally P. 34

Gianna Santucci P. 58

Heather Swenson P. 64

Ivy Jewell P. 30

Jess Lauro P. 36

Intersections

Intersections

an interdisciplinary collaboration produced by the 2025 Master of Fine Arts candidates in partnership with graduate art history students at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.

Acknowledgments

Graduate Faculty

Graduate Faculty

Mariola Alvarez

Laurin Aman

Stephen Anderson

Kate Benisek

Mauricio Bertet

Sonja Bijelic

Gerard F. Brown

Douglas Bucci

Susan E. Cahan

Joshua Caplan

Tracy E. Cooper

Mia Culbertson

Chad D. Curtis

Matt Curtius

Delaney DeMott

Ryan Devlin

Jeffrey Doshna

Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver

Sasha Eisenman

Amze Emmons

Jane DeRose Evans

Clifton Fordham

Sam Fritch

Dilmar Gamero Santos

Mark Thomas Gibson

Philip Glahn

Abby Ryan Guido

Marcia Hall

Sally Harrison

Jesse Harrod

John Hatfield

Nathan M. Heavers

David Herman Jr.

Kelly Holohan

Renee E. Jackson

C.T. Jasper

Simona Josan

Jessica J. Julius

Lisa Kay

Nichola Kinch

Joseph R. Kopta

Robert T. Kuper

Baldev Lamba

Scott Laserow

Dermot Mac Cormack

Lynn A. Mandarano

Christopher McAdams

Pablo Meninato

Rebecca Michaels

Leah Modigliani

Taryn Mudge

Jeffrey Nesbit

Emily Neumeier

Odili Donald Odita

Karyn Olivier

Michael Olszewski

Sharyn O’Mara

Pepón Osorio

Alpesh Kantilal Patel

Erin Pauwels

Andrea Ray

Jeffrey Richards

George Rodriguez

Fauzia Sadiq Garcia

Lauren Sandler

Bryan Martin Satalino

Paul Sheriff

Mark Shetabi

Robert Shuman Jr.

Samantha Simpson

Kim D. Strommen

Corinne Teed

Ulysses Sean Vance III

Jessica Vaughn

Jeremy Voorhees

Na Wei

Ashley D. West

Mallory Weston

M. Katherine Wingert-Playdon

Andrew J. Wit

Byron Wolfe

William Yalowitz

Nathan William Young

It is an honor to introduce the 13th annual Tyler School of Art and Architecture graduate catalog. The work of the emerging artists in our class of 2025 Master of Fine Arts graduates is brought to life not only through images but also through the critical reflections and essays contributed by our art history master’s and doctoral students.

The works presented here speak volumes about the state of our world today. Some works address the excesses of our moment in history: overconsumption of resources, overreach of power, and overuse of technologies that cause irreparable damage to the environment. The artists pursue ethical pathways of creative practice through the use of found objects, recycled materials, and in the case of one artist, her own baby teeth that embody the impact of exposure to contaminants.

Other works create space for the expression of wide-ranging subjectivities and collective identities to foster acceptance, celebration, and belonging.

Still others foster experiences of ethereal beauty through visual, visceral and sonic means. There is sincerity and tenderness—and a marked absence of facile irony.

The texts in this volume demonstrate the partnership between our art history and MFA students. The clarity and richness of the writing illuminate aspects of the works that are hard to experience in reproduction and explore the integration of concept, affect, and physicality. They show deep understanding that was borne of strong collaboration. I urge you to read them all.

My deep appreciation goes to the faculty and students who provided leadership in the production of this catalog. For their mentorship and guidance, I extend my sincere gratitude to Sharyn O’Mara, associate professor, program head of sculpture, and graduate program director in the Art Department, and Emily Neumeier, assistant professor of Islamic art and architecture in the Art History Department; Erin Rose Boyle, assistant director of academic enrichment programs; and Faith Kellermeyer, assistant dean of Strategic Communications, for skillfully managing the production of the publication. I warmly acknowledge our faculty and staff editors: Mariola Alvarez, Tracy E. Cooper, Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, John A. Hatfield, Joseph R. Kopta, Leah Modigliani,

and Andrea Ray. Special thanks to the catalog design team, Matt Bouloutian (BFA ’99) and Emma Lindsay (BFA ’18) of Modern Good. Finally, I am especially grateful to the art historian and artists who led this project: Robin Morris (PhD candidate), Mollie Hansen (MFA ’25), and Macy West (MFA ’25). Just as the artworks reflect rigorous inquiry and creativity, the production of this catalog reflects the care and guidance of these individuals.

The pages that follow document not only individual achievements but also the networks of mentorship, critique, and community that distinguish graduate study at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Susan E. Cahan Dean

Table of Contents WRITERS

Jessica Braum PhD > 22

Julia Carita MA > 20

Natalie Cruz PhD > 26, 62

Ivy D’Agostino MA > 36

Danielle Degon Rhodes MA > 14, 46

Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie PhD > 24, 44

Emily L. Dugan PhD > 12

Miray Eroglu PhD > 56

Cecelia Heintzelman MA > 38

Kyra Jackson MA > 50

Piper Kozar-Meyers MA > 48

Liam Maher PhD > 16, 54

Martina Merlo PhD > 10, 58, 68

Robin Morris MA > 66

Joanna Platt PhD > 28

Lauren Ray MA > 52

Fernanda Senger PhD > 42

Jackie Streker PhD > 18, 34

Srđan Tunic PhD > 32, 60, 64

Gillian Yee PhD > 30, 40

Boi Boy > 10

Lilly Buttitta > 12

Amanda Crain-Freeland > 14

Logan Crompton > 16

Theodora Dagkli Andonopoulos > 18

Sophia Dell’Arciprete > 20

Ruoxuan (Kimi) Fan > 22

Mollie Hansen > 24

Rae Helms > 26

Charles Jarboe > 28

Ivy Jewell > 30

Diego Juarez > 32

Francesca Lally > 34

Jess Rose Lauro > 36

Maedeh Mehdipour > 38

Ally Messer > 40

Dora Moghaddami > 42

Mo (Maria-Fernanda) Nuñez Alzate > 44

Mika Obayashi > 46

Esther Park > 48

Natalia Purchiaroni > 50

Marissa Raybuck > 52

Maddie Jones Rodriguez > 54

Pegah Saebi > 56

Gianna Santucci > 58

Angelique Scott > 60

Ben Solo > 62

Heather Swenson > 64

Macy West > 66

Ari Zuaro > 68

Boi Boy

Written by Martina Merlo

Boi Boy’s Vacancy tells the story of the longing, the desire to be seen, and the liminality, manifoldness, and space(lessness) of the queer experience. Their exhibition simultaneously honors the discovery of desire and subverts expectations: upon approaching Vacancy , the viewer is confronted with the unfinished-wood partitioning of a backstage, only to find that the space itself is a façade, a masquerade, a real, materially solid, yet concurrently false reality with the drag persona of a love motel room. But what is a motel, if not a stage? It mimics a home but is in fact not the container for a life—it is a set, waiting to be activated by a play of illusory domesticity through wonderful, awkward and sometimes absurd ephemeral encounters.

In a set design of dated, almost familiar elements of middle-American 20th-century homes, clad in sensual surfaces punctuated with hardware recalling kink culture, Vacancy seduces the viewer into a setting of aesthetically camp, humorously inhospitable elements—a window to a nonexistent outdoor realm, a neon fireplace, a heart-shaped bed with no accessible side tables, and with purchasable gift shop items like handmade glass dildos, fragrances, and vinyl LPs. Each performative object converses through activation by the viewer, as hyperaware voyeur-audience-actor in a metatheatre of the absurd. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Vacancy simultaneously drags the lowbrow into the academic setting and transforms the institutional gallery into a proletarian space, reflecting the significance of the seedy underbelly of near domesticity as a place of communion, dreaming, and delusion, to the queer experience.

Installation view. Dimensions variable.

Installation view. Dimensions variable.

Lilly Buttitta

Written by Emily L. Dugan

Hiraeth (noun)

“Hiraeth knows what I seek is gone, or never was— or was only for a moment.”

—Hiraeth,

Lilly Buttitta

Hiraeth is a word that has no direct translation from its Welsh origins. In English, the closest to its definition is homesickness, longing, or the desire for a place you’ve never been before. More accurately, hiraeth is the solitary experience that you are both never and always at home; it is the unnamable longing for where you are not, and the pull to where you might belong.

Lilly Buttitta’s intensely intimate show of small-scale oil paintings Hiraeth translates this feeling of anticipatory grief by cataloguing spaces to help maintain the memory of small moments and the feelings one has in them. Drawing inspiration from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, [1] these intimate interiors represent the way in which one’s emotional experiences can be tied to the spaces we once have or may yet inhabit. In focusing on interior vignettes, capturing transitional spaces or evoking the feeling of moving from liminal to gathering spaces, Buttitta creates a sense of distance that through form and technique, simultaneously conveys intimacy and vulnerability. This is further bolstered by the dedication to her craft. Each work in Hiraeth is painted from life at different points throughout the day, creating distinct memories of and within these spaces. Buttitta’s embodied, contemplative artistic process allowed her to cultivate an atmosphere in her work unattainable without pausing, without slowing down in order to capture the fleeting moments of the day. Her process and, as a result, her work demonstrates how close looking is the doorway to awareness as she asks her audience to slow down and sit with their feelings. “To paint and to be a painter,” she says, “is to endeavor to do so,” and likewise her work in Hiraeth, a word which encapsulates the desire to belong, to be at home, to be where you are supposed to be, encourages us to seek.

Remember to Turn on the Light and The Certainty of a Little More Time (BOTTOM CENTER) Oil on paper mounted on aluminum.

variable. Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Amanda CrainFreeland

Written by Danielle Degon Rhodes

In two series of work, Amanda Crain-Freeland interrogates the interplay between desire and state violence. Lining the northern wall of the gallery, a series of seven framed diptychs present a striking juxtaposition: each piece pairs a delicately rendered butterfly with an overhead view of a woman after cosmetic surgery. The butterflies, their wings displayed in graceful symmetry, stand in stark contrast to images of women whose faces bear the fresh marks of bruising, sutures and wounds. This deliberate pairing creates a dynamic tension: the butterfly, emblematic of metamorphosis and ephemeral beauty, is counterpoised with the altered human visage that exposes the brutal realities of society’s relentless pursuit of desire. Notably, neither subject remains static; both oscillate between states of beauty and violence. The dead insect and the marred human face marked by the quest for beauty continually flutter between the extremes, compelling viewers to question the deceptive allure of aesthetic presentation.

On the gallery floor, the artist has erected five illuminated aluminum structures. Resembling modern architectural forms with simple foundations and vertical aluminum and glass planes, these pieces are scaled down to headstone-like sizes, allowing for an elevated, detached aerial perspective. Here, the structures of global capitalism and surveillance are laid bare to our privileged gaze. Their luminous surfaces serve as canvases for provocative imagery and text—words such as “PREMIUM” and “Fatigue” are displayed much like billboards or retail windows. In one installation, airplane decals form a circular aerobatic display against a backdrop of lilac, pixelated camouflage. A conspicuous blank cartouche inscription on the aluminum, where authorship would typically be denoted, underscores the work’s commentary on mass societal subjectivity over individual authority.

Through these dual presentations, Crain-Freeland exposes a visceral conflict at the nexus of beauty and state violence. The paradox of transformation—where desire and fatigue collide—is unmasked through the same flatness which mediates our everyday lives, underscoring the cost of aesthetic allure under oppressive surveillance and control.

Logan Crompton

Written by Liam Maher

Untitled (detail) (ABOVE) Sublimation on sequins, pink bow.

credit: Neighboring States.

Logan Crompton’s practice counters the commodification of Black people in visual culture with rituals of protection. Trained as a painter and art historian, Crompton grew disillusioned with the art economy after feeling commodified themselves as a nameless “Black artist” into whom buyers might invest. Crompton identifies this commodification in everything from the fine art market to lowbrow meme culture, a recent focus of their practice. Heavily inspired by Legacy Russell’s Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us , Crompton uses memes lampooning Blackness to explore the translation, replication, and reinterpretation of racialized images.

Crompton’s process begins with a “deep-fried” image in which Black people are the subject. They print this across multiple printer paper sheets, assembling an imperfect grid as a metaphor for how the image fails to fully represent Blackness, for the “grid” of social media, and for the rigidity of white supremacist structures. Crompton then conducts a packing tape transfer of these images. As a final gesture, Crompton also reprints the image on sequined fabric. Sequins, themselves a cheap imitation of a gemstone, both heighten and allude to the artifice of the meme image while further abstracting the low-quality image through material pixelation. This multi-stage process results in variations on a theme, which puts into stark relief the specific techniques Crompton deploys in each iteration while visualizing a breakdown in legibility.

While formal similarities between the plastic tape transfers and sequined iterations emerge (for example, the gentle rise and fall of the plastic resembles the draping of sequined fabric against the wall), the legibility/ illegibility of the image between media differs, contributing to Crompton’s overall message about racial representation in visual culture. In this way, Crompton “physically replicates what is happening in the digital space” of online memes, translating images ad nauseam until their original context and meaning are warped, faint traces pixelated away with every download and upload.[1]

Interfacing their understanding of memes as tied to memetics and, more existentially, manifestation magic, Crompton views their work as a counter to the curses of digital racism. By reconstituting as illegible images meant to ridicule Blackness and Black people, Crompton offers amulets and casts charms of protection. They call on viewers to see these memes for what they are: mimicry. The parallel replication of Crompton’s practice acts as a protective mantra. To quote the title of one of their recent works, “healing is a process/not a destination.” By practicing mimesis in their replicatory process, Crompton invites the viewer to disempower these images—to practice healing—through close looking.

[1] Conversation with the artist on March 19, 2025.

Healing is a process not a destination (BOTTOM LEFT)

Installation view.

Dimensions variable.

Neighboring States.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Healing is a process not a destination

Installation view.

Dimensions variable.

Theodora Dagkli Andonopoulos

Written by Jackie Streker

Attention and welcome to The Inconvenience Store, where your experience is none of our business.

Theodora Dagkli Andonopoulos writes comics about The Clown, their dog Star, and a cast of other characters. Don’t be fooled by the painted-on smiles, they often hide the darkest secrets. Secrets and stories darker than the ink Dagkli applies. Illustrations in black and white present a world that is anything but. The shades of grey of power dynamics, trauma, and mental health can be seen by those with the life experience to identify them.

Dagkli’s work is not intended to be seen or experienced in a white box gallery (though the high-contrast furniture taken straight from her studio create a captivating atmosphere). The characters and their stories are meant for private reflection because the experience may be painful. To be immersed in this world is to feel seen, perhaps for the first time.

The Inconvenience Store installation highlights the communicative and community aspects of Dagkli’s practice. Postcards of humorous and heart wrenching panels elicit chuckles, gasps and questions as to whether they can be taken home. The answer is simple: yes. If you connect with something in her stories, Dagkli wants you to have a memento, a confirmation, that you are not alone.

They aren’t for everyone.

But if you get it, welcome, The Clown and Star are here for you now.

Sophia Dell’Arciprete

Written by Julia Carita

Untitled (Portrait of Couch) (ABOVE)

Inkjet print.

31” x 44”.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

I JUST NEED TO HAVE SEX WITH A MAN (TOP LEFT) Installation view.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Like a hermit crab in its shell, the family home shapes our behavior and ascribes identity from childhood. Seemingly innocuous objects like books, framed photographs and family heirlooms designate a well-trodden path of heterosexual desire, marriage and parenthood that we are expected to follow. [1]

In I JUST NEED TO HAVE SEX WITH A MAN, Sophia Dell’Arciprete presents an alternative path that rejects this expectation, confronting the objects that orient and reinforce heteronormativity in the American home. Through photographs, facsimiles and a video installation, Dell’Arciprete considers the disruptive effect of queer identities on this well-trodden path and seeks a new way forward.

The installation has the familiar layout of a home. Framed photographs line the walls, a shelf holds open scans of a picture book and a window frame allows viewers to peer “outside.” It is only on looking closer that underlying tensions and ambiguities arise. On the far wall, Dell’Arciprete recreates a 1975 children’s book on puberty from her childhood home. [2] These facsimiles are untouched aside from a heavily redacted “Girl’s Guide” page. Similarly, two photographs document the artist’s floral couch, which has been visibly repaired with red stitches. Taking inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology, Dell’Arciprete considers the way our contact with domestic objects orients us toward heteronormativity.[3] By altering them, is the artist able to “queer” this “straight” space?

On the next wall, a series of small, doubled portraits shows Dell’Arciprete conversing and cohabitating with another version of herself, capturing the internal dialogue that emerges from existing off the designated path. Other work evokes the feeling of being watched while at home, grappling with the tension of living in a heteronormative neighborhood as a queer person. In two adjacent photographs, the viewer takes on the role of a voyeuristic neighbor, separated from Dell’Arciprete by the threshold of a window. The only movement in an otherwise still gallery space comes from a looping video projected from the center of the room, in which Dell’Arciprete stacks bricks methodically into structures, perhaps laying the foundation for a home free from heteronormative orientations.

[1] Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ 12, no. 4 (2006): 555.

[2] Peter Mayle, What’s Happening to Me? (Lyle Stuart, 1975).

[3] Ahmed, “Orientations,” 552.

It's not the same pile of bricks (TOP RIGHT)

Bricks, 26 min 37 sec video. Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

It's always been there (BOTTOM CENTER)

Masonite, Inkjet print.

24” x 14”.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Ruoxuan (Kimi) Fan

Written by Jessica Braum

(detail) (ABOVE)

AR.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

LEFT) Installation view

variable. Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Drawing on her experiences with anxiety and depression, Kimi Fan materializes her emotions and physical responses through Augmented Reality (AR) and jewelry. A brooch, approximately a quarter the size of her palm, comprises two horizontal silver elements loosely stitched together with red, multi-ply cotton thread. Created using the lost wax casting technique, the brooch’s scale and peripheral shape evoke the form of a mouth, while the texture and composition of the silver pieces simultaneously suggest a sharp instrument and a cracked, mutilated surface. Through this piece, Fan translates her habitual lip-biting—an anxious response to uncertainty— into a tangible form, reflecting both the act itself and the resulting damage to her skin.

Fan’s AR filters are digital elements that, when superimposed on the real world through a smartphone's camera view, create a hybrid experience in which the viewer engages with an altered reality that visualizes intangible emotions. By integrating graphic elements such as eyeballs, screws and a chaotic swarm of cartoonish human forms that orbit the viewer’s head as interactive overlays, these filters externalize Fan’s inner struggles, inviting the viewer to confront, empathize with, or even embody states of emotional distress and vulnerability.

Fan acknowledges the tension between the relative levity of AR filters and the gravity of the mental health conditions that inform her work. She characterizes her artistic impetus as follows: “presenting my emotions in this humorous way allows others to experience them; which, in turn, makes me feel happy. My goal is to raise awareness about emotional well-being.” By rendering her emotions wearable—whether through jewelry that manifests physical responses to anxiety or AR filters that project psychological distress—Fan transforms deeply personal experiences into shared, embodied encounters.

(TOP RIGHT) Installation view.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States. Anxiety (BOTTOM CENTER)

Animation, video, blender, white resin, electric forming.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Mollie Hansen

Written by Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie

In her practice, Mollie Hansen seeks to manifest the complex psychological processes of making and unmaking the self through the cultural associations surrounding the domestic, what art theorist Marsha Meskimmon defines as “the materials, tropes, images and spaces associated with ‘home.’” [1] With the interactive artwork entitled Guarding Rug, Hansen encourages viewers to walk across a rug concealing broken glass, and invites reflection on how the home can sometimes conspire with silence to retain past emotional experiences in such a way that, dwelling in memory, they transmute into unexpected forms over time.

Aurate, the title Hansen chose for her MFA thesis show, describes something made of or having the color of gold. But the metal itself appears sparsely in her work. Rather, Hansen favors pink glass, a color created by the addition of gold nanoparticles, which irreversibly change to a rosy hue through the action of acid and heat. In Weeping Lamp, then, despite the pink color, it is an aureate lampshade that disintegrates as the heat of the bulb slowly melts the wax holding it together. The pink glass—gold transmuted—materially enhances Weeping Lamp’s instability.[2] Though a functional domestic object, its value is lessened by the uselessness of its tenuous structure, even as its material is defined by a highly valued precious metal.

Other works in Aureate extend this exploration of value within the framework of the domestic to its impacts on the formation of the self. Evading Mirror, comprised of cellophane glass set into a large frame, likens the material to internal experience, both mental and bodily. Though shattered and fragile, the glass nevertheless overcomes the bounds of its ornate 7-foot frame, its glistening surface spilling up and out onto the gallery wall. While frames can hold reflections or memories, they cannot contain the emotions or memories they spark. Instead, these mental experiences are held in our bodies, receptacles that, as Hansen knows, can be as fragile or as resilient as glass.

[1] Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (Routledge, 2010), 2.

[2] For more on the longstanding associations between gold ruby glass and transmutational alchemy, see Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie, “The Noble Art: Alchemy and Innovation at Court,” in Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe, ed. Wolfram Koeppe (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019) and Dedo von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk, Glass of the Alchemists: Lead Crystal – Gold Ruby, 1650-1750 (The Corning Museum of Glass, 2008).

Evading Mirror, (detail) (ABOVE)

Glass, Found Frame, Glue, Paint, and Steel. 71” x 41” x 6”.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Aurate (TOP CENTER)

Installation view. Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Evading Mirror (MIDDLE LEFT)

Glass, Found Frame, Glue, Paint, and Steel. 71” x 41” x 6”.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Primordial Creation, (detail) (BOTTOM LEFT)

Installation, Glass and Vinyl. Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Rae Helms

Written by Natalie Cruz

Fault Lines (detail) (ABOVE)

Rae Helms's show, Asphalt, Parking Lot, Rain Garden, inscribes itself onto the urban expanse, revealing a desire—or need—to impact our surroundings the way they do to us, as a reciprocal gesture of the mundane’s presence. The viewer traverses the gallery through an intentional path of deconstructed sidewalk concrete and “disregarded” objects, not unlike a scene one would pass on the street. Snippets of etched text including “respite is found through spite” and “refusal is the quiet act of remembering” cut in and out of the slabs; these become increasingly apparent the further a visitor enters the space following the footpath. A quiet act of defiance transforms the banality of the concrete—a monotonous hum analogous to the capitalist infrastructure it creates—by using it against itself. The artist places every stroke within the concrete as a permanent act of refusal against conformity, humanity’s touch, and forgetfulness. In this way, Helms's practice centers the inscribing of an outwardly anonymous communal space into a collective, radical experience.

A scattering of Philadelphian local flora has taken root in the bed of black glass shards and dirt between concrete cracks. These resilient plants emerge and eventually overtake the newly exposed earth and become an archive of ecological resistance. The remnants of a wooden beam and glass panel from West Philadelphia rest in the viewer's periphery. These local objects tell a story of their place despite their apparent indifference to their original environment. These seemingly disparate objects find a commonality through Helms’s intervention: a third landscape that stands firmly within its diversity, which sends out a call for connection—a reorientation of care toward what is possible when we reject systems built to exhaust.

“Capitalism curates its landscapes. It demands quiet compliance with continuous renewal.”

How to Write Your Name on Concrete, Rae Helms

In the living room peeling skins (detail) (BOTTOM LEFT)

Reclaimed found wooden beam from a collapsed West Philadelphia home. Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Charles Jarboe

Written by Joanna Platt

In Totality, (still) (ABOVE)

Detail view of “Optic Disc (Red)”. Retroreflective glass microspheres, acrylic paint, foam, steel, LED light, computer controller.

46” x 46” x 14”.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

In Totality, (still) (TOP LEFT)

Time-based installation view showing “Optic Disc (Red)” and “Optic Disc (Yellow)”

Retroreflective glass microspheres, acrylic paint, foam, steel, LED light, computer controller.

46” x 46” x 14” each.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Charles Jarboe’s work uses light as a tool to explore architectural space. Arranged as a chapel with benches positioned for quiet contemplation, In Totality comprises four illuminated discs that seem to hover on the walls. These solid discs vacillate with the incursion of different lighting effects; the glass microspheres on their surfaces bounce and scatter light, creating a spatial disconnect, a spectral contrast. Seductive, subversive, deceiving and defying perception, the light breathes and shifts, encouraging the viewer to pause as the circles splinter into crescents and half crescents, changing color as they multiply space, expanding beyond the walls.

Josef Albers states, “color is the most relative medium in art.” Jarboe utilizes the wavelengths of light to explore the relativity of color. In this work, the light emanating from the discs uses contrasting hues to create images and afterimages, playing with the neurophysiological effects of vision. Such explorations into the nature of perception are central to Jarboe’s artworks and those of his artistic forefathers, James Turrell and Robert Irwin. Attuned to sensory mechanisms in relationship to light, Jarboe investigates the nature of color. He curiously questions perceptions merging scientific inquiry into the scientific imaginary as a visceral experience of light.

Inspired by his experience of the eclipse, In Totality is a nod to science, a connection to the cosmos and the overwhelming power of nature. How can one bring the forces of nature into the gallery, to slow down time, to stop it? Cycling through a timed sequence of colors, one’s eyes create the eclipse as the discs never change. Working with light and shadow, the primal urge to light the dark, Jarboe’s work slowly illuminates the room in a prism of refracted color, then fades to black creating the moment of the full eclipse, the totality.

In Totality, (still) (TOP RIGHT)

Time-based installation view showing “Optic Disc (Red)” and “Optic Disc (Yellow)”

Retroreflective glass microspheres, acrylic paint, foam, steel, LED light, computer controller.

46” x 46” x 14” each.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

In Totality, (still) (MIDDLE LEFT)

Time-based installation view showing “Optic Disc (Red)”.

Retroreflective glass microspheres, acrylic paint, foam, steel, LED light, computer controller.

46” x 46” x 14”.

Photo credit: Dilmar M. Gamero S.

Time-based installation view showing “Optic

glass

Time-based installation view showing “Optic

Retroreflective glass

Time-based installation view showing “Optic Disc (Green)”.

Retroreflective glass microspheres, acrylic paint, foam, steel, LED light, computer controller.

Ivy Jewell

Written by Gillian Yee

Continued Ties to Mary (detail) (ABOVE)

P.N.E. (porcelain)*, glaze chips, aggregate*, powder*, soybeans.

*contains bio-mined metals and minerals from the artist’s body.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Residual (TOP CENTER)

Installation view Dimensions variable. Photo credit: Neighboring States.

The sculptures found in Ivy Jewell’s Residual extract their material and meaning from the impact of the agricultural and petrochemical industries on middle-American communities. Iowa, specifically, is one of the hardest hit areas in the United States, with decades of agricultural pollution and pesticides so prevalent that they have become embedded into both the land and bodies of its inhabitants.

In Jewell’s practice, the body is an archive of the generations-old health impacts of exposure to agricultural runoff permanently intermingling with air, water and earth. The intergenerational ties carried through land and body are highlighted through an array of cast-glaze amalgamations that comprise Residual. These sculptures are made from components that are both the cause and effect of environmental degradation: blue-green algae that blooms in impaired waterways; calthemites, or urban stalactites that form from crumbling concrete road structures; and Jewell’s own ground-down and calcined baby teeth. A chemical analysis of the latter reveals ingrained bodily trauma. Lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium and nickel are all found in trace amounts, signifying epigenetic change invisible at first glance but registered in at least three generations post-exposure.

Furthermore, the solid-cast glaze blocks in Residual utilize a material Jewell termed PNE, created by burning wood slivers (excelsior) used to provide bodily support in traditional taxidermy mounts. PNE simultaneously exists as its own, new substance and retains the physical memory of what it once was. Therefore, the results of these contaminants’ absorption into one’s body are echoed in the feedback loops Jewell utilizes in their material processes. Every piece is formed from the remnants of what existed long before it: previous sculptures whose material holds traces of both body and land, all the way back to Iowa.

Along with the use of the artist’s own body and the collection/cultivation of various biomaterial, Residual anchors itself in how the body remembers: “Trauma,” Jewell explains, “is stored in the land, in the body, over generations. We carry the land within us.”

Core Collection (on-going) (MIDDLE CENTER)

Core-sampled glaze casts, additions added over the duration of the exhibition.

Photo credit: Dilmar M. Gamero S.

Time, Transferral (1994-1995, 2007, 2023-2025)

(BOTTOM LEFT)

Cast glaze*, P.N.E. (porcelain)*, fragments (cast glaze, P.N.E.)*, artist’s baby teeth (whole), tank of live culture cyanobacteria (blue green algae), tank of wild clay, studio reclaim, grieving-mold (Age: 9mo), pine boxes, soft brick.

*contains bio-mined metals and minerals from the artist’s body.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Time, Transferral (1994-1995, 2007, 2023-2025) (detail) (BOTTOM RIGHT)

Diego Juarez

Written by Srđan Tunić

Re: The message you hid in the moon (ABOVE)

Found Aluminum Lid (Norris and American), Ink on Paper, Inkjet Print, and Polyurethane. 19.5” Diameter.

Photo credit: Neighboring States. Landmark (TOP LEFT)

Found door (31st and Spring Garden), Cinderblocks. 79” x 40.5” x 17.5”.

A silvery, lightly stained and wrinkled circle stands on the wall like an ancient, muffled mirror or the surface of the moon. On closer examination, we see the top of a barrel. This is just one of many sculptures, fabrics and collages that Diego Juarez uses to weave his poetic cityscape. Avoiding direct, representational narration and focusing on abstraction, Juarez incorporates found material with an attempt to “depict landscapes through the social, political, and economic systems that produce them.”[1] The material is, according to him, “an active collaborator.” By repurposing discarded materials from the streets, the artist takes us towards these dilapidated, abandoned and transitory spaces throughout Philadelphia, at the same time mundane and often overlooked. Consequently, we are drawn towards the ephemerality of our old cities, their layers, human and non-human traces, and surfaces. As Sabina Andron reminds us, all of these are a means of spatial production and visible expression of how we imagine and treat the urban environment and its meaning.[2]

Many other pieces—such as a door with a window opening, sprayed with graffiti tags or an imprint of metal fence—are removed from their immediate physical context and the urban noise. As such, they become standalone, estranged fragments fixed under a spotlight, underlined by the white cube gallery setting. Taken from their “natural” setting, the found objects are transformed into curated concrete poetry in a form of urban assemblage. In a gesture that seemingly abandons traditional painting itself, Juarez embraces the painterly quality of the everyday readymade.

However, if the concept of the readymade assumes focusing on the here and now, grounding us in the present moment and in our immediate space, it falls short of Juarez’s full intentions. He envisions a wider, planetary framework; in his own words: “[o]rienting ourselves with this time scale lets us navigate space as interconnected extensions of our planet rather than disparate individuals. This abstraction reconfigures fixed subjectivities and ideas of value, enabling more expansive, poetic forms of meaning.”[3] Poetry is a key aspect in Juarez’s oeuvre—both as a research method and curating device. The poetic frames the exhibition, enabling non-didactic interpretation of this mediated emotional landscape. Throughout art history, landscapes have always been a means of projecting us into the world and at the same time ordering that very same world. However, Juarez avoids imposing any plan or system but instead the careful observation of ephemerality over a longer timeframe, both within and outside our lifespan.

[1] Diego Juarez, “Artist statement,” Tyler School of Art and Architecture, 2025, https://tyler. temple.edu/diego-juarez-mfa-2025.

[2] See: Sabina Andron, Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City (Routledge, 2024), p. 4.

[3] Juarez, “Artist statement.”

Photo credit: Neighboring States. Fireproof (TOP RIGHT)

Found USPS pallet (31st and Spring Garden), collage, acrylic, flashe, polyurethane, and oil stick. 48” x 40”.

Re: The message you hid in the moon (BOTTOM CENTER)

Installation view.

Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

“tell me about our boat”

With this simple request, Francesca Lally points out a fatal flaw of collective memory, the idea that a singular object like the SS United States, a once grand ocean liner that sat abandoned in South Philly for 29 years, can ever have a singular memory. Encouraging visitors to leave notes of their own stories about the ship specifically, Philadelphia in general, or even family stories, Lally makes tangible the multiplicity inherent in memory, narrative and print.

Like the composite captain’s log, which recorded these stories and was only on hand during the run of the exhibition, Lally started with a compound image of SS United States. Mark by mark, she transferred it to punch cards. By foregrounding her own labor, Lally reincarnates the knowledge of those before her, challenging yet another communal memory. Though credit is given to the man who oversaw the invention of punch cards, much of the computing was done by a workforce of human calculators. A workforce of mostly women. The industry of these brilliant women was as hidden and coded as the information in the technology they helped create.

Francesca Lally

Written by Jackie Streker

Invented to store and process data through holes, punched cards rely on what is missing to convey information. The image of the beloved South Philly ship is contained in the perforations. An archive-based artist, Lally regularly explores the possibilities of outdated technology to retain information. The disguised information is illuminated, by highlighting and decoding the positive image. By illuminating the woven together image, Lally decodes the visual data and deftly reminds us of not just her own labor, but also of those who helped develop the technology. Is Lally’s dream boat the paper object hanging in the gallery or the projection of light through the matrix?

Babycamera Dream Boat (ABOVE)

Thermal print.

Babycamera Dream Boat (TOP LEFT)

Installation view.

Perforated cotton paper, waxed linen thread, overhead projectors.

Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Babycamera Dream Boat (TOP RIGHT)

Installation view.

Perforated cotton paper, waxed linen thread, overhead projectors.

Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Babycamera Dream Boat (MIDDLE LEFT)

Installation view.

Perforated cotton paper, waxed linen thread, overhead projectors.

Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Jess Rose Lauro

Written by Ivy D’Agostino

Reflections (ABOVE)

Copper. 11” x 10” x 6”.

Pattern & Presence (TOP LEFT) Installation view. Dimensions variable. Photo by Neighboring States.

Together with her work, Jess Rose Lauro invites us to pause our ever-present worries and encounter strangely familiar follicles in copper. Lauro’s Pattern & Presence invokes nostalgic memories of frolicking barefoot through the trees in the backyard, wincing at the sweet gum pods that stuck to eager feet in the early days of autumn.

Her intricately smithed and electroformed vessels and brooches beckon the viewer into a meditative space as they gaze upon echoes of natural forms. Inspired mostly by magnolia seed pods, Lauro’s work delicately balances the wildness and perseverance of nature with the rigidness of ordered humanity. Resting upon deckled edge paper on wood, the copper material becomes even less ornamental and more natural in connotation. The light passes through areas of concavity and absence, projecting a beautiful extended pattern onto the paper underneath and walls surrounding each piece. Like seed pods scattering and producing more plants, light is a main actor in Pattern & Presence, producing more undulating forms from each vessel.

Copper, too, is taken from the earth, and as a naturally soft and malleable object, holds in it every mark of Lauro’s decision making. Sow, a collection of formed seed pods mid-scatter up a wall, displays the intricacies of both copper and seed pods that the artist has faithfully studied. It joins the rest of the objects in the collection in permitting the viewer to enter the same kind of meditative state that Lauro does when she works on these objects. The mundanity of repetition blossoms into persevering patience as memories of seeds drifting in the late summer breeze bloom in the viewer’s mind.

Pattern & Presence (TOP RIGHT) Installation view. Dimensions variable. Photo by Neighboring States.

Seeping (BOTTOM CENTER)

Resin Print, Copper. 10” x 6” x 1.5” Each. Photo by Neighboring States.

Maedeh Mehdipour

Written by Cecelia Heintzelman

Whisper of the souls! (ABOVE)

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

I’m holding (TOP LEFT)

Installation view.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

The weight of womanhood is a burden shared around the world. The cruelty of existence and the societal expectation of cooperation imposed on women creates a tension impressed upon the collective female memory.

Maedeh Mehdipour examines this crucial tension in her work. A mass of existence rendered through wax, silicone and rope, her work demands sentience through inanimacy—a guttural scream with no mouth. This voice is an echo that speaks through all generations of women. The principal work drips blood into a box below it, which is filled with mirrored edges, reflecting both womanhood and its repetitive facets—judgement, oppression, self-criticism. It is a testament to the endlessness in life. The act of viewing this work, and the show at large, is the understanding and feeling the emotions of Mehdipour—the rage, the helplessness, the desire—brought to life by the artist’s hand. Mehdipour's installations are an exercise in understanding Freud’s id and ego, and the tension between inner desire and turmoil and the expectation of rationality. Mehdipour intertwines her experience in weaving and the femininity of the art and re-imagines its potential as a testament to female rage. The viewer is left with a knot in their stomach when approaching these works. They are forced to identify what their own existence means in this world. Among other installations of wax, hair and fabric, Mehdipour's work is an expression of the desire to understand what the conformist community insists upon.

I will give birth to a new baby! (TOP RIGHT)

Bones cast in wax, sever motor, wood, cardboard, plastic.

30” x 65”.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

I’m holding (BOTTOM CENTER)

Installation view.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Ally Messer

Written by Gillian Yee

Entwined (Costume artifact from stop-motion animation) (ABOVE)

Wool, paper, wire.

26” x 28”.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

our breath and the trembling of leaves

(TOP CENTER)

Installation view.

Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Our breath and the trembling of leaves is not only an exercise in love, care and connection, but the expansion of how we consider ourselves to be irrevocably bonded to one another. Reaching across and perhaps even seeking to deconstruct the boundaries of the non/human, Ally Messer explores the world’s exciting, unique, and special entanglements and shows how we might better take care of one another in times of (ecological) crisis. In other words, this exhibition asks: what do we have, if not for the care and attention we hold for one another?

Messer’s particular mode of storytelling is built through processes such as stop-motion animation, needle-felting, and papier-mâché that enforce intimate relationships with the material through slow, repetitive movements. The merging of individual fibers, both paper and wool, form a cohesive whole that further replicates the solidarity growing out of a sense of community and care for one another. As a viewer absorbs all of the minute, intricate details of the exhibition—every papier-mâché’d leaf and petal, or every hand-crafted seed pod made to be taken, planted, and grown—they are reminded that they’re part of an ever-expanding, interconnected web of life that extends far beyond an anthropocentric point of view. In Messer’s words, “We are connected to this hurting world and although it can feel hopeless and easy to remove oneself, we are all here and part of it all.”

In exploring instances of care and reciprocity that emerge for various species that are not our own, this exhibition reveals the hope and joy we might discover in focusing on our connections with each other and the world beyond. Informed by all that is mythical, mystical, magical and otherworldly, Messer follows an ecofeminist and queer framework in creating models of hope that the world so desperately needs. In a place and time where we’re encouraged to self-isolate and prioritize, our breath and the trembling of leaves remains a gentle reminder that one of the most important parts of living is living—in the present moment, intertwined with others and the world around us.

Community Theater (Detail) (MIDDLE LEFT)

Paper, wire, cotton, wool, lanolin, hay, projector, stop-motion animation.

53” x 47” x 16”.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

our breath and the trembling of leaves

(MIDDLE RIGHT)

Installation view.

Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Hope Is a Choice We Make Together (Detail)

Dora Moghaddami

Written by Fernanda Senger

Temple Made Alumni Portraits (ABOVE)

Installation view.

Illustration, poster, postcard.

40" x 60".

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

365 Days Far Apart (TOP CENTER)

Installation view.

Illustration, book design, calendar. Wood cover. 6" x 65".

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Dora Moghaddami wants her audience to see perfection in what society often deems imperfect. The artist meticulously designs and illustrates works that promote women’s autonomy, reflects the beauty and resilience of immigration and, above all, celebrate human flourishing.

Moghaddami’s oversized Temple Made Alumni Portraits is one of the first works the viewer encounters in the group show XYZ. Along with her fellow exhibitors, Moghaddami is joining the wide range of voices that often stay frozen in a graduate portrait. No more! The artist pioneered a fluid series that highlights the individuality of each subject, reflecting the diversity that makes the fabric of her new alma mater. After interviewing and photographing sitters, Moghaddami translates their stories into a singular digital painting making their most prominent traits shine through choices of composition, the use of their favorite colors and flowers as well as elements that hint at their places of origin. It is as if Moghaddami included something from herself in the portraits too, not as a mirror image as artists have done throughout the history of art, but through the fact that the subjects are all women migrants like herself.

Women's experience is the center of several works including the charming house-shaped book 365 Days Apart, in which a female character leaves her beloved to seek professional opportunities abroad. Evocative seasonal illustrations transform a one-year separation into a journey of self-discovery, the reassurance of love, and the promise of reunion. In using bright colors and playful typography Moghaddami demonstrates versatility to tailor narratives for each occasion. She communicates her boldest feminist messaging in primary colors and punk-style typography in Salty, a swimsuit branding design that amplifies the inherent beauty of all women's bodies. As for the elegant Voice of Venus board game, play turns into a tool for awareness through the exploration of challenges involving gender equality and social justice. And, the packaging of Madness, Old Gin brings the surreal world of Alice in Wonderland through the satiny aesthetics and rich textures of its character inspired flavors.

Moghaddami’s interactive digital platforms deal with the duality of the immigrant mindset and put her background in motion design into purposeful use. In So Near, So Far she provides a “digital experience of migration” with overlapping languages and simulation of cultural barriers that evoke cultural difference while in another, public resources appear to aid an assimilative process.

Ultimately, designing projects in which the individual can center themself and honor their (im)perfection while acknowledging an uncertain world is what keeps Moghaddami’s work grounded in a sense of belonging. She generously invites viewers to recognize their own affinities, hopefully generating new meanings that say they also belong somewhere.

The Voice of Venus (BOTTOM LEFT)

Installation view.

Branding and identity, board game design. 20" x 20".

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

So Near, So Far (BOTTOM RIGHT)

Installation view.

Interactive book, experimental narrative, web design, installation.

Materials: acrylic, mirror, transparent

film photos, pomegranate.

Cube size: 3" x 3".

Mirror panel: 17.5" x 18.5".

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Mo (MariaFernanda) Nuñez Alzate

Written by Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie

As water drips from a conical paper cup wedged into the base of its dispenser, the pile of cement powder underneath becomes increasingly solid. Its components are reacting with the water to form something new: calcium silicate hydrates that will aggregate and harden into cement.[1] With the artwork entitled, not a single mouth, Mo Nuñez Alzate created the conditions for this reaction, though they do not remain in the gallery to see it through. There is no need: they have placed water and cement powder in proximity and left them to do the rest. The only trace of the human left in “not a single mouth” are the paper cups and dispenser—human-made and made for human use, but now independently facilitating the material transformation of cement.

Engaging with things on their own terms is central to Nuñez Alzate’s practice. To borrow from political theorist Jane Bennett, ‘things’ are, "vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them."[2] For Nuñez Alzate, too, things have power beyond human manipulation. In Survival strategies—an aluminum trough filled with a mixture of wax, butter and whole spices placed under hot, bright lights—each component acts on the others: heat melts, spices infuse and butter releases fat-soluble flavor compounds, transforming the gallery by releasing the scent of cinnamon, star anise and clove. As the actor that placed these materials in proximity to one another, the artist is integral to the materialization of their action. But it is equally integral to Nuñez Alzate’s work that they do not define it. For Nuñez Alzate, the artwork is realized only through their reactions to each other.

Nuñez Alzate is interested in the relationships that form between ‘things’ when they are placed in this kind of sensorial proximity. What instabilities do those relationships reveal in the boundaries we create between the human, the natural and the built environment of the city?[3] With the artwork entitled living is such wet data, Alzate disorients the viewer’s perception of these divisions. By pairing banana leaves and steel, they worry at the edges of any separation between organic and inorganic entities in the urban environment, pushing the viewer to question the validity of this boundary in their everyday life.

[1] T. Zhou, K. Ioannidou, F. Ulm, M.Z. Bazant, & R.J. Pellenq, “Multiscale poromechanics of wet cement paste,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116 (22) 10652-10657, https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1901160116 (2019).

[2] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, 2010, 6.

[3] These combinations thus evoke places where, “there is no definitive break between sentient and non-sentient entities.” Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010, 10.

Heat upon arrival (detail) (ABOVE)

Steel, wood, orange, plastic mesh, grapes, wax, marshmallow, mirror, laser image. Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Heat Upon Arrival (TOP CENTER)

Steel, wood, orange, plastic mesh, grapes, wax, marshmallow, mirror, laser image (left). Not a single mouth.

Water cup dispenser, water, powder cement (right).

Dimensions Variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Picnic, lightning (MIDDLE LEFT)

Installation view. Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Survival strategies (detail) (MIDDLE RIGHT)

Aluminum, wax, butter, cardamom, cinnamon, allspice, star anise.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Mika Obayashi

Written by Danielle Degon Rhodes

Mika Obayashi’s sculptures emerge from chance encounters with objects discarded by society—objects deemed excess, flawed or forgotten. A globe, a grandfather clock, a Styrofoam cooler—each has completed its lifecycle in the consumer marketplace and now exists primarily in its material form. Rather than restoring their past significance, Obayashi foregrounds their latent potential, allowing their weight, texture and balance to dictate new, often precarious relationships.

Her process is subtle. Rather than imposing a fixed narrative, Obayashi explores the relationships between objects with minimal intervention. A gold chain or a stack of paper, for example, become dependent on one another’s composition. By relying primarily on balance and tension to determine how one object relates to another, she guides the work’s formation without controlling its outcome. In this way, Obayashi positions herself as a conduit for the objects' underlying possibilities, allowing them to reveal their own interdependent form. Objects lean, press and hover, held together by the simplest yet most elemental forces—gravity, friction, tension. In relinquishing control over the final form, she shifts the sculptural act from construction to facilitation, positioning herself as an intermediary rather than an author.

Repetition, absurdity and subtle humor permeate the work as the materials find a new equilibrium. In stripping these objects of their prescribed identities, she allows them an autonomy rarely afforded to the discarded and the obsolete. What emerges is a fragile, provisional order—an arrangement at once tenuous and inevitable, poised on the edge of collapse yet momentarily, improbably, at rest. Through her careful arrangements, these materials engage in a silent dialogue, their internal logic emerging through the delicate balance and interconnectedness that Obayashi facilitates.

A Day on Earth When No One Dies (upper left) and Conscience/Temptation (TOP RIGHT)

Ikea shelf, peeled globe. 59” x 16” x 15”. Equator.

8” x 2” x 5”.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Apocalypto (MIDDLE LEFT)

Aircraft metal, mylar, vellum, acrylic, screws. 16.5” x 8.5”.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Esther Park

Written by Piper Kozar-Meyers

“We encounter its excess constantly, via our hands, mouths, and skin. Now indispensable, this material seeps into both our bodies and surroundings, embedding itself into a throwaway-driven society.”

Plastic has become a part of the human experience. It has permeated every sphere of our existence, running through our veins and into the seas. Single-use plastic is a product of the consumer culture which drives the modern human condition. Through her works, Esther Park utilizes everyday materials, which garner no thought from the average consumer, and transforms them into wearable sculptures, transcending their once singular purpose. Park examines the value systems of the contemporary economic and social climate with a focus on the abundance of plastic all around us, in particular eating utensils.

By repurposing and evolving the plastic forms into wearable sculpture, Park aims to establish tangible links between the life-sustaining act of eating and the tactile experience of the materials. It is not just a narrative of the overconsumption of single-use plastics, but rather a reflection on the relationships between the pervasive nature of the material world, and the human experience. In her practice, the shapes undergo natural transformations, heat influencing the new, natural forms that they take on. This manual manipulation symbolizes the return to nature, reimbuing life and vitality into the plastic. The pieces retain traces of their factory shape, yet their visual manipulation invites new perceptions. Utilizing the visible traces of casting, stone setting and the imprint of jewelry components, Esther Park elevates the inherent qualities of plastic—its affordability, disposability and lightness—to new forms of value. By harmonizing these elements, she transforms material into something more, highlighting its potential to transcend its intrinsic roles. Wearable sculptures, intimately connected to the body, invite tactile and personal engagement, encouraging viewers to reconnect with the material.

Different from what it seems 1, 4 and 5

(MIDDLE RIGHT)

Plastic Fork, Recycled Aluminum Can. Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Natalia Purchiaroni

Written by Kyra Jackson

The Algorithmic Gaze is an exhibition highlighting the discursive perception of women within society. Purchiaroni is intrigued by the medium of photography and its potential for manipulation in the presentation of truth. By using Artificial Intelligence to generate images based on simple prompts, she highlights its idiosyncratic nature of accumulated data. AI synthesizes immense volumes of visual information, from the Venus of Willendorf to mid-century advertisements that present the American Dream. The inclusion of AI as a tool depersonalizes familiar images we have been historically presented with and interrogates broader notions of agency, control, and identity.

Upon entering space, the viewer is submerged in yellow tones. From the yellow light projecting from above, to the yellow wallpaper lining the floors. Closer inspection of this dizzying wallpaper reveals distorted images of women and ornament. The wallpaper is confining in its re-presentation of stereotypical female gender performance back to the viewer. Purchiaroni draws on the literary themes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by using it as inspiration for the prompt imputed into an AI software. Extending from this literary reference, she begins to consider the visual and social expectations placed on women within the age of technology.

Moving through the immersive installation, the viewer enters a separate space that presents algorithmic inquiry in another way. These images are backgrounded by flat white walls that intensely contrast the previous immersion of the viewer. The presented results are studies in algorithmic conclusions of what working class women look like as opposed to the previous compounded representations of women. The AI produced women have blank faces, their bodies merely an outline under their clothing. Purchiaroni makes the consistent choice to paste these images directly on the wall, fusing them to the walls that present artworks for scrutiny and observation, thus continuing the cycle of scrutiny to which women are consistently subjected. These representations cause us to consider our perception of the female body in the age of technology and artificial productions.

Marissa Raybuck

Written by Lauren Ray

Jones Supply: Expectation Essentials (detail)

(ABOVE)

Video, matte paper, laminated paper, vellum paper, plastic, paint, cotton, metal. Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

The Practical Guide to Grief (TOP CENTER)

Installation view.

Matte paper.

Dimensions variable.

Marissa Raybuck’s work, showcased in the joint exhibition, X, Y, Z, leaves the viewer with a chuckle at the back of their throat. Raybuck’s designs span all different types of deliverables from self-help kits to a satirical line of novelty items to app design. This fluidity of style showcases Raybuck's passion for experimentation. Raybuck’s work invites the viewer to “create new conversations based on things people don’t want to talk about or narratives so familiar they go unchallenged.”

Raybuck’s designs are also fueled by her love for her community, as her friends and loved ones are reflected throughout the exhibition in ways that honor both their relationships and Raybuck’s playfulness. For example, in The Practical Guide to Grief: Navigating the Ups and Downs of Emotional Suffering, a mid-century inspired green and pink satirical pamphlet provides the readers with all they need to know about dealing (or not dealing) with grief, including casserole recipes and helpful quizzes to figure out one's mourning style. It is playfully intense, nostalgic yet haunting. Throughout the pamphlet and the other prints, Raybuck is always thinking about how to include her viewers, making sure that they can see themselves in the work. For instance, anthropomorphic cats appear on every page of the pamphlet. The lack of gender or race gives the viewer an entry point through a whiskered face.

Raybuck is vulnerable with her viewers, showing them pieces of herself that they might not even realize are there. For example, in the self-help kit designed by Raybuck, Shut Up Martha, Martha is the name given to the voice in Raybuck's head. The kit includes a card deck. On one side of each card is the negative self-talk, the positive on the other, literally flipping the negative narrative on its head. Raybuck’s style is bright and intentional. In speaking with Raybuck, I noticed that when introducing her different projects she would begin her thought with “What if?” What if the voice inside one’s head was named Martha? Or what if everyone could see themselves through anthropomorphic cats? Raybuck sees ideas and products in mainstream advertisements that pertain to mental health and grief that may be widespread and popular, but might not necessarily be working, either personally or for the people and communities that she cares about. Through experimentation and playfulness, she then designs work that reflects how she sees the world, and how she wants to see her community represented.

Photo credit: Neighboring States. Shut Up Martha

(BOTTOM LEFT)

Pressed cardboard, laminated paper, matte paper, acrylic, metal.

Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Threads of Silence: The Wild Swan, Philomela, and The Lady of Shalott (BOTTOM RIGHT)

Installation view.

Matte paper, woven. Wood. 60” x 36” each.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

We are connected by holes. Maddie Jones Rodriguez reminds us of this through her humorous take on the literal holes that make up our bodies and the world around us. In her work, she leans into Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “abject,” defined as that which “coheres the subject through its exclusion as an in-between, ambiguous, and composite intermediary entity, yet threatens the constitution of the subject who is invested in the myth of wholeness and completeness.” [1] Rodriguez explores how the abject holes of the bathroom represent transient borders between self and other. In this way, she encourages viewers to reflect on how capitalist privatization and shame define our sense of belonging.

Maddie Jones Rodriguez

Written by Liam Maher

Rodriguez was raised by her vintage-dealer mother and stepfather who brought her on searches for wares for resale. Drawing on this experience, Rodriguez sources her sculptural material from Facebook Marketplace and other reuse microeconomies. This, combined with her father’s career as a plumber, led Rodriguez to contemplate the bathroom through "abject” materials.

Take Mattress Painting #1, a readymade shower drain centered on a mattress foam pad. The work is suspended on the wall with a bedframe and trompe-l’oeil floor. Exploring the mattress as canvas, Rodriguez artfully drips wax to resemble bodily fluids clogging the drain. In spotlighting this abject runoff, Rodriguez encourages viewers to affirm their bodies and the marks they make.

In and Out/Relief or Schematic of Connection, a satirical take on the neoclassical mid-relief frieze, elaborates upon this theme. The title outlines the diagrammatic function of the work, which visualizes how we are all connected through our functioning digestive systems. Here, Rodriguez casts several digestive systems in toilet paper and suspends them over toilets draining to a singular pipe, also cast in toilet paper. This work maps the internal piping of our body and its connection to physical plumbing systems through the portal of the toilet. Rodriguez encourages viewers to understand their connection to others in our common use of the toilet. In short, everybody poops. Using the bathroom is a metaphor for collective action. Through it, Rodriguez calls us to purge ourselves of systems that oppress and marginalize. Together, we can shit out capitalism.

[1] Alvarado, Leticia. Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production Dissident Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 7.

Pegah Saebi

Written by Miray Eroglu

How far can words travel? What can we see through language? Pegah Saebi’s works delve into the power of language, memory and identity on a personal and cosmic level. Words may seem intangible and a place within a memory may appear hazy. In People, Places, Things Saebi engages with memory by pixelating personal photographs in a book and transforming them into tangible objects, recreating them as embroidery and quilts. Pegah's art draws from her Iranian heritage and is inspired by traditional Persian art forms, which she reimagines through a contemporary lens. In “Black Practice ( )” Saebi responds to the fleeting nature of spoken language by transforming Farsi typography into three-dimensional digital forms and shapes. Her works examine connections between language as an art and form, focusing on the physical and emotional ties to places, and illustrating the vast distances words can span—and create. In Trace, Saebi further explores senses by evoking places through scent—in the form of a perfume collection that captures the memory and essence of a place, in this case inspired by the landscapes of three iconic artists: Frida Kahlo’s Mexico City, Edward Hopper’s New York and Claude Monet’s Giverny.

In Letters of Simin and Jalal, Saebi visualizes letters sent between Simin Daneshvar and Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, two influential literary figures in Iran, by reproducing their correspondence with a 3D printing pen, enlivening their shared creative life through letters they sent each other. They speak and live each other’s experiences through each other’s words, even in absentia. Here, the visual is a mediator, recording and preserving experiences, allowing viewers a chance to enter their world. Language serves as a visual and verbal means of communication, a way of being, living and sharing. “Tâk” (literally “grapevine” in Farsi) is Saebi’s digital language learning app she designed to teach users Farsi and help second-generation Iranians engage with their Persian identity and bridge the generational gap by creating a space for cultural reconnection.

In her project Decrescendo, Saebi explores the gradual loss of hearing experienced by Ludwig van Beethoven. Through album covers, she digitally represents the fading of sound using an audio spectrum in a circular format, resembling the shape of a vinyl record. From a distance, these concentric circles evoke a cosmic, celestial feel—a theme that also appears in her board game Beyond in which players use constellation cards to navigate toward the central black hole. While outer space, undefined by borders or absent of human activity, may seem like the ultimate dislocation, Saebi portrays it as a shared, interconnected universe. Together, Saebi’s works utilize the power of language to center lived experience, engaging the digital with the analog to create a platform of storytelling that can transcend temporal and physical bounds.

Letters of Simin and Jalal (BOTTOM CENTER)

PLA filament, paper.

100” x 140”.

Gianna Santucci

Written by Martina Merlo

STAGING (detail)

(ABOVE)

04:30 video projection on snare drums, speakers, subwoofer, sub amp, global trusses.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Dilmar M. Gamero S.

STAGING (detail) (TOP LEFT)

04:30 video projection on snare drums, speakers, subwoofer, sub amp, global trusses.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Dilmar M. Gamero S.

If architecture is frozen music, then noise lives between, inside, around, across and enveloping the built environment. If a stage is set for sound, then noise—perceived as disruptive rather than productive—travels through the air, materials and bodies, compressing space and time. Previously relegated to the passive, ambient and otherworldly, noise triumphs in Gianna Santucci’s Staging. Where generations of youth cultures have clandestinely occupied formal spaces, transforming them into subversive auditory landscapes, noise has thrived in the face of authoritarianism. Conversely, the snare drum is a physical and sonic symbol of control and suppression, struck with rhythmic precision in linear military formation. So, what’s to occur when the drum becomes the agent of its own sound, when rhythm and noise are alienated from an embodied, violent hit? When the snare breaks from the grid, and turns on its side, what can it produce in tandem with others?

Combining her expertise as percussionist with her technological prowess, Santucci has created a condition for the stage’s subversion in a form of Epic Theatre that Bertolt Brecht could not have anticipated, through sonic-and-video sculpture illuminating invisible technologies. Staging comprises 21 snare drums, onto which found and personal video—remarkably analogous imagery of protests, mosh pits, police LRAD usage, military marches and satellite launches—is projected, with accompanying audio of drumming, droning and disembodied vocal samples. As these drums filter, amplify and distort the premade sound through subwoofers and sympathetic resonance, the generated noise reciprocally informs itself and the conversing drums, air, surface materials, objects and bodies within the space.

Santucci has created an instrument, a concert, an entirely new condition of visual and auditory spectacle—with no input, no overlord, only the ever-present, seemingly alien, and perpetually productive noise— which disrupts, overtakes, and itself becomes solidified sonic space. Through technology, the immaterial is materialized, and we in turn become conductors of rhythm and noise, simultaneously the concert and the audience. Confronted with sonic discomfort, we become inspired to take liberatory action.

STAGING (detail)

(TOP RIGHT)

04:30 video projection on snare drums, speakers, subwoofer, sub amp, global trusses.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Dilmar M. Gamero S.

STAGING (still) (BOTTOM CENTER)

04:30 video projection on snare drums, speakers, subwoofer, sub amp, global trusses.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Dilmar M. Gamero S.

Angelique Scott

Written by Srđan Tunić

Always Here (ABOVE)

BeStill(detail) (TOP

Adorning the gallery in Afrodiasporic material culture and constructing an altar-esque setting, Angelique Scott proposes an intimate space rich in affective potentials and meaning. Objects are made of (or reference) bamboo earrings, cowrie shells, braids, mirrors, ceramics, indigo dye fabrics, black glass and acrylic, and more. They form a domestic interior surrounding that is grounded in her memories of her home and magical realism, yet feels familiar to any visitor. Scott is intentional with the symbology in the materials/works on display, incorporating encoded messages like the Sankofa braid gate or Africana womanist affirmations. All of them stem from a larger pool of values and beliefs, including Afrocentricity, ethics of care, wellness, the importance of rest, spirituality, community, family and love. Her multimedia art pieces are empowered by these affirmations and invite us—through interactivity, embodiment and/or textuality—to activate them in our own lives, and in the immediate community.

The artist’s insistence on recognizing the importance of care celebrates both the seen and unseen elements of Black culture while remaining mindful of the fine balance between authentic expression and double-consciousness—i.e., the dominant and the marginalized culture. Scott further activates the space and objects through special viewings centered around the Black women. In this context, the artist explores cultural and spiritual heritage in close touch with the sovereign community that it came from—a community to which she belongs as well.

Scott’s effort to recreate and practice intimacy and connection within an artistically mediated space can be seen as an act of remembrance, evident in the ceramic frames preserving photographs of her family members and stewarded through the protection and guidance of Africana women visionaries whose images and words adorn the space. Rooted in her Caribbean and U.S. East Coast heritage and the shared threads woven throughout the broader African Diaspora, Angelique Scott navigates and negotiates here and there, now and then, familiar and new, with an attempt to signal safety, constant change and communal gathering. Going back to some of her objects and their affirmations that encourage us to remember that “Rest is home” and “God is change.”

Who All Gon’ Be There (MIDDLE LEFT)

Installation view. Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Ben Solo

Written by Natalie Cruz

The echoing sound of bass, a flapping of “wings,” and a light-show grace the gallery with its energetic, club-like presence. A domineering wall of white fans are perched on a group of horizontal wooden beams. Four electronic dance songs composed by Ben Solo enhance the cacophony of movement and sound filling the room. The flapping is orchestrated entirely through Solo who controls it and the corresponding light-show through a DJ’s launchpad. The atmosphere reaches its peak energy during the final song, when Solo pulls up his bandana over his nose, pulls out two glow sticks, and dances in front of his work.

Solo’s installation grapples with his lived experience as a first-generation Korean American in Los Angeles. He has transformed a lifetime of navigating forced assimilation and reinscribing his own visibility into a practice predicated on his learned resourcefulness. Solo himself coded the mechanics used for the fan’s movement via the music through a meticulous process of deconstructing and then reconstructing motherboards. In this way, he has made them his own. Solo echoes this resilience through his choice of medium, which includes the fans themselves; popsicle sticks and average white butcher paper form the shape of a traditional Korean fan. Solo, who as a child had arts and crafts taken from him as punishment in school, reclaims and empowers himself and others to critique institutions from within and offers an alternative narrative of resistance through cultural preservation and having fun.

Heather Swenson

Written by Srđan Tunić

Picnic, Lightning (ABOVE)

Installation view.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Potentials, *restrictions apply (detail) (TOP CENTER)

Plywood, pine, inkjet print, concrete, screenprint, masonite, book board, plastic, dollhouse lattice, found objects, insulation board, model fencing.

Dimensions variable (individual sculptures are 37” x 12” x 14”).

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Heather Swenson’s practice responds to the built environment around us with a subtle, humorous and absurd twist. Here architectural solutions and makeshift practices that once had a clear function or goal reach a point of uselessness and exhaustion of meaning. Denied Access and Pure Staircase, False Exit , for example, show staircases that are structurally inaccessible or lead to nowhere, while “Best Practices” is a collage of street photography centering on a small iron fence framing a cut tree. The artist not only brings our attention to overlooked, mundane sites, but also ruminates on the possible beauty and wonder outside their use-value as practical objects satisfying our needs under capitalist logic. In other words, can we appreciate these sites on their own terms and as disruptions of dominant and expected “usefulness”?

Swenson also applies this sentiment to the inward-looking pieces that leave us with a sense of restlessness and imagination. Seven scale models of Temple Contemporary labeled Potentials* (restrictions apply) appear like seven parallel paths that this show might have taken in the present, ranging between possibility and impossibility. Swenson worked with limitations of the concrete gallery space, finding ways to include diverse work at a different scale. But each scale model is not just a draft plan for a possible full-scale show—each is a fully conceptualized exhibition of its own.

At the same time, some of Swenson’s own larger works and sculptures have been shrunk and adapted to the gallery space. A great example is the “Seminar Table,” an installation sited in a conference table located in one of Tyler’s basement classrooms that has an oddly placed rectangular hole on the table’s surface. For two years, Swenson has been creating experimental interventions in this opening and inviting other artists to do so as well. In the miniature gallery version, she collected all multimedia interventions in one place. Playing with scale, the artist also plays with the perception of our immediate surroundings—an aspect that seems to pervade her overall work.

Picnic, Lightning (BOTTOM LEFT)

Installation view.

Dimensions variable.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Denied Access (BOTTOM RIGHT)

Staircase, balsa wood, wire. 9” x 6” x 5”.

Photo credit: Neighboring States.

Macy West

Written by Robin Morris

Credit: Neighboring States.

Ribbon shapes overlap and interlock across Macy West’s abstract paintings. An extension of her gestural brushstroke, they are speedy and flexible. However, West interrupts their liberatory dance with framing and ordering devices. Take Line and Sight, a painting on two panels. On one panel, ribbons roam freely; on the other, they are roughly charted onto a complex and multilayered pie chart.

West adopts the ribbon motif as a stand-in for sensations and uses grids and diagrams to investigate these fragments of information. The show’s title, Manifold, nods to philosopher Immanuel Kant’s secular adaptation of the term to describe all the raw material we perceive before it is unified by the rational mind. As West’s paintings juxtapose part and whole, they also caution against the limits of focused analysis. In and Out isolates a small square at the center, illuminating a detail of ribbons while masking what lies beyond it with a uniform layer of off-white paint. Its counterpart, Out and In, inverts the composition. Here, the white block floats in the middle, revealing only the perimeter. Moving between the two, we begin to question the grid—designed to provide clarity, it instead obscures the whole.

Not strictly a secular term, manifold carries biblical significance, evoking the intricacy of God’s holy wisdom and acknowledging that some things lie beyond the grasp of the rational mind. On the show’s colossal floor-to-ceiling canvas, West builds a layered oil paint surface of earthy, pastel washes and charging swaths of opaque white. Here, ribbons defy capture by an ordering system. Large and boundless, they separate, interweave, and reunite—transforming from one glorious form (or Kantian sense) to another. They dance from sea tones in the lower register upward to a heavenly pearl field. West abandons the partto-whole dissection, and without an imposed structure, we take it all in.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Ari Zuaro

Written by Martina Merlo

Board at the Dock (ABOVE)

Installation view.

Reclaimed (wood, steel, tiles, roofing and mirror), ceramic, cedar shingles and projection 84” x 30” x 44”.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

To What New Place (TOP LEFT)

Installation view.

Reclaimed, construction materials, ceramic, low-pressure sodium light, multi-channel projection and sound.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

With To What New Place, Ari Zuaro has orchestrated a hybrid zone for collective imagining and speculative futures in this immersive multimedia installation. Utilizing the three conceptual devices of place, materiality and projection , Zuaro has broken the planar confines of the gallery, allowing audiences to inhabit simultaneous fragmented realities that collide with one another in seemingly happenstance and alien ways. Physicality and digitality coexist within this work that comprises elements of ceramics, found materials, sound and video projections, colored lighting and digital rendering software. Every facet is chosen and modified with precision through considerations of sitelessness.

Reflecting on their own Chinese diasporic experience, Zuaro has created or extracted every found object from its place of origin—solid or rendered in pixels—recontextualizing them within the gallery space. From reclaimed detritus, Zuaro creates temporary architectures, which question the notion of “enclosure” and materiality as a marker for permanence. Ceramic simulacra of several crabs and one headless camel punctuate and actively transcend these structures and the gallery’s confines. Derived from hand-built prototypes, the crabs are digitally scanned and 3-D printed to become new forms altogether. These unique, texturally topographical bodies have been spliced in several points, some to become reconstructed wholes, and some remaining fragmentary, connoting transience between realities.

The gallery and its physical elements become activated through projection, both technological and intangible. Zuaro’s looping sounds and videos—including a clip of New Art City, a digital gallery space built with software into which Zuaro has 3-D scanned several of their handmade objects—transform the physical elements and occupants in the gallery through reflection, absorption and occlusion. Disembodied voices heighten the audience’s awareness of the coincidental nature of the digital transcending to the physical—and vice versa. Additionally, projection entails prefiguration: each viewer arrives with preconceptions that transform their perception of this space of alternative realities. And, as each viewer shares their experiences with others in the gallery space, Zuaro’s generative creation becomes a vehicle for productive dreaming and collective work toward utopian futures.

To What New Place (TOP RIGHT)

Installation view.

Reclaimed, construction materials, ceramic, low-pressure sodium light, multi-channel projection and sound.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

To What New Place (BOTTOM CENTER)

Installation view.

Reclaimed, construction materials, ceramic, low-pressure sodium light, multi-channel projection and sound.

Dimensions variable.

Photo Credit: Neighboring States.

Contributing Authors

Jessica Braum

Jessica Braum is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at Temple University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Print and Sculpture in the Global Field: Transnational Feminism and the Recuperation of Kim Lim’s Artistic Practice,” examines how colonialism, globalization, and gender shaped contemporaneous engagement with Lim’s work, result in a limited and misrepresentative canon of post-war British and Southeast Asian art. Jessica engages feminist theories and multidisciplinary research methods to study women artists working in transnational contexts. She currently serves on the College Art Association’s Committee on Research and Scholarship and as the Graduate Representative for the Society of Contemporary Art Historians.

Julia Carita

Julia Carita is an MA student who specializes in art and ephemera from the American counterculture. Her research interests include snapshot-style photographs from the late-20th century, nontraditional development techniques, and punk zines. She is interested in the expression of identity and community through photography. Carita received her BA in art history from Bucknell University, where she published an entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and worked in a commercial art gallery prior to pursuing her master’s degree.

Natalie Cruz (she/her) is a firstyear Art History PhD student specializing in global modern and contemporary art. Her past studies have contended with generational and personal memory, historically absent or destroyed archives, language preservation, identity and queerness in diaspora and assimilation of Armenians post-genocide, as a descendent of survivors herself. She received her BA in Art History from Pacific University Oregon (2021) and her MA from Temple University (2023).

Ivy D’Agostino

Ivy D’Agostino (she/her) is a Master of Arts candidate in Art History, though soon she will be graduating and beginning internships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Mercer Museum. Her research is grounded in the materiality and global reality of early modern objects made in colonial Latin and South America. Having completed an applied major in Religious Studies alongside her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from Marywood University (2023), D’Agostino discusses the complicated metamorphosis of spiritual influences embodied in these objects.

Emily L. Dugan

Emily L. Dugan is a PhD student specializing in Northern continental art of the seventeenth century. Her work investigates artists working for the court of England, as well as issues of scale, affect and desire in representation. Emily has held positions over the years at different US institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She received her MA in Art History from Syracuse University (2020) and her BA with honors from Temple University (2018).

Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie

Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie is a PhD student and University Fellow who specializes in the decorative arts of early modern northern Europe, with research interests in issues of materiality, artisanal labor and dialectics of form. Before pursuing doctoral studies, from 2017 to 2023 they held a curatorial research position in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s department of European Sculpture and Decorative Art. They earned their MA in Decorative Arts, Design, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center (2017), and graduated from the University of Kings College Halifax with combined honors (History of Science and Technology and History, 2015).

Danielle Degon Rhodes

Danielle Degon Rhodes is an artist, curator and co-director of AUTOMAT Collective in Philadelphia. Through collaboration, she creates exhibitions and public projects that investigate the psychological effects of the human pursuit of progress. Danielle holds a BFA in Sculpture and an MA in Art History from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Additionally, she has studied at the Salzburg Academy of Fine Arts in Austria and Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong.

Miray Eroglu

Miray Eroglu is a PhD candidate concentrating on late Ottoman painting. She holds an MA from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and a BA From McGill University’s Faculty of Arts. She has held internships in the Islamic Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at Artam Antik auction house in Istanbul. She also worked as gallery assistant at the Winter Show Art Fair in New York and as a copy editor and editorial assistant for the Istanbul Research Institute.

Contributing Authors

Cecelia Heintzelman

Cecelia Heintzelman is an MA student in Art History at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her work centers around the medieval world and Byzantium, particularly around concepts of the embodiment of the divine, materiality, and the psychology of divine materials. Cecelia holds a BA in Art History and Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania (2022). She works as a Collections Manager at the La Salle University Art Museum.

Kyra Jackson

Kyra Jackson is a first-year MA student focusing on vernacular and subaltern works of the Americas, particularly of Afro-descendants. Their research interest resides within the commonalities and fissures of the diaspora and how it influences contemporary art. They graduated from Louisiana State University in 2022 with a BFA concentrated in Ceramics with a minor in Art History. Jackson moved to Philadelphia in 2023 to complete the Special Student Program in the Ceramics department at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Piper Kozar-Meyers

Piper Kozar-Meyers is an MA student in Art History at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, studying Egyptian Art History, primarily in the representation of royal women and their roles in art and culture. Piper received her BA in Art from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2023, where she was involved in the campus galleries.

Liam Maher

Liam Maher is a PhD candidate and Temple University Fellow. His dissertation focuses on queerness, Catholicism and anti-colonialism in 20th and 21st century Latin American/Latinx art. His writing has appeared in Accomplice, Art&About PDX and The National Catholic Reporter. He currently teaches art history at Moore College of Art & Design and Drexel University.

Martina Merlo

Martina Merlo is an interdisciplinary scholar of architecture, visual studies, technology, urbanism and music, pursuing a PhD at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Their research explores temporal media, performance, and the built environment through multisensory aesthetics. Martina holds a BA in Visual Studies and Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and dual MSc degrees in Architecture from Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino. Their writing and multimedia work are featured on Artblog, among other print and digital publications, with more forthcoming.

Robin Morris

Robin Morris (she/her) is a Master of Arts candidate in art history at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture. Her research interests lie within the representations of feminine and masculine, women’s sexual agency and the punk cultural movements within the US, UK and Spain. Morris holds a Bachelors in Art Education from Towson University and a Masters in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her research is informed by her educational sensibilities and personal art-making practice.

Joanna Platt

Joanna Platt is a PhD candidate specializing in 20th-Century American Art History. With a background in bronze casting and fabrication, Joanna balances an active studio practice with research into the representation of labor and the economics of art and production, especially as it relates to issues of class and social status. She earned a BFA from Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University and an MFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia.

Lauren Ray

Lauren Ray is a first-year MA student in Art History with a focus in Arts Management. Her research explores images of the black female body through the lens of orientalism and the Mid-Atlantic slave trade. She holds her BFA in Creative Writing with a minor in Art History from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Contributing Authors

Fernanda Senger

Fernanda Senger (she/her) is a PhD student in the field of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, concentrating on modernist printmaking in Brazil and its relation to hemispheric and transatlantic networks in 20th century. Her research interests also include drawing and prints in global modernisms, art and labor, migration, placemaking, ecocriticism and indigenous studies. Fernanda received a double degree in History (Research and Teaching) from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Brazil.

Jackie Streker

Jackie Streker (she/they) is a PhD student focusing on the print culture of early modern Northern Europe, with research interests how the materiality and monumentality of print can shape ideas of place. Before returning to academia, they worked as Curator of the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum where she implemented exhibitions relating to the history and collective memory surrounding residents of our unrepresented capital city.

Srđan Tunić

Srđan Tunić is a PhD student in art history and a freelance curator specializing in global contemporary art. His current research focuses on street art, graffiti, murals and public art, situating these works at the intersections of gender and queer theories, transculturality, and political activism. He is a member of the research projects Street Art Belgrade and Not Afraid of the Ruins. He graduated from the University of California, Davis, and the University of Arts and the University of Belgrade in Serbia.

Gillian Yee

Gillian Yee (they/them) specializes in global contemporary art from 1980 to the present, receiving an MA in Art History and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University in 2021. With an emphasis on looking at art in the United States through a diasporic lens, their goal as a scholar is to explore and expand the realm of queerness, transness and “non-normative” identities within the discipline, thereby circumventing a traditional canonical understanding of art history.

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