Fine arts works by 17 graduating seniors will be on view in the Crowell and West galleries at the Feigenbaum Center for the Visual Arts in “Out from In,” opening Friday, May 16.
A reception is set for 4:30-6:30 p.m.
The exhibition is free and open to the campus community and by appointment. It runs through June 16.
The featured artists:
Lily van Baaren of Bernardston, Mass., is a visual arts major with a focus on photography and drawing, and a minor in gender, sexuality and women’s studies. She is interested in transformation as it exists through gender kinds and social location. Her work examines the act of “dressing up,” both in terms of subject and concept. She makes silver gelatin and chromogenic prints of people and places of spectacle using a wet darkroom process, then extends her picture making play working with intaglio on acrylic.
Georgia Baer of Stamford, Conn., is a studio fine arts and English double major who comes from a family of teachers. The importance of education has inspired the paintings she created for her senior thesis. She works in oil and is interested in the relationship between color and emotions. Her subject matter “entangles youthful vibrant colors with the dark looming presence of adulthood.”
Cray Case of New Hartford, Conn., is a double major in studio fine arts and art history. His thesis work is a modern day approach to Schenectady’s 20th century history, focused on recording longstanding local restaurants as anchors in time. The grandson of Max Michael Simon, Class of 1921, he uses photography to trace connections between past and present, and between individuals and their community.
Victoria Estelle Davison, a visual arts major from Scotia, N.Y., is a digital artist specializing in illustration, drawing and painting. Her work explores complex narratives, often drawing inspiration from pop culture, media and personal experience. Her “Fabled Roots” project consists of world-building through writing and visual collage, with the final installation consisting of large-format digital illustrations.
Allison Gowern, of Manchester N.H., is a visual arts major with a film studies minor. Her passions lie in digital media and sculpture. She often uses personal experiences and important people in her life in her work. “Dreamscapes: Projecting the Subconscious” is an immersive exploration of the psychological terrain of dreaming. Drawing inspiration from surrealist traditions, “this installation merges digital projection mapping with hand-crafted sculpture to blur the boundary between the real and the imagined.”
Walter Kraus of West Hartford, Conn., a studio fine arts major with a film studies minor, has always been interested in film as an art form and a means of storytelling. His documentary film is designed to explore a shift in American culture through the decline in hitchhiking in the past couple of decades.
Isaac Levey is a multidisciplinary artist from Newton, Mass., with a focus on digital fabrication, kinetic sculpture and design. His kinetic sculptures explore how motion and spatial interaction shape the experience of objects and environments. His practice includes wall art, digital design, and furniture, with each medium expanding his understanding of balance, form, and interaction.
Yuxuan Li, a visual arts and philosophy ID major from Weston, Mass., explores the relationship between structure and transformation. “I’m interested in how we navigate change while seeking stability, and how that experience can be made visible through form,” she says. “This interest grows out of my own progression – how I’ve learned to hold shape through times of instability, both physically and emotionally.”
Aspen Morris, a photographer from Lutherville, Md., works with self-portraiture, rephotography and photographic sculpture. She is interested in “the long-held power differential between artist and subject, re-staging that conflict onto herself and reveling in the dual catharsis of domination and submission.” Her work, “No Desires,” is “a conceptual piece that hinges on the power and impotence of photography with regards to the body.”
Anna Nickman of Scarsdale, N.Y., integrates digital techniques with traditional methods such as drawing, painting and sculpture. Her art is driven by a curiosity for how diverse techniques can coexist in a single artistic vision. “I am creating artworks that explore the complexities of the human form, specifically focusing on the discomfort and detachment that can be felt within one’s own body. … I hope to create space for reflection and offer a sense of feeling seen to those who have felt similarly.”
Jenna Paszek, a visual arts major with a minor in psychology, is from western Massachusetts. She works primarily in steel sculpture and photography. Her personal experience of carrying grief is comparable to the way she addresses steel, by “working with it and moving with it. Taking advantage of access to tools and machines such as the power squaring shear inspires feelings of empowerment and control in a chaotic world.”
Evan Perry photographs nature in the Northeast and also uses forms from nature to influence sculpture. He draws inspiration from his native Shutesbury, Mass., as well as Chester, Vt. “These places shaped my childhood, and returning to them with a camera has allowed me to reconnect to them in a new way.” For his project, he used a digital SLR camera with a telephoto lens and a vibration reduction lens. He is a double major in mathematics and studio fine arts.
Claudia Porto of Salem, N.H., a computer science major with a minor in digital media, explores the intersection of technology and art, using tools like TouchDesigner and Processing to create immersive, interactive installations and generative visuals. “‘Emergent Growth’ is a meditation on the invisible forces that shape us – our environments, our technologies, and our inner lives. I’ve always been fascinated by how we grow not just biologically or emotionally, but in response to the systems we create and inhabit.”
Ambrose Proctor is a Queer artist born and raised in New York City within a multi-ethnic, multi-religious household. Employing sculpture, book and fiber arts, printmaking and photography, they dissect the emotional experience of struggling with identity, mental health and interpersonal relationships. Proctor investigates how materials gathered from their environment act as a conduit for their relationship to the tactile world.
Lili Wang of Changzhou, China, is a digital artist and storyteller whose work bridges traditional Chinese art and contemporary digital media. She combines her immersive training in Chinese folk art with digital tools such as Virtual Reality, 3D modeling and interactive design. She is committed to using technology as a medium for cross-cultural understanding and artistic reinvention. “I am deeply drawn to how new technologies can revitalize traditional narratives and bring the past into active dialogue with the present,” she says.
Caroline Rose Werner of Schenectady, N.Y., is a photographer and painter. “My work explores the tension between conflicting aesthetics and seeks to unify contrast as a way to reflect the complexity of my own lived experience,” she says. “Through oil painting, photography and collage, I overlap dualities—femininity and masculinity, softness and brutality, nostalgia and chaos, innocence and violence. By layering these elements, I aim to blur the boundaries between them and challenge societal structures.”
Suzanna Wright of Baltimore, Md., is a double major in studio fine arts and biology. Her work focuses on the interplay between color and light. Using oil paint, she studies how these elements interact, drawing inspiration from everyday objects like CDs, holographic materials and prisms. “I’m captivated by how these objects bend and refract light, creating dynamic and ever-changing bursts of color. Bold colors have always drawn me in, especially the iridescent beauty these materials reveal as they shift with the viewer’s perspective.”
The senior exhibit is funded by the Visual Arts Department and Student Research Grants. The galleries are open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.