First-Year Candidates
Frankmarlin
In his practice, Frankmarlin takes a look into the invisible, sees beyond what is presented, and asks questions he doesn’t know the answers to. With a sense of urgency, his works explore themes of erasure, lineage, surveillance, healing, and the beauty of the mundane black experiences.
Izsys Archer
Izsys Archer's practice explores the Black women’s intrinsic need to create through physical, digital, and ritualistic spaces of the Archive. Perpetual self-portraiture becomes a performance of identity as she interrogates notions of domesticity, memory, and Black iconography to wander on a journey of self-actualization and representation.
Tingting Cheng
Tingting Cheng activates cultural archives in different ways, using sound and sculpture as contemporary witchcraft to connect the audience and create a sense of ritual. She also brings this immersive landscape into other communities as a social practice.
Chantal Feitosa-Desouza
Chantal Feitosa-Desouza is a Brazilian United Statesian working across images, text, and the classroom. Her practice explores alternative systems of learning and knowledge distribution. She uses time-based media, collage, and language to propose slower ways of thinking, remembering, and storytelling.
Max Tristan Watkins
Max Tristan Watkins' practice employs text and image in order to gesture towards injury, childhood, disaster, and (homosocial) desire. His work toys with camp melancholy, drawing on ballet training to create performances of transsexual aristocracy and shame. His poetry exposes relationships with queer pleading, surrender, ‘again-ness’ and anecdote.
Second-Year Candidates
Sobia Ahmad
Sobia Ahmad’s interdisciplinary practice investigates how our deeply intimate struggles of belonging can inform larger conversations about national identity, notions of home, cultural memory, and gender. By weaving personal and communal narratives with current and historical socio-political contexts, she highlights the inseparability of the self and larger power structures.
Steve Alexis
Steve Alexis is an artist whose work focuses on framing and conveying emotive transference through abstraction. He employs mark making, bold color, and large-scale to create works that speak to the idea of connecting to beauty. He works across the modalities of jewelry, painting, sculpture, performance, and ceramics.
Anisha Baid
Anisha Baid's practice and research involve an investigation of pervasive technologies through an examination of their design, diversity of use, and their relationship with ideas from science fiction. Her work attempts to poke at the flat-scapes of the computer screen to decode computer labor through the interface — a technological tool that has converted most spaces of work into image space.
Inbar Hagai
Inbar Hagai works largely in long-term projects, combining video, VR and sculpture, as well as experimental art films verging on the documentary. She focuses mainly on human-animal power relations, the way the feminine image is constructed through kitshi fantasies and the ethical ambivalence of art.
Georgia Saxelby
Georgia Saxelby is an interactive installation artist whose participatory practice investigates the relationship between ritual, gender and architecture. Through collective actions, reimagined rituals, and the constructing of new architectures, Saxelby invites her audience to perform a symbolic task in order to undergo an emotional and social transformation.
London Williams
London Williams is a multidisciplinary artist that navigates intersections of blackness through masculinity and sexuality within paintings, drawings, photographs, and mixed media. The work approaches documentation of the domestic interior as a reproach of a history that has yet to be lived.
Third-Year Candidates
Sarah Bowling
Sarah Bowling is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the power dynamics embedded within intimacy and relationships, the phases of vulnerability within the self, and the weight of desire. Her work is brightly colored, blingy, and unapologetically demands attention.
Jessica Fuquay
Jessica Fuquay's multidisciplinary work explores the role of mass media, performance, and other dominant cultural forms in the construction of political subjectivity. Her practice, often drawing from her perspective as a first-generation Colombian-American, is concerned with conflict, power, and systems of domination that reproduce and designate otherness.
Laura Hudspith
Laura Hudspith’s interdisciplinary work explores the relationship between chronic illness and feminist action. With a focus in autotheoretical methodologies, her work positions practice, performance, and product as indistinguishable elements that are equally personal and political in nature. Casting and capturing pieces of herself in poetic texts, sculpture and lens-based work, Hudspith enacts rituals of self-imposed objectification where the asomatous is somatically shed and agency reclaimed.
Rosabel Rosalind
Rosabel’s visual language has been informed by her extensive Garbage Pail Kids collection, soap opera sets, hitler’s mustache, anti-infestations, her lazy eye, being a little gay, synchronized swimming, traffic on the 405, sunburns, heartburn, stained glass windows, her rollerskating Bat Mitzvah party and her Zayde.
Rebecca Shapass
Working across film, video, installation, performance, and text, Rebecca Shapass creates bio-mythographic, audio-visual worlds where the fissures between personal and collective memory are mined to reveal fragile systems of perception and remembering.
Caroline Yoo
Caroline Yoo’s past informs her work exploring the boundaries between belonging, othering, and being. Using her body as vessel, she poses questions on larger topics of power structures and embedded cultural norms in relation to immigration, race, gender, and sexuality.
