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ABOUT

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GRAPHIC DESIGN

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PAINTING

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PRINT MEDIA & PHOTOGRAPHY

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SCULPTURE

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VISUAL NARRATIVE

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@bu_visualarts

@bu_graphicdesign

@bostonpainting

@pmp.bu
@bostonsculpture
@buvisualnarrative

PAINTING

www.teachaibeer.com

@tea.chai.beer

she/her

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Téa Chai Beer

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My practice explores the multiplicity of the self through layered drawings and paintings on translucent substrates, including raw silk, poly silk, and rice paper. As a (cisgender) queer and mixed-race Korean and White American, I move through the world fluidly, shifting and adjusting according to context or perception by others. Through self-portraiture, my work aims to embody this slipperiness by exploring the complexities of my experiences across various situations and affects.

My paintings begin with stacked drawings—suggesting movement, different moments in time, or multiple feelings held simultaneously—to provide a compositional foundation. I then work wet-into-wet with water-based media, such as acrylic paints or inks, resulting in stains that complicate the initial framework, echo the translucency of the substrate, and evoke notions of indelibility, fluidity, and plasticity. As the layers of stained pigment continue to build upon themselves, obfuscating earlier passages, I draw out select moments of clarity with denser opacities. Due to my use of unprimed poly silk and silk, the pigment ultimately seeps into the surface’s fibers, resulting in two-sided paintings and drawings that, when suspended in the middle of the room, simultaneously beg a more embodied encounter with their viewers. Installed this way, their ephemeral materiality can elicit ideas of dislocation, dissociation, and disassociation.

Through the porosity of my substrate, every gesture—intentional and accidental—becomes permanently embedded in the painting’s body; I think about how this parallels the ways our actions and lived experiences become a part of who we are and how we relate to others. Through the metaphors I draw between how I make my work and how I feel in my own skin, I hope to exploit, cannibalize, and resist ideas of affect, identity, and morality at stake in my materials, process, and practice.

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www.cbluett.com

@cbluett

he/him

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Cody Robert Hook Bluett

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My artwork focuses on the relationship between landscape, narrative, and memory. I make paintings using traditional oil landscape techniques layered with contemporary material explorations. These images are composed using various types of frames and vignettes, investigating the lens of the viewer’s experience and exploring formal relationships of edge, texture, and atmosphere. With a high cultural value towards craft and the handmade, three-dimensional elements continue to complicate and abstract the dreamlike narrative qualities of my work. These works imbue slowness and emptiness in order to express the beautiful, absurd, and ominous boundaries between fiction and reality, creating a unique American folk horror aesthetic and atmosphere. 

My practice also includes sculpture installations that encourage slow interaction and close attention to detail. Many of these works use various visual and audio technologies that focus on the mechanical aspects of their operation to enhance the viewer’s experience. These objects present visual engagement and tactility without clear function or instruction for the viewer, further expanding the dreamlike and supernatural elements of the work. My sound work focuses on electronic musical experimentation to create slow and meditative compositions informed by my paintings and amplified in tandem with sculptural objects.

My practice invests heavily in themes of working-class life experiences and relies on the aesthetic qualities of my coming of age in Pennsylvania. These themes portray the idea of American blue-collar beliefs and disbeliefs that are the undertones of social and political contemporaneity. My landscapes are still and liminal, experienced by the proletariat during moments of respite, repetition, and reminiscence. These places allow for imagination and creativity to flourish, for they are the dreamscapes and nightmares of an economic class whose culture is being systematically eliminated. I represent these ideas in honest and transparent ways while continuing to honor their ambiguity.  

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@saraibustos_

she/her

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Sarai Bustos

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In my large-scale oil paintings, I negotiate what it means to use mapmaking as a guide to create imaginary places and abstract spaces that explore my family, identity, and spirituality as a first-generation Mexican American. By painting on raw canvas, I engage in the soak-staining and resistance of ink, oils, and oil paint to create biomorphic shapes through various viscosities and intimate marks.

By working on large canvases and through my bodily relationship to scale, drawing, and movement, I discover unlocatable landforms through an improvisational process of mapping imaginary places. My forms and dotted lines reflect my longing to locate myself as a whole. I wander through external routes, leaving and entering boundaryless forms and color fields. These metaphorical journeys suggest past explorations and passages that have guided me across internal boundaries.

I use culture-specific imagery to signal my community and reclaim the struggles of not being recognized. By engaging with these forms, I place myself as a small protagonist in a large world, signaling my intuition to guide me. Navigating these organic forms leads me across open or closed barriers of pink-earth color fields. There, I trace my different drawing methods to create maps that ground me when I wander between cultures. The scale and materiality of the paintings call on the viewer to feel and trace the known and unknown dotted lines and locations. 

Moments of raw canvas are left untouched, signaling that all areas of the map have not been discovered yet, questioning my intuition that has guided me to discover the painted areas. I wonder about decolonizing the idea of maps to create guides for myself and future generations into places of belonging. Bringing forward my first-generation experience of not knowing where I am, while using my curiosity to find where I want to be, these paintings function as my spiritual guides.

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@huakai_chen

he/him

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Huakai Chen

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As an artist, I explore the overwhelmingness of confronting socio-political issues in China from an individual perspective, through the combination of oil painting, calligraphy, photo transfers, and found materials. These feelings derive from my own family history with governmental control, the tragic domestic news I read online every day, and the difficulty in expressing these issues under censorship. The multiplicity of visual languages in my work speaks to the impossibility and stress of communicating my intentions and becomes evidence of the endurance of the artist.

The End Of The Road is my most recent painting. In this wall-sized piece, I integrate the direct marks of painting and calligraphy with the indirect marks of woodcut print transferred onto the canvas’s surface. With the density of visual information rendered in muted palettes, the illegible text turns into deep and low murmurs of distress. My use of repetition recreates these feelings visually, from the application of material to the formats of individual pieces. I regard each repeated action as an attempt to realize the intangible and prolong the ephemeral. In addition, I build up multiple semi-transparent layers of color to interrupt legibility. As a result, the space in my paintings invites viewers to enter, yet rejects them by challenging legibility at the same time. 

The scale of my artwork exists in two extremes—either as big as architecture or as small as a sheet of paper. I want to remind the audience of scale relationships: between their own bodies, the scale of art, and the problems within society today. I hope my viewer, like me, is in search of a form, reaches out to it, recognizes more than what they initially see, and eventually gets lost in the experience of perception.

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www.natalie-conway.com

@natalie.a.conway

she/her

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Natalie Conway

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I want to give shape to my inner thought world—the stuff I can’t capture in words. Using color and gesture intuitively, I create dense, layered paintings through a multitude of experimental processes. Bits of recognizable imagery and text point to my preoccupations with childhood, femininity, spirituality, science, and education, while more abstract forms invite free association. Made on sturdy wooden supports, the surfaces and edges of these paintings reveal a history of deposition and erasure, rendering them objects as much as images.

My practice begins with remnants and fragments I collect with no end in mind: scraps of wood, dried-up chunks of gesso, trinkets, and trash, along with doodles, word lists, and photos of the ground taken during walks. Scavenging and salvaging are vital to my lifestyle, and these activities provide the raw material for my creative practice. In the additive stage of putting paint to a surface, I see myself collaborating with chance and entropy, welcoming in whatever captures my attention.

Such openness entails overwhelming accumulation. I have to find ways to recover the most important forms that have been buried, which I do through physical excavation like scraping, sanding, and polishing. All done by hand, this careful but extensive labor becomes another opportunity for discovery, yielding cross sections reminiscent of geological, biological, and archaeological samples. Such specimens do serve as sources of inspiration, but also point to the ways in which my process affects my body: the compression and abrasion of materials wear on my skin, ligaments, and bones.

Though the wounds and aches force me to attend to my age and present condition, my practice helps me rekindle a youthful sense of creativity. The accrual and removal of layers mirrors the nonlinear process of personal growth, in which unlearning is just as important as learning, and healing means bearing scars.

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www.jamesgold.com

@jamesgoldstudio

he/him

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James Gold

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At once ancient and futuristic, my paintings depict fragments of  hypothetical archaeology. Their lustrous surfaces are created with traditional painting techniques, yet are influenced by the hyperreality of digital imagery, occupying a space between fact and fable. 

In my recent work, a papyrus scroll unfurls like a flag against a glowing coral background, an illusionistic black-and-white mosaic reveals swirling silhouetted artifacts, and an array of floating golden fragments on an electric-blue background suggests cartographic contours of islands and oceans. The cropped compositions imply that each painted object might extend infinitely beyond the edges.

My studio is an alchemical laboratory where I explore the sensuality of diverse materials. Starting with a sandy-textured pigmented gesso, I layer India ink, egg tempera, and sign-painting enamel in a range of shimmering colors—using stamps, brushes, abrasives, and calligraphy pens to realize objects that appear found, even to me. Viewers are invited into a world of “willing suspension of disbelief” as color and form become trompe l’oeil fragments of marble, tapestry, and papyrus. I create my paintings with love and care, and as I foreground an imagined future, I invite viewers to rethink the physicality of our contemporary world.

Each painting grows out of in-depth research and prompts investigations into an ever-expanding web of topics. As I read about archaeology, the history of design, neuroscience, geology, and the language of symbols, I gather and condense information into the surfaces of my paintings, driven by a desire to freely share the excitement of my discovery with viewers. This cycle of expansion (through learning) and compression (through making) allows me to cast a wide net, as I explore the question: What does our historical imagination look like?

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www.abbikenny.com

@abbihkenny

she/her

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Abbi Kenny

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Born in Boston into generations of New Englanders, I make materially dense paintings depicting regionally and personally specific objects. By recreating inherited family recipes, interior dining scenes, and kitchenscapes, I seek to understand and locate myself. I look to discover my identity within the truths and fictions of culture-making. I utilize cuisine and the tradition of still-life painting to digest the legacies of class, place, and history. 

My practice is an alchemical exploration of acrylic paint: I pour, stencil, airbrush, sand, and render material into unexpectedly representational paintings. While my work may seem initially photorealistic, the topographical surfaces of each canvas dissolve into color, shape, and texture. By clashing together distinct paint languages, I disrupt the viewer’s expectations of visual coherence calling attention to the mundane—asking more of everyday objects and cultural behaviors. As an artist, I ask, what is remembered and what is lost? The unease of the compositions positions the viewer in my place as the sole inheritor of my parents’ family histories, each entangled with New England.

Through my engagement with history, while painting everyday objects, I push up against the legacy of pop art. Matrilineage and depictions of caretaking co-opt pop art’s visual lexicon with a feminist lens, probing ideas of pop culture applied to women’s spaces and belongings. I transcribe my grandmother’s handwritten recipes alongside 1970s Betty Crocker recipe cards, trompe l’oeil yet larger than life and loaded with materiality. I am the historian’s unexpected assistant, an heir, and a translator. I make art that collapses generational visual culture, bringing regionally specific objects into circulation in a contemporary world. Unlike a historian though, my work does not take its final form as a thesis, but rather as a series of additional questions and observations bound up and investigated through the transformative qualities of paint.

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www.yingxuedaisyli.com

@daisyli0105

she/her

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Yingxue Daisy Li 

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My days often start with setting up a still life with a view outside the window or biking around Boston to find a landscape motif, such as ponds, woods, bridges, or tunnels. While intensively observing my chosen subject, I transcribe my spirit and thoughts through the back-and-forth acts of looking and creating. I constantly make marks, then erase and rearrange them, revealing my honest search, not a mere picture of a preconceived idea of how a subject appears.

My works bear traces of covered and erased lines and repainted shapes and colors. Using multiple mediums, such as charcoal, pastel, ink, acrylic, oil, and collage on paper or canvas, I play with how laying in colors in different textures and brush strokes can connect with my observational experiences and internal thought processes. 

The continuous struggle between the two procedural modes in my practice—immersive looking and making use of what I perceive—emerges from my own personal history of existing between China and Western countries and the diverse philosophies in each culture. I believe the self is an illusion, Daoism’s concept of selflessness and the idea that existence is defined by our continuous search, doubting and actions of making decisions. I digest various cultural tensions, and they are expressed through emotional states, such as meditative and ecstatic, which I then re-locate in my works.

Born in Anhui, China, where many traditional landscape painters are from, I carry with me the same longing for a quiet inner space and a pastoral lifestyle, even after many years of studying abroad. However, my family and my multicultural educational background have also taught me to continually look at things from different perspectives and question my initial point of view. My creative process, through painting and drawing, is my journey of navigating through such complex cultural influences. Between marking and looking is the experience of knowing and not knowing. Through painting and doubting, I process my existence and the world around me.

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www.juliamcgehean.com

@julia.mcgehean

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Julia McGehean

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Rendered to scale with crisp lines defining the edges of regulated color, my paintings depict tennis courts and book pages with intersecting qualities of geometric abstraction, action painting, and trompe l’oeil. Through an overlapping presence of sequential tracking in sports and literacy, my process is informed by a parts-to-whole paradox of labored learning. Each painting is a visual record of the cumulative efforts that are inherently erased at the threshold of success. I interrupt these compartmentalized shapes in relation to movement and (mis)translation by imprinting sneaker soles and game-related gear into wet grounds. This responsive approach intuitively records the pressures of manufactured mark-making to lift and deposit oil paint across the impacted surface. Despite their inert properties, these paintings are active opponents in the studio; relating the endurance of failure and grief to running with a stone in your shoe. 

Through an amalgamation of published imagery and everyday office supplies, I engage with found objects as a tangible study of the writing process. My collection serves as a modular dictionary in which distinct definitions are exchanged for familiar forms. As an artist, I am also an editor. I add, subtract, and rearrange visual components until they formally and pragmatically converge as one. Whether assembled laterally on shelves or vertically in pegboard, these working documents consider the neurological interplay between objects and words and objects as words. This offbeat internal dialogue is articulated with a physical vocabulary of punctuation; disrupting the surface-tension with an undercurrent of comedic timing. These mechanical moves articulately suspend a string of non sequiturs, while encoding personal anecdotes that are simultaneously disconcerting and amusing, revealing and perplexing. Reflecting on constraints placed on the neurodivergent population to exist legibly, I grapple with my own didactic tendencies and question what it means to hold the privilege to consciously choose illegibility. 

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