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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

SCULPTURE

@helena_nasser

she/her

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Helena Abdelnasser

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I am a visual artist who grew up in a culture in which science, myths, and ritualistic spirituality are coexisting and at times overlapping. My installation work is often composed of biodegradable ingredients used for their cultural and political symbolism to retell stories about humans’ desire to control the uncontrollable; generally, that which is natural.

By playing with both logic and materials, my work creates absurd settings in which architecture, infrastructure, animals, and bureaucracies become active characters. These characters construct narratives centered around themes of consumer culture, institutional structures, and the industrialization of nature.

The impermanence of my work results in performative installations that are constantly enduring change through decomposing, melting, or sprouting—all in the interest of allowing unexpected narratives to develop over time. According to the logic of this world, the words of an email are blooming and wilting, the fish are melting, and three dead pigeons are sprouting near a garden fence. 

Why is there a tendency to preserve? And how much assertion of control goes into attempts to preserve? These parable-like settings offer an alternative logic that questions what it is like to not be able to control a situation.

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www.liamcoughlin.com

@puppet__face

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Liam Coughlin

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In my sculptural practice, I conjoin, embed, and conceal cheap plastic ephemera with and within common building materials as a means to craft a surreal allusion to the suburban rural New England landscape. The repeated use of chintz—Halloween pumpkin pails, plastic Walmart shopping bags, and Burger King cups—often makes reference to the depressing cultural psychosis of the ceaseless chain-store holiday display. My interest in frontality is both a physical reference to the kinds of façade-oriented, strip-mall architecture that often define these down-trodden spaces as well as a call-back to the repressed mentality of growing up in a homogenized, hermetically sealed, village-like culture of a small New England town. This frontality is just as much a formal concern as a metaphorical interest. The seemingly dichotomous relationships developed between the consumer byproducts and construction materials serve to develop a type of alphabet within the material focus of my studio practice. These constructed, pseudo-minimalist forms serve as containers for meaning as they oscillate between withholding and offering information through partially or completely obscured objects, sounds, and videos.

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www.alyssagreystudio.com

@al_grey__

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Alyssa Grey

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As a sculptor interested in the formal language of materials and their interactions within space, my creative focus toggles between art objects and their modes of display. Drawing inspiration from traditional uses of pedestals, I create interdependent networks whereby units rely upon each other in order to function as a means of support for isolated moments in the work. Fueled by the never-ending question: what if? I experiment with industrial and organic materials to find new and unlikely combinations of both. These personally inflected and playful objects draw from the do-it-yourself expediency of lower-middle-class home projects which often entails crafting my own tools and equipment to jerry-rig problems. These soiled structures form quick-fix foundations while stubbornly (if tenuously) clinging to kindred objects that can only be described as coping mechanisms. Using soda cans, duct tape, rust, and sacks of potatoes, I create double meanings and puns with my material choices in order to imbed poorly made jokes within the larger sculptural systems. These jokes always fall just short of a punchline—leaving them confused and alone; feelings that echo throughout the work, with each elaborate piece dismissed and left in silence.

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www.mae-chu.wixsite.com/artwork

@maechu.oconnell

she/they

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Mae-Chu Lin O’Connell

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My practice is a navigation of the discomforts, misalignments, and frustrations that I experience in life. Through crafting various personas and implementing pseudo-therapeutic measures, I attempt to address physical and mental disturbances in ways that can seem exacerbatory.

Literal is my conceptual native language, the mother tongue of the instructions I create and follow. I self-stimulate to the point of exhaustion to achieve the feeling of productivity; enervating myself in the highs of container-construction elicits satisfaction even if temporary. Cherishing said containers, I derive comfort from finding homes for objects/collections/feelings/moods. As such, these receptacles are built in some cases physically and others within the confines of my mental palace.

These organizational tendencies infiltrate my productive processes, including the corporeal: hair and other bodily products make appearances in many of my performances and apparatuses, whether merely collected and en-vesseled or transformed for a purposeful device.

In an effort to ensure proper communication of instruction, theatrics become a method of information distribution and preservation. Though she is a persona to whom I can divert culpability, the actor I become is nonetheless plagued by insecurity, perpetually in pursuit of an existence without disappointment, without fear, without grief, without FOMO, without cringe, without burnout. Introspection is key, yet I do not wish to over-think/act/react/eat/promise/do-it, nor navel gaze. 

The alter ego aids in my pursuit of happiness and discovers that joy is not merely the avoidance of the anti-joy; it is the overarching goal of life and therefore the mission of the artistic practice; for artmaking must supplement the mental diet.

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www.yolandayanghe.com

@yolandaheyang_arts

she/her

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Yolanda He Yang

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By fusing photography, body movement, performance, video, and sculpture, my installations delve into the hidden layers of emotion embedded within aspects of the optical experience. I seek to offer poetic presentations that invite the viewer to experience space as it exists beyond its surface appearance and to suggest the total rupture of boundaries imposed between inside and outside, space and time. Through subtle adjustments and slight re-orientations of objects, my installations challenge conventional notions of meaning while advocating for the power, resilience, and possibility inherent within fugitivity and delicacy. My work invites viewers to explore the intimate immensity of these concepts while engaging with the politics of space and body, prompting reflections on these themes’ societal and personal implications.

Yolanda He Yang is a Boston-based artist whose practice encompasses both personal studio work and public art. Born in a Catholic family in North China, Yolanda relocated to various places she remembered as homes, schools, and playgrounds when she was a child.

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