MFA Visual Studies

Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/10177/40343

The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Studies program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon provides experienced makers with the opportunity to enhance and diversify their creative skills through independent research and critical analysis.

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Now showing 1 - 16 of 16

mai ide, 2025
(2025-05-20) ide, mai
Mai Ide’s thesis explores self-discovery, nourishment, and resilience through writing and artistic expression. Her creative and intellectual pursuits serve as essential tools in shaping an understanding of authenticity and the importance of living as one’s true self. A central theme of her work is the racialized invisibility of Asian Americans in the U.S., who have historically been marginalized as the “other.” Through her research, she critically examines how deeply rooted cultural values—such as family-oriented structures and ethnic identity—shape individual lives and self-definition. Mai also analyzes the pervasive influence of the white gaze on Asian American women, investigating how historical and contemporary racialized and gendered experiences impact visibility, desirability, and agency. She confronts the ways systemic perceptions dictate representation and how these constructs influence societal roles. Additionally, her project delves into the complexities of her relationship with her mother, using art to process and give form to her identity. Textile objects and sewing become key mediums for honoring familial connections, allowing her to preserve meaning and family history through tactile expression. Her thesis further interrogates the racialized commodification of Asian femininity, particularly through the lens of "cuteness" as a form of delegitimization. She critiques femininity as an ego of complexity and constructs multiple corsets to symbolize layered identity and gender expression. Through this approach, she examines how notions of sweetness and cuteness function as tools for societal control, shaping perceptions of femininity within consumer and cultural frameworks. By integrating theory and creative practice, Mai Ide uses writing to articulate her beliefs and deepen her awareness of selfhood. Her engagement with artistic and intellectual processes transforms introspection into resilience and self-expression into a powerful assertion of individuality.
Blue Corvidae 2025
(2025-05) Corvidae Blue
PRISMATIC MELANCHOLY was constructed with anti-capitalist collective care in mind and an understanding that collective work must start with the self. This research originated with a desire to find a way for my spiritual-artistic practice to live in accordance with collective care praxes. With this in mind I adopt an autoethnographic exploration of my early experiences with religion and trauma– specifically the fragmenting effect they had on my developing queer-trans sense of self and how I might reapproach spirituality as a survival pathway through apostatic faith practices. As a mad, disabled, queer-trans multiplicity I was born into a series of tragedies that assured my bodymindspirit would never truly feel there was space enough for me. Strung from one ill-fitting home/label/town to the next, I began to crack, we began to splinter. Before long, compacted within the contours of societal expectation, our consciousness had shattered into multiplicity, pushing us to think multivalently despite our melancholy. In this project we were called to ask: what kind of relationship with divinity could support us in bearing the emotional distress of ongoing global catastrophe? And, more importantly, what kind of space could hold us, in all our multiplicity, such that we might be able to approach divinity?
Cynthia Souder, 2025
(2025-05-16) Souder, Cynthia
This thesis explores the cultural and symbolic dimensions of the "crone" through a series of five original sculptures, each embodying a distinct trope of older womanhood. Installed in the shape of a physic garden, the sculptures form a circle—an invitation for the viewer to enter, explore, and witness their differences. This immersive arrangement at Building Five creates a space not only for contemplation but also for connection and participation. I invite you to become part of the circle of crones in the garden. My research draws on feminist theory, histories, and contemporary art discourse, challenging the ageist and misogynistic connotations historically attached to the term "crone." Instead, I reclaim the crone as an archetype of wisdom, resilience, and transformation. Historically, women labeled as crones were often persecuted not for any wrongdoing, but for stepping outside patriarchal expectations—retreating from societal norms, decentering men, and living mature, independent, and wise lives. Through this research and sculptural practice, I trace the figure of the crone across history and popular culture, examining how these representations shape and are shaped by the roles, behaviors, and perceptions of women in contemporary Western American society.
Annika Rausch 2025
(2025) Rausch, Annika
With my series of intaglio prints, I explore themes relating to identity construction and place, arguing that those residents who think of themselves as “Portlanders” should instead shift their primary allegiance to the Willamette River. My thesis work contributes to this project of identity reformation by building an affective-aesthetic matrix of imagery, recalling viewers back to local land and water forms, the reality of political violence, and the larger cosmos. My work includes references to the often-suppressed Indigenous materiality of this place, recognized as a fact of the social environment that demands reckoning, plus imagery from the distant past of my own European ancestry, as well as “composted” charts and diagrams from scientific research. By “composting,” I mean erasing the legibility of a graphic or making it esoteric, in order to remove it from rigidly emotionless systems of information-and-control. The main text of my thesis takes the form of a glossary, meant to aid in “reading” the visual work.
Adelina Ruvalcaba 2025
(2025-05-16) Ruvalcaba, Adelina
"I Am de Mis Antepasadas" is a dedication to the labor of love. I use my art as a way of honoring my ancestors’ perseverance, drawing influences from the personalities, sacrifices, and the strengths of our family that continue to shape me into the adult I am today. This is my rendition of recontextualizing identity as an artist born into two beautiful Latin American cultures—both unique in their own right—alongside being born and raised in the United States of America. Creating ceramic fossils imprinted with the ingredients of my cuisine allows me to commemorate my ancestry while simultaneously passing down heirlooms for my descendants. I create for the pasado, the present, y el futuro.
golden lionheart collier 2025
(2025-05-15) collier, golden lionheart
What can be known and how? What is the nature of existence, and how is that nature reflected in the expression of culture? What exactly counts as data, and how is it encoded, decoded, exchanged, and circulated? To better explore the mysteries of how cultural information and data migrate through time, space, and complex systems, I’ve adapted a variety of unconventional conceptual and methodological tools to examine the phenomenon of strong emergence in diasporic cultural transmission.
Claire Frances Spaulding 2025
(2025-05-15) Spaulding, Claire
How do I face the material reality of a studio practice balanced against a theoretical framework centered upon environmental criticism and affect theory? What does it mean to coexist in an ecology of plastic as contributor, as collaborator? A combination of found and new material, Doing Despite explores material flirtation to utilize kitsch and fem aesthetics as a hyper visual language. The compositional elements are inspired by oceanography, topographical striations, and geometric patterns – a blue wave recedes and ascends from sandy, scalloped edge’s reminiscent of Americana pomp and circumstance. An amalgamation of synthetic and natural fibers, the work represents a convergence of ecology and new materialism: “ecodread”. “Ecodread” is a sensitizing concept of cognitive dissonance and ecological affect. It is the tension between social expectations of sustainability and subjective material engagements: the discomfort between a desire to exist in the world as eco-conscious as possible against a reality where the expense of those decisions is not attainable. Working through the dissonance and dread, the climate crisis is faced with a “doing despite” mentality rather than anxious paralysis. Polyethylene terephthalate – it’s what persists long after objects are discarded, disintegrated into microplastics, or smashed together as a conglomerate of mineral, media, and matter. Plastic was a promise of infinite potentiality, of endless supply for a demand of clear, synthetic, reflective, durable objects meant to last a lifetime. But whose lifetime? Ours or polymers? Material or mineral? Doing Despite works through the dissonance to consider an ecological futurity where matter and audience embrace the entanglement of vibrant plasticity. Doing Despite is a visual compliment to the theoretical framework and qualitative research undertaken in my MA Critical Studies Thesis: “Ecodread: Dissonance, Material, and Ecology within Creative Practice.” This project positions ecodread into the fields of new materialism and environmental criticism as an offering and proposal that the personal, the self is able to reenter the rhetoric on impact and futurity.
Myra Crane 2025
(2025-05) Crane, Myra
Cosmic Currents: Chromatic Meditations on Wonder is an immersive, drawing-based installation that explores the patterns of the natural world, perception, interconnectedness and wonder. Guided by synesthesia, scientific curiosity, and a mystical sensibility, I construct an imagined ecosystem that blur the boundaries between the microscopic and cosmic, the real and the speculative. Using watercolor pencils, ink, markers, and other drawing tools, I built a layered composition on paper that I installed into a circular environment by hanging from an steel structure. This allows viewers to enter and experience the work with their whole bodies. At the heart of this work is a deep reverence for the patterns found in nature—fractal geometries, cellular divisions, astronomical structures—which serve as both visual inspiration and conceptual frameworks. My synesthetic perception allows me to experience colors as flavors, sounds as hues, imbuing my work with a sensory richness that is both intuitive and visceral. This installation is not just a visual experience but a meditative one—a spiritual practice of tuning into wonder. It offers viewers an invitation to slow down, reawaken their sense of awe, and reconnect with the mystery that surrounds us. The work is personal and emotional, offering space for reflection, healing, and transformation. At its core, Cosmic Currents is about honoring mystery and navigating the fluid dance between what we know and what remains beautifully unknowable.
Erin Fox 2025
(2025-05-06) Fox, Erin
I once read a poem about waking up from a dream in the middle of the day, about the in-between time when there are no words for the things you see, and so finally you can just see them. “To wake is to become what one first sees,” the poem said. I liked that. I liked the idea that really looking at something could be relational in some way; that if the conditions were right, a kind of resonance could happen between your eyes and the world. So I tried making work about things I had seen that had felt like that to me—not depictions of the things themselves, but of the way we were resonating together at the time.
Pearl Lockwood 2025
(2025) Lockwood, Pearl
intersistere explores the connection between our shared subconscious and the collective dream world, aiming to create a visual portal into these mysterious realms. The portal represents the internal subconscious looking within oneself and the dreams that exist. itersistere takes over space as it infiltrates the wall, breaking through and crossing the line of reality and delusion. The felted intestines house the dreamscape that I once entered, looking inside my dream-self, standing between reality and dream. My work is a living research project, and I will continue looking into these ideas and dreams for as long as I am creating. Starting from recurring childhood dreams, my work is about how hypnagogia, hypnopompia and lucid dreaming are an integral part of my understanding of sleep and the way that I process them into my art. My thesis is a look into my mind as a dreamer and artist, how I think, work, and connect to the worlds around me.
Danielle Van Dam 2025
(2025) Van Dam, Danielle
The Clown is a formal investigation of iteration, technique, and endurance in my artistic process underpinned by an exploration of interpretation and meaning in painting. I have created seven smaller-scale paintings all representing the same subject that read together as one body of work. I made a conscious choice to refrain from prescribing a narrative to the work, allowing my viewer to reach their own conclusion, rather than preemptively assign it for them and follow with a supplemental written explanation. With The Clown series, I attempted to invoke an atmosphere of irresolution through representational oil painting, in this case, using a small porcelain clown figurine as my only reference. My motivation to disrupt some logical function or compulsive intellectualization in the process of viewing paintings is a reflection of my studio practice as well as my reverence for the enigmatic. This paper will explore how I’ve chosen to approach my time in this program, as well as for my thesis project—with a self-designed curriculum centered on a technically focused material study in oil painting.
Brady Wolchansky 2024
(2024-06-24) Wolchansky, Brady
MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL SYNDROME, A Micro-Cinematic Experience features the premier of an experimental short film I wrote, co-directed, and starred in called, Manic Pixie Dream Girl Syndrome, an adaptation from a comedic monologue of the same name I performed at an all-female group art show in 2023. This tangential monologue begins with, “you guys ever hear of the expression ‘all beautiful women are crazy’?” The 5-minute short screens at looped intervals in a makeshift microcinema constructed alongside a pop-up museum of “artifacts”; a behind-the-scenes look of the filmmaking process, including but not limited to props, costumes and images from the film’s set. The complete installation revolves around my investigations of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (MPDG) character archetype, as seen in popular romantic films such as, Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and 500 Days of Summer with Zooey Deschanel. In cinema, the MPDG is portrayed as an artsy independent woman who often rejects societal expectations of classic womanhood and domesticity. While the MPDG is presumed to be free-spirited and independent, she is still defined by the expectations of a predominantly male protagonist and is mostly restricted within the confines of said male protagonist’s own personal goals and growth, and rarely displays any self-actualization or true personhood. This exhibition aims to recreate my own version of the MPDG, examined from a modern, feminist lens. Through the aesthetics of filmmaking, stand-up comedy and intermedia installation my hope is to show empathy with those who can relate and rouse awareness of the MPDG trope’s negative effects in others.
Erin Boberg Doughton, 2024
(2024-07-25) Doughton, Erin Boberg
The written thesis Now it’s a Party explores the tensions and possibilities of performance in visual art spaces, with a focus on why and how artists create ephemeral, embodied work in spaces designed for the care and display of objects. The title is taken from a common phrase exclaimed after a glass is broken at a house party. Like a good party, a performance often involves breaking something - a glass, a rule, a social code. Performance relies on a shared (if temporary) belief in the value of process over product, people over objects and the collective over the individual. The exhibition Now it’s a Party extends the thesis to the gallery as an open studio where visitors are invited to share meals, practice simple magic tricks and experiment with creating and recreating documents of performance. Unlike traditional magic - where the magician does not reveal their tricks, everything in the gallery is real and revealed. Visitors are offered a menu of solo and collaborative scores to be performed with domestic objects including tables, chairs, tablecloths, dishes and brooms, revealing the often invisible labor of art-making and caretaking. The objects and actions vary from day to day, documented in an accumulative archive of photographs and ephemera. The documentation includes two primary scores - Do Over (tablecloth trick) and Ghost Broom. The performers in the photographs are Erin Boberg Doughton, PNCA Alum Crimson Ravarra and PNCA student Malique Pye. All photos by Mario Gallucci.
Sally Jablonsky 2024
(2024) Jablonsky, Sally
Through oil painting, clay sculpture, and a self published magazine, I explore the experience of being a body and an animal on the Earth. I use the body as a source of information to reveal the human fantasy while at the same time creating a new framework to live within–one that shows the human experience in the greater context of the natural world. My work explores: the experience of time and being a body relating to disability, what it is to be a human animal, art making as tool use, aesthetics and care as resistance, and nature as the appropriate context for chronically ill people’s (and maybe everyone’s) experiences. I am interested in undoing hierarchical values assigned to species and in looking to nature, not as a metaphor, but as a place to find commonality among the living beings of this planet. By allowing myself to move between a range of styles within the paintings, I show a respect for a number of things: the physical, the pleasure of looking and of making, and the importance of questioning aesthetics as an essential part of resistance and survival. As it is a part of the fantasy of ableism, I throw away mastery, and instead am guided by the pure fun of making as well as a questioning of my own aesthetic tendencies. Imagery in paintings (a shadow person resting on a floral couch, a tree at night, a doctors' visit, a waterfall scene, and a cat person) come from experiences I've had that have given me a certain kind of awareness of my body–a new perception and relationship involving care and maintenance, physical feeling, and mental picture of who and what I am. I invite viewers to unlearn that we are separate from nature, and to witness a journey through the kingdom of the sick.
Sunshine Tourtillott 2024
(2024-07-23) Tourtillott, Sunshine
DEVOTED TO THE AFTERMATH IS AN EDUCATIONAL AND ARTIST JOURNEY EXPLORING GRIEF, LOSS, AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE. USING FOUR COMPONENTS TO HIGHLIGHT MY PERSONAL FEELINGS IN LOSING FAMILY. I USE A COMBINATION OF PHOTOGRAPHY, CANOTYPE, SEWING, AND CREATIVE WRITING TO PROCESS MY THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, AND RESEARCH. MY PROJECT IS DEEPLY ROOTED IN RESEARCH IN THE AREAS OF GENEALOGY, RELIGION, AND GRIEF COUNSELING. USING MEDIUM FORMAT COLOR FILM, LIGHT, SHADOW, AND SHAPES TO EXPRESS MY FEELINGS OF ISOLATION, MISSED OPPORTUNITY, AND LONELINESS. BUT THAT WASN’T ENOUGH. FOR A DECADE I HAD RESEARCH MY TOURTILLOTT FAMILY HISTORY GOING BACK TEN GENERATIONS. THIS PROCESS WAS VERY MUCH IN TUNE WITH THE LOSS OF FAMILY AND I WANTED TO INCLUDE THE FAMILY I HAD FOUND BUT KNOW I WANTED TO MAKE SOMETHING TANGIBLE THAT I COULD HOLD, THAT WOULD REMIND ME OF FAMILY. THE PROCESS OF CYANOTYPE AND SEWING WAS THAT PERFECT EXPRESSION. TAKING AND PROCESSING THE IMAGES, CUTTING THE COTTON FABRIC, DYING THAT FABRIC AND PROCESSING IT OUTSIDE GAVE ME LAYERS OF TIME TO CONNECT WITH EACH STEP AND MY EMOTIONS. PROCESSING THE CANOTYPES GAVE ME THE SPACE AND TIME TO SIT WITH WHAT I WAS CREATING, TO MAKE BONDED DECISIONS, AND MEET MY ANCESTORS. THE THIRD COMPONENT IS MY MEMOIR WHICH IS CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITTEN IN A DAIRY FORMAT. I DISCOVERED LANGUAGE TOWARD THE END OF THIS PROJECT AND COULD SEE THAT IN ORDER TO FULLY COMPLETE THE CIRCLE OF MY GRIEF FOR MYSELF AND MY AUDIENCE I NEED TO WRITE AND PRINT A MEMOIR. IT'S RAW, REAL, EMOTIONAL, AND HONEST.
Morgan Rice 2024
(2024) Rice, Morgan
Xanadu is a tabletop role-play game about social construction: the concept that societies collectively invent the terms that then come to define reality. My purpose is to suggest that there is revolutionary power in this, and to explore the ways in which play, imagination, and nonlinear storytelling can develop viable descriptions of reality outside of Western constructs. My artwork often responds to observations about social systems and epistemologies. From what I observe, the systems that dominate societies worldwide derive primarily from slavery, war, and supremacist Western ideologies, and work in tandem to power a centuries-long process of mass exploitation. In my thesis work, I wanted to distill these intertwining systems into a microcosm that names and deconstructs, but does not reproduce, the violence of these systems of oppression, while making space for creative experimentation with alternatives. Writing the game was also a way of creating a context for the artwork I would make in response to it. The exhibition is designed to show the temporality of the project’s composition, and to offer thematic breadcrumbs about the game’s narrative universe. It functions as a pathway, wall-papered with notes and early concept sketches that give way to more concrete game materials, alongside symbolic works relating to the game’s themes of performativity, social construct, authoritarianism, and community. The “destination” at the end of the pathway mimics the scene in which player-characters find themselves when the game begins.

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