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 - 20 of 37

Mallary Wilson 2026
(2026-05) Wilson, Mallary
Materia/conditions explores human consciousness through materiality, positioning geological, monolithic structures as Affective bodies both ancient and immediate. These forms do not represent the artist's body; they are erupting bodies of their own. A mountain has a name but is never considered separate from the earth. They stand individually in their connectivity. Each work externalizes what forms beneath the impact of stimulus on material. This is Affect. It is the intensity of a stimulus moving through matter before it is captured by language. It is sediment of living, allowing Affect to surface and solidify into something that can be witnessed without being defined. They are cut apart and cut together: the geological, the biological, the beautiful, and the grotesque. Visually similarities are made systemic to illuminate shared origin and a connectivity that does not dissolve boundaries so much as reveal they were never fixed. These monoliths do not represent individual feelings but rather solidified affect: the eruption of interior life made tangible and offered to the viewer as a reflectionless mirror. The question they pose is not aesthetic but ontological. Is it possible to feel the connection of consciousness to the material of the body? Drawing on Karen Barad's agential realism, the work resists frameworks that position consciousness as separate from matter. Consciousness is not a layer placed over the material body but something wholly emergent from it. The shimmering ribbons, the multi-materiality, and the bright geological forms are not symbols of the mind. They are its conditions: what produces something and its state of being. This is a practice co-constituted by collective affect and a materially emergent mind. A reminder that what moves through one also moves through others and the intangible can be communicated precisely by refusing to translate it.
Mango Chardiet 2026
(2026-04-20) Chardiet, Mango
Here Lies A Fallen Dove explores themes of grief, loneliness, Catholic guilt, and reckoning with oneself through a ten-minute stop-motion film animated at 24 frames per second. The story follows the main character, Amalthea, as she summons a god of death and falls through a portal into hell. Circumstance can shape any living thing from hopeful to desperate as quickly as one can breathe, and Amalthea is no exception. She finds herself alone in a desolate cabin deep in the woods, with the poorly buried body of her sweetheart just outside. Amalthea watches as the earth refuses to take the body. Consumed by grief and desperation, she summons the god of death from below, beginning her journey into the abyss. Will she find what she is looking for?
Hayashi Wilder 2026
(2026) Wilder, Hayashi
bodymemory geography is a series of abstract, large-scale textile monuments created with traditional Black craft techniques and materials and activated through ecological performances. The body of work speculates and translates the visual poetics and affects of skyscapes imagined in Black feminist literature as geographies of struggle, mapping bodily and epistemological abstractions that occur in the undoing and becoming of Black diasporic environments and experiences. The stories reimagined in this series are Sula by Toni Morrison, Passing by Nella Larsen, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Each monument reflects, through the visual language of abstraction and performance, a direct quote that references and relates to the ecological affects of the sky, a geographic poetic within the Black diaspora; enslavement and its afterlife. The quotes are as listed below: Sula by Toni Morrison“Perhaps Sula answered them even then, for it began to rain…Nel left the cemetery with the sunset in her face. Passing by Nella Larsen: “On Tuesday morning a dome of grey sky rose over the parched city, but the stifling air was not relieved by the silvery mist that seemed to hold a promise of rain, which did not fall.” Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs: “Then he went away, and I was left with my thoughts—starless as the midnight darkness around me.”
Olivia Valiante 2026
(2026-05-05) Valiante, Olivia
The Side Effects of Loving Something You Don’t Believe In is a series of paintings, printed works, and objects which explore love, healthy skepticism, and repetition while using the framework of a short story as a guide. The way that things change through retelling is explored through the concepts of illusory truth and the transmission chain method. The narrative depicted in the paintings deals with love, but it acts as a surrogate for a story about death. The desire is for the viewer to question what the story is, the truth of it, and how far it drifted from the original source in its iterations. The Side Effects of Loving Something You Don’t Believe In draws inspiration from horror, faulty memory, and my personal life experiences. Every object that is painted was intentionally selected. The Jersey Devil acts as a stand-in for an east coast childhood while the pill bottles invite you to see and dream as yourself. The deer skull acts as a memento mori. Threads move around the room and sit patiently in a bowl. Short story books and a guide to magic sit on the table as a ritual unfolds. Masked figures show us the outcome of love without belief, severance. Through this research and collection of poems and short stories, I have clarified the importance of these themes in my work and further explored their connection to one another.
Grace Hartley 2026
(2026-05-10) Hartley, Grace
The pieces you see here, the fragments of the relic, are all stories. Stories of love and home, memories of people, small moments that led to other small moments that led to my hands forming one shape or another in clay. The three fragments, vessel, lake, and breath, all come together to form an intimate place for quiet reflection. First, a vessel, explores my relationship with material and form. The word vessel is one of expansion, holding meaning and symbol: it can refer to people, women, boats, crockery, and veins. I find myself asking is everything in fact a vessel? A lake, the second fragment, explores the generational links of holding and place. Memories of growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan have led to the inclusion of cycling lake water and time. Now I ask what does it mean to hold and be held? Lastly, a breath, explores the reverence and relationships, the tensions, the chains that hold and bind, and how everything is connected. Here I ask what if where I am now is the same as where I came from? Together, the three fragments form a whole. A relic of my hands (vessel), body (lake), and heart (breath).
Ella Martini 2026
(2026-04) Martini, Ella
voteboykiss.com is a critical response to the sidelining of queer and feminine tastes in emo discourse. For the past twenty five years, white male music journalists have dominated the conversation around emo, its histories, and its canon. These accounts consistently prioritize the bands themselves and pay comparatively little attention to emo fandom, which, since the mid-2000s, has been dominated by young women and queer people online. Because the majority of emo bands have (until recently) also consisted of mostly white men, this approach has broadly misrepresented emo as white masculine subculture and has obscured the fact that girls and queers online have almost singlehandedly steered emo's trajectory for the past twenty five years. At the center of this installation sits the titular voteboykiss.com, a hand-coded website which parodies "emo historian" Tom Mullen's notorious 2014 website isthisbandemo.com. Mullen's site cheekily presents itself as the authority on which bands are "real emo" and which are not, as decided upon by a committee consisting of himself and his circle of music journalist friends. Consistently, bands associated with teen fangirl audiences rank as not real emo, capturing the way that feminine tastes and values threaten emo's credibility and must therefore be excised from the subculture. Mimicking the design of Mullen's original site, voteboykiss.com asks visitors to choose between quintessential boy-favorite emo album American Football's LP1 (1999) and the notorious gay kiss from My Chemical Romance's I'm Not Okay (2004). Pitting these two emo icons against each other in a mock-battle ultimately rigged in boy kiss's favor, voteboykiss. com reclaims vilified queer and feminine contributions to emo (i.e. shipping) and centers those who have for so long been treated as an embarrassing footnote to emo's history: girls and queers on the internet.
Ainsley Van Hook 2026
(2026) Van Hook, Ainsley
My Sweaters Keep My Cold Body Warm explores textile craft, particularly knitting and weaving, as methods of care, memory, and embodied knowledge. Through personal narrative, material exploration, collaboration, and craft education. I position craft in this project as both a deeply personal and collective act, highlighting the importance of passing on knowledge and communal learning. With this my thesis engages with tensions surrounding the contemporary resurgence of textile arts alongside the decline of accessible material-based education. Rather than attempting to resolve these contradictions, I re-directed and refocused my energy towards acts of care: maintaining and sourcing weaving tools and equipment for PNCA, sharing and learning with others, honoring, studying, and listening to the labor embedded in these tools, objects and craftspeople. The resulting body of work prioritizes the personal relationships with other makers and post-display use. Textile practices function as vital methods of survival, healing, and connection and by centering softness, repetition, and care, My Sweaters Keep My Cold Body Warm reclaims craft as a critical, living practice that sustains both individual and collective well-being.
Charli Beck 2026
(2026) Beck, Charli
Lambing Season: Being Here, Becoming-with is the archive of a moment in a place-based, embodied creative practice. The collection demonstrates the materials, narrative, and affect of the artist's time spent in residence at Sugarfield Farm in Astoria, OR during lambing season. It consists of a family of wool weavings which act as containers for materials found at the farm, a series of drawings of the sky as seen each day, a field journal sketchbook used to track the details of the experience, and a set of illustrations made from the sketchbook afterward to show the narrative setting. Together, this collection is intended to demonstrate the complex balance between fresh, sweet, calm moments and those of mud and labor that go had in hand in life on a farm.
Casey Durand 2026
(2026-05-05) Durand, Casey
Do You Know Lucy? is a digital short film, using both digital video and real-time computer graphics. Viewers are dropped into the game-like perspective of a visitor to a bizarre, high tech government facility. Lucy, an illustrious and enigmatic socialite, has been asleep and held in stasis for many years inside this facility. Her body is hooked up to machines that monitor her vitals and gather information on her health. The voice of Lady Chastity, the lead scientist and keeper of Lucy’s Chamber, walks the visitor through the lab and attempts to illuminate the truth about who Lucy really is. Advanced “bio-imaging” technology allows Lady Chastity to conjure up visual simulations of the activity happening inside Lucy’s body, these manifest as three live-action short films. Meanwhile, a group of revolutionaries send hacked radio transmissions into the visitors mind to try and convince them to help their plot to free Lucy. The game-world of this film serves as a narrative container for the three live-action vignettes. Together, they create a portrait of a moment of crisis in American popular culture, and in my own personal life. In this paper, I hope to explore the narrative, stylistic, and emotional decisions behind each step of the process of producing this film. Along with that, I hope to outline a loose, family-tree of avant-garde internet video content ranging from the early 90s to today. All the artists, creators, techniques, and subcultures held within that tree are ones that I am perpetually in conversation with as I make my films. Both this paper and the film share the same chapter names, numbers, and guiding thematic principles. I do not intend for it to be a guide or a companion piece to the film, but rather a journal-like collection of notes, concepts, and references that informed each chapter of the narrative.
Dani Wilder 2026
(2026) Wilder, Dani
I am so inspired by the repression of American cinema, especially when it comes to the body. There is an almost universal electric charge, an odd taboo, a shifting in one’s seat phenomenon towards the presentation of the human body on screen. That almost instinctual response I believe especially extends to trans women in film, clothed or not. This isn’t to say that trans women provoke an inherently sexual feeling, although oftentimes that can certainly be the case. It is more that, implicitly, it is breaking the rules of traditional filmmaking to even see a trans person in a movie. Usually, this is a feeling that the filmmaker ignores or pushes through or feeds into a larger moralization about trans identity present in the story, but I so wish to burrow into that feeling itself. There is an untapped potential in the trans body onscreen, something that can be presented without comment or context and still create some sort of reaction in an audience. Despite a growing “normalization” (in huge scare-quotes) of trans people in pop culture, popular cinematic narratives around transness are often focused on the same rote themes; whether that be dysphoria, the beginning stages of transition, violence towards trans people, or the physical components of the transition process. While these are all meaningful subjects to portray, they are often limited to a hyperliteral objectivity and don’t delve fully into a trans subjectivity. I crave work that is enveloped in the unique emotional circumstances of the trans experience. I think for a cinematic empathy towards trans people to be established, there must be space afforded for not just trans prose but trans poetics in the prevailing cinematic language. My thesis consists of two films that work under the pretense of this premise. "Gloriohio" is a colorful, low-budget feature film that uses the genre of the vampire film and the romantic comedy to get at unarticulated feelings of loneliness and alienation experienced by transgender women in the United States. "Spirit 3," on the other hand, explores similar themes through a no-budget, quasi-autobiographical setup. In presenting two works that vary significantly on the surface level (one colorful, polished, and structurally predictable, the other black & white, lo-fi, and meandering), I hope to bring out their shared interest in looking towards the future of trans representation in film, whether that be narrative, experimental, or otherwise.
Indi Foerster 2026
(2026-05) Foerster, Indi
Recovering from memory loss, I found brief moments of reprieve when I leaned into the natural world around me. This occurred through a desperate material exploration of the forest, searching for meaning and communing with the bodies of trees that resembled my own: splintered and shedding itself with growth. Here you will find my recollection of each knot, of each event, written alongside these painted iterations of bark, as I sought an abstraction to reconcile the ontological–the intangible. I pursued not only acts of remembering, but the quiet crevices between memory and forgetting, where identity is formed, dissolved and reimagined. These painted crevices reflect memoir: They’re disjointed, they’re scattered, they’re unpredictable. They operate not only as a space for disconnection, but more importantly, they become a space of holding. A space for the hypothetical. A space for hope. This tension of possibility asks us what are these spaces that are forgotten? And more importantly, what is held there?
Cassie Tompkins 2025
(2025) Tompkins, Cassie
Bioregionalism, whose principles were conveyed by the environmentalist Peter Berg in the 1970s (and are widely present in indigenous land practices) is an awareness of both the diverse life-forms of a place and how they are interrelated, including with humans. Bioregionalist thought not only encompasses practices like habitat restoration and regenerative agriculture, it has cultural elements. It asks us to identify as citizens of the bioregion as much as the state, meaning not only having a familiarity with the local ecology but maintaining a commitment to stewarding it together. This essay uses bioregionalism or ‘placefulness’ as a framework to examine my own multidisciplinary practice and that of contemporary artists who utilize tenets of the philosophy to sustain, memorialize, and empathize with a place and its people.
simiya sudduth 2025
(2024-05-03) sudduth, simiya
The Confluence Tarot is a decolonial reinterpretation of the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot deck, rooted in the cultural and ecological landscapes of the Mississippi River Valley. As a mixed-race Black and Indigenous, queer, femme, neurodivergent mother and artist, I created this project to critique exclusionary narratives in traditional tarot and to center communities historically erased from its imagery. Through a developing body of illustrated cards and an accompanying playlist, the work combines visual art, sound, and public practice to create an immersive tool for reflection, divination, and healing. The imagery draws on archival, historical, and contemporary sources to embed local histories, ancestral symbols, and lived experiences into the visual language of the deck. The playlist, spanning hip hop, soul, jazz, R&B, and experimental sound, extends each archetype into the sonic realm, inviting a multisensory engagement with the cards. Emerging from my transdisciplinary practice in public art, sound healing, and community care, The Confluence Tarot operates as both a spiritual tool and a cultural critique. It challenges systems of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and ableism, while affirming practices of joy, rest, and collective liberation. This thesis documents the project’s development and theoretical grounding, positioning The Confluence Tarot as an offering of reclamation, resistance, and transformation.
Paper Son's Passage 2025
(2025-06-27) Sheng, Ran
Paper Son's Passage (A VR Interactive Experience) In 1903, a fifteen-year-old Chinese boy stood in a Portland jail cell, carrying a secret that could determine his fate in America. His story, preserved in immigration archives, becomes the foundation for this immersive virtual reality experience that blurs the boundaries between historical documentation and surreal imagination. Paper Son's Passage invites viewers to step inside a detention cell from the Chinese Exclusion Act era – but this is no ordinary historical recreation. The room itself becomes a manifestation of alienation, an environment where the familiar turns foreign and the mundane transforms into something monstrous. As a first-generation Chinese immigrant artist, I uncover stories hidden in time through creative narration. This experimental VR experience serves as a portal – an invitation to step inside history's uncomfortable spaces and gather what fragments remain. It exists both as a puzzle to decode and a space to inhabit, where the past haunts the present in forms strange and terribly familiar. Through embodied exploration, viewers navigate the liminal territory between citizen and stranger, between belonging and exclusion, discovering how these boundaries dissolve under scrutiny. Paper Son's Passage offers no easy answers – only an encounter with history's twisted geometries and the human stories concealed within them.
Samuel Jayms Case 2025
(2025-06-28) Case, Samuel
"Love Letters" is an exploration of queer hope and queer futurity. Using the writings of Edouard Glissant and Jose Esteban Munoz as its conceptual backing, the visual work combines drawing, plastic, wood, candles, and nylon cord to describe a private artist's hopes for the future. Lace becomes a metaphor for the ways that the patter of queer history is traced, interpreted, and passed along to future generations. Each piece is an epistolic portrait of someone who the artist hopes will be a part of their queer future.
Matt Seavers
(2025) Seavers, Matt
My thesis centers on a series of oil paintings that explore how memory distorts and reshapes itself over time. Drawing from my own childhood in a working-class neighborhood—alleyways, backyards, overgrown lots, and half-forgotten pile-ons—I use paint to investigate how ordinary places become charged with emotion, myth, and personal significance. These works are not literal depictions of past events, but emotional reconstructions. I often start with a specific fragment—a cracked sidewalk, a chain-link fence, the tangle of limbs during a backyard brawl—and let the painting evolve from there. Figures dissolve into landscape, spaces flatten or twist, and forms repeat or vanish entirely. I lean into ambiguity, trusting the process to mirror the uncertainty of memory itself. The visual language borrows from artists like Joan Brown and William Kentridge, who navigate the tension between personal narrative and formal experimentation. Carl Jung’s writing on the unconscious helped me think about memory not just as a personal archive, but as something archetypal—shaped by symbols, emotions, and repetition. Alongside the paintings, I created a small zine titled The Possum Story: A Family Classic, which retells one childhood memory through multiple versions, highlighting how narrative shifts depending on time and perspective. While the zine grounds the project in language, it’s the paintings that carry the weight of memory—fragmented, emotional, and open-ended. Together, these works ask what happens when we stop chasing the truth of the past and instead engage with how it continues to echo. I’m not painting what happened—I’m painting how it felt, how it changed, and how it continues to resurface, distorted but still alive.
Rissa Martinez 2025
(2025-07-18) Martinez, Rissa
This essay examines the intersectionality between Chicana, Punk, and Queerness through the lens of auto-ethnographic biography, specifically commenting on a long-debated feminist issue of domesticity and patriarchal gender roles. With Tomas Ybarra Frausto’s ideas on Rasquachismo and Amalia Mesa-Bains ideas on Domesticana as a basis for my research, I add to their efforts in outlining a new era of femininity through the perspective of punk subculture; that which I refer to as, Punkeras Domestica. With respect to history, current and future generations of Chicanas are still at odds with their expected roles and as we enter our “Señora” era, we find ourselves asking, what do we take and what do we leave behind?
Keith E Kesler 2025
(2025-08-07) Kesler, Keith E
Olly Olly Oxen Free is a multidisciplinary MFA thesis that explores the role of the artist as a “wounded healer,” interweaving personal history, psychoanalytic insight, and creative practice. Bridging my careers as both a visual artist and physician-psychoanalyst, the work investigates how emotional wounds—personal, cultural, and collective—can become sites of transformation and resistance through art. Inspired by Carl Jung’s notion of the shadow and the archetype of Chiron, this thesis frames creative practice as a form of psychological integration. Drawing upon myth, memory, and contemporary visual culture, the exhibition and writing trace a path of healing that emerges not from resolution, but from inhabiting the uncertainty and pain of lived experience. Through sculpture, photography, and narrative, the project reflects on dualities such as visibility/invisibility, control/autonomy, and trauma/resilience. Emerging from the pandemic and a climate of escalating cultural marginalization, works such as Olly Olly Oxen Free, It’s a Texas Thing, and Jazz Hands explore themes of exclusion and belonging in a Texas landscape shaped by regressive policy. Community collaborations, including Photography projects with OUT YOUTH in Austin, TX, centered on affirming the presence and identity of LGBTQ+ teens, exemplify the healing potential of portraiture and visibility. The experience of my trans granddaughter’s forced departure from university, underscore the real-life impact of political hostility and the need for compassionate presence. This work is not only autobiographical but operates as a cultural mirror, using materials like steel, plaster, and reclaimed objects to forge ritualistic totems of grief and resistance. In reclaiming artistic identity within the frame of therapeutic practice, the thesis asserts that creativity and vulnerability are tools for both personal metamorphosis and social critique. Ultimately, Olly Olly Oxen Free is a call to step out of hiding, into the light—an invitation for artist and viewer alike to witness, to feel, and to heal.
Gia Whitlock, 2025
(2025-05-03) Whitlock, Gia
"We were all in line for coffee, we were all twerking. I was also working on a quilt, and I never quilt." Excerpt from my dream journal, October, 2024 For my thesis project, I researched and analyzed my dream content from the year 2024, found in five hand-written journals. I searched my writing for commonly occurring themes and paired it with academic and internet research to explain their possible meanings. Based on the research, this paper centers around dream symbols of the bathroom and the house as well as on visitation from loved ones who have passed away. Possible dream meanings combine the story of my trajectory through the MFA program and end in a tale a personal transformation and evolution in my work.
Melissa Jones 2025
(2025-07-18) Jones, Melissa
Growth Spurt is a sculptural installation that examines the parallels between human life cycles and the growth cycle of plants. Just as plants require all four elements to survive and undergo constant change, each part of the exhibition represents a stage in the process of human transformation and evolution. We all experience change in our lives, but in different ways and at different times. This work is interwoven and connected in a nonlinear timeline, reflecting the intertwining of my artwork and personal journey of growth.

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