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 25

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.
Morgan Swartz 2025
(2025-06-27) Swartz, Morgan
Stories form the backbone of human understanding, spirituality, and cultural evolution. They can expand our conceptual frameworks and excite a desire for deeper knowledge as they push beyond the boundaries of the known into the realm of "what if." In Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, he suggests that "it is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call commonplace and to re-present them to us in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded." To See: The Mystery of the Binding Threads is a project dedicated to the re-presentation of ideas discovered within quantum physics. It draws inspiration from stories I have both read and written over recent years—narratives centered on characters who discover realms where all things emerge from the Weave, a woven network in constant flux, shaped by human choice. Through written and painted works, I crafted a personal cosmology with the Weave at its center. It highlights the ways in which our sensory experience is limited and speculates on ways in which we can see more. Through the act of creation, we have the ability to reveal these mysterious threads of life and potentially manipulate their pattern. Though other mediums provide entry points for understanding the Weave, this series utilizes my primary medium of painting. The works either visualize elements from the accompanying story or interpret the Weave's impact on real-world experience through symbolism.
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.

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