Tenacity, Order & Disorder, Lucy Manalo

CGU MFA Theses

My work is about empowerment. The idea of using metal comes from my past experience as a welder/machinist in the Air Force. Metal is a tough medium and I believe it conveys the themes of strength and tenacity through it’s materiality.

Capacity, Rachel Baydian

CGU MFA Theses

This Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition by Rachel Baydian is an installation of ceramic sculptures that function as a stand-in for the human body, touching on relationship, interconnectivity, and imperfection. Using abstracted forms that derive from the earth, these art objects are sculpted to mimic nature and its processes. The work highlights our human connection to nature as integrative and vital. Through experience and tactility, there is more of an awareness of space and heightened senses. The work taps into the awe and seduction of the mystery of nature through seemingly ordinary elements of the physical world.

Carbon 碳, Mengyuan Li

CGU MFA Theses

Death is the one certainty in life. This fascinates me and I cannot stop thinking about it. When it comes to life and death, the cemetery is a more realistic place than heaven and hell, and it is also a place to feel life and death more directly. A simple gravestone separates life from death. Cemeteries let people come face to face with life, death, and even love.

In a cemetery, there is a tranquility that is different from the city or nature. In a cemetery, people take off their masks and face their emotions. I believe that when we …

Threaded, Madeline Arnault

CGU MFA Theses

This group of works is taken from my drawing practice. I have always been fascinated by the variety of line and color you can play with on fabric. For that reason each piece in this exhibition is image and line centric. I love the way a fabric can blend from color to color in the weave and yet contrast so sharply with a line placed on top. These works are a testament to that love.

Zooairyland- Xinjie Yin Mfa Thesis Show, Xinjie Yin

CGU MFA Theses

During the process of discovering myself in my art world, I have determined to use cuteness as a way to express my worldview, values, and experiences. Cuteness is my own philosophy and language in the interpersonal communication. I intend to make cuteness meaningful to me as well as to the rest of the world. I believe cuteness contains a power to bring people back to their original simplicity regardless of their age, it is the idea of innocence. Cuteness is like a shield for me to protect myself from the tough, scary and crazy reality; and it is a positive …

Fugitive Fragment, Diana Campuzano

CGU MFA Theses

My work explores the fugitive beauty around us and tries to capture and embody it. For my work IC5070 I began with an image of a nebula IC5070, I created a work that hung from the ceiling and was 27 feet square and hung down 8 feet to just above the viewers. I explore the micro and the macro worlds with many of my works crossing back and forth between

Frankenstein's Onion, Chien Tai

CGU MFA Theses

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.

Kimono, Elizabeth D. Hoffman

CGU MFA Theses

Globalization opens up opportunities for the international community to push for freedom of expression. It is precisely because the history of kimonos is a multi-cultural one, invented by the Chinese, then adapted and adopted by the Japanese, then altered by Western colonialists and changed as it permutated from the aristocracy to the middle class and to laborers, that I felt that it was relevant to today and the cross-cultural influences of globalization. This summer, I purchased two authentic Japanese kimonos, (one an everyday cotton one to use as a model for my drawings, and the second, an elaborate silk one …

Lara Salmon, Thesis Statement, Lara Salmon

CGU MFA Theses

My art brings together materials and ideas inspired by personal experience that do not usually exist side by side. My body is the primary mechanism with which I make work, incidentally making me the subject matter of the work. I use my physical self as an instrument to coalesce and transform other materiality. Through live performance and photographic installations I create tension and balance between crude biology and bright, polished formalism. This body of work focuses on Millennial Feminism and the Middle East.