Morgan Collins

Lesley Art + Design

This work draws viewers into paralleled states of prediction and investigation. Employing strategies of visual promise and optical illusion, these pieces circumvent the desired gratification in our relentless search for reasoning. Dissolving and tangling photographic prints, I probe the impossible stability prophesied in systems of belief. Sourcing images from scientific study, text from revered doctrines, and genetic code, I attempt to see through symbols of assurance, and watch as their certainties evade. In hopes of lifting this mist, we alter ourselves; we squint, look close, listen keenly, or step back, wait, and take in, to make discoveries from details and wholes. Therein, these works examine our anticipation of access, and our labor for clarity.

Sanjé James

Lesley Art + Design

Sanjé James is a twenty-one year old multimedia artist with a proclivity for photography. She is currently working on her BFA in photography at Lesley Art + Design in Massachusetts. Her work focuses on the influences pop culture has on her generation and how she was influenced by it in her upbringing in the suburbs. By working in collage and video. She challenges the viewer to often reflect on the past and how society is constantly changing how we view the world.

Marena Koenka

Clark University

This body of work explores enhancing images through processes that might be thought of as destructive; such as taping, bleaching, and scratching. 35mm negatives lend themselves as a workspace for physical manipulation. The multi-step process of mark making builds layers to add visual complexity, depth, and texture. An intimate relationship with the photograph is created as time is spent physically altering it to create beauty in what most would call mistakes. The idea that a negative is fragile and a print can easily be ruined by dust, a scratch, exposure to a foreign substance, or improper application of a developer is examined.

Vanessa Leroy

MassArt

Beyond being an avenue to externalize the internal, photography is a powerful tool for responsible representation, and I aspire to capture people in an honest and illuminating way. Lately, I have been making portraits that parallel the way I navigate through the difficult emotions I’ve been going through, and display how it’s a series of standstills and awakenings. During this part of my journey, I am being led away from the melancholy I was sitting in for many years and I would like to revel in the ways that pain and hardship have strengthened my heart and allowed me to open up in ways I had never imagined I would. It comes naturally to me to use nature to address these inner changes, because that is where I tend to gain the most clarity and feel most at ease and connected to myself. I’m inspired by the way that nature works together and coexists to survive. I like to find ways to intersect environmental portraits with domestic spaces and other interiors that have meaning to me. These images are being seen through the lens of a young black woman, and in my work I would also like to more directly address this aspect of myself and how it affects my emotional experience. Overall, I hope to make images that create worlds that people feel as if they can enter and draw from, as well as provide a look inside of an experience that they may not personally recognize.

Nina Mollo

Lesley Art + Design

Growing up, the domestic became a transitional landscape – as a result, I questioned the soundness of walls built around me. Discovering the tension that lies among interior and exterior landscapes has allowed me to reflect on these insecurities of space through moments of careful observation. This work mirrors my feelings of instability and impermanence.

By harnessing light and constructing scenes to perform tension among the domestic landscape, this work allows me to focus on the reclamation of these instances where I feel unarmed and out of control, catching myself oscillating between states of perception and recognition. 

Scott Offen

MassArt

Is it possible to know another? Can we see another’s vantage point through their eyes? On a hike? Metaphorically? Ontologically? 

I make portraits of my wife, Grace. We work together: Sometimes I direct from behind the camera. Sometimes she directs from in front of the camera. Sometimes we’re mad. It’s like a photographic game of tennis. These portraits are an exploration of the mystery and difficulty of knowing another as well as oneself.

Samson Pojdl

Emerson College

This project explores how we confront our own annihilation, or, more specifically, the process we go through to accept death as a terminus to our experience of life. The unanswerable dilemma makes it easy to ignore, and, thus, it becomes a matter of social taboo. On the other hand, humanity’s constant search for purpose reflects a bid for control and authority—in minute and overt ways—to coat the fear that life can be perpetually fraught with, but there is no authority more immovable than death. What would it mean to face this feeling of dread underlying the facade we’ve constructed, out of necessity, in hopes that we may accept and share our fears with more meaningful reciprocity?

Makayla Sullivan

Lesley Art + Design

My work negotiates the way our identities have been imagined and shaped by societal interpretations and celebrates the idea that identity is not a fixed state of being, but rather in a constant flux. I am interested in how we perform outside of binaries that limit our expressions of identity, in order to feel comfortable in our own skin. Within my work, I utilize the aesthetic of fashion photography as a language to unveil how much pleasure and detachment fashion can give us. Through gesture, gaze, and saturated hues, I photograph various people, including myself, performing different modes of their identities in a utopian-like world in which I created. I long to understand how people interpret their sense of self in a world where they are bombarded with messaging that disrupts our understanding of the many ways a person can be a human.

Gia Williams

Lesley Art + Design

When I was four years old, my mother ended her own life. Now alone, my father and I moved from our old house - where my mother had passed - into a new house in southern Massachusetts. Attempting to reduce the amount of sudden changes taking place, my dad kept the majority of my mother’s possessions and even began collecting things that she would have liked. To this day, my house is filled with beanie babies, Catholic icons, and old photographs my mother took of me before her passing. By re-engaging with the past and analyzing the present I hope to grow closer to my mother and better understand how people try to preserve the past through objects.

Ziyang Xiang

Boston College

After transferring from University of Minnesota to Boston College, I had mixed feelings with these two places and my memories keep haunting me. Sometimes, memories of Minnesota will suddenly appear in my mind like you are catching the next train, putting your credit card in the ticket machine and suddenly noticing the empty wheelchair on your left. Sometimes those memories are like encountering a bunch of balloons randomly when you hurry to the next meeting. Those moments constantly remind me I am no longer there but I was there once. Trying to understand the haunting in my mind, I took a trip back to Minnesota, revisiting the “good old days.” During that short trip, I collected some photographs in conjunction with the photographs I took in Boston and created this body of work about “Memory.”

Olivia Hawes

University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Over the last couple of years, I’ve collected countless shopping lists found on the floors at Costco, where I work, that are otherwise discarded. After initially discarding them, I decided to collect them in hopes of finding a way to repurpose them; originally I focused on the items on the list, but after considerable thought, I began to imagine the person behind each list. I took into account the items on the list, the handwriting, and what media the list was written on. Based on the character I created off of each list, I designed an environment to further portray these individuals. My ultimate goal is to reimagine these disposable shopping lists and give them a new life, allowing the viewer to determine an identity based off of the details in each scene. Even with little information to go on, I am still able to collect many ideas about the person behind the list, simply based on their consumption and buying habits. 

Aleda Kirstein

University of Vermont

Through photography I have grown interested in holes. Holes can be contradictory—they have the suggestion of leading somewhere, a portal, or leading nowhere, a dead end. They can be a portrayal of the internal, or they can act to emphasize the external. Holes can let light in or can drown light out. Holes can be window-like and in this way camera-like. Exploring holes through photograms seemed like a logical transgression, light passing through a lens, screen, or flash holds a hole-light relation in itself. Holes bore the emergence of a wider exploration in my photographic practice.Most recently I’ve been exploring the photographic document. Using my iPhone screen as a portal, I’ve been creating photograms of my peers’ Instagram accounts. In doing so I explore modes of communication, how the spread of social media and digital reticulation affects the ways we connect and individuals and in masses.

Ethan Lassey

University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

To elicit a sense of guiding hand, I utilize scale and visible construction within these photographs to create an atmosphere of a doll house or film set; doing so to allude to a greater power or force that controls the content of these scenes. When making these images, isolation and loneliness became key themes. The lack of human presence within these spaces become a surrogate, with the objects that remain within them also becoming a surrogate character. While some objects feel as though they belong, others are placed there to offset expectations. Within this series, surreal elements inspired by the iconography of witch trials in 1600s New England, compare this contemporary setting with a time period known for its paranoia.

Caterina Maina

MassArt

I see the earth being tormented, with not enough done to protect it and the beings on it. It is said that we are coming to a point of no return, that what we do now decides our future. Through imagery and personal thoughts, I explore these feelings I have, as well as many other people my age. With a mixture of abstraction and artificial lighting, I transform the tone of landscapes, areas, and people within these images to produce an uneasiness within the viewer. The use of the figure in this work is important as a representation of the generation I am in, but also used in looking at the tension of the body in relation to our physical and social environment by physically connecting a figure to nature, or placing them amongst the landscape in an unsettling way. My work examines the time period we are in, responding to the strain placed upon us, but also looks back on the past and the warnings we dismissed to no fault but our own.

Kevin Moore

MassArt

Inspired by film and societal constructs of femininity, my work is an exploration on the formation of character, narrative, and identity. Drawing inspiration from domestic space, I construct each image in order to direct my own narrative. These photographs are a world created to speak freely without interruption. By utilizing the past--both historic and cultural references--I am able to juxtapose queer existence with classic Americana. Although my work is made up predominantly of self-portraits, my goal is for viewers to consider their own responses to queerness as they see it. By applying my own identity and queer experience, I hope to engage the viewer in an unfamiliar set of circumstances.

The photographs in my series ask: can we live comfortably outside the norm? How does this character challenge the societal ideas of masculinity? Driven by emotion and intuition, I utilize melodrama to discuss ideas of visibility and invisibility, what is acknowledged and what is not-- questions that remain relevant in today’s politics.

Tomi Oyinloye

Boston College

Infinite combinations of beliefs, backgrounds, and interests have become the driving force behind my work. Every individual I meet teaches me something new about myself and the world, and I channel and challenge these perspectives through my art. Using bright colors, distortion, and visual manipulation, I portray the complexity and confusion of identity in all its forms - besides obvious physical differences. I create images to magnify personal diversity in a most visually appealing way. These pieces serve as a challenge to everyone - do you see yourselves in these images in any way? How can you be more open to the nuances of identity that make us? Allow yourself fall into the details of the images, to release all preconceived notions and expectations, and to let beauty take its place.

Harry Scales

New England School of Photography

The Clover’s Shadow is a body of work made on the streets of Dorchester, Roxbury & Mattapan; neighborhoods home to a large number of Boston’s citizens of color; home of my mother, father, sisters & now my son. During my time making this work I considered what it meant to live here, to be from this place, to find myself wandering down Bowdoin Street in the morning after most had gone off on the bus or train to work.

The images are made during Boston’s colder months when the streets grow quiet & the occurrence of people becomes less frequent, leaving room to appreciate the structures & spaces which reveal as much as the people themselves.

The Clover’s Shadow is a quiet song written on the backstreets of a loud town; it is my song. It is a song of questions found & shared, grappling with the place you’re from & your own identity in the shadow of a city’s beloved heritage.

Nicholas van der Wal

Lesley Art + Design

Throughout the last century, the world has changed at an unprecedented rate. Climate change and a growing population have driven the agricultural industry to innovate and adapt. Current technological advancements form strange and unfamiliar hydroponic farms creating artificial horizons across the landscape. The notion of a farmer shifts similarly, incorporating scientific roles into automated, climate controlled spaces that are unresponsive to the external world—leading me to question whether someday automation will lead to the independent cultivation of our food without any human interaction. Investigating the future of my food sources and their impact on the land, I examine various farms throughout New England. Regardless of extreme weather, each constructed environment remains constant: from shipping container to a greenhouse, to the countryside to an urban warehouse. Within these spaces, vegetation is idealized in a dirt-less climate in which nutrient-rich water substitutes soil and LED lights artificially substitute the sun. In this work, I observe the shift in the agricultural industry and the perceived sustainability and economics of these hydroponic farms for generations to come. I consider how they may influence trade as they grow crops in places where they wouldn't otherwise sustain life. Consequently, having real benefits to those who live in food deserts and extreme climates providing access to safe local produce for all in a time when we are being affected by a pandemic.

Xuemeng Zhang

Clark University

Imagination does not always reflect reality. However, imagined outcomes can induce real emotions. Anxiety in particular is an emotion based on anticipation of what may occur, rather than what is currently real. In this series, the careful arrangement of objects reinterprets my imagined triggers of anxiety in a whimsical way and poses a question about using the power of imagination to overcome anxiety. Seeing inanimate objects as silent narrators, I use them to visualize the intangible and share hidden feelings. During the photographic process, the still-life table turns into a mysterious stage, objects become interdependent emotional creatures, the fragile gains a sense of stability, and the imagined blurs with the real.