Garage Sale is a query into our understanding and expectations of the material world. I create curious objects which simultaneously imply utility through their features and form and disrupt assumptions surrounding their use by being functionally useless. By combining familiar materials, forms, and mechanisms, the outcomes appear both functional and confounding. Initial predictions are perverted or left unfulfilled as levers fail to initiate a reaction or containers spill out their contents. The objects solicit viewers to consider their material world and reconsider their expectations.

The transient nature of conversations within family and community contexts belies their profound influence on individual and collective identities. This thesis investigates how art can capture and memorialize the fleeting, everyday conversations shared with loved ones. Family table talks, in particular, shape our lives, influencing our values and relationships. Yet, these pivotal moments often vanish without a trace, leaving only vague impressions. A worn table might evoke memories of past meals and discussions, but it lacks a direct link to any specific, meaningful exchange. My artistic intervention aims to embed subtle reminders of these important talks within key social spaces, transforming them into tangible memorials. This project seeks to contribute to the broader conversation about art's role in preserving cultural memory and fostering community. By transforming daily chats into enduring artifacts, I hope to highlight the significance of these often-overlooked moments.

This thesis explores the phenomena of solitude and self-reflection, particularly focusing on women. Through ceramic sculptures, I capture the essence of quiet, introspective moments, where the figures exist free from the constraints of objectification and external gaze. These sculptures embody a sense of weightlessness, suspended in time, plucked from intimate moments of reflection and thought. The figures are presented as though floating between reality and dream, with a surface that evokes a sense of ambiguity—a dreamlike quality—achieved through the use of milk paint and translucent skin tones that blur the boundary between the tangible and the imagined daydream world.

There were three objects on display in my thesis exhibit at the Dorsky Museum: A Theater A Book A Cross between a Book and a Theater After three years working the presses in the print studio at SUNY new Paltz, I have become attuned to printmaking as a mediated process. The rollers, the press beds, the silkscreen frames, the light tables have all been reminders that many phases separate the artist’s intention from the finished product. Printmaking is a medium in the truest sense, I have found – something that lies between the hand and the artwork – and the more time I have spent in the studio, the more my focus has shifted away from the fine art image as an outcome and towards printmaking itself as a technology. With this appreciation of printmaking not as an autonomous art form but as a medium, I have chosen to direct its myriad capacities towards developing a project in a domain not usually associated with fine art – puppet theater.

Honey is a photographic exploration of the intertwinings of multifaceted relationships through community, acts of care, and unrequited love. This project is about the craving within those relationships and the resentment that can lie underneath; it’s about the push and pull of yearning for place. Honey is a nonlinear narrative that is driven by emotion.

In my paper, I will explore how entropy and accretion serve as catalysts in contemporary painting through Georges Bataille’s concept of l’informe (the formless), first published in 1929 in the Surrealist journal Documents, and further developed by Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois in the 1990s. While entropy—the inevitable dissolution of matter into disorder—and accretion—the gradual accumulation of matter into sedimentary layers—seem antithetical, I will argue that their tension, in relation to l’informe, has played a generative role in art since the birth of Modernism and continues to reverberate in artmaking today. How can painting function both as an indexical mark and as an expressive collaboration with the forces that shape our world and beyond? What slippages, or gaps, remain to be explored by engaging with these phenomena in painting today? Over the course of a month-long residency in Northern Italy, I discovered an unexpected link: dust, as a pervasive, unifying accumulation, and its specific effects on the paintings I made there.

You & I Are Earth is photographic autofiction: a combination of self portraiture and portraiture, real and ephemeral places, actual and imagined events. It is a project about the friendships that mean the world to me, the ways we nourish and adorn our lives, and the spaces we love and lose and recreate together over and over again.

"Beyond Shattered Honor" serves as a tribute to the silenced voices of Iranian women, victims of the brutal practice of "honor" killings. In shadows where men decree death over perceived dishonor, this multidisciplinary installation revives the forgotten, those obscured by family and faith. Combining sculpture, photographs, video, and audio, it brings their stories back to light. It transforms symbols of mourning into a critique of violence, seeking justice through memory and artistic expression. This project creates a sanctuary that merges remembrance with resistance, honoring those who were silenced.

Mi Querencia is a project about my maternal home country of Venezuela. In the summer of 2023, I was able to go to Venezuela for about a month, for the first time since 2016. The reason for the trip was familial: to reunite my scattered, refugee family from Chile and the U.S.A. However, having never been there as an adult, I also sought out what might be a ‘Venezuelan identity’, and was excited to see what new blood — what kinds of culture and activism and liveliness — might still exist under 25 years of oppressive regime.