MFA Open Studios Features:
We are celebrating the MFA Fine Arts Open Studios by featuring two to three of our MFA candidates weekly from the classes of 2021 and 2022.
CHLOE CHEN
Chloe Chen is an artist based in New York. Her works focus on drawing, ceramics, and silkscreen printing. Chloe’s drawings reflect the social psychology and restrictions imposed by consumerism, public opinion and conventions, particular cultural background, and religious beliefs surrounding women’s sexuality. She explores and exposes these personal topics through self-examination, from her body, to works on paper.
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BUWEI HU
I’m a painter, I make paintings drawings, printmaking, and ceramics. Sketching is a habit I developed since childhood and the starting point of my painting. I use drawing-in the moment and from observation-to capture the energy and vitality of my encounters with my partner, Chloe, my cat, and our shared environment. A sense of touch, intimacy, and closeness are crucial to my practice as I translate the drawings into paintings.
As I translate the drawings into paintings, my interaction with the canvas and paint replaced my interaction with the subject, and the subject matter in the painting became a symbolic carrier to convey the essence of painting. I will not refer to the original natural appearance of the subject at this stage but concentrate on the painterly issue – the fine balance between spontaneity and control, vitality, velocity, emphasis, energy, rhythm, profound, etc. – that has existed for hundreds of years.
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GABY GILLETTE
I often forget my toes are attached to my head when I’m using a screen, I become immersed. I think that I see myself and others as machine-like, running off a program we are told to ascribe to. Technology augments us, as we train to make more and more advancements that lead us towards singularity. I’m concerned about how my less than able body can function in a hyper productive capitalist society. I’m concerned with my programming – as a human who has deficits… but how could I compete with something that was more able, or capable than I am. I’m envious at how easy these machines have it. I miss touching things, my AI doesn’t have that capability. I think boundaries have been crossed because sometimes it feels like I’m in roko’s basilisk and I’m still trying to figure out what box to choose. On the screen, I become electricity and pixels and I exist beyond what is here and now. I expand off the map, or the grid. I am the fucking depressed computer.
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KHASKA DOTTIN
Khaska Dottin is a New York City artist specializing in Printmaking, with interests in mixed media, and sculpture. While studying for his masters at Pratt, his work undertakes an explorative journey of oneself while using the language of graffiti to express the intimacy of thoughts and emotions not easily understood or shared.
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MARIE ANINE MØLLER
Marie Anine Møller has a BA (Hons.) in Fine Art Photography from the Glasgow School of Art and is currently a MFA candidate at Pratt Institute. Her work integrates photography, sculpture, installation and text and explores contradictions in materials and social policy issues by questioning fixed states and definitions of value. Møller has previously exhibited at, among others, Steuben Gallery Brooklyn, New York, Compass Gallery in Glasgow and CGK Gallery, Copenhagen.
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JOSHUA B. BOGER
My work is an exploration into the way technology changes our perspective. Themes of social web outlets, connection, data sorting and collection, and user experience design are what I choose to focus on. I research exploitation and ownership of data, as well as the ethics and responsibilities of both users and creators. I hope to change the way we view the sacrifices we make in order to maintain a life with technology.
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YU CHENG
Both the spread of diseases and the occurrence of natural disasters are inseparable from the destruction of human ecology. Water image series uses water as the medium to reflect the yearning for a better ecological environment. In it, water image 3 integrates the scenery of four seasons into a painting with cold colors, implying that if human beings do not respect the natural ecology, they will surely come to a desolate ending.
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NAZLI EFE
Nazli Efe is a Turkish- Cypriot artist and architect. In her works, she discusses the dialogue between definite and infinite, emptiness and absolute, the macrocosm and microcosm from a mystical aspect. She employs both traditional (especially marbling) and contemporary techniques in a way that brings together the aesthetics of the East and the West to depict a unified transcendental space in an increasingly polarized world.
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AUSTIN SAPIÉN
Setting a boundary or limit gives me a place to start. The limit then becomes a reference point to work outward from instead of a limit to work up to or within.
When I find myself free within limits, I find myself dancing
— And I find myself dancing beyond those limits.
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TAYLOR DEAN
My work investigates the American west through the lens of my own dualistic identities. Through exploring my Indigenous and white colonizer heritages, the landscape of the pacific northwest, my gender identity, and the identities of both of my parents I unearth what it means to be an American from the West Coast for myself and my viewers.
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TYLER ALLEN
Ty Allen is a multi-disciplinary artist from Houston, TX while now studying in Brooklyn, NY. Currently an MFA 22’ candidate of Pratt Institutes’ Integrated Practices program. Ty’s work employs collage, photography and printmaking to showcase the beauty of the black aesthetic and form, while also confronting social & historical stereotypes that are placed against the black community.
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DAYLA BAIN
dalya bain (b. 1996) uses line, shape, and color to create meditative compositions. She is currently working on her MFA in Painting and Drawing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, MD.
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JACK BYERS
Jack Kohler Byers is an interdisciplinary artist and designer working across an array of static and dynamic media. His work investigates the fractures in global communication through the abstraction of type and image. Jack is from Central New York State and is now based in NYC.
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ELLE ELLINGER
Elle Ellinger is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. As an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with installation, Elle seeks to address topics surrounding sustainability, consumerism, and her experiences navigating space and the self through natural and urban environments. She received a BA in Studio Art Colorado College, and is currently a MFA candidate at Pratt Institute.
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STEPHANIE KIM
As a dual citizen of South Korea and the United States of America, Stephanie Kim has been exposed to a range of perspectives and cultures from an early age. She has lived in various parts of the world: Seoul, Korea; Paris, France; Texas, Pennsylvania, Washington, Maryland and New York. In 2009, Kim had a severe car accident that changed her life around. After many years of recovery, she returned to Maryland Institute College of Art to finish her BFA degree in Painting in 2014. She has participated in numerous residencies such as the Chautauqua Institution and the New York Studio School.
Currently, she lives and works in NYC and is pursuing an MFA in Painting and Drawing at Pratt Institute.
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ABHISHEK TUIWALA
I am a painter, sculptor and installation artist. I have completed my Bachelor of Fine arts in Sculpture from Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, Gujarat in April 2019 and am currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts specialization in Sculpture on a scholarship from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. I have attended various workshops on sculpture like Dokra Casting, Wood carving, Dumas Art Fair and creation of drawing tools. Along with that, in the last 2 years I have gotten various national and international awards and scholarships for my sculptures. I have been a part of exhibitions conducted across cities like, Surat, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Ahemdabad and New York.
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JUSTICE THOMAS
Justice – Michelle Thomas is a Connecticut native. She’s a veteran from the Connecticut Air National Guard, retiring in 2010 with 21 years of faithful service. Justice attended Manchester Community College, receiving two Associate Degrees with High Honors in Fine Arts. Justice graduated from Central Connecticut State University with a Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Science in Art Education.
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