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SMFA BFA Capstone

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Jack Zhu - I use archival footage, graphic design, screen-captured images, generative models, and filmic techniques to examine how images function as documentation and how they shape what can be remembered. Across my filmography, I return to moments that were never recorded—events and interactions that could not be perceived or preserved at the time. These works act as proxies, constructing images where no documentation exists and questioning what it means to record a place, a relationship, or an event after the fact. In doing so, the work shifts attention from images as evidence to images as constructed and interpretive forms. My iterative process moves between digital and analog systems. Images are first collected and then processed through generative tools to produce sequences that shift or extend the original material. These are combined with archival footage and translated onto 16mm film. As images move across formats, each step alters their meaning, accumulating information while simultaneously losing clarity as documents. Growing up in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southwest China, within minority communities where culture is embedded in everyday routines, has shaped my approach to documentation. I aim to draw attention to how systems of recording often reduce lived experience into simplified or legible forms, especially when detached from the conditions in which those experiences occur. At the core of all my works, whether in installation or theatrical viewing spaces, is a focus on what documentation cannot capture. The work engages with gaps, omissions, and reconstructed moments, asking how images produce knowledge about people and places. Viewers encounter environments that feel familiar but unstable, where images shift, overlap, and resist a single fixed narrative. Photos by Chris Diani for Tufts University @chrisdiani by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Evelyn Yoon - My work is concerned with the interior life of ordinary spaces and the quiet psychological shifts that happen within them. Elsewhere is a multimedia installation that stages a domestic bedroom corner as a site of departure, exploring how the familiar can become a threshold to something beyond itself. The work draws from magic realist narrative traditions, where the impossible does not announce itself but arrives through small, unsettling displacements in everyday life, and from psychological research on escapism as a coping mechanism rooted not in avoidance but in a deeply human need for mental refuge.
The installation presents a vanity surrounded by roses, perfume bottles, and personal objects that construct the illusion of an inhabited interior. At its center, a circular mirror is activated through projection mapping to reveal a moving garden landscape, a forest clearing at dusk where vines spill over the frame, and a single chair sits waiting. Rather than reflecting the room, the mirror opens outward. The boundary between the domestic space and the world beyond it is deliberately blurred, as if the crossing has already begun.
Across my practice in graphic design, digital media, and multimedia installation, I return consistently to the question of how design can create not just something to look at but something to feel. I am interested in spaces where the visual and the psychological meet, where an image or an environment can hold a person in a moment of recognition. Elsewhere extends this into physical space, asking what it means to build a room that lets someone leave it, briefly and safely, without going anywhere at all. Photos by Chris Diani for Tufts University @chrisdiani by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Julia Yoo - Computation theory has long shown that a machine can self-reproduce, provided its definition acts as both its genetic code and its instruction manual. While modern technology has a demonstrated power to hurt and exploit, I believe that with more imaginative and curious thought, it has the power to discover and heal.   My lineage has always been full of blanks. By blending the power of modern AI with limited familial testimony and laborious craft, I examine the way relationships of power and desire in society drive our relationships with technology. Gender/race-based violence, historical/linguistic erasure, and chronic loneliness are just a few undercurrents revealed by my explorations. Using custom models far from their intended purpose with forced ambiguity allows me to peek into the cultural memory that is residual in the technology. Images of war planes, rolling mountains and flowers generated from my grandparent’s names help to unravel the mystery hidden behind silence and language barriers.    This process is self-critical, and often acknowledges the narcissism, gluttony, and addictive behaviours associated with all of these technologies. Yet through this practice of world-building, I have found a place where absurdity, lack of precedent and rapid transformation bring me comfort and joy in my identity and my lineage. I give technology my own genetic code and instruction manual, and hope that it can help reproduce a version of self that is clearer, more forgiving, and embodying of the complexities of identity. Photos by Chris Diani and Peter Gumaskas @chrisdiani @pgumaskas by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Jiu Yi - My work honors the ordinary objects of the home — the easily overlooked things that persist around us in quiet fragments. I am drawn to what is most readily forgotten: domestic items that appear insignificant at first glance, yet carry the texture of memory, routine, and presence. I think of the home as an archive of living, a space where meaning accumulates in modest corners and even the smallest things hold unexpected emotional weight. These partial glimpses reflect the way memory itself operates — not as a continuous whole, but as scattered details, isolated impressions, fleeting recollections. A single household object can become a vessel for intimacy, absence, habit, or care, suggesting an entire emotional world while remaining materially simple. What interests me is the tension between scale and significance: how something physically small can hold something much larger than itself. This relationship is echoed in my formal choices. I make my etching plates deliberately small and place them within a generous field of paper. By allowing the image to occupy only a fraction of the page, I emphasize its quiet presence and ask the viewer to lean in, to look more carefully, and to reconsider what might otherwise be dismissed. The surrounding space does not diminish the image; it gives it room to breathe and resonate. Through this work, I want to honor the subtle power of ordinary things. These objects may be humble and easily forgotten, but they are never empty. They store traces of lived experience and remind us that memory often resides not in monumental moments but in the small things we carry with us and leave behind. Photos by Chris Diani and Peter Gumaskas @chrisdiani @pgumaskas by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Hanfang Xue - Xue Hanfang's practice explores the shifting relationship between the human body and the constructed spaces that frame contemporary life. Working across painting, printmaking, and spatial experimentation, she considers how architecture, interiors, and everyday environments shape gestures, emotions, and a sense of belonging. Her work attends to the tension between physical presence and the less visible structures that influence how we move and feel. She is also interested in the quiet repetition embedded in daily life, where familiar actions can carry a subdued sense of melancholy. Her paintings often unfold in a muted, grey-leaning palette that softens the boundary between figure and space. Forms emerge gradually, as if suspended within a thin atmosphere, making the image difficult to grasp at first glance. These subject matters remain unsettled and invite the viewer to look more closely and complete what is seen through their own perception. Photos by Chris Diani for Tufts University @chrisdiani by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Elika Wilson - I work primarily in oil paint on wood surfaces, as I am drawn to the temporal quality of wood grain. My art explores memory and cultural inheritance: how identity is passed down, accumulated, and worn into the surface of things. To paint something slowly and carefully, for me, is an act of honoring and preserving it. I use the process of creation to connect with my heritage, and much of my practice stems from explorations of family archives. My most recent work was inspired by my family’s ties to the New England seafood trade and looks at Menemsha, a small historic fishing village on Martha’s Vineyard. Its fishing shacks are shaped by generational labor; their interiors home to accumulated tools, keepsakes, photographs, and make shift repairs. With the local industry in slow decline, I am interested in how these places persist through tradition and inherited knowledge. Photos by Chris Diani for Tufts University @chrisdiani by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Izzy Ward - My practice seeks to emphasize the intersections of art and science as I have experienced them during my time as a Combined Degree student in Art and Astrophysics at Tufts. As a child, I was fascinated by space and knew I wanted to learn all I could about it, but the complexity of in-depth educational resources made it difficult to pursue that interest until I reached college. Knowing not everyone has that opportunity, I intend to use my work to discuss exciting aspects of science in more accessible ways. From scientific history to present-day discoveries, I want to get the public as excited about science as I am. I primarily work in illustration, fibers, or a combination of the two. As a child, illustration was the most accessible medium to me, and I wish to show my appreciation for that by continuing to incorporate it into my work. At the same time, I have more recently come to love fibers particularly in the context of science art. In the sciences, I have at times felt the sentiment from the community that in order to succeed I must reject femininity. As a result, it has become special to me to utilize fibers, which have historically been belittled due to an association with femininity, in my artistic discussion of astrophysics. Overall, my art serves to prove not only that art and science are interconnected, but also as a reminder that you do not have to compromise your own identity to succeed. Photos by Chris Diani for Tufts University @chrisdiani by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Allen Wang - I depict landscapes I have not returned to since childhood, where memory and imagination begin to converge. The Yellow River series is an ongoing body of work that investigates place, memory, and identity rooted in the Loess Plateau of northwestern China, the landscape of my earliest memories. The land there is soft and unstable, constantly collapsing under erosion. Hills are carved into ravines; cliffs slip downward year after year; villages quietly disappear. Through layered, textured mark-making and an earthy, weathered palette, I ask what it means to carry the stories of a land that continues to shift, one I can no longer physically touch. This project is grounded in my relationship with charcoal. Unlike brushes or pens, charcoal resists control; it's dusty, unstable, and deeply unpredictable. I grind it into powder and apply it with sponges and hand-held tools, where each gesture reacts to pressure, moisture, and the heat of my palm. Through dense blacks against exposed whites, I build surfaces that feel unstable and physically charged, mirroring the vulnerability of the land itself. Over time, I realized I had created my own Plateau: viewers approach the drawings carefully, unsure whether they might disturb the surface by simply being near it, or be stained by the charcoal themselves, often holding their breath as they lean in. To locate textures reminiscent of the Loess Plateau, I traveled across New England, studying waterways, reservoirs, dams, and riverbeds. Being in these places allowed memory and distance to filter through my lived experience. In Vermont, where ongoing drought has thinned the water, even near waterfalls, exposed riverbeds reveal the changes underneath. Rather than collapse, I felt endurance. In Held in Pressure, I depict layers of erosion, traces of history, and the accumulation of pressure and change. Meanwhile, violent surges pulse through hidden urban sewage channels. Together, these experiences push the work beyond a search for remembered terrain toward broader questions of land transformation, ecological instability, and human intervention. Photos by Chris Diani and Peter Gumaskas @chrisdiani @pgumaskas by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Broden Walsh - In a looping knot we always find joy, something familiar, hair to braid, a photo to send, an unending, un-beginning love that sends telepathy, wavelength, sound file, snail mail, hearth throbbing, outwards always. As a child, I believed that the trees in the forest walked around at night. My work is born from a lasting wonderment and continued conviction that there is something more than the plainly visible. Which is applied to the work by acknowledging the agency of materials and by referencing varied spiritual practices. Through sculpture that utilizes craft mediums, the work is both imbued with the charge of my bodily actions and is approachable to the human body. The body becomes one of the agental mediums alongside wood, metal or stone. These materials are activated through time-based processes; a burning candle, dripping water, the rusting of metal. Engagement with the work is subverted by encouraging viewer interaction, balancing the sculpture between art object and domestic object. Slowness or awareness is often required from the viewer, positioning the work against the scramble of modern life. My process integrates the sourcing of found materials with research on cultural and spiritual ceremony. Reused objects bring their past lives to the work while understanding sociological history informs how my experience can be made universal. Any material or belief that appears throughout time and place can tell us something about humanity. I am particularly interested in materials with interpretations rooted in both the environment and ritual, such as ash. Ash is not neutral, some might even call it provocative. It is present post-destruction. It is material un-done. Large amounts of ash can be associated with explosions or forest fires or war. All of which are unsettlingly familiar today. However, the nutrient-dense quality of ash makes it life giving. Ash is at once post-destruction and pre-becoming.  Aren’t we all? Through the cultivation of slowness and utilization of minimally processed materials, my work challenges the mainstream; maintaining a quiet strength. Photos Chris Diani and Peter Gumaskas for Tufts University @chrisdiani @pgumaskas by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Elliot Turner - My work explores the intersection of disability studies and social justice through the lens of family origin and remembrance. Working in hand-built ceramics and through glaze chemistry, I have created two fountains, one representing the future and ourselves and the other representing the destruction of one’s past. Across these sculptural pieces, I use the form and function of a fountain to question what protest can look like when traditional modes of resistance are inaccessible. Flowing water becomes both a metaphor for persistence and interruption mirroring the experience of navigating identity through the current climate in the United States. Influenced by Sick Woman Theory, I consider how people that cannot participate in conventional protest are often excluded from dominant able-bodied ideas of traditional protest. This work responds to Johanna Hedva’s question: How can you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?. In response, I use remembrance as an act of defiance. I invite viewers to add to the piece by writing down a small detail of their family history and adding it to the piece, to pollute the fountain with remembering where we come from and to insist on carrying that history forward to resist erasure in a society that often devalues anything but sanitized American culture. The two pieces embody both the destruction and reconstruction of identity. Materials and textures suggesting erosion, and fragmentation, while color and form point toward regrowth and transformation. This tension reflects the ongoing process of identity- making shaped by both personal and collective histories. In this work, protest is quiet but insistent. It lives in the act of continuing and remembering. By putting these ideas within sculpture, I aim to create a space where vulnerability and resistance coexist where decay is not an end, but part of an ongoing cycle of regrowth. Photos by Chris Diani for Tufts University @chrisdiani by @smfacapstone
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4 months ago
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Navi Tshibambe - My work explores the fragile, often elusive nature of belonging— what it means to create space for oneself in the absence of a place that feels fitting. Drawing from childhood memories, family narratives, and Congolese folklore, I reimagine and reconstruct the idea of home as something fluid. The vast sky and deep sea become both metaphor and material—expanses that simultaneously connect and divide my motherland, Kinshasa, Congo, and the place I was raised, Ipswich, Massachusetts. These immense fields of blue function as thresholds that mark separation, and by dissolving and merging these blues, I attempt to bridge these distant landscapes, forming a sacred, imagined space where these two homes can coexist. Photos by Chris Diani and Peter Gumaskas for Tufts University @chrisdiani @pgumaskas by @smfacapstone
9
4 months ago
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Emma Thomas - Over the past 5 generations, my family has lived along a stretch of wooded land on the coast of Beverly, MA. My paintings are inspired by the wild adventures of growing up on the North Shore of Massachusetts, which never lose their spark. I have grown up hearing stories of my mom, grandparents, and great-grandparents exploring tidal pools, galavanting through the woods, and spending their days under the sun at the beach. The recent loss of my grandfather has inspired me to depict scenes in which we have lived parallel lives. While we didn’t experience our young adult lives together, I invite my audience to imagine the activities, relationships, and life that flourished within my landscape paintings for generations. My family’s beach and paths through the woods represent an unwavering capsule of memories, love, and growth. This beautiful haven has nurtured our belonging and connection to one another. I use loose, playful mark-making techniques, coupled with vibrant colors, to capture the full sensory experience of the landscape. Loose splatters of white paint echo the sea spray. The 3D leaves were applied with a palette knife, imitating the feel of a tree’s canopy blocking the suns rays. I built homemade wood frames decorated with found objects from the beach. The shells, rocks, and seaglass ground the piece in the natural landscape depicted. The process of painting my home, along with the recent loss of my grandfather, has brought up mixed feelings of joy and grief. Over the years, I have watched as older generations pass on, family disperses, and land is sold. I’ve watched as the landscape begins to change, as it’s no longer owned and preserved within our family. As pieces of land are sold and developed, I hope that my oil paintings can hold the legacy of the land and our family that has begun to disappear. Photos by Chris Diani @chrisdiani by @smfacapstone
7
4 months ago
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