Browse previous Graduate Research Grant projects below.
Chrystine Rayburn
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: Entitled “where’s the beast”, my thesis will engage in a series of collective sound and movement practices to harness the tones and timbres of VCU’s Siegel Center chiller system, culminating in an audio-visual installation at The Anderson. The project explores how the multi-sensory exchange of listening, breathing, and moving with the ceaseless voice of a building’s circulatory system creates an entanglement of body and infrastructure.
Leilei Xia
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: “Expect” (working title) is a speculative sci-fi documentary film and performance project that explores the hidden details behind the tropes of how disabilities are represented in science fiction. I ask people who are interested in sci-fi while also influenced by different kinds of disabilities, to imagine themselves as a science fiction character, or a character in another dimension or alien civilization. I will ask various detailed questions around accessibility of their world, and film the conversation in VR.
Jesse Hoyle
Photography + Film
Proposal: Conceptually, my thesis titled How To Forget, explores the push and pull of my own eidetic memory (a near photographic memory, and one that causes the rememberer to relive the memory as if they were experiencing it all over again) with the experience of watching my close family deal with diseases that are robbing them of all of their own memories.
Mary Catherine Langston
Art History
Proposal: I will travel to Paris, France, to pursue research for my Qualifying Paper, Nadar’s Expression Studies of Charles Deburau as Pierrot. The primary goal of this research trip is to view ten out of the fourteen photographs from Nadar’s expression studies of the mime Charles Deburau as Pierrot.
Taehee Whang
Graphic Design
Proposal: Taehee Whang is a Korean American digital artist and designer whose work explores themes related to the fluidity of the queer body, kinship, and grief with 3D modeling and publishing. They implement digital fabrication technology such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC machines, as a publishing tool that could broaden the definition of circulation in the digital age. They are a founder for the publishing initiative anti-bone (2023-ongoing) and Hyperlink Press (2018-2022).
Paz Sher
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: My thesis exhibition will merge our extended material culture and technological reality while questioning geopolitical infrastructures and the relations between human beings and the land. Three spatial gestures will structure the space: An inclined plane as a section of landscape, a waterfall with a shallow pond, and ‘parachutes’ descending from the ceiling. By embedding objects and a variety of materials, I will create an alternate dream-site that fosters a contemplative space of processing the reality suggested by the contemporary moment.
Rabeeha Adnan
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: My MFA thesis exhibition seeks to investigate social institutions and the power dynamics that support them. I explore these concerns in my practice by orchestrating choreographies of power around objects (with speculative agency and consciousness), understanding sonic agency and rethinking ways in which bodies encounter my work. Projection, objects, sound and text constitute a significant part of my practice. While different bodies of work appear separate and contained in their own world, they exist in tandem with one another.
Alexis Mabry
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: Alexis E. Mabry is an interdisciplinary artist born in Dallas, Texas. Through observation, and anecdote, Mabry draws from personal experiences and examines nuance in counterculture archetypes she finds close to home: punks, metal heads, goths, skateboarders and bicycle moto-cross (BMX) riders. Using a multitude of traditional art languages and installation Mabry builds fully immersive experiences that offer a new perspective into these subcultural worlds revealing societally constructed mystifications and contrasts surrounding these counterculture participants and their relative environments.
Pia Bakala
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: My work incorporates play, fantasy, and self actualization via painting, sculpture, and video. In recent works, I explore embodiment / disembodiment, taste, and horror. These concepts center on The Sims 4, a gaming platform through which I experiment with world building.
Gilad Leiba
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: I investigate the notion of vacancy through careful reading of Kabbalic and philosophical texts that deal with solitude, individuation and companionship. For my thesis show, I wish to present a two-fold exhibition: first, a painterly body of work which will consist of pieces made mostly on found objects and ready-made. Second, a documentary project, _AirbnBirkenau,_ about the Airbnb industry in the Polish city of Oświęcim, which lies minutes from Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp.
Arghavan Heydareslam
Photography + Film
Proposal: My work is a film with a mixed-media approach, including Collage/paper cut-out animation and live-action. It is a visual poem based on my journal writing in a specific period of my life when I was away from home and looking back. My goal is to depict very internal emotional experiences.
Joya Mandel-Assael
Art Education
Proposal: It is vital that educators have tangible and engaging resources that facilitate de-colonial education, and it is imperative that Jewish communities encourage meaningful, anti-Zionist connections to land and place. I am creating resources that are approachable for diverse K-12 educators who may be hesitant to broach the subject of Palestine/Israel in schools, as well as for a multicultural Jewish audience who likely have intricate relationships with the country of Israel and the land of Palestine.
Bradley Sinanan
Graphic Design
Proposal: This project will utilize video, performance, sound, and digitally-rendered 3D sets to reflect on the relationship between colonial archives, oral history, and the diasporic imaginary. Utilizing an approach of “critical fabulation” and speculative fiction which pulls from the writings/theories of Saidiya Hartman and N.K. Jemisen respectively, I will develop a series of videos which will be set in a speculative island culture meant to mimic the Indo-Caribbean diaspora.
Shannon Kurzyniec
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Toxic Dose will be a site-specific immersive installation, incorporating elements such as sound, sculptures, and objects. Constructing a monumental representation of blister packs. This monument symbolizes the immense influence Americans have bestowed upon the pharmaceutical industry within our healthcare system. Just as the erection of national monuments over the course of centuries has given rise to both revered and contentious symbols we either embody or protest against, the pharmaceutical industry occupies a distinct position within American society.
Yifei Kong
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: My thesis research is based on my cultural background and history as a Chinese woman. I now explore the control and restraint of women from ancient times and discuss feminism. I want to show women’s freedom through my thesis work and free myself from these constraints to show female beauty and personality.
Yuan Xin
Graphic Design
Proposal: Echoes is an interactive space that delves into Chinese folklore, exploring the complexities of female identity across historical contexts. Guided by two scripts participants are randomly assigned roles with unique personalities and relationships. Players collaborate, follow the storyline, and uncover the truth through clues, sound, video, prints, and sculptures. Echoes provide insights into the impact of patriarchal structures on female identity, offering a deeper understanding of historical effects on gender, identity, and societal norms.
Chelsea Rowe
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: I probe how objects act as intermediaries between people. These explorations reflect on the delicate navigation that happens when we intertwine our lives with others. My curiosities lie in the fuzzy aura of human life that I imagine surrounds materials. Do our materials possess life or do we imbue and inject the materials in our world with personalities reflective of ourselves?
Kai Chu Chuang
Graphic Design
Proposal: *World Wide Walk* is a series of browser-based works exploring the concept of “What if websites could walk?” The project incorporates websites, browser games, interactive devices, sculptures, and site-specific installation to create an environment that fosters tangible memories and conscious interactions within the digital realm. Six computers will serve as hosts for the websites, positioned throughout the Anderson Gallery on separate floors and diverse locations. Some stations will have specialized navigating tools, while one station will include a screen sculpture.
Clara Cruz
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: My work spans painting, sculpture and immersive installation to address memory, memorials and the relational nature of meaning within my experience as a mixed-race Chicana from New England. Recently, I have investigated the process of re-remembering a moment until it turns into a talisman, distinct from the original memory. My work is often built up and worn away so that it breaks into moments of visual static and brown noise.
Abigail Ogle
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Through simulated wind, the science of breathing, and silk, Metronome, an exploration of breath, will make visible the inner landscape. This large-scale installation will manifest as a 660 square foot piece of silk that is manipulated using the wind from fans. The viewer will be invited to engage with the installation by walking on top of it, thus creating billowing landscapes that undulate around them. The work will interact with a “score” in which a series of fans will be coded to evoke different types of breath that will be visually and auditorily represented.
Aida Lizalde Rios
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: My studio research began as an investigation of identity in relation to geographical and socio-political situations. The body and the consciousness are the focal points of unfolding of these inquiries. My thesis will be composed of two installations interpreting conscious and subconscious metabolizing (or failing to metabolize) data like sensory data, emotional, nutritional, and environmental factors, and social codes. Through materials like porous low-fired clay, fibers, and found objects.
Nyasha Chigama
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Nyasha Chigama is a second-year Graduate student from Zimbabwe, she has been creating work at VCU in Richmond for almost two years now. Her body of work involves the use of different types of clay as mediums of expression and research. She explores ideas of transformative labor and reclaims agency by subverting the traditional function and aesthetic of clay vessels.
Fanxi Sun
Photography + Film
Proposal: Consisting of single-channel film projection, multi-channel soundscape, and live performance, my thesis project deconstructs individual cinematic elements and reconstitutes them both on screen and in real-time. It experiments with the concepts of time and space, and investigates the idea of subjective metaphoric reality with bodily movements and interactions. By breaking from the traditional experience of a silver-screen in a black box, this project aims to provide an immersive visual and sonic experience while eliciting the viewers’ active engagement.
Natalia Andrea Mejía Murillo
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: The project is based on an investigation and production of astronomical images, mapping, and data. I will materialize the images through the use of digital and analog engraving techniques. The result will be an installation made up of multiple parts: large-format prints, printed on different supports; in addition to pieces in glass and wood. The engraved surfaces (wood. plexiglass) will be printed on supports such as paper, bioplastic and bioceramic.
Kaitlyn Paston
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: My research explores relationships between images and the body through sensory experience, performance, and moving image. I primarily present my work as installations of projection and sound. I begin by filtering ideas through the body with movement, mark-making, and vocalizing, then edit in an ongoing process of collage. The thesis project will bring several image making modes into relationship with one another in an installation to deepen understanding of different languages of images. I am working with 16mm film and cyanotypes to study the literal relationship between light, time and image. I am also researching ways to access embodied knowledge through animation and performance.
Katherine Thompson
Photography + Film
Proposal: Jamaica: REINSTATED” is a visual exploration that connects missing links while finding patterns and parallels within the immigrant family and others. I plan on sparking the conversation of the universal message of a shared interconnectedness with the immigrant experience that potentially could be borderless and blur the lines of what constitutes a dual transnational identity, as well as a social critique of the American and Caribbean (Jamaican) material space.
Ali Kaeini
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: This body of work borrows from Irano-Islamic architecture, decorative arts, and crafts that have been displaced from their origin into the museum context. I use these ornamental objects as an allegory for the displacement experienced by the contemporary Iranian diaspora. I recreate decorative elements such as Persian vases, ancient Persian/Islamic structures, thrones, walls, stairs, windows, and gates by utilizing online museum archives. The silhouette of broken and dusty vases are a metaphor for the displaced body. As a result, the jars and other objects in my works are a symbol of human beings with an identity belonging to the past.
Tendai Mupita
Sculpture + Extended Media
Tendai Mupita is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose work includes Sculptures, site specific installations, printmaking, and painting. Mupita’s works explores Shona indigenous philosophy, cosmologies, epistemologies and phenomenology. Tendai is an MFA student in sculpture currently working on bronze and aluminium as his material of interest.
Yameng Wang
Graphic Design
Proposal: My thesis project《讳》will be an immersive video projecting concurrently on two opposing walls. On the first wall, there will be a 3D dancing model, which is expressing how an individual’s spiritual figure struggles with unescapable control and force. On the opposite wall, a huge fractal object will echo the movement of this model. They change drastically and struggle together but finally get a peaceful moment, in the end, returning to a cathartic natural state.
Erin Yerby
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: Using photographs as indexical entryways, I meet fugitive sensation and forces of the past emitted through the image. My paintings concern the return of pasts as animate forces haunting the present. Childhood worlds, vernacular and imagined landscapes of the west/Western; the ruins of culture; forces of nature within an apocalyptic now; spectral inheritances of settler colonial history; converging geological, mythical and historical time: all these are subjects of my work.
Samson Stilwell
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: Win Conditioned is an exhibition consisting of a pneumatic tube system that shuttles a taxidermied ferret at high speed around a loop. Accompanying the tube system will be a VR video. The video will be a stylized recreation of the end state of Fortnite (an ultra popular battle royale video game). Win Conditioned is an exhibition concerned with the aesthetics of the narcissistic, depressive, self oppressive subject of contemporary capitalism–and asks where, in our ceaseless, solipsistic loop, is love?
Stacy Sabady
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: My work is about experimentation through repetition of construction and pattern. While repetition has made it easier for me to escape into the world of creating, it has taken a toll on my aging body. Ailments have developed that are the natural result of repetitive motion. Of utmost importance in my life is focusing on activities that encourage good physical habits. One needn’t ruin their body to make great work.
Ajana Bradshaw
Art History
When using a visual arts database, the image of a nude Josephine Baker appears with the title “The Black Venus.” After viewing the image, I wondered why the title centralizes Baker’s racial/ethnic identity and how Baker’s portrait was created. Through the research to answer my question, I began to uncover the complex, incomplete, and nuanced story of Josephine Baker as a nude model for Jean-Gabriel Doumergue. This research grant will help aid the in-person research of the socio-political structures surrounding Domergue’s portrait of Josephine Baker.
Sarah Reagan
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Using the language of contemporary architecture and queer theory, my thesis exhibition features site-specific works honoring the extant idealism of the inner child. From childhood, I learned to regulate my response to aggressive behaviors through defense mechanisms: fight, flight, fawn, freeze… and humor. The work expresses simultaneously comical and tragic depictions of hope, hopelessness, and rebellion through inflatables, architectural scale children’s toys, and a space where fear is confronted by fantasy.
Mark Tan
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Object as Atlas is a site-specific installation that relates to my personal migration narrative to the United States. The work expresses the emotional value of preconceived notions, disconnectedness, and longing for place and acceptance within a community. Incorporating memory, personal narrative, emotion, and perception, I manipulate data into lines, forms, and materials through the subjective human experience of a non-citizen.
Bella Kubo
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: Salt rejection is a performance and immersive three-channel video and sound installation of archival family films and my own home videos. Through video projection and an immersive soundscape, the audience will reckon with repressed memories, absence, and refuge. Extension from this will include a performance of the voice, contact microphones in relationship with site-specific elemental materials, and the amplification of sound through cups. This will take place on Governors Island in New York City.
Muthi Reed
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: I shall become a collector of me. And put meat on my soul. says the poet Sonia Sanchez. I will develop a suite of queer bodied attempts at thrive survival methods in critical conversation with social topographies overwhelmed by the collection and inheritance of violent things. A print publication will accompany the embodied work and serve as a companion text of qr coded geo locations, vernacular maps and sonic architectures.
Chad Mundie
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: Chad Mundie’s thesis exhibition, Crabapple, is a dive into the collision of flesh, fixture, and the mundane, exploring the connection between the home and the inhabitants within. By allowing these connections and boundaries to blur, forms begin to morph and mutate together. Body and spirit become one with the home and we are audience to all stages of this process.
Megan Ratliff
Media, Art & Text
Proposal: This interdisciplinary research addresses the perceived immateriality of digital data and DNA data storage by way of various chemical-based photographic processes (such as gum bichromate, silver gelatin, carbon printing, inkjet printing) and bringing awareness to the state of data storage. This project serves as a means to situate a creative body of work within this emerging technology, which is still in a state of flux, by undermining the often-arbitrary line dividing analogue and digital photographic technologies. The makeup of these photographic prints will simultaneously embody forgotten processes and materialize ones yet to be seen.
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: Rituals Here is a gallery space, a publication, a series of conversations. An ecosystem for my greater communities to be in dialogue about the places/people/networks that provide safety for us. Gathering around a table, in the gallery, the streets, over a meal. How do we grow our utopic spaces? How can we sustain queer communities? How does it feel to read a story that tells your story?
Julliana Bustillo
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: Childhood Reliquary De Una Catracha Entre Nopales (mexicatracha, catrachamexi) is a sensory based installation consisting of nine large and three small scale mixed media paintings with two performances. It is informed by my upbringing in Boyle Heights in the projects during the 90s, followed by East LA in the mid 2000s. It is the reliquary for my discomfort in institutional spaces and why I have found comfort in dystopian-like installations. This is the landscape in which I exist, regardless of where I am now. It is where I place my work. It is the context in which I celebrate the powerful delicacy of Brown Femininity.
Ekaterina Muromtseva
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: In my work I expand the possibilities of figurative painting and drawing by using documentary elements and performative gestures. This expansion creates an enriched form of visual narrative that introduces an interplay of storytelling elements and static images.
Caroline Minchew
Photography + Film
Proposal: Strange Meeting explores how landscape posits itself as a site for transcending reality. Unearthing becomes an instrument for decomposing pain; the material of mud transforms into eco-poetics, and ephemeral pools become evidence of deep time. My work investigates ecological darkness and the extreme falsehood of untainted, pristine nature, and our collective impulse to “other” nature. Did nature ever really exist?
Michelle Albertson
Photography + Film
Proposal: The Silent Rage of Being Loved is a multimedia site-specific installation working primarily with photography, video, and sculpture. It explores the nuanced ways in which memory, grief, and veneration manifest physically in my life through objects and my body. My proposed thesis installation is intended as a place of refuge for my audience amongst a shrine-like space and for us, collectively, to reexamine and widen the ways in which we experience mourning and grief.
Saar Shemesh
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: The installation is two-fold: an architectural intervention consisting of sloping ramps that line the room, covered in foam tiles that extend past the ramps across the floor. Low platforms present several sculptures made of cast-silicone and epoxy clay, emerging from their flexible molds in configurations that elicit sci-fi visions of alien flora and fauna. The result is a sparse room of forms simultaneously unsettling and inviting.
Dylan Ahern
Sculpture and Extended Media
Proposal: This is a project proposing a sculptural installation to take place at the Anderson Gallery during the Spring of 2022. It includes several hundred clay monster heads and several gallons of Coca Cola syrup. The work intends to explore the correlation between material excess and psychological depression.
Manal Shoukair
Sculpture and Extended Media
Proposal: My Proposed project is a site specific work installed on the island of Belle Isle Richmond, within the architectural structure of the ODIS (Old Dominion Iron Steel Co) factory Shed. This will be a 24hour immersive installation that is open to the public. This chosen site explores an installation that is sensitive to history, surrounding architecture and encourages viewers to navigate a conscious space of being and reflection of place.
Hannah (HH) Hiaasen
Visual Communications
Proposal: Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. “Spectrum of Shit” is an interdisciplinary installation of an office space interrupted by ruptures of grief.
Sarah Kleinman
Art History
Proposal: I am requesting grant funds to support my dissertation research and writing on Kynaston McShine. This grant will cover the fees for digitizing a selection of slides from the MoMA Archives that are integral to my argument and contribution to art historical scholarship. A portion of the grant will allow me to purchase books and supplies to facilitate the process of sorting through the vast amount of archival material I have already gathered for my doctoral dissertation.
Rice Evans
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: For my MFA Thesis I will create a series of “mirrors” made from clay in an ornate classical style. The mirrors will be glazed with projections of videos that subvert and comment on digital culture. The mirrors will be surrounded with outdated technology and 3D printed ceramic tiles wallpapering the scene.
Sarah Parker
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Sarah Parker, a Craft/Material Studies grad studying Metals and Jewelry uses contemporary jewelry-language to create relationships between body and adornment from parts of objects that have begun their arduous journey of decomposition. On the surfaces of found materials is the reflection of a culture that rejects the uncomfortable realities of human existence. Once part of a valuable whole, the disparate detritus emerges from brokenness into new forms, illuminating and honoring scars and evidence of former use. Sarah aims to rewrite her history and collective histories in a way that imagine alternative outcomes just as she rewrites the history of found objects that once served vital functions.
Mariah Jones
Graphic Design
Proposal: Cross Yourself When You See Me is an exploration into the world-for-us vs the world-in-itself, and a contention against the presumed inevitability of event horizons and post-humanism, both as reactions and coping mechanisms to colonialist progressivism and capitalist horror, informed by both my childhood of devout Irish Catholicism and as an internet citizen, denizen, traveler, and voyeur, I ask: what does it mean to look, watch, see? What does it mean to bear witness? Though my work usually exists in an online space, this concept will enter the physical realm — occupying a single, hidden room, discovered only when stumbled upon, the viewer will find an altar of sorts, overwhelmed with curving, interlocking candles, relics and reliquaries, a canopy of shimmering nightmares, a mass being held.
Ruth Deibler
Interior Design
Proposal: This project will utilize grounded theory research to explore healing space within healthcare environments. The first phase will be a survey. The goal is to understand, categorize and develop the theories and questions surrounding interiors and experience within spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a team of design students, the goal is to develop an understanding of what research will be needed to improve interior spaces in healthcare for the long term.
Martha Glenn
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: The cave. The body. The cosmos. The seed. These antediluvian sites of earth writing have persisted through time, providing a home for history to lay its head. Protean formations of object, image, and language dance with the viscera of minerals and memory–a crystalline emergence, a constant becoming. In my practice I seek to shape, by fortuitous associations, relationships that cross the boundaries of logic. It’s about finding connections between things that are not necessarily related. It’s about conjuring felt meaning, collapsing history into a timeless vortex, in order to experience the potential of the sensorial, the atmospheric.
Brook Vann
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: performing ourselves is a sound installation and dance performance that uses motion and sound to explore queer and non-binary gender identities. The show will also be accompanied by zines that have writing and dance scores that functions as the basis of the dance.
Yuxiang Dong
Media, Art, & Text
Proposal: “To Stay, To Leave,” a feature-length documentary film, investigates the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on young Chinese artists in America. The first part focuses on a young artist who recently finished his MFA and decided to apply for an O1 visa to stay in US. The second part features a group of young artists who decided to leave US. The work contributes to the update of our knowledge about global migration, cultural exchange, interpersonal relationship, and Sino-American relations in the post-pandemic era.
Kelley-Ann Lindo
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: The proposed project comes out of my ongoing research and thoughts around trauma, memory and its relationship to identity in the Caribbean. It will be realized as a multimedia installation comprising of sculptures, prints and videos. I am interested in the relationship to the past, a narrative of displacement, through the metaphor of flooding. It is an attempt at examining ideas around incoherent intrusions, recollections, imaginary representations of truth and false memory in post-colonial spaces.
Raul Aguilar Canela
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: The way I participate in image-making is with the awareness that images function as disseminators of knowledge and subjectivities. Because of this, I’m interested in using painting as a way to mint concepts to better deal with the present. By being hyper-attentive to the state of depression and isolation that characterizes living our physical and digital lives, my work tries to offer alternatives to understand and alleviate these feelings.
Connor Stankard
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: N°STERIA is a fictional brand formed around a series of unusable devices — eight glass body plugs: one for each human hole. The plugs and exhibition will be contextualized with the supporting materials of a beauty campaign. A logo, slogan, brand ambassador, four video ‘advertisements’, and take-home sample scents lend credence to the fictional world of N°STERIA. Let me count the holes in your body.
Cecilia Kim
Photography + Film
Proposal: My immersive two-channel video installation with sound will present observational footage of the labor of women in traditional markets of Busan, South Korea, and of landscapes from various locations across the United States and Korea. The work documents the endurance within the women’s labor practices at these markets. The project is a revolutionary, self-reflexive examination of women’s identity as well as a witness to the passage of generational time.
Mireille Heidbreder
Photography + Film
Proposal: My current work is an experimental documentary in which I use a combination of film print and digital footage to “re-imagine” moments in which a shift in the balance of the human/natural world has occurred. In it, a lone hill above a town is revealed to be an active volcano, a destructive tornado seemingly intentionally repeats its path through a neighborhood, and a hurricane forces its way over a mountain. A soundscape of my own creation stands as an individual “character”, heightening the disturbing, and transforming sensory experience.
John Alex Goss
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: I will create a two-room installation of sculpture, 3d-rendered video, and sound. This work connects the inside of the mouth and rectum physically, and digitally, and narratively. While this installation imagines inhabiting these interior-body spaces as architecture, it also describes bodies inhabited by orthopedic and therapeutic devices. The videos that surround the sculptures reverse this miniaturization and exemplify the ways in which technopolitics assimilate and shape anatomy. This installation incites an empathetic response in the viewer’s own body and reorients normative perceptions of intimacy and control.
Lari Garcia
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: Missing Pass is a two channel video documenting the search of my missing mother in the Appalachian region. Starting at the highest plateau to the ritual thresholds of caves. The narrative will be told through four geological layers: Topsoil, Subsoil, Parent Material and Caverns. Within these layers, who has been here and why? What is explored in these layers are missing indigenous bodies, alternative modes of navigation and traps that have captured lingering ghosts.
David Guy
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: My thesis project realizes a video insulation that will include large steel and brass wire woven sculptures, wall sculptures, small knitted brass plant models depicting plants found in St. Lucia and Jamaica. Steel, iron, brass, silver and stripped/exposed electrical wiring have become staples in my material language because of their relationship to my familial homelands of St. Lucia and Jamaica.
Katharine Given
Theatre
Proposal: My thesis project will examine the intersection of performance theory and material culture through the practices of garment reconstruction. Through the course of this research, I will build reproduction garments from the the eighteenth century using historically appropriate tools and methods. The construction of an entire period outfit will act as an embodiment of my research of the way history performs for/with modern bodies, and effectively cross the silos of theatre and history.
Laura Boban
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: For my 2020 MFA thesis exhibition, Attempting Stability, I will create an installation comprised of video and abstract sculptures to critically examine conformity and success. In the video I will work with my three sisters to build four-person cheerleading stunts, a process of tackling childhood activities many years later. Large-scale sculptures made of t-shirts, gym weights, and furniture pieces will occupy the gallery, implicating the body through material and object relationships.
Eric Anthony Berdis
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: My practice engages childhood idealism, mythology, and historic events, to subvert, ideas of place, actions, and imagery that are often considered neutral in a hetero-normative society. Through installation, performance, and objects, my work explores themes of shame, failure, and the AIDS epidemic. My thesis grant proposal seeks to contextualize my research for the 2 week exhibition at the Anderson Gallery during the Month of April.
Yutong Liu
Graphic Design
Proposal: The work we did as labor is the way it pushes us to become a cyborg. My aim is to create a participatory design room in the gallery. This project discusses communication and miscommunication during this cyber participatory performance. The participatory design is letting participants get involved in the whole work. The intervention from humans to machines lead us to become a cyborg in this working space. During this machine working, what the role of humans? What the role of the machines?
Aidan Quinlan
Graphic Design
Proposal: When I Leave I am Replaced by a Bench is an exploration of precarity: the loss of certainty and the loss of traditional structures and models of rest within the accelerating flow of information, the 24-hour work day, and the ever-smoother space of our persistently connected digital interfaces. The project simultaneously questions and makes an argument for frustrating, detouring, and slowing down.
Julia Mishler
Interior Design
Proposal: This grant proposal is to support my Interior Design MFA thesis studies. The proposed project is to visit Helsinki, Finland to study key interior architecture projects firsthand. Specific projects include Helsinki Central Library Oodi, Academic Bookstore Helsinki, Finlandia Hall, Vyborg Library, Harald Herlin Learning Centre, Amos Rex art museum, Loyly, Jamppi Chapel of Silence, and the National Library of Finland. Each of these projects is an important precedent site for my thesis project. My thesis is designing a space that combines a library and a movie theater into the historic Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Virginia.
Jared Duesterhaus
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: Hold my Hand is a live multi-media performance and installation that uses gesture to examine identity and the performative aspect of self. Consisting of tightly scripted narrative vignettes, the performance is based around variations of interpersonal conversations between several characters. Repeated gestures ghost through the environment, connecting the scenes and characters. The performers’ actions are emphasized by careful use of animation and sound to create an immersive experience.
Seren Moran
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: “Lest We Forget, Prey Begins With Play” is an immersive exhibition inclusive of animations, poetry, sound, paintings and installation. Each piece tells a specific story of sexual assault that focuses on the lasting devastation of these events. Through the use of satirical limericks and saturated color palettes, this work functions as a reflection of how we are taught to disguise sexual violence as harmless play.
John Chae
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: My thesis project is an installation that maps the ways in which ideology determines reality. The installation is a spatial timeline, a composite of imaginaries, declarations, and remembrances associated with the reciprocating effects of evangelism, colonialism, and capitalism. The project takes the form of paintings, maps, text, photographs, pamphlets, a calendar, a board game, a script–assembled within and around a central infrastructure, a grid that proposes pathways and vantage points from one work to the next.
Luis Vasquez La Roche
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: Greg Tate “says, “Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine.” I understand this to mean that brown and black folks were the first aliens by the way of the middle passage. As a point of departure from this notion, I have decided to create a space suit that would be an assemblage of found materials, fabricated parts and purchased products. Each one of these considered attachments will reference or point towards certain histories and economies.
GM Keaton
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: For my thesis exhibition, I will create an installation that imagines queer embodiment as an ongoing practice of relational existence, material intimacy, and resistance towards a subject/object binary. Large scale fiber sculptures, experimental video, sound, and light works come together to create an immersive environment where queer relations blur the boundary between self and other, each recognizing the other as mutually constitutive.
Paul Finch
Painting + Printmaking
Proposal: “Mars Fashion Week 2020” usurps the performative structure of a runway show to explore issues of dandyism, frugality, and our relationship with the future. It features drag queens, children, and queer models stomping around a camp simulation of a Martian landscape in flamboyant bespoke costumes. The work critiques dominant rhetoric about progress by centering non-conformity, flamboyance, and hand-made fashion as cornerstones for a new aesthetic for queer futurism.
Hannah Altman
Photography + Film
Proposal: Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. When my mother grabbed my wrist too hard pulling me across the intersection, when my great-grandmother’s fingers went numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, when Miriam’s palms poured water for the Hebrews throughout their biblical desert journey – this is how the Jew is able to trace ache. To encounter an image in this way is not only to ask what it feels like, but to ask: what does it remember like?
Mariana Parisca
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: This body of work, is a personal and diasporic reconciliation with the value and the notion of a nation. It is informed by research on the causes of the crisis that has enveloped Venezuela, and on the power of global neoliberal economic speculation, and its relationship to land, borders, and natural resources. Using devalued Venezuelan currency, these ideas are weaved together in a phenomenological installation, in which sculptural works, video, and text are activated through performance.
Katelyn Turner
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: Kate Turner’s exhibition is an autobiographical installation pulling from her experiences and memories growing up in the suburbs of Ohio as a transracially adopted child. Romantic notions of midwestern iconography mix with surreal shifts of perception, draw the viewers into a strange realm where their gaze implicates them into her narratives.
Ruben Rodriguez
Sculpture + Extended Media
Proposal: A Spaceship/Aztec Temple made from hypersensitive tentacles of nahuales. As a means to reimagine ancient Aztec artifacts and their use in ritual. Made with contemporary materials like my clothes and mariachi sombreros. I will be creating a decolonial futurism with the aid of magical realism and science fiction. A future where; hybridity, myth-making, and the fantastic inhabit the mundane along tangents of non-linear time.
Andrew Bryce
Theatre
Proposal: I intend to use the Graduate Research Grant to supply funding to study with master Meisner Technique Teachers Larry Silverberg and Patricia Skarbinski, as well as with Elizabeth Terrel and Miller Voice Method teacher Tia James. This research investigates the integration between Meisner’s acting technique and Somatic Vocal work. This first-hand research into their methods will have direct impact on my intended Thesis project, which is to create a new method of vocal preparation for actors implementing the Meisner Technique. This research is vital for my intended presentation of my research and thesis at the 2020 Southeastern Theatre Conference.
Samantha Encarnacion
Art History
Proposal: This grant will support travel to the Tate Modern in London to view their upcoming retrospective on Dorothea Tanning. With over 150 works on view, the exhibition offers a rare comprehensive look at this important artist’s long career. Viewing the exhibition will be invaluable for completing my dissertation on Tanning, in which I re-conceptualize her oeuvre as a thoroughgoing critique of the onto-epistemological assumptions upholding the fraught legacy of western humanism.
Marie Fornaro
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: From the medieval witch hunts to the present day, women who dare to speak have been ignored, silenced, or punished. The New Commons is a fiber-based sculptural installation that blurs the lines between human and landscape, critically examining the capitalist belief that certain people are considered natural resources, available to be consumed freely. Plumbing the confluence of quiltmaking and language, both coded and overt, this quilted installation gives voice to those who have been silenced.
Hannah Shaban
Craft/Material Studies
Proposal: Arab Americanesque’ is an immersive installation and performance confronting cultural obfuscation in a postcolonial society. By layering the environment with traditional oriental flourishes and the contemporary perversion that is the arabesque tile commonly seen in Western decor, I illustrate how certain aspects of a culture are stifled by the lens of colonialism and imperialism. Through their discovery and destruction of the space, viewers are made complicit in the blatant appropriation of culture and the blurring effects it has on Arab identity.
Yixue Li
Graphic Design
Proposal: Neither and Both, is a project that reproduces the experience of miscommunication of the Chinese diaspora identity, in the context of global consumption and cultural exchanges. It also examines the consumption process as, according to Jean Baudrillard, “a communication system” and “the manipulation of objects as signs”. As part of research project, I aim to build a retail store for my thesis exhibition, which provides a space for (mis)communication, and a surface for cultural (mis)translation to take place.
Chino Amobi
Graphic Design
Proposal: This Exhibition will function as a collaborative editing room and theatrical set for the production of ACT 1 of STRIKE: A Living Film in which practitioners from fields both inside and outside of the VCU will participate in.
Ruiqi Zhang
Kinetic Imaging
Proposal: This research project seeks to explore the impact of current short-video social media software on Chinese social structure. And the use of social media as a way of creating new media art, engaging in the increasingly influential media class conflicts in China’s cyberspace. This media conflict involves a broad socialization and politicized race and class division.
Clare van Loenen
MATX
Proposal: To participate in a three-week artist residency at Elsewhere in Greensboro, North Carolina in February 2019. Elsewhere is the focus of one chapter of Clare’s doctoral dissertation, Social Sites: Artist Project Spaces 2001 – 2016. It is also the only artist project space critiqued that is ongoing and, as such, provides an intensive opportunity for direct participation in its practices as a living museum and artist residency.
Yu Su
Painting and Printmaking
Proposal: My proposed exhibition will be the culmination of a year’s experiences and conversations with close friends that form an intersectional, challenging and safe community. It will consist of painting, writing and sound work that are generated from these experiences. The work explores the process of affirming myself as a foreign, non-white, non-straight male subject in the West in particular, as well as how the new generation of global subjects navigate spaces and boundaries.
Diane Antohe
Painting and Printmaking
Proposal: This folio-book and installation is centered around storytelling: the weaving of information shared by generations of my family within the historical and pop-culture climates of Romania and the United States, such as new connections between my childhood sense of “in-betweenness” and the ‘80s soap opera Dallas. The book form serves as a sculptural object that assembles materials and allows viewer engagement.
Evie Metz
Photography and Film
Proposal: I create handcrafted stop-frame puppet animations that explore self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment, shame, and envy within unpredictable life scenarios. The stories depict human instinctive natural behavior. These are animations of inner life. This work attempts to resolve conflicting elements of the human psyche. In merging digital technology and meticulous handcraft, the animations are presented with corresponding animatronics that are an extension of the characters, props, and sets of the animation, in a physical manner.
David Riley
Photography and Film
Proposal: “Silver Sands” is a documentary film which follows the story of Marc Hampton, a gay, desert-dwelling Vietnam vet, former Playgirl model, and vintage car collector who lost two lovers to AIDS. The film functions as a series of meditations on aging, loss, spirituality and intergenerational relationships. Together with an accompanying installation recreating parts of Marc’s domestic space and photo archive, “Silver Sands” explores evolving ideas of memory, history, and representation.
Colin Klockner
Sculpture and Extended Media
Proposal: “In defense of pure evil” is an installation that approaches questions surrounding objecthood, embodiment, and historical conflation of transfemininity with evil. A surrealistic, transparent room functions as a listening space for reproduced covers of Q Lazzarus’ 1988 single “Goodbye Horses.” Outside of this room, a collection of both original and manipulated fan-fictions inform a series of sculptural elements that reference the shape of the Brother 3-in-1 printer.
Raul De Lara
Sculpture and Extended Media
Proposal: Raul De Lara will make palpable the feeling of deep instability undocumented households feel in this country by creating a body of sculptures for his thesis exhibition.