Date of Award

2026

Document Type

MA Project - Restricted Access (SIA Only) - With Distinction

Project Type

MA Project - Curatorial Proposal

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Contemporary Art

First Advisor

Morgan Falconer

Second Advisor

Agnes Berecz

Abstract

What lies behind the closed door, the drawn curtain, the enigmatic expression? Outside/In brings together seven New York-based emerging and mid-career artists whose work peers through the peephole of the mind. Across two dozen paintings, sculptures, and digital animation, this exhibition explores interior worlds: struggles with self-worth and identity, intense emotion, and the porous boundaries between self and other, self and world. In an era of information overload, media saturation, AI, deepfakes, and relentless branding, these works assert the importance in this current moment of discerning a true self. The artists in this exhibition turn to alter egos, doubles, and invented characters to express the self. Visually, the show leans on bold figuration, strong color, sharp contrasts, cartoon-inflected forms, as well as recurring motifs drawn from art history, myth and popular culture. Some works construct alternative realities informed by the worldbuilding techniques of gaming—stages on which psychic dramas play out. Sophia Kayafas paints a queer origin story through muscular, mythic canvases that remix Biblical narratives. Grappling with her Greek Orthodox upbringing, she casts herself as a heroine wrestling a colossal serpent or slipping out of a giant fish’s mouth; scenes of entanglement and rebirth frame sexuality, faith, and patriarchal power as forces that bind and divide the self. Mario Saponaro’s square canvases hold cloned figures trapped in claustrophobic rooms. Upside-down bodies, ladders, doors, and arrows create a frantic choreography of escape that never quite resolves, while various motifs—a dog, a daisy, tools, a distant mushroom cloud—can be seen to turn each painting into a game where interior anxieties chafe against the outside world. Tom Prinsell builds on Gothic architecture, carved tabernacle-style frames, and borrowings from Giotto and Piranesi. Within these ornate structures, an alter ego cradles a child-self and a headless man with a birdcage torso presides over a series of stairs to nowhere. The sacred visual language of altarpieces is morphed to self-worship, recasting spiritual ascent as an uncertain search for identity. In Devaun Longley’s animation Dreams and Trauma, a young man falls asleep and tumbles through his own eye sockets into a soundless nightmare, confronting a demon-like double whose crown reads as both mask and VR headset—a clear vision of the Jungian shadow, the side of the self we fear yet with which we are intimate. Meredith Bakke paints the charged space between viewer and viewed: oversized eyes, mouths, and distorted faces stage the discomfort of being seen and altered by another’s gaze. Melinda Hackett’s biomorphic paintings set forth a “family of forms” that might be galaxies or microbes, opening onto a more collective, porous sense of consciousness. Sculptor Sarah Angèle Wilson shifts the focus outward, juxtaposing shells, insects, clocks, currency symbols, bones, and text bubbles in glossy reliefs that engage with kitsch and commodity aesthetics while staging a face-off between human excess and the persistence of the natural world. The exhibition Outside/In was realized in a gallery in Tribeca in the fall of 2025. Earnest and evocative, these works insist on their own importance. And the stakes remain personal: to chart the contours of inner life and to hold space for the personal in a disaffected, consumption-driven world.

Distinction

1

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