DPI 2024 BFA Senior Thesis Exhibition, Curated by Kalia Brooks
Images by Denise Stephanie Hewitt, DPI Class of 2024
An exhibition featuring works in photography, digital imaging, and multimedia by graduating seniors from the Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU Tisch School of the Arts
DPI is proud to present the 2024 DPI BFA Exhibition, curated by Kalia Brooks. This exhibition presents the work of the graduating Photography & Imaging class. It is installed in the Gulf + Western Gallery (1st floor rear lobby) and the 8th Floor Gallery at 721 Broadway (at Waverly Place). It will remain on view through May 17, 2024.
The 2024 DPI BFA Exhibition presents 45 artistic thesis projects, featuring everything from photographs, images, videos and books to sounds, installations, and interactive experiences. The artists in this year’s graduating class go above and beyond traditional notions of the photograph, blurring the lines between mediums, materials, and fields of knowledge, to redefine what it means to be a photographer, an artist, and a student in a constantly evolving world. Their work addresses contemporary themes of identity, the body, place, time, spirituality, technology, memory, and globalization and serves as their capstone project providing just a peek into what they’ve learned during their time at NYU, a school that fosters global perspectives and critical thinkers.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Kalia Brooks, PhD, is the Director of Programs and Exhibitions at NXTHVN. She is responsible for the design and delivery of curatorial exhibitions, public programs, artist projects, community engagement initiatives and the learning environment for the fellowship and apprenticeship programs. Her academic research covers art from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on emergent technologies and African American, trans-Atlantic and diasporic cultures of the Americas. Brooks holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). She is co editor of Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 2019 and 2022). She has served as a consulting curator with the City of New York through the Department of Cultural Affairs and was an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York during the de Blasio administration.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS INCLUDE
Noor Alireza
"Nomad In Town" Finding comfort in the landscape is the eternal journey we are all on. Nomads seeking familiarity in the places that evoke memories, creating imaginary homelands in foreign spaces.
Shirene Anand
"Shakti: The Divine Feminine Cosmic." Energy I draw from India's colors, philosophies, and cultures to create a unique voice, questioning place, and perspective through the practice of image-making.
Nik Bauman
"Ink, Sweat, Feedback" documents the various punk sub genres found throughout the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York.
Erwin Chen
"Free Spirits" is a reminder to us, of what living in this time has made us become, and where we came from. I want it to make us remember that we were all once, free spirits.
Evelyn Coates
"Gravity Will Wave You In" is a project on deep personal healing, on learning how to swim to shore (a lifelong process).
Rolin Dai
"Y2Kids" - We long for the past like we long for the future.
Derrick Devonn
"Government Hooker" In this work I will bear witness to this life. A life lived by those who needed to be torn from the wreckage of this society. Multiple societal failings ordered my path into the military. It was in fact a deal with the devil himself.
Elaine Du
"Symbiosis" Altogether, we create a symphony that illustrates humans and nature, where the symbiosis of all living.
Ari Elgharsi
"Studio Playhouse" While shooting in the studio, the only boundaries were those of my own ideas, allowing me to shape, play and mold my artistic vision without the distractions or help from the external world.
Emma Estes
"1.5° Celsius" is a fictional body of work that explores how humans must mutate to survive the future consequences of global climate change.
Yu Gao
"Family Archive #0" By employing algorithms to compose scenes that mirror the aesthetics of traditional documentary photography, the project aims to provoke a dialogue about the malleability of truth in the visual representation of our world.
Annie Guo
"Discomfort" The sultry tension of femininity.
Anna Henderson
Anna Henderson's series, “I love you, now”, functions as artifacts or evidence of love, physical objects derived from the intangible thing of human connection in the face of time’s nature, bearing her imprint as archeologist, anthropologist, sociologist, observer, human.
Denise Stephanie Hewitt
"Found, Fond" explores Hewitt's maternal-lead family homes as a curation of the family archive through artifacts and still life imagaery while adding her own photographs to the collection.
Lamar Kendrick-Dial
"ELYSIUM" explores the uncanny nature of societies attachment to people in the public sphere, critiquing complacency in the world of social media.
Liz Koch
"Te Quiero Mucho" is an exploration of the intersection of memory, movement, and tradition employing the visual mediums of dance and archival imagery.
Lola Krueger
"A Window Between Worlds"
Chiu Pok Kwan
"Can I Make You Feel _____ ?" Have you, like me, ever doubted your abilities and felt inferior and anxious when comparing yourself to the peers around you?
Jo Lieber
"All We Ever Wanted is to Be Seen" When I gaze upon the historic gallery wall I find gaps of our identity; I aim to begin to rectify that because All we have ever wanted is to be seen.
Miller Lyle
"Breaking the Mold" At a time when unease and uncertainty are often palpable facets of everyday life, Breaking the Mold invites viewers to reconsider the mutable nature of identity and the delicate balance between form and fragmentation, ultimately challenging preconceptions and prompting reflections on the evolving essence of human existence.
Makenna Mitchell
"Sacred Scars" Revisiting religion beyond the conservative bubble I grew up in.
Lamar Mufti
"Beyond the Mirage" Delving into the profound impact of rapid technological advancements, the Beyond the Mirage navigates through time to critically examine the fading of culture and unravel the influence of Orientalism, using the metaphor of the cloak to depict the gradual shedding of identity.
Katie Noble
"between miles : behind words" I will dream of that home - that version of you - long after this goodbye.
Ashley Peña
"Fragments" Shedding light to honor my grandmothers contributions and celebrating their virtual roles in my collective family history, fragments of a tree.
Amy Petralia
"The Red Thread" This series is inspired by my own adoption from Vietnam and shares not only mine, but fellow Asian adoptees and our stories.
Ryan Pizarro
"90s Vogue Vibe" As a child, I’d cut and paste images from my grandmother’s magazines onto construction paper to construct my own.
Jarod Polakoff
"Familiar Alien" contends with the confines of verbal language, mechanizing ambiguity, fantasy, and sensory experience as vehicles for emotional excavation.
Jacqueline De Poortere
"Echoes of Origin" This project is a reverberation of beginnings that link back to my first experience with art and how the influence of a place echoes through my work today.
Yong Min Park
"Illusory Truth Effect" Exploring the foundation of the medium itself while expressing my visual interests as a photographer.
Maddie Provost
My project, Queering Nature, focuses on the symbiotic relationship between queerness and nature as it offers a means to liberation—liberation of the erotic, the body, sexuality, and the rigid boundaries of gender
Ryan Qian
"Inked," my new series, delves into the intimate stories of heavily tattooed individuals, capturing their journeys, societal perceptions, and the profound personal connection I share with the project as it mirrors my aspiration to embrace a heavily inked identity in the future.
Esmé Bella Rice
“I Think You Should Hear This” is a series of windows to my most intimate and vulnerable thoughts and experiences that are revealing of how much a person does not say out loud.
Luke Rodriguez
"PLAY" is a project emphasizing the joy of discovering new image-making processes.
Maximilian Ruibal
In "Granularity Indeterminacy Relationality," I take the audience outside their frame of reference in an attempt to understand time through a quantum lens.
William Rowan
"Fear of Death" I created images for this series through the pairing of models, physical locations, sourced props, and hand-built sculptures, to examine the role of death as both an American media object and vessel for traversing grief, western culture, perception, aspiration, and collective effervescence.
Helena Shan
"Me & Mine" A mother redefined, a self rediscovered.
Ali Stancheva
Плетеница, "Pletenitsa," a Bulgarian word conveying a "woven tangle," is a reconciliation of my Bulgarian identity, a nostalgia for the summers of my childhood as well as an upbringing I was never able to fully experience.
Lilith Soros
"View From Above" Utilizing the iPhone, spy cameras, and appropriated imagery, I seek to craft a new, contemplative vision of the West Side Highway, where I am both witness and participant in the West Side's metamorphosis.
Jeremy Thorpe
"Fatherhood: The Love of a Single Father" I've long observed a media focus on motherhood, particularly single mothers, with limited attention to single fathers, often portrayed negatively; thus, I embarked on a project capturing the lives of single fathers in New York, facilitated by City Dad Groups, Real Dad Network, and friends, showcasing their diverse experiences, from custody battles to surrogacy, through interviews and immersive photography, shedding light on their stories, daily routines, and the profound bonds they share with their children.
Jesus A Ulloa
"WRLD DOM" WRLD DOM,' a collaborative animation by twin brothers, merges storytelling, music, and 3D animation in a space-themed universe, showcasing a rebellion against the Galactic Unit and highlighting themes of rescue and reunion.
Hazelle Withers
"Girls on Film" is an illuminated papier mache mannequin displaying a bikini made out of nearly 70 vintage 35-millimeter transparencies from the 1970s to the late 1990s that were taken for male entertainment.
Angela Xu
"The Black Box" Exploring the evolving landscape of image-making across generations of photographic tools, this project delves into the complex interplay between technological advancements, copyright challenges, and human agency in the current photography process.
Shentong Yu
"What Is a Door? A video essay to those doors I opened and doors that I have never opened.
Michael Zhan
"In a Perfect World" Bring beauty into life, make my vision come alive.
Ao Zhang
"窗十宿春窗春" In the fluidity of my artistic approaches, the concept of 'home' transcends the physical, consistently straddling between past and present, home and elsewhere, and it is this interplay that haunts my work, '窗十宿春窗春,' as I seek to create a 'nested world' uniting my sense of 'home' and 'the self' through flowers and self-created characters