ABOUT

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GRAPHIC DESIGN

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PAINTING

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PRINT MEDIA & PHOTOGRAPHY

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SCULPTURE

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VISUAL NARRATIVE

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@bu_visualarts

@bu_graphicdesign

@bostonpainting

@pmp.bu
@bostonsculpture
@buvisualnarrative

@sambittaker

he/him

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Sam Bittaker

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Where I grew up was sat between the hustle of urban life and the quiet pull of nature. It wasn’t a central metropolitan area, nor was it purely rural. It occupied a space in between, where the natural world and human development collide in fascinating, sometimes imperceptible ways. The transitions from nature to urban can be abrupt, subtle, or sometimes, nearly indistinguishable. I spent a lot of time in a park near my house—a space that, to me and my friends, felt like a hidden forest, far from the reach of civilization. In reality, it was just a small, underwhelming park surrounded by suburban developments. It wasn’t until we examined the ground, finding fragments of old pottery and household items, or looked up the hill to see the encroaching rows of houses that we realized the park’s true context. Our perception of being in a remote, untouched space was at odds with the actual place we inhabited. This tension between illusion and reality, the uncertainty of what is seen versus what is perceived, is central to my work.

My paintings engage with these themes of interweaving, negotiation, and transformation. I am deeply interested in creating conditions for an experience that can fluctuate over time. Through layering, wiping, pushing, scraping, sanding, and cutting, the elements in my paintings can shift in meaning, scale, and context. Things can interchange from big to small, from near to far, from familiar to foreign. In this way, the picture plane becomes an arena for exploration—a space where obstacles can be confronted, negotiated, and harmonized. Lately, I’ve been interested in seeing the interaction between the physical and the picture plane. Can the painting operate as an object while simultaneously being a window? In what space will you engage with the painting? 

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@adipersio

she/her

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Adel DiPersio

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How we define painting is loose, but the definition of drawing has to be completely inexplicable. There are no edges to what drawing could be; due to this, I know it is wonderfully impossible for me to ever fully understand it. Painting lives by stricter rules. This material hierarchy is what fuels the weight projected onto painting and has always felt like something I have to contend with.

I am most interested in the space between drawing and painting for it allows me to question freely. Recently, I have been asking questions about mark making and its relationship to material, accumulation, and time. Additionally, there are always constructional questions and conceptual questions throughout my process. Some constructional questions are: Can the inherent air of a material be playful? Can I itch the back of a shape? Can the speed stop where it needs to? What does drawing have that painting doesn’t? While conceptual questions ask: Can a mark feel like handwriting, drawing, and painting at the same time? Can air be eliminating? How do different speeds touch? Can a painting have everything that I love about drawing?

Though all of my work is imbued with questions, the answers are not as important to me. My work is simply a love letter to concepts and questions that I will never fully know, but hope to gain a better understanding of. 

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@grace_gior

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J. Grace Giordano

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I make objects, paintings, and installations which devolve into complex, self-referencing systems of meaning-making, representation, and experience. Using the structures of language as a starting point, my work investigates the ways that systems are built and the instability of frameworks that exist in continual change. Resituating the idea of finish, I repeatedly arrange and rearrange my modular painting-objects, letting the work rewrite itself over and over again. 

Through foregrounding the work’s relationship to physical space, I place the challenges of navigating language into an experience that can be had with the body. I use wood as a centralizing material, connecting the histories of painting, sculpture, architecture, craft, toys, and paper with the woods of Kentucky as a grounding site.

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@nasirisartpage

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Nasiri Guzman

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My work represents the revival and manifestation of the moments we share with friends and family or in solitude within an interior space. While growing up in the Dominican Republic, I witnessed many people living in extreme poverty and experienced the loss of several family members and friends. This shaped my perspective on the world, making me realize how society often conditions us to think like machines rather than as living beings, prioritizing productivity over the time we have to spend with our loved ones.

In my paintings, I aim to depict family gatherings and everyday life activities. I focus on the overall event without going into an excessive amount of detail. This method allows for loose brushstrokes, making some areas feel like sketches. The use of chiaroscuro in my paintings evokes my experiences in my country during blackouts. At night, it was always dark, and the only light we had came from the moon or candles, creating a lovely obscurity among vibrant colors. Much of the work I created over the past year plays with obscuring colors, which helps to direct the viewer’s focus to the objects within the composition. The most important aspect of this technique is the control I achieve in desaturating colors and fading unnecessary elements into dark areas.

I aim to capture the essence of fleeting moments in my artwork, utilizing rich, evocative dark colors to bring life to intricate portraits and serene domestic scenes. Each work tells a story, inviting viewers to pause and immerse themselves in a world brimming with emotion and beauty. Every brushstroke reflects my understanding of the deep significance found in our interactions with the living world—whether it’s the soulful gaze of a beloved pet or the warmth shared with friends and family. 

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@ivomakianich
ivomakianich.com

he/him

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Ivo Makianich

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The space and architecture depicted in the images of these works appear to be divorced from time, existing instead in a similar liminal twilight. Yet each subtractive mark subtly betrays this sense of timelessness; felt viscerally, each mark builds toward a montage of images that construct architecture. The process begins with an even layer of black paint applied to paper, then paint is gradually removed with a brush, slowly revealing the image beneath. Eventually, the process requires physical scarring of the paper through repetitive cuts, pulling out the whitest whites and highest values.

Each painting is created within a strict one-week timeframe. In a sense, looking at any of these works is akin to watching an accumulation of marks form into an image. However, rarely does each mark represent so succinctly the constraint of time. To walk through a parking garage, beach, bridge, or an industrial building is to experience time as a factor of space. That time exists in our memories of having passed through it, where it unfolds as single images of space, configured linearly in retrospect. Looking at one of these paintings is to witness the way time sees space.

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@aleemanning
aleemanning.com

she/her

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Andrea Manning

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I’ve always had trouble understanding things. When we look at something head on, details tend to get lost in translation. Instead, I’ve found that looking slightly left of the thing reveals a truer meaning of the thing than a direct view. Clear and more meaningful understanding occurs here. This has led me to the use of metaphor and symbolism in the paintings. Deeper understanding is revealed through the relationship to its like. 

I’ve never been on the battlefield, but I have stood in front of a white canvas. Who am I? Who is this? Who are we? What are we fighting for? Every time it changes. Every time it should. I am not the same as I was yesterday. The painting is not the same as it was three hours ago. We fight together with common goals, to figure out what we are and to gain perspective in the experience. 

The content of the work is contradiction and the balance that occurs within this state. Hard but soft. Object but idea. Here but there. Wobbly but centered. Teammate but adversary. Clear but mumbled. Epic but ordinary. Balance can only occur when two sides of the same coin are present, existing together and simultaneously pulling at the other’s existence. 

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@sylvie__mayer
sylviemayer.art

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Sylvie Mayer

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Through layers of translucent washes that build to opacity, my paintings consider intimacy, interiority, and impermanence. Drawing from sources with varied markers of time, my work evokes a sense of anachronism. Repetition and duplication play a role; I repaint, rehearse, and alter images, shifting tone and texture to consider new meanings. 

My paintings examine the mechanics of fiction—questioning the boundaries between reality and illusion and considering the construction of personal and collective narratives. Informed by my childhood spent backstage as the daughter of a ballet dancer, choreographer, and teacher, I am interested in the dynamics of revelation and concealment in theatrical settings. Preoccupied by thresholds and in-between states, I depict transitional spaces that mediate between public and private. 

Interior scenes are a frequent subject of my paintings, imagined as spaces of suspended time, imbued with traces of their inhabitants. I reflect on attachment, entanglement, and the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Suspended moments and hidden glimpses are altered through scale and perspective, converging to confront boundaries between the self and the external world.

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@Dylanmintz

he/him

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Dylan Foster Mintz

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My paintings often freeze-frame moments of things I see in nature. Many of these paintings are based on encounters with strange yet natural forms, specifically those found in the coastal ecosystems of North Carolina. While the paintings represent subjects from reality, they are often relayed from imagined perspectives. 

This body of work is devoted to the psychological revelations that occur when noticing small things in nature that feel larger than life. From a panpsychist worldview, my paintings behold compact sites of consciousness in unexpected places. This outlook is located in the presentation of figures, ranging from trees and flames to insects and mollusks. The paintings are struck with vivid interior illumination and shadowy recessiveness, which elicit dramas. Elements of the paintings coalesce like actors, making symbolic references to human relationships with nature. 

My choice of subject is prioritized by a rediscovery of the familiar rather than an overvaluation of the novel, yet the image remains otherworldly. The figures in my work exist in a supernatural state of suspense. When rendering forms, I describe the character of a subject rather than the likeness of that thing. For example, I’ll emphasize the aura of a surface, a gleam of light, or a pocket of sensorial fluttering. This offers a more visionary or metaphorical representation, conjuring the mystical, sometimes cheesy, qualities that are evoked when noticing the subtle aliveness of everything.

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mirandapikul.com

she/her

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Miranda Pikul
A SHORT STORY

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Sometimes, just to feel something, her strange awkward body will contort itself to fit along the edges of a canvas. Stay within frame, she thinks.

Easier said than done.

Sometimes, she’s not in frame at all and the painting becomes something else entirely. When this happens, she’s having a panic attack. But really I am. A contribution to her bad posture. My posture. She suspects her bad posture is obvious after all, considering people tend to adjust themselves while in proximity to her. While viewing her.

Now her skin is burning. My skin. Bright non-descript red paint. Sometimes a Pale Rose Blush mixed with Naples Yellow Light. Her face is powdering into wrinkles. Congesting. Pigment starts staining. And you’ve never felt worse. Wilted. Withering. Building up layers of washes and glazes. She’s just trying to figure it out. Which means there’s hope. She rehearses again and again, a spontaneous depiction of horror. Resilience.

Her unkempt dirty blonde hair—sometimes brown—hangs heavy. Twisted and knotted. She feels everything deeply or not at all. Too sensitive. Or not enough. She wants everything. Or nothing. But really, she just wants to fit in. No longer needing to contort her strange awkward body to fit along the grooves of anything. Maybe one day she’ll stand up straight and find a box worth fitting in. For now, she is a story told over and over again. A story you may recognize yourself in.

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Lemuel E. Saputra

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My work engages painting and photography as a means of encountering Indonesia’s colonial past through embracing the limitations and tensions between both mediums—fixedness and ambiguity, indexicality and invention, and proximity and distance. Images of colonial Indonesia (from Dutch national archives) are translated and mistranslated using image transfer, collage, and assemblage in combination with painterly mark making. The layered painting surface becomes a screen between viewer and image, creating a push and pull between legibility and obfuscation. Through their sequence and placement in space, each painting begins to function as text, where meaning is constructed by the relationship between individual works. The images’ presentation and re-presentations through various material processes complicates the possibility of any single, fixed reading, questioning the capacity of photography, painting, and the archive to bear witness.

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@_hannahstoll
hannahstoll.com

she/her

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Hannah Stoll

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My work engages the convention of landscape painting with modern revelations in ecological thinking. Considered ecologically, landscape becomes a teeming extension of the self, holding countless sensory and temporal experiences. It becomes indistinguishable from portraits and arrangements of fruit. Painting is as old as cultural ideas about the way humans fit into ecology: I work within this tradition as a way to question these dominant socialized perceptions. 

The paintings are built from layered drawings and glazes, observed contour, and invention. As they evolve, I continually negotiate each element’s relationship to nameable forms. I conflate qualities of scale ranging from micro to macro, and rework edges as membranes that merge or contain. Forms open up as deep empty space and breathe and crawl as living things. Pigment and fabric are laid bare while contributing to the depth and shape of images. 

At the core of this work is an interest in bodies and ecosystems as both living and habitable places. Despite the reality that they are, many people seem to share my feeling of an alienating and excruciating distance. I think of it as the longing to inhabit, and I searched for it by painting a living place that is both seductive and inaccessible through its obfuscation. This longing, a carrot on a string, may approach a biological survival instinct that can activate the life of painted forms.

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noah-wertheimer.com

he/him

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Noah Wertheimer
TELLING STORIES

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In the unfolding of narratives, where does the image belong? Through perspective and framing does the image become fixed? Does the architecture of an image limit the ability for the malleability of narrative? How can we create images that tell multiple stories?

That is not to say that the image is in any way subservient or subsequent to narrative. The image shapes language. The very vocabulary from which the narrative is built is derived from the impulse for confirmation. From one to another. That what I see is also what you see. 

Constantly caught between conveyance of perspective in an image and the construction of vocabulary through it. 

Stories bleed into one another. From mythology to history, through icons to uncertainties. 

less of the story and more of the storyteller. 

The debauchery of a late-night card game awakes to find the redemptive poppy. The moment of sexual discovery runs itself into fascist iconographies that shape the way we determine the attractive and beautiful. The siren song leads to dismemberment and cannibalism. Only to find the song again beautiful and redemptive. 

The work dismembers itself. Through collage, through paint, the narrative unworks itself. Unraveling and beginning again elsewhere. Horrific and hopeful. 

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