Slow Gardens

Slow Gardens: 2025 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition, on view at WashU's Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, features thesis projects by the MFA in Visual Art candidates in the 2025 graduating class of the Sam Fox School’s Graduate School of Art.

The title Slow Gardens refers to the candidates’ interest in topics such as memory and myth, care and control, temporal and spatial boundaries, domesticity, and gender and identity. These themes are explored through various media, including painting, photography, fiber, collage, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and installation.

The 2025 MFA in Visual Art candidates are Eva Agüero, Sam Berger, Catie Cook, Tahia Farhin Haque, Addyson Hoey, Jungsoo Kim, Mu Lan, Carmen Ribaudo, Grace C. Ryder, Roy Uptain, and Czesława Wojtkowski.

Eva Agüero explores the lingering influence of colonial discourse on identity, migration, and cultural perception. Through video installations, sculpture, and constructed environments, Agüero, who was born in Venezuela, investigates how colonialist ideals shape self-perception, particularly in the diaspora.

“Transmutation of Self” by Sam Berger is a series of layered self-portraits printed on diaphanous fabric that explores bodily relationships to the work and how the idea of multiple selves can be depicted, interacted with, and pushed.

Through her large-scale oil painting on canvas, Catie Cook deals with themes of hyperfemininity and girlhood inspired by her childhood in the American South. Her work attempts to simultaneously celebrate and critique our understanding of modern-day femininity.

Tahia Farhin Haque, originally from Bangladesh, is a photographer and visual artist who questions the prejudices and perceptions of society. Farhin Haque’s “Present:0” draws attention to the children who have been and continue to be killed during global conflict through a large-scale installation with the phrase “Every child is innocent” written in chalk in three languages: Bengali, Arabic, and English.

Addyson Hoey blends physical and digital, two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, painting and sculpture with “Mask,” which is supported by hot pink steel. Hoey challenges the narratives and conditions of painting where painting is no longer a static image, but an image that is evolving.

Jungsoo Kim delves into the themes of memory, trauma, and healing. Kim’s mixed-media installation “Deep Abyss: Repository of Echoes” aims to create a reflective space that goes beyond traditional memorial forms, providing a sensory environment that invites deep emotional engagement and contemplation of personal and collective memories.

Multidisciplinary artist and writer Mu Lan explores vulnerability, transformation, and the dissolution of the human body. Through ceramics, installation, performance, and text, they construct fragmented narratives that blend mythology, queerness, and speculative fiction. Lan’s “Undefinitive” is a multimedia installation of primarily ceramic objects telling a queer love story in a post-apocalyptic world.

Carmen Ribaudo presents “Rights of Way,” 24 plein air graphite drawings on Tyvek of her parked car in relation to vegetation, sometimes outside, sometimes reflected in the car’s mirrors or on its polished body. 

In “Go Cry About It!,” Grace C. Ryder represents 158 instances of crying over the course of one year through delicate ceramic wall pieces accompanied by a dot matrix printer that has printed the data of the instances — including location and reason for crying — onto continuous tractor paper.

In the multimedia installation “Edgelord Ethnography,” Roy Uptain reconstructs domestic spaces modeled after real images from online forums like the Reddit community r/malelivingspaces to explore how internet subcultures, especially 4chan-adjacent edgelord communities, bleed into physical space.

Czesława Wojtkowski explores femmephobia against trans women and non-binary people in “Nose Candy Candy Candy Candy Darling,” three 45” x 70” velvet banners embellished with intricate beadwork and two projected videos: one of the artist and one of a fictional muse, Mighty Lady.