A BFA Thesis show by Zoe Maitland, Ava Murakami, Gabe Sames, and Luke Schafer.

Zoe Maitland explores nostalgia, intimacy, and the fleeting in-between moments of young women’s lives through photography. Guided by a playful and spontaneous approach, her work captures connection and the beauty of everyday life. Through personal yet familiar imagery, she offers up the world as she sees it, reflecting on the tenderness and complexity of ordinary moments.

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Ava Murakami’s practice explores how oil painting can translate subtle exchanges between people in public spaces, focusing on nuanced and often overlooked moments of human connection. Through figurative painting, she captures fleeting encounters between friends and strangers alike, using composition, color, and form to reveal emotional narratives within everyday life.

Working through a slow and deliberate oil painting process, Murakami’s work responds to the speed and distraction of contemporary life by encouraging viewers to pause, reflect, and look more closely. Using photographic references influenced by snapshot and street photography, she extends and preserves transient moments through paint, transforming ordinary interactions into lasting and meaningful observations. Her practice is informed by themes of attention, temporality, and the quiet significance of daily human experience.

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Gabriel Sames creates abstract expressionist oil paintings directed by his own original music. Drawing from alternative R&B and electronic instrumentation, these saturated works utilize soft fluid forms and hard defined shapes to capture the internal conflict between delayed growth and future regret. By composing the music along with the visual marks, the canvases become devices for capturing the unseen, presenting the viewer with a language previously intangible.

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Luke Schafer explores spatial relations of geometric forms through experimentation. Through his inquisitive process he creates geometric assemblies that integrate the body as another element to be spliced into the composition.