1st Year MFA Exhibition featuring artwork by Shannon Clegg, Omar Khouri, Manda Vasquez and Sequoia Maria Rose Williams-Valenzuela.

Manda’s work “For Our Hearts Adorned” explores the metaphorical traces we leave behind in our absence. This work challenges the limitations of the physical body by using light to solidify the gestural, atmospheric, and fleeting movements of one’s energetic presence. This photographic series aims to highlight the eternal essence and memory of one’s soul.

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Omar’s piece “I Hope This Email Finds You Well.“ is a durational installation about the complex psychological torture an expat goes through when forced to observe a war happening in their home country from afar. In this specific instance, it is about the horrid and indiscriminate military action and invasion that Israeli Occupation Forces are perpetrating on Lebanon, as well as the attacks by the US and Israeli military on Iran.

A special thank you to my family, friends and all the innocent people around the world who have to endure this hell on our behalf.

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Sequoia’s work explores the intersections of access, movement, and borders, examining how external and internal boundaries produce tensions, narratives, and points of limited mobility that shape how bodies are experienced and perceived. Working through warp and weft, they locate the body within the woven cloth—held in tension, structure, and repetition—while materials and process anchor the work within layered geopolitical histories and contexts.

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Shannon’s work “To The Place” explores belonging under shifting conditions of home through migration. Using text drawn from personal postcards to places lived and left, she engraves language into paper through a durational process until it transforms into texture. This act attempts to stabilize what remains in flux, as home is continually re-formed through what is carried from one place to another.