Someday You’ll Have To Say It Out Loud:
2023 MFA Graduation Exhibition

April 1 – May 6, 2023
USF Contemporary Art Museum

This eagerly anticipated annual exhibition features Master’s Thesis work by the 3rd year Master of Fine Arts candidates in the USF School of Art and Art History. The 2023 exhibition, titled Someday You’ll Have To Say It Out Loud, features artists Molly Duff, Kai Holyoke, Caitlin Nobilé, Trinity Oribio, Rachel Treide, Manon VanScoder, Alicia Watkinson, and Willow Wells.

Hours: Mon-Fri 10am - 5pm, Thu 10am-8pm, Sat 1-4pm, Closed Sunday and USF Holidays.
Free admission.

 

EXHIBITION BROCHURE

View and download a pdf of the Someday You’ll Have To Say It Out Loud exhibition brochure, with the exhibition checklist, artists' bios and selected images, and texts by USF School of Art and Art History Director Wallace Wilson and USFCAM Director Margaret Miller. (2MB)

 

VIRTUAL TOUR

Explore this virtual 360 degree interactive walkthrough of Someday You’ll Have To Say It Out Loud, the 2023 MFA Graduation Exhibition. For the best experience click the View Fullscreen icon in the lower right of the window. Virtual tour Courtesy of USF Access 3D Lab, Dr. Laura Harrison.

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Molly A. Duff // Spring Lake, MI
B.F.A. Printmaking + Ceramics (2016) Kendall College of Art and Design, Grand Rapids, MI
M.A. (2020) Maharishi University, Fairfield, IA
Website: mollyaduff.com // Instagram: @mollyaduff

Body is the fulcrum that all of my artistic practices stem from. I build ceramic sculptures that are figurative in a distorted way. Elongated legs, flaccid penises, and butt cheeks employ a sense of humor in the figure. With these objects I am questioning why we find exposure of the body comical. I use pink velvet and colored clay slips to adorn my objects. I’m interested in the conversation that can be created between materials that are opposite in nature, pairing soft with hard, fuzzy with smooth, or shiny with dull. I also address the body through movement and gesture in the installation practice of applying clay coils and slip on canvas. The repeated symbol of an upside down U is repeated to create a composition. I install the canvas in a way that becomes seamless; the space wears the textile like a layer of skin, appearing to be applied directly onto the wall’s surface. This approach to installation creates an interruption that breaks the architecture of the gallery. I question the body’s relationship to impermanence. I use color to reference skin: pinks, browns, and undertones of greens and blues create correlation to the body. 

 

Kai Holyoke // Tampa, FL
B.A. Art History (2019) University of South Florida, Tampa, FL
Website: kaiholyoke.com // Instagram: @kaiholyoke

Big thoughts. Silly objects. Papier-mâché, sound, cardboard, found fabric, used pillowcase stuffing, and wigs are activated as props and backdrops within larger contexts. Performance, video, and installation work together to create parallel realities that question the one we find ourselves in. A funner world, a visceral world, a world where mirrors obscure our footwork and rules only function when they’re broken. This is the world where normalized internet culture meets identity and where identity meets the body. 

We understand the world through screens—I attempt to create work through a similar lens while contradicting our reliance on technology. Here, absurdity and sincerity are central, interchangeable, braided terms. While pulling the internet out of the screen, I’m pushing myself further into it. The body reacts with malleability—flesh is putty for playfulness. This is the world where I am an actor of myself. 

Obstacles are of the utmost importance; productive failure remains a primary objective. Intervening with broken instruments and found objects, I enhance the janky, and humorous qualities that live within them. This is the world where DIY will never die. 

This work celebrates incapacity, reifies the multiplicity of identity, and questions the relationship of the body to its material environment.

 

Caitlin Nobilé // Boca Raton, FL
B.F.A. Studio Art (2017) Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton FL
Instagram: @11th_angel4ever

My practice involves creating a tangible reconciliation between the painted surface and the screen, while questioning how disparate the two mediums really are. I make acrylic paintings of enclosed spaces that mimic video game logic such as first-person perspective, and lighting as navigation and visual cues to guide the viewer through the space. My compositional structure of long empty spaces is informed by the dreamlike perspective of metaphysical painting, an art movement which explores the subconscious. 

 These spaces reference formative memories of physical environments, like childhood homes and hospital rooms, and virtual environments such as video game scenery and early online nu-metal imagery. This process of merging the two mediums—painting and screen—is a response to the emotional impact of the increasingly technological world.

 

Trinity Oribio // Bellingham, WA
B.F.A. (2019) Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA
Instagram: @trinidad_oribio

With my work I use photography, installation, and painting to dramatize life experiences and examine my performance of femininity within the context of generational trauma. I am guided always by my obsessions, by the desire to know and the need to understand. The power of my own desire fascinates me, where is the breaking point, what will the after be like? Through this deconstruction of my desire, I acknowledge and reckon with the fact my reality is constructed, that almost nothing within this construction is absolute or concrete. I look for an entry point, a center to disassemble. This gives me the freedom to revel in the spectacle and absurdity of everyday life and to create a reality which is akin to the way a child plays, with great power and agency.

 

Rachel Treide // Uxbridge, MA
B.F.A. Art History (2018) Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA
Website: behance.net/racheltreide // Instagram: @rachel_treide

As a cultural discussion swirls around the concepts and relevancy of truth, beauty, binaries, and stability, we are inclined to look for examples, precedents, and maps to make sense of the present. The inclination to divine structure from chaos, creating order if it does not exist naturally, manifests here as the creation and revelation of new patterns through found forms. Precedent can be reassuring or discouraging, but the very presence of patterns indicates order that is pervasive, intentional, and enduring.

Through pairing or joining photographs in series of two or more, dialogue between forms is generated and patterns emerge. Landscapes without horizons, jumbled scenes in which living and decaying plant life engage in a struggle for dominance, and flowing paths of water are pictured both up close and from afar. Segments and angles of streams, cliff faces, horizons, and shorelines are joined at seams of similarity, but the differing textures, objects, and vantage points within the frames remind the viewer that the scene created is a fabrication.

By focusing on the anti-monuments within the landscape, the ground beneath one's feet that gives rise to the embodied experience of a place rather than iconic markers of a well-known site, the viewer is allowed a small window into the photographer’s encounter with an unmanicured environment. 

Materials and methods are sourced from both historic and contemporary photographic processes, including printmaking techniques, silver-based prints, wetplate collodion, and iPhone videos. Working across and with the contact sheet engages the medium and history of photography and its relationship to time and narrative. The act of using a camera to generate serial images exhibits an archival impulse to classify objects, establish connections, and draw conclusions through collection.

 

Manon VanScoder // Toledo, OH
B.A. Film Production (2018) Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH
Website: manvansco.com // Instagram: @manvansco

I explore memory, trauma, and mental health themes using video, sound, text, cellphone photography, and digital media. Through emotionally digitized landscapes and moving collages, I recreate personal experiences using symbols and references from internet subcultures, horror, natural world imagery, and more. My work investigates the performative nature of digitally mediated behavior, exploring the intersection of the emotional and digital worlds. I use video to separate the passage of time and layer scenes on the screen like emotions. The desktop serves as a reflection of our thought processes, while the internet is a graveyard of digital remnants. My art seeks to connect the personal with the language of the digital world, using familiar images to question how feelings can be visualized.

 

Alicia Watkinson // Missoula, MT
B.A. Communication Studies / B.A. Psychology (2011) University of Montana, Missoula, MT

I am an interdisciplinary artist living in both the negative and positive spaces while learning how to name them. The spaces between where absence becomes presence becomes absence. The feeling of being nowhere and somewhere at the same time. Pursuing moments and monuments to time past, a look at what has been lost and what still remains.

The form is simplified to construct an environment that generates a level of perception. I have the desire to strip things down, to minimize material and content to the most essential in order to attempt to filter out unnecessary noise. What am I paying attention to? The restriction of color pares down elements and allows a focus on structure, connection, and moments of departure. The architecture defines the space to facilitate movements.

I move into the studio to pull something and let it be something else. To exist in a constant state of weaving in and out of the work. A process of open-ended searching. I relish the shadows, the in-between, and the telling of stories honoring the radiance of the mundane day-to-day. Through the simple and the abstract, whether through sculpture, photography, or gestures on paper—my work provides a vessel for emotional expression and a translation of experience into visual terms.

 

Willow Wells // Middletown, CT
BB.F.A. (2019) Lyme Academy, University of New Haven, Old Lyme, CT
Website: willow-wells.com // Instagram: @willows_wells

My work explores the human body and nature, with the objective of entangling them into a singular form. Using oil paint and printmaking, my work centers around traditional fine-art techniques while taking visual and conceptual inspiration from the genre body horror and its use of the metamorphosis narrative.

Printmaking allows me to utilize line, tone, and layering to both render a subject and disguise it. This allows me to meld figures and plants into cohesive forms that are meant to give the work a sense of “in-between” male and female, and plant and human.

Through these processes, I am addressing the act of metamorphosis as a tool to express things beyond verbal explanation. The body itself is telling the story exposing exterior and interior conflicts. Implementing this narrative format into other elements of visual culture as well as art history, I’m hoping to further the conversation around the fluidity of gender, sex, and the constriction of binaries.

 

Someday You'll Have To Say It Out Loud is supported in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, the USF School of Art & Art History, the Stanton Storer Embrace the Arts Foundation, and CAM Club. The USF Contemporary Art Museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.