Fractured Horizon

There is an adage in the theater world that no matter what happens the show must go on. This is certainly the situation all of us—educators and students alike—face as we embrace a “new normal” brought about by the COVID-19 virus. At this point in the life of an academic year, second year graduate students are readying the install of individual thesis exhibitions. This year, however, MFA in Photography and Related Media candidates—Granville Carroll, Jin Chan, Carlos Tobón Franco, Jiageng Lin, and Hugo Teixeira— must be especially enterprising, fashioning their thesis exhibitions for display in a virtual gallery rather than on gallery walls. The title chosen for the collective exhibitions—Fractured Horizon—partially speaks to this consequence. With the end stage of their advanced studies in sight, the horizon line has been splintered by new inexorable realities. But delve deeper and similar themes of fracture also run through the creative subject and/or process forwarded by each of the graduate candidates in their individual displays.  

Important to all the thesis presentations are fractures, be it a crack, split or fragment, forced by history, personal, public and political identities, migration, or the questioning of the cultural and material constitution of photographic media itself. Each graduate candidate approaches their individual subject with an intellectual acuity supported by a wide range of finely-honed creative expression, from the sculptural to the spiritual, the vernacular to the performative. Each has achieved the exacting measure of thesis expectation: the creation of original work imbued with personal and professional aesthetic advancement.

The School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, its faculty and staff, celebrates the end of study thesis exhibitions of its five graduate candidates. Even in these trying times, the unified display Fractured Horizon demonstrates the ways in which the act of art making points to personal revelations and cultural understanding.

— Therese Mulligan, Ph.D., Director, School of Photographic Arts & Sciences