Surface Tension,
Fine Arts BFA 2026 Graduating Exhibition
Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), New York12 - 24 May’26
227 W 27th St, New York, NY 10001
John E. Reeves Great Hall
paintings
sculptures
Jaden Kenna Botte, T Brandwein, Isa Carmona, Courtney Corrigan, Makena D'Amario, Katie Dee, Mariana del Sol, Sandrine Delattre, Cameron Dennis, Noa Doron, Katharine Drury, Lauréline Epron, Cianna Gibson, Renee Harari, Kenny Heredia, Arianne Hernandez, Ashley "Ashetray" Hernandez, Simon Ho, Laur Jerlin, Wiktoria Klimczuk, Jacqueline Lafayette, Maria LaRosa, Samuel Leone, Jeanette Lin, Michelle Bing Lin, Tania Madhalam, Brenna Mahoney, Garrett Mastrantonio, Andrea Melendez, Ryan Michael, Shanti Nakamaru Chowdhury, Clover Ntalo, Alleta Patterson, Noelle Peck, Josie Ponce, Taylor (Lore) Quinto, Jaylene Robles, Lesley Salas, Vanessa Santiago, Sofiya Shalashova, Autumn Shapiro, Matthew Teutonico, Luz Ticona, Dorothy Trujillo, Mendy Wang, Clementine Watts, Cecelia Wilson & Isabella Zeyben
Surface Tension aims to explore themes of intersectional dialogue and the ambiguity of coming and going; how artists contend with the tensions of a mark on a flat substrate, the bodily responses to site specific installation, or the earnestness of sculpture in the round. In examining these tensions, this show reveals the ways in which we coalesce and diverge from one another through our individual investigations, adaptations, and innovations.
In their time at FIT, our students have developed a greater awareness of how their own ideas relate to both their creative predecessors and today's contemporary dialogue.
Some projects resonated with me deeply; others, not so much. This is the perfect place for a disclaimer: my impressions are purely subjective. They are what make me me, reflecting my identity as a viewer. It is completely normal if someone else walks through the same exhibition and finds different favorites or pieces that fail to reach their core. That’s where the irony and magic of art lie. I’m not writing this to put anyone on a pedestal or to tear anyone down; I simply want to express my own perception. I encourage you to form your own opinion—not through the lens of my words, but in person.
Today, I want to share the specific works and artists that appealed to my personal taste, along with a few snippets I found at the entrance to the gallery.
SO, LET’S BEGIN?
Oil & Screenprints on Wood
'If Our Walls Could Speak' discusses the complexity of relationships. It takes a great amount of effort to learn how to trust someone, but far greater effort to apply that same principle when it comes to trusting one's own judgment. Our upbringings shape the people we become and the people we let into our lives. The repeated cycles we experienced as young ones influence the choices we make as we get older, whether they are great or poor decisions. Sitting in front of what is the vanity of the generational curse one hopes so passionately to break are the consequences of the ones that came before them.
@ash3tray.archives
I use photo transfers within my art to combine contrasting phenomena within my life. An apparent one is where live now, which is America, but my ancestry comes from Peru. Being indigenous and being taught about my culture, yet my family moved to urban areas, forgot their language, and confided in the church, which was another contradiction. Being a first-generation immigrant adds another layer of complexity to my self-reflection. I grew up moving around a lot, never having an exact place I could call home; everywhere I stayed felt like a placeholder.
My process begins with me pasting the image with matte medium on canvas; the image references my experiences in Peru and America. Then I paint with oil to create an image that contrasts itself in place or time, symbolizing how my mind processes the treatment of my culture throughout generations. Resulting in a distorted image that commemorates my relatives and reminisces about the experiences of growing up and moving around.
@0816.44
Photo Transfer on Canvas
Through color, I explore vast emotions, translating my physical energy into forms that feel alive. My primary focus is on large-scale abstractions created with both oil paint and oil sticks. I work across a range of canvas and paper sizes. My intention through my work is that this space becomes available to others. There is something deeply connective about the ground we walk on. It is a constant reminder we are tied to the same physical world. I seek for that connection allowing my energy to surface through gestural movement. To create a strong, dynamic quality, one that begins to feel sculptural in its presence. I believe in abstraction because it takes fragments of thought and intention to come together and depict a feeling.
Abstraction carries the mind beyond literal representation.
Oil on Canvas
I don't know what to say. At first, I thought, “This color is so bright, it's almost jarring.” But after a couple of minutes, my opinion completely changed—I started to like these colors and lines so much that I thought Jacqueline and I could be good friends: we both like large canvases, we both want to go beyond the boundaries of conventional classical beauty, and in abstraction we see something more and more narrative. To me, her painting is like a movie with an open ending—it sticks in my mind, a pleasant feeling.
My paintings explore the space between personal memory and shared recognition. Drawing from family narratives and lived experience, I create images that feel intimate yet deliberately unresolved. Rather than depicting specific stories, I construct scenes that feel familiar but slightly distant, with moments that appear suspended, fragmented, or partially withheld. This reflects how memory functions: selective, incomplete, and shaped as much by absence as by what remains visible.
Formally, I focus on color relationships, atmosphere, and spatial ambiguity.
Color acts as a psychological structure that shapes the emotional tone of the work, while figures and environments often dissolve into one another.
Surfaces are built through layered acrylic, drawing, and subtle shifts in texture.
My thinking has been informed by writers Gaston Bachelard and Susan Sontag, as well as painters Amy Dury and Jennifer Packer, whose work demonstrates how emotional presence can emerge through restraint, ambiguity, and atmosphere, rather than explicit narrative.
@mar1aarts
I work between painting and sculpture to examine how human subjectivity encounters the material conditions of lived environments. My practice begins with closely observing objects and experiences situated in liminal states, where social and physical structures that organize everyday life temporarily suspend to expose the sublime, humorous, violent, and ambiguous. I am particularly interested in how systems of labor shape routines and the obligations and desires of individuals, and in doing so, how it affects spaces of human habitation such as public and urban spaces. Discarded, consumed, or residual objects left by human use often reveal the innate tendencies of a collective that are hidden by habit of maintenance or ignorance. I paint impressions of these observations of human materiality on multiple surfaces and incorporate the utility of wood to construct a direct mediated reality between an external material world and internal subjectivity to allow the work to be read as both image and object.
@shellemi1
Be Somebody
Dive deep
Stay down long
Come up fast
Throw up-Die!
Oil, Enamel, Pencil on Wood
& Oil on Canvas
I work across multiple mediums including painting, printmaking, and analogue photography, allowing each discipline to inform my techniques, themes, and visual language. Currently, my work explores the relationships between body and mind. While the physical body is often separated from abstract concepts like consciousness, spirituality, or philosophy, l aim to merge these realms through dissection, abstraction, and reconstruction of human forms. By creating new anatomical elements, I imagine systems that act as highways for consciousness while emphasizing the body's physical functions. Some forms echo recognizable anatomy, while others evolve into biomorphic landscapes. I am drawn to recurring patterns found in nature, often discovered through photography. Recently, medical imagery has become a strong influence. These visuals echo abstract paintings, and reinforce my fascination with how art reflects and amplifies natural forms.
My process is deliberate and layered, involving thin washes and subtractive techniques. Working in segments and panels, I build composite structures where individual parts form interdependent wholes, embracing uncertainty and discovery throughout the process.
@w_glowieizba
Oil on Wood /Found Object
My work deals primarily with themes of interpersonal image, transness as a metaphysical operation, and the body in conversation with marine life. My current body of work is a series of life size self-portraits. Each work in this series is painted on a 6ft x 2ft canvas. I use this format to prioritize presence. The scale and expression of each figure is designed to register directly with viewers initially as a person and secondly as an image.
@cwatts.portfolio
Oil on Canvas
I’d love to show you more photos of these pieces, but I simply don’t have any—it was practically impossible to take any because of the crowds of onlookers. The colors are very cinematic, with an unusual neon vibe; the pieces are conceptual, vibrant, and incredibly lifelike—they create a real sense of presence.
Cyanotype,
Silkscreen, Wood & Found Objects
@noellearrts
Contemporary art :) In the classic sense, you start off asking yourself, “What the hell is this?”, and then you get somehow curious and walk back and forth, noticing more and more details and little things that tie everything together. It’s cool; I’d love to transfer designs like this onto clothing—it would be awesome.
OMG LMK IF U STILL ALIVE AT THIS POINT LMAO ANYWAY I HAVE SOMETHING ELSE TO SHOW HEHEHEHE
OH WAIT? DID I SAID THAT U CAN GO AND TAKE A LOOK IN PERSON INSTEAD OF STARE AT YOUR MONITOR?–OH YEAH I DID...
Laur Jerlin is a New York City based artist whose work explores themes of place, structure, identity, and change. Using repetition, color, and contrast they play with the tension between the familiar and the abstract, along with the personal and the universal. Their work often begins with something rooted—a familial connection, a number pattern, a piece of music—and evolves into compositions that hold both order and ambiguity. Each work investigates how environments shape us, and how memory and perception re-shape those environments in return. Influenced by poetry, sound, and systems, Laur seeks to create spaces where structure and feeling coexist, and where the viewer might recognize their own places and patterns within theirs.
laurjerlin.myportfolio.com
How did you make that giant metal ball? It's awesome! It looks totally epic next to those cute, light, and delicate pendants.
@jadenbotte
New Territories is a series of multimedia paintings of varying sizes, arranged to join into a large rectangular form that subtly evokes the geometry of a tennis court. Rooted in the language of sport and abstraction, the project draws from the physical and emotional terrain of tennis: the tournament, the match, the rally, the strike and return, the charged atmosphere of competition, and the fleeting sensations embedded within play. While the works can be experienced as a single visual field, each painting remains its own distinct moment, titled sequentially as part of the New Territories series. Together, they reflect a deeply personal vocabulary shaped by my experiences as an athlete, tennis player, competitor, trainer, and artist. Through oil and mixed media on canvas, these paintings become courts, surfaces, and shifting perspectives of space and time, constructed through regulating lines, reciprocal brushwork, and layered material presence.
@simonarchived
Oil, Colored Pencil, Pastel, Conte, Cement with Sand mix and 3D-printed panel on Canvas, Charcoal, Oil stick, Pigment & Chinese
Watercolor on Linen
Untitled 2, Series 1
Video Installation
I am a Mexican-Puerto Rican artist based in Brooklyn, NY. My artistic endeavors center around an exploration of the human figure and energy and its interactions with space and time, employing a range of dry and wet mediums such as oil paint, oil sticks, watercolors, graphite, and color pencils.
In my creations, I attempt to delicately weave in elements of fantasy to articulate my perspective on the human experience and personal memory.
Color plays a crucial role in my work, as it is my tool in creating atmospheric light and a sense of place. I build my palette intuitively, which serves as a conduit for engaging in vulnerability and play. My vision is rooted in the desire to connect with others through visual conversation, creating familiar yet imaginary.
@byisacarmona
Oil on Canvas
@silhouettefront
I'm serious.
Not only does the work itself contain plenty of “clues,” but you also have the opportunity to step beyond the boundaries of the real (or relatively real) world and into a virtual one.
Currently I've been investigating past childhood and adolescent memories of my younger self playing outside in play environments, structures, and imaginative states to transport somewhere else. In my practice, I reconstruct these spaces with a present subjectivity where these once permanent spaces now only exist in my mind as a memory or fleeting image. The current work I've developed calls specifically to the exploration of these spaces, memory, and time. My paintings reflect an experimental and tactile attitude to the touch. Each work is extremely physical, using collage elements with a limited color palette, abstracted compositions through subtractive and additive painting methods, recalling to Tic Tac Toe games built within playgrounds, fences, and walls. While also referencing physical media through photo transfers, objects, use of obsessive repetitive imagery, and abrasive texture, I explore my relationship to industrial structures as tools of play that measure time and memory.
@cianna.files
@5amle1
My Thesis became a reflection of transformation, inheritance, and the way the body carries memory. Through orchids, layered surfaces, and organic forms, I wanted to create a space where femininity could exist without shame or silence. The work speaks about growth through discomfort, the complexity of womanhood, and the tension between softness and survival.
Using stained canvas, oil, leather, branches, and mixed media, I built the surface slowly so it could hold both vulnerability and strength at the same time. The leather became important to the piece because of its relationship to skin and flesh. It carries its own history, texture, scars, and softness, mirroring the body and the idea of lived experience. Incorporating material craft into painting allowed me to merge different parts of my practice together while pushing the work beyond a traditional flat surface.
The orchids became symbols of resilience and personal history, tied to my childhood, my mother, and the women who shaped me. More than anything, this thesis is an invitation to have conversations around the stigmas placed on women’s bodies and experiences, and to turn those conversations into something visible, intimate, and alive.
@_ariannehernandez
I work in a variety of traditional and digital mediums, blending technical drawings with the fluidity of paint/liquid mediums to craft my scenes. Humor, metaphor and a constant recycling of memory are themes I explore most often— they serve as conduits for merging my traditional fine arts training with digital influences/culture.
ka-heredia.com
OMG THAT'S UNBELIEVABLE–I’M FINALLY DONEEEEEE YAAAASSSSSSSS
THANKSFOR HANGING OUT W ME! :)
AS USUAL,
– GO AND SEE IT IN PERSON
elena volkova