Student Name:
SA Advisor Name:
SA Advisor Email Address:
LA Advisor Name:
LA Advisor Email Address:
LA Advisor_Preferred type of communication:
(ex. 1. Email, 2. In Person)
LA Advisor_Typical availabilities during the week for a meeting (please include office hours):
(ex. Office Hours: Every Monday 12-1pm at Gibson Hall (no appointment needed)
Non-Office Hours: may also be available every Tuesday 10-11am at MacLab 1 (appointment needed))
LA Advisor_Number of Business days (M-F) to take to response_Meeting Arrangement:
(ex. Please expect at least 1-business day to get a response to arrange a meeting.)
LA Advisor_Number of Business days (M-F) to take to response_Artist Statement Review:
(ex. Please expect at least 3-business days to get feedback.)
Before you send your artist statement, please complete the followings:
(ex. 1. Spell check, 2. Format the document according to the BFA Exhibition guideline (font size,
margins..etc.), 3. Email subject line: BFA_ArtistStatement_YourLastName_FirstName_Draft#.docx)
* It is the student responsibility to submit his/her artist statement on time.
* Students cannot expect any of the SA or LA advisors to be available during weekends, holidays, and
college break.
SELECTED ARTIST STATEMENT EXAMPLES
Graphic Design
Brand Identity – Charleston, South Carolina
For the past year at MCA I have focused my studies on branding and identity systems. These two systems
are closely related and possess multiple benefits to help support whatever they are being applied to. These
benefits include, but are not limited to building credibility, clarity, and consistency. For my BFA, I have
designed an identity system for the city of Charleston, SC. I spent many years living close to downtown
Charleston and see a lot of areas that could benefit from a system such as this.
Charleston is the oldest city in South Carolina and is full of history and charm. It is currently the secondlargest city in the state and is rapidly growing. For the past three years Charleston has been voted number
one city to visit in the United States by Conde Nast Traveler. An increase of attention has resulted in an influx
of visitors and residents. Because of this influx, the city is now responsible for providing a higher quality
experience for both its residents and visitors.
My BFA gives Charleston a strong and cohesive identity that portrays a capable and charming city full of
southern hospitality. My designs create an identity system that provides the city with a new logo, three
specific typefaces, a color palette, and secondary language that can be used to develop future applications. It
is used through multiple touch points to provide the city with a consistent look that forms a sense of familiarity.
These touch points include business cards for the city departments, street signs, bus ads, welcome signs,
brochures and maps for visitors, and merchandise that will be available for purchase. With this system in
place, both residents and visitors can easily recognize what is officially owned and provided by the city of
Charleston.
For the exhibition, Charleston’s identity system has been displayed through multiple frames, both landscape
and portrait, because cities are not composed of one single aspect but rather a system of many personalities
and stories that make up a whole. The salmon color has been chosen as the main one because it brings
warmth to the overall design. The supporting colors have been chosen because of the many colors that are
visible throughout the city. All the colors are bright, fun, refreshing, and comforting which is a direct correlation
with the feel of the city. Charleston’s famous ironwork gates, specifically St. John Lutheran Church Gates,
inspired the logo’s form. Its delicate appearance reflects Charleston’s refined personality and architecture.
The curves are used consistently throughout multiple applications and work together with the colors of the
identity to produce visuals that accurately portray Charleston.
Painting
Undisclosed Desires
My work is a response to the constant influx of technological developments that bombard us daily. With human
progress growing exponentially, the world is in a constant state of change. Through my paintings, I seek to
express the excitement, anxiety, and confusion that I feel while grappling with the implications of this continuous
flow of new advances. Our attention diverges between increasingly more novel distractions. Our experience has
shifted to a fixation on specifics. Our news, our communication, and our very experience of life is given to us in
short, neat bursts of data. Technology has created in us an obsession with fact that impedes us from seeing the
entirety of our experience.
Through geometric abstraction, I deconstruct objects, only to reassemble them into half-truths, objects that are
almost complete. Through folding paper into triangular shards, I create a representation of those snippets of
information that we base our experience around. The resulting forms are ideas that become overpowered by the
components that create them. I suspend my imagery in a state between recognition and confusion, stasis and
motion, reality and imagination. As humans, we look for the recognizable, but in my work I seek to give the viewer
only enough information to make them feel a sense of the subject. These aspects of my painting reconstruct the
sense of fixation and specificity.
Digital Media
Hairy Situation
Hair is very important to different cultures in the world. It is how many people convey who they are, where they
come from, and what they believe in. America’s expenditure on cosmetic hair products is up to $10.8 billion each
year. People willingly spend large sums of money on these products because they are never happy with what
they have. I have chosen the element of hair to critique America’s culture of wanting more. My short film, Hairy
Situation presents the classic mythical theme, “He who wants everything shall lose everything.” We follow
Memphis musician Jake Reigns, with his lush curly locks of hair, as he explores his persistent ambition to acquire
the perfect hair. Cool lit gritty neighborhoods and bars highlight deceptive witty characters who tempt Jake, while
warm lit scenes spaced through out the film are where he encounters characters who have his best interest at
heart. In the end Jake sacrifices everything he has to get the perfect hair but realizes that his blind desire made
him lose what was most important to him and made him whole. Jake’s surprising turn for the better is intended to
leave the audience feeling appreciative of what they have.
Print Making
Corporeal Flux
I am driven by a fascination with ideas that surround feminine perfection and morality—a tethered experience
often found when examining female representation in religion. My installation explores my desire to break free of
these structures by referencing metaphors of “purity” that are applied to the female body to reinforce virtue.
What interests me is that the ideal of female purity automatically creates in my mind fear of the opposite—impurity
or a sense of bodily pollution. My exploration of this began with the idea of liminality, the in between zone that
exists between the polarized concepts of “pure” and the “contaminated,” and the question of what it might look like
if this interstitial space of negotiation were an environment. This brought me to the site of a garden as a place to
explore the purity/pollution binary because it contains elements of both building and landscape, causing it to exist
as an ambiguous space between inner and outer worlds. The etymological origin of the word garden is
“enclosure,” a meaning that brings to mind secret, mystical spaces that transcend space and time. Sex is also a
common theme in garden allegories throughout history, and strong associations have been made between
women and nature, as in the idea of “mother Earth.” Across cultures gardens exist as sites of pleasure and ruin,
paradise lost and paradise restored, from the Garden of Eden to the mythological Greek paradise Hesperides.
The silhouetted forms of flora propagate throughout my installation—panels of leaves, allusions to flowers,
connecting vines—and are hung to appear as if undulating up the wall. Their outlines serve as a guise of sorts,
while upon closer inspection the texture and colors of the handmade paper appear more evocative of decay than
of idyllic nature. Areas of hand cut abaca paper were dried to appear slick and shiny, as if flowing through the
growth. Rough cotton paper sections contrast with the glossy paper elements, furthering the sense of this
formation existing in a transitional state.
The cut-out grid that flows in and out of the piece refers to a garden lattice but becomes warped and broken by
the plants. This element, and the choice to install the piece in a corner, is intended to abstractly imply an enclosed
garden, and in extension my inner and outer body, but one that is not subject to a strict sense of control and
breaks beyond the fence-like structures containing it.
Through a convergence of growth and decay, this piece inverts the idealized ordering of nature in an archetypal
garden and strives for a liminal balance between growth and dilapidation—in turn becoming a projection of the
female body existing between the conflicting ideas of purity and pollution that seek to confine it.
Illustration
Record Shop
I long for a more physical and aesthetic way to connect with music, and to connect people with music and each
other. In a world that is increasingly digitalized and intangible, most people rarely listen to music without also
doing something else: driving, working, reading, or talking. There is no interaction happening; no physical
exchange with music or between people and with digital downloads. While digital media is incredibly practical, it is
packaged and presented in a very cold way. Installing a record shop is a form of tiny rebellion. It creates a social
space where people and music converge. Tour posters and physical albums are tactile ways of interacting with
the music. They have weight in your hands. They wear away with time and handling and offer relief from a world
in constant motion; a break from the impersonal. There is something deliberate about buying analog music. The
choice to put on a record is compelling enough to require one’s undivided attention. It becomes an experience
unlike the digital and intangible.
The albums included in my record shop have a memory attached to them. Each has significance to me and tells a
story. I have sorted through these albums, listening to them intentionally and interpreting them visually. Though
each album is individual to itself, as a whole they are connected aesthetically. Just as there is a finite element to
the albums themselves, there is a finality in my work. Wear and time are illustrated through the use of skulls,
dying plants, and worn objects, evoking a sense of nostalgia both in the materials and the illustrations.
All the records are hand drawn with pens and paper, to reinforce the human touch of my work. I use intricate line
work, with an attention to detail intended to slow down the viewer's process of observation, a parallel to the
experience of listening to analog music: of taking the time to focus, sit down, look at the jacket, and listen. Finally,
the albums and posters are printed, cut, and assembled by hand. They become very physical in nature, each one
having been touched multiple times. I invite the viewer to the record shop, to flip through the albums, to look at the
artwork, to hold them in their hands, to touch.
Sculpture
Culmination of Knowledge
As far back as I can recall I remember my father preaching to me the importance of gaining knowledge in order to
succeed. Throughout my years at MCA I have been creating work using the idea of self-transformation by the way
of acquiring knowledge.
My piece consists of multiple materials and techniques that I have used throughout my college career in order to
display an accumulation of knowledge. The ceramic self-portrait’s transition from rough to smooth is done so in
order to resemble the awakening from a shell or cocoon, which is why there is a closed and opened eye. The
bookcase acts as the body, and inside that body are objects associated with knowledge, or books. A skill is
learned or information is committed to memory and is stored within the body to be put to use later. The content of
the first shelf’s books are that of my origin and influences, the second shelf consists of the principal materials I
have utilized as a sculptor and the bottom shelf’s book contain promise of the future and what I could do with the
teachings I have gained.