Look Both Ways: A Hunter MFA Thesis Exhibition

By LIAM OTERO March 10, 2025

On the evening of Thursday March 6, CUNY - Hunter College’s downtown gallery, 205 Hudson, was abuzz with activity for the opening night of the first of multiple MFA Studio Art thesis exhibitions for Spring 2025. Look Both Ways was a triumphant start for the first cohort of graduating MFA students whose markedly distinct creative practices are demonstrative of an exciting undercurrent defining the next generation of Contemporary Art. A throughline uniting these 7 artists is that their works challenge one-dimensional, face value readings of art in favor of far more nuanced, multidimensional interpretations that compel viewers to engage and re-engage with the pieces in perpetuity. Robert Rauschenberg, a titan of multidisciplinary art, often voiced concerns that if an artwork’s meaning was perfectly understood, then it was dead. Remarkably, this concern need not apply here as each students’ works are alive and thriving with a robust open-endedness whose myriad interpretations extend ad infinitum.

Meredith Bakke with Any Orifice Will Do!, 2025, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches

Lining two walls of the left side of the upper gallery, Dallas-born Meredith Bakke’s viscerally-charged paintings of cartoonish physical violence will make one abruptly stop in their tracks to take in the gruesome scenes: an elongated arm crashes through the heads of two figures, eyeballs jump out of their sockets while still attached to their spindly optic nerves, a brutal demonstration of gendered violence in which a man’s foot squashes the face of a recumbent woman who looks toward us. Drawing upon the stylized gore of Japanese anime, Bakke’s paintings of carnage is a satirical inquiry into the harsh realities of what it means to be a person who exists in a world where violence is an ever-present possibility. Another important takeaway to consider is that these largely flesh-toned, compositional torrents of painterly blood and mucus seepages are bold statements on the dangers of fetishizing violence on a societal level. After all, Bakke’s aforementioned eyeball-less victim agonizes before an open laptop, a nod to internet culture fomenting morbid curiosities in all-things violent. Elsewhere, Donald Duck’s mouth is stuffed with an unknown protuberance, an allusion to controversies of how pâté de foie gras cuisine is prepared. 

Instagram: Meredith Bakke (@meredithbakke)

Nava Derakhshani, Golden Samovar, 2025, fountain installation, glazed porcelain and ceramic
 

Born in Eswatini in Southern Africa to Iranian parents in exile, Nava Derakhshani identifies as a global diasporic artist whose personal and familial histories strongly inform the direction of her multidisciplinary art-making. Her Golden Samovar installation is a cleverly sardonic critique of patriarchy albeit through a post-colonial Farsi perspective. In the center of the space, a custom-designed fountain made from a stack of thrown Persian-style teapots is rendered in an asymmetrical, slightly tilting, off-kilter position. Protruding golden spouts that deliberately resemble penises are situated in all-over arrangement along the fountain, similar to Yayoi Kusama’s playful use of phallic motifs in her 1960s soft sculptures. Plastic tubes connected to the sculptural phalluses transfer water from the fountain to the wide ceramic dishes on the floor surrounding the sculpture. A flock of miniature testicular shapes with eyes are suspended from the ceiling with their gaze directed below at the fountain and the viewer. The application of traditional Persian art & design techniques and explicit body humor effectively scrutinizes male hegemony, especially the long-held views of male sexual physiognomy being synonymous with power and authority.

Even after exiting her designated exhibition space, one cannot seem to escape the playful humor of Derakhshani as her small-scale painting of a sea of disembodied red-pink eyes is placed squarely along the wall of the back stairway near the restroom - a not-so-subtle reminder for viewers that literally all eyes are on them wherever they stand. 

Instagram: Nava Derakhshani (@navaderakhshani)

Max Eisenberg, Storm Warning, 2024, archival pigment print, 28 x 24.2 in. Edition 1 of 2 + AP

Max Eisenberg’s archival pigment prints are a brilliant demonstration of how breaking the rules in any medium - especially a more mechanized one like photography - can produce outstandingly novel results. Eisenberg’s series of prints serve as an alternative portrait of his native Florida, one that is distinguished by signs, symbols, and other iconography specific to the state - basically, an “if you know, you know” sort of sentiment that can be quite multilayered in its associations, be it an abstract swirl emblematic of a hurricane or water spout, the use of orange and tealish green color schemes symbolic of the University of Florida (Eisenberg’s undergraduate alma mater), local fauna such as pelicans or the venomous coral snake evoking the humid, southeastern tropical climate, etc. A complex system involving a Japanese camera from the 1980s, shaped black cut-outs, and overlaid transparent sheets are the main ingredients for how Eisenberg creates his images, with further interventions in drawing and semi-collage elements, giving a greater sense of tactility to an otherwise textureless medium. 

Instagram: Max Eisenberg (@badatphotoshop)

Ali Motamedi with Farsi Flows, 2024, installation with image, text, and code on printed 8.5 x 11 inch paper
 

A resident of New York for the last 15 years, Iranian-born Ali Motamedi synthesizes his work as an artist and author into a prodigious interdisciplinary practice involving research-based art, language, photography, and text-based art. As an immigrant artist, Motamedi experimented with the characters of his native Farsi language and found that their visual elements bore similarities to objects and symbols outside Iran. Subsequently, he formulated his site-specific installation, Farsi Flows (2024), a sophisticated grid-layout of images, texts, and colors that hang along the walls of a jutted corner of the gallery with an accompanying string-bound booklet placed on a custom-designed shelf that faces this particular corner. For all its systematized orderliness, Motamedi encourages viewers to conceive their own open-ended interpretations of what each image or sign represents and how they are connected with one another. Interspersed among the images of Farsi characters, one will find rudimentary sketches of a train, a picture of a simple circle, an aerial photograph of the Prehistoric Uffington White Horse hill figure, textual transcriptions, etc. The conceptual intricacies behind the making and display of this installation was quite profound in discovering a greater universality behind language and signs seeing that there are truly an infinitesimal range of possibilities one could glean.

Ali Motamedi (@alimotamedi)

Magdalen Pickering, Ferns for Maggie, 2024, acrylic ink screen printed on canvas
 

In the back corner of the upper gallery, Magdalen Pickering experiments with spatial illusionism by painting certain sections of the walls to appear as if the space were opening itself up into another room. Her mixed media acrylic on canvas paintings are hung at differing heights to both reinforce the sense that the space expands beyond and to create a sense of disorientation. The vibrant use of purple for the walls combined with the cheerful paintings whose surfaces are rich with glitter and spray paint makes for a welcoming atmosphere, very much a personal sanctuary like one’s bedroom, according to Pickering. She purposefully vied for a space whose aesthetics felt more like a “feminine facade” as this methodology was directly inspired by Pickering’s experience of living through the COVID-19 pandemic with her room as a symbol of peace and safety. Going a step further, visitors can opt to wear a Virtual Reality headset in which they interact with an avatar of the artist whilst creating their own virtual paintings that atomize into the digital simulacra of the exhibition space. 

As I remarked to Pickering, this room-within-a-room or meta-gallery would make the artist-writer Brian O’Doherty (aka Patrick Ireland) proud given his famous critical analysis of the antiseptic, pristine white walls of the modern gallery (or white cube).

Instagram: Magdalen Pickering (@pickeringgallery)

Artist Rosalie Smith posing with (Mobile Nursing Station), 2024-2025, bike frame, IV stand, rebar, fidget spinner, kickstand, bike pedal, casters, clamp, driftwood, earbud, lightbulb, wires, gum, crab claw, buzzballz, hair bows, shells, artificial rose petals, toy grenade, cigarette, matches, clothespin, artists’ hair, cable, ribbon, zip tie

To the right of the main entrance, one will be readily acquainted with the large-scale sculptural installations of Rosalie Smith that occupy the floors, walls, and ceiling. With science fiction at the forefront of her mind lately, Smith is an expert world builder who fuses seemingly unrelated objects to create mind-boggling formations that anticipate a post-human future in which the Earth has been left in shambles while technological ruins abound and are transformed into new, fantastical subjects that appear as eccentric vehicles or inventions. But even with this futuristic reading of ecological crisis and technological waste, there is an autobiographical facet to her work. Smith explained that each artwork is a material record of the found objects she acquired on the streets of New York or from her studio - discarded metal trays, rusted and bent golf clubs, broken walkers, loose nails & screws, faux foliage, piles of dust and paint chips, etc. This elaborate menagerie of literally thousands of disparate items make for fascinating observations as they are linked together in spore-like permutations (there are quite a few instances in which entire sections are bound with gum chewed by Smith). As an artist whose creative methodologies entail the overwhelming accumulation of a hodge-podge of objects and detritus that transform into otherworldly and whimsical structures, Smith’s art is very much a part of the lineage of such accomplished practitioners of sculptural assemblage like Lee Bontecou and Nari Ward.

Rosalie Smith (@rosalieglsmith)

Emily Wichtrich, Imitation, 2025, mixed media, 20’x13’x10’
 

In the central space of the upper level, Emily Wichtrich’s Imitation (2025) takes the form of a tripartite mixed media installation that allegorizes the relationship between Christianity and empire in America’s past and present. A life-size papier-mache sculpture of an anthropomorphic horse-like creature with the face of a green man donning a golden crown is Wichtrich’s take on the lamassu, a mythological winged deity from Ancient Assyrian culture known for its protective role. However, this creature appears distracted as it tends to a leg wound, thus enabling viewers passage to a table with a Van de Graaaff generator sporting a platinum blonde wig; when the button is activated, the strands of hair rise from the electrical currents. And finally, viewers are met with the carnivalesque red-white striped tent titled “The Magdalen”, which contains an image of Jesus Christ’s Crucifixion as enclosed in a mock mandorla from two criss-crossed hula hoops and a surrounding ring of orange hair. This almost Lynchian display of uncanny symbols and icons in a dreamlike setting is a melding of Wichtrich’s Catholic background, interest in theatrical spectacle (from stage design to her work as a Studio Artist at Madame Tussauds), the blurred distinction between religious and secular devotion (hence the shrine-like tent’s references to Christ’s disciple Mary Magdalene and the blonde wig’s association with Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe), and the artist’s moral concerns over ways in which Christianity has been employed toward egregious ends in America. This extremely sophisticated tableau of characters, objects, setting, and narrative has brought religious or spiritualistic art into an entirely new dimension.

Instagram: Emily Wichtrich (@emilyfwichtrich)

Final Thoughts

As it should be readily evident, the inherent nuances of each artist’s works necessitated a thorough description and analysis given the level of depth achieved through experimental techniques, unconventional narratives, and an endless litany of thematic connections. Even after engaging in the most thorough kind of slow, close looking, you will still come away realizing that there remains much, much more to the work than meets the eye, which makes for a most enriching gallery experience. If only such a show could be extended beyond 10 days! WM