School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents BFA Visual & Critical Studies’ 2021 thesis show, “3D/ream Spiral_r e l a x.” Curated by faculty member Suzanne Joelson and presenting works by Mina Al Huqail, Julia Colletes, Tyler Downing, Nour Moustafa, Juliet Nelson, Jay Park and Naomi Treistman, the exhibition will be on view from Saturday, January 16, through Saturday, February 6, at the SVA Flatiron Windows, 133/141 West 21st Street, New York City, and online at galleries.sva.edu.

The BFA Visual & Critical Studies Senior Thesis Group rolls with the unpredictable. In a challenging situation, they defied expectations. That is what school can be; one learns to develop a plan, then question one’s assumptions and reconsider. Rarely is dialectical thinking so outwardly motivated. Time in quarantine has revealed untapped resources and, for some, a fresh focus on long-lived concerns.

In a year in which community and family have appeared as heads on a screen, it is no surprise that three of the seven participating artists are working with faces. Tyler Downing created an impermeable character, Face Boy, who embodies the smoke break and its offer of escape. Nour Moustafa has generated characters for a mythology yet to be written. Mina Al Huqail, who makes work about borders and boundaries, has in recent months secreted those images into the framing of a face. Her masks call on a tradition which they transgress.

At the other end of the lens, Julia Colletes employs traditional Sashiko stitching and laser printers to evoke a mountain range as a shelter for intimate inserts, in her work Blue Book, which measures 14 feet. Juliet Nelson consistently works with climate change, and in Nelpo, on view here, she explores the ugly side of the beauty business, creating paper from the flower industry’s shipping and material debris. While Nelson’s flowers come from a family farm in Ecuador, Naomi Treistman summons the plants of her native Peru in sculptures that feel like wayward friends.

Jay Park created a thesis class website, vcs-21.nyc, the form of which feels as rich and tumultuous as the moment in which we live. We hope you will take a look.