Every Spring, Gallery&Studio is pleased to spotlight the MFA Thesis Exhibition of the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Western Connecticut State University. Shown at Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City’s Chelsea, this year’s exhibition celebrates the 2025 cohort of six dedicated artists, newly-minted Masters who invite us to join them on vibrant—and very different—visual paths of discovery.
Joseph Nolan’s deeply felt portrait paintings let us pause to contemplate people we might not have expected to find on contemporary art-gallery walls: America’s war veterans. Airman Patrick Nolan depicts the artist’s twin; both twins, and their younger brother Jack served in the U.S. Armed Forces, (Joseph in the Marine Corps, Patrick in the Air Force, and Jack in the Navy; their father, also the subject of a painting, was a WWII vet who served in the Navy at Iwo Jima). “I am a Vietnam veteran and a Gold Star father,” the artist says. “Initially, my work centered around my son Joe, who was killed in Iraq in 2004. He was an Arabic linguist in the Army.”
The younger Nolan practically comes alive in a compelling portrait titled Sgt. Joseph M. Nolan KIA Iraq 2004, his face an icon framed by sand-toned Desert Storm camouflage.“It is important to remember the fallen… painting their portraits is a good way to keep their memories alive.” Other portrait subjects granted immortality by Nolan’s brave brush are the heroes of a different kind of battle: life with Down syndrome. Nolan’s painting series, The Face of Down Syndrome, includes several images of the artist’s daughter, Martha, who is a painter herself.
Plein-air painting—in which the artist ventures outside the studio, bringing her tools outdoors to work whilst surrounded by the very nature she aims to capture—is a time-honored tradition whose practitioners are justly admired for their skill at taming nature with a paintbrush. Having dedicated years to this alfresco practice, Andrea B. McLaughlin hits it with a contemporary gust of wind, creating collages that combine different sections of plein-air paintings for an intimate and pleasingly puzzle-like effect. “I extend an invitation to the observer to step into my very personal ‘sense of place’,” says the artist, with evident deference to Mother Nature as the ultimate artist: unfinished, unpredictable, unmoved by attempts to contain, cultivate, or otherwise control Her.
Polymath artist-poet-writer Cristina Querrer’s images keep viewers’ eyes on the move, so we are challenged to decipher the busy network of scribbles she draws—or is that writes?—as they coalesce to form, say, a human face (Shadow Work). “My work navigates the space between presence and absence, where remnants of time are bound together, reconstructed, or left unraveling.”
“La Pensadora” presents a seated female thinker figure, a la Rodin, actively contemplating amidst a swarm of loopy forms floating in the air around her: amoebas, ideas, granular components aggregating to form a structure, like an old stone building the artist admired on a trip to Italy and posted on her Instagram feed. The unique ability of “the ‘gram” to offer illuminating insights into an artist’s practice is evident in Querrer’s post sharing photo portraits of herself at work in her studio, tipping her hat to her colleague for the photographs.
Those images were captured by Querrer’s fellow MFA candidate, Tony DeZinno, an accomplished photographer who is equally at home chronicling his fellow creatives—particularly performing artists—and manipulating his own images to create layered artworks with built-in drama. The performative aspect to DeZinno’s work takes center stage in the archival inkjet print A Silent Voice, portraying, in black and white, a person in profile, their mouth “canceled” by a black swath of ink: a study in censorship … or perhaps involuntary self-negation?
To Fragmented Vision, a full color archival inkjet print, DeZinno adds thread collage for a hint of the piercing, multi-dimensional way that multidisciplinary artists see the world. “In all my work,” says the artist, “I seek to create a space for reflection—one that invites questions about belonging, family, and the ways in which we navigate the complexities of an ever-changing world.”
Rather than a limitation, focusing on a single medium can become a reliable source of inspiration for an artist. “I have been working digitally since 2010 when I started my artistic journey and have the unique experience of the digital medium being one of my first mediums to express myself artistically,” says the artist with a solitary handle: Sluggo, whose composition entitled Yellowstone demonstrates a strong command of digital artistry, with echoes of old-school, pre-digital illustration. Like a post-modern Art Nouveau graphic, Yellowstone depicts—with decorative flair—the untamed wildlife of our great national park. A framework of antlers and tree branches forms a perilously spiny border, reminding us that, out in the wild, there is paradoxically serene beauty amidst the often violent struggle for survival that all earthlings experience daily.
Jillian Kathryn Mirabal deploys digital artistry to create nightmarishly imaginative scenes of terror. Particularly haunting is the draconian embrace of A Loving Mother, a two-faced (literally) green mom-ster, complete with scaly green tail, threatens to fatally squeeze the child she spoon-feeds. “I’ve always been drawn to the darker and more unusual aspects of life,” explains the artist. “Growing up, I was immersed in horror and Halloween-themed media—through my mother’s love of horror movies and my father’s mission to create the scariest haunted house in the neighborhood,” Mirabal recalls. “These influences naturally find a way into my work. Through my art, I aim to shed light on the unspoken and unsettling—those captivating spectacles that people often try to ignore.” G&S
MFA Thesis Exhibition on view June 17-July 6, 2025 Reception June 19, 5-8 pm Bluemountaingallery.org
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