MFA Class of 2023 | Thesis Part 1

Detail from Megan Nugroho, My Heart Drives, 2023

Secrets of the Heart

These works search for a conduit, through the body, to what William James called the more. A more not estranged from this world, a separate supernatural entity, but embedded in the daily, the domestic, and our tender corporeal forms. A more with traces of fairy tale enchantment, the lingering soul and the unconscious as a palace in time. A new, and much anticipated theology is developing, image by image, fueled not by traditional religious precepts, but rituals lost and found, nature and the movement of energy. Unbracketed life force, urgent as the thrust of green stems in spring, whirling in the spiraling mind, but manifest too in quiet, in stillness, in absence. To go inside is to enter a wilderness. We know this; but we forget. Life at its most elemental; the root seeking in the dark earth. Mundane yet mythic, the glow of veins that are also vines, a son’s careful attention to the residue of maternal spirit, and a partner’s visual message to a lover, that while the struggle is real, the doorway is open, the doorway is not only open, it is also spewing light.