The Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine is pleased to present Open Seams | Closed Windows, the 2024 Undergraduate Honors Thesis Exhibition. The show features thesis presentations by seven students from the Art Honors cohort. Open Seams | Closed Windows brings together seven diverse practices, encompassing painting, sculpture, textiles, video, animation, and installation. Exploring themes of identity construction, societal frameworks, gender, social architecture, and mass media embodied in vessels of both collective and personal memory, the exhibition proposes the potential and possibility in that which is revealed, concealed, withheld and contained.

Artists:
 
Dirui Cheng’s work explores the intersections between personal, collective, and muscle memory. He draws upon experiences of his scholastic upbringing in China, layering diverse forms of media and  intertwining personal memories with the broader cultural phenomenon of Broadcast Gymnastics. The result reflects the complex interplay of history, cultural exchange, and personal autobiography.
 
Ashley Kim creates large scale drawings and paintings that translate source images from popular media and found printed material through personal gesture. Addressing themes of human emotion and the sociopolitical, her work aims to shed light on aspects of life that often go unnoticed. Privileging gestural abstraction over representation, her highly emotive work asks viewers to contemplate different aspects of what it means to be human.
 
Ross Kim delves into the intricacies of interpersonal relationships, examining the tension and complexity inherent within them. Drawing inspiration from traditional fairy tales and didactic characters such as the antagonist of the Big Bad Wolf, she reinterprets narratives into immersive digital scenes. Through illustrative animated renderings, Kim explores the raw dynamics of human interaction and the underlying emotions that influence our interactions with one another.
 
Sarah Kwak engages sculpture, material specificity, and immersive installation. Her work explores themes of physical and mental discomfort and the construction of self-worth through the metaphor of skin. For Kwak, skin takes on a symbolic significance, representing not only the physical but the surface level identities we present to the world, defining and blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior.
 
Peggy Lee creates realistically rendered oil paintings that draw upon her interest in liminal spaces and lively social settings devoid of people. Originating in personal social encounters and photographic documentation, her works arrest the essences and traces of human interaction, evoking longing, loneliness, and nostalgia as well as capturing moments charged with potential energy.
 
Ray Qin’s work delves into the intricate concept of constructing and deconstructing personal identity as a complex amalgam of personal attributes and socially assigned characteristics. Through heroically scaled sculpture, Qin highlights the dynamic relationship between the individual and society, transcending singular perspectives such as race, gender, or class. Her work serves as both a personal exploration and a mirror, inviting viewers to engage in a dialogue about the connections between self and society.
 
Sadie Rose uses fiber and the process of wet felting embedded with vintage domestic textiles to create dynamic works with gendered associations. Following in the legacies of female artists whose work aimed to elevate the medium of textiles and craft to the high art status of painting and sculpture, she creates expressive painterly works embedded with materials charged with their own history, creating layers of visibility that mimic the structure of memory.