Work > Writing

Jessica Zi Chen

"Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which
each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other," writes Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation. I Thought Of You begins from this proposition, multiplying relation across a space where artistic practice emerges through contact, affinity, and shared inquiry. Bringing together eight MFA artists working across film, video, sculpture, painting, textile, architecture, and site-specific installation, the exhibition renders relation palpable: each practice remains distinct while carrying traces of the others.
Stephanie Wademan's sculptural installations, Every Freezer is a Self-Portrait and Jasmine, linger at the threshold between the bodily and the speculative, staging transformation through cast fragments lodged within estranged, almost sanitized, interior spaces. Turning the familiar uncanny, her work opens the exhibition onto questions of mortality, perception, and what hovers just beyond visibility. That sense of threshold extends into Eugene Yu's movement 1, a reconfigurable architectural structure that holds, divides, and redirects space without insisting upon itself, becoming a spatial hinge through which adjacency and suspension are felt across the gallery. Cecelia Grant's Between Here and There similarly attends to the conditions of seeing, using mesh, tension, and fragile arrangements to slow perception and foreground instability. Her work deepens the exhibition's inquiry into constructed space by treating vision itself as partial, mediated, and delicately contingent.
From there, the exhibition turns toward practices that unsettle the familiar through touch,
memory, and altered scale. Jasmine Brown's woolly veil and projected performance, where we ll meet again and again, center the intimate relationships between the artist and those who enter the space, spinning belonging and embodiment into a tactile installation where identity takes form through erasure and reimagination. By illuminating scarred ash wood marked by the devastation of the Emerald Ash Borer in blaze orange, Christopher Woodward's Of Felling | To Sustain and Portent Tree compels viewers to confront slow violence and environmental loss through a language that is at once expressive, didactic, and strangely mythical. Elsewhere, orange is turned to a different tone. Grace Bishop's paintings stage portraiture through a poetics of camouflage, where the figure emerges only partially from a dazzling entanglement of gestural brushwork. Suspended between revelation and concealment, her diptych, Thayer's Law, is shaped as much by longing as by its continual deflection.
Questions of trace, invasion, and aftermath take on another register in Alina Senchenko's Under Uncertain Sky, which explores war, diaspora, and decolonization through moving images and sculptural installation. Refusing spectacle in favor of fragment, montage, and witness, she considers how violence in Ukraine is mediated, carried, and remembered from afar.
In Ciara Rose's video installation Unbecoming and photographic work Where She Split, the body emerges as a site of innocence, awareness, rupture, and rebellion. Confronting objectification and the internalized structures of gendered control, the female figure reclaims power and knowledge through vulnerability, eroticism, and discomfort as modes of resistance.
This forges a self-defined path rooted in physical and physiological truth.
Across these works, difference does not foreclose reciprocity but makes it possible, generating a shared field of resonance in which memory, embodiment, ecology, violence, and
belonging remain in productive tension. I Thought Of You thus unfolds as a collective articulation of how the eight artists think with, beside, and through one another.