Maine College of Art & Design 2025 MFA Thesis

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	<title>Maine College of Art &#38; Design 2025 MFA Thesis</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2025 15:24:10 +0000</pubDate>

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	Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art &#38;amp; DesignICA Gallery hours: Wed–Sun, 11:00am–5:00pm, Thursday, 11:00am–7:00pm
	
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		<title>Jordan Hanid Awan</title>
				
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2025 15:24:13 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Maine College of Art &#38; Design 2025 MFA Thesis</dc:creator>

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	Jordan Hanid Awanwww.jordanawan.com
@jordan_awan

Jordan Hanid Awan is an artist based in Salem, Massachusetts. He received his BFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in 2007 and his MFA from Maine College of Art &#38;amp; Design in 2025. His work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine; the Menino Arts Center in Hyde Park, Massachusetts; the Museum of American Illustration in New York, New York; and Cooler Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. He has received awards from the Art Directors Club, the Society of Illustrators, and the Society of Publication Designers. Awan is a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts. He previously taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Awan’s illustration clients include A24, TED, and the Glenstone Museum. He has worked as an Art Director for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and MIT Technology Review. 
Jordan Hanid Awan is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting. His subjects include overlooked everyday objects and imagery like novelty jokes and fetish items. Awan’s work mistranslates the recognizable into strange new things with unknown meanings. In his sculptures, Awan uses nontraditional materials such as hand-crocheted rubber cord, compressed homegrown marijuana, or his own hair. His thoughtful and meticulous process is informed by occult traditions and bodily experience. Conjuring a multiplicity of cultural, art historical, and philosophical associations, Awan’s work disconnects objects and symbols from their socially established roles in surprising and funny ways.


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		<title>Rachel Clark</title>
				
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:02:27 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Maine College of Art &#38; Design 2025 MFA Thesis</dc:creator>

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	Rachel Clark@uselessgutfeeling

Rachel Clark is a graduate of Maine College of Art and Design whose work focuses on the erotic pleasures of perception and revels in the physicality of paint. Rachel also holds a BFA in painting/printmaking from the University of Connecticut and a Post-Baccalaureate teaching certificate from Central Connecticut State University. Their work has received numerous awards and recognitions and has been shown throughout the Northeast, including venues such as the Annmarie Sculpture Garden &#38;amp; Crafts Center in Maryland, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine, and a solo show, Same Time, Same Place, in Stafford Springs, CT. Related projects include a zine, Useless Gut Feeling, which was included at the University of Southern Maine Book Fair and the CT Zine Fair in New Haven. Rachel lives and works in Hartford, Connecticut.
My work responds to questions about desire, pleasure, and satisfaction. I think of painting as a form of play, through which I weave my own curiosities together with what I know of art history. Through the specificity of each shape, color, and gesture, I make room for an esoteric eroticism. I pair shapes that satisfy with colors that activate each other, finding equivalents to both physical and psychological experiences of desire, pleasure, and satisfaction through the act of painting.

	
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&#38;nbsp;


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		<title>Paige Friedman</title>
				
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:02:29 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Maine College of Art &#38; Design 2025 MFA Thesis</dc:creator>

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	Paige Friedman
@_paige_friedman

Paige Friedman (b. 2001) makes monstrous soft sculptures, rooted in creating figures to explore cuteness and fear, finding comfort in horror.&#38;nbsp; In 2023, Friedman obtained a BFA in Fine Art at Towson University in Towson, MD. While attending, Friedman exhibited work in the BFA Thesis Exhibition as well as a small solo exhibition in the Storage Space Gallery titled Morbid. Most recently, Friedman’s soft sculpture figures were exhibited in a solo show titled amalgamated, at the gallery 82 Parris in Portland, ME, in May 2024.&#38;nbsp; Friedman currently lives and works in Portland, ME, and obtained an MFA in Studio Art at the Maine College of Art and Design in 2025. 
Through creating large-scale soft sculptures, I am exploring how the monstrous stuffed object can toe the line by being confusing, comfortable, and overwhelming. The sculptures are rooted in creating figures to explore fear and find comfort in horror.&#38;nbsp; With the use of mutual notions of fear as a starting point for form, I am using demon-like forms to emulate the monster and evoke a more universal emotion in relation to individualized and internalized fear. I am using soft, textured materials like various fabrics and stuffing, bright colors, fuzzy airbrushing, and giant eyes to evoke comfort through the use of the aesthetic category of the cute. The object plays with our life experiences to reflect our emotions. By using a soft and stuffed monster, I find moments where both the viewer and myself can feel comforted while being uncomfortable. The work recognizes the individuality of the viewer as well as a sense of shared mutuality through an empathetic connection to reflect both comfort and fear. 


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		<title>Mark Ford</title>
				
		<link>https://mecamfa25.cargo.site/Mark-Ford</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:02:32 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Maine College of Art &#38; Design 2025 MFA Thesis</dc:creator>

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	Mark Fordwww.markfordart.com
@mark_ford_art

Mark Ford is a mixed media artist and educator living in Portland, Maine. He began making artist's books in 2003, bringing to the medium a background in both photography and graphic design. His current work focuses on the deconstruction of books, which he uses to make new objects that question systems of knowledge and invite the viewer to contemplate reading conventions. He has attended residencies at Hewnoaks Artist Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Monson Arts. Recent shows include Want/Need at Zero Station Gallery in Portland, Maine, Connecting Distances at Rountree Gallery in Platteville, Wisconsin, as well as a solo show at Kate Cheney Chappell 83 Center for Book Arts, University of Southern Maine. He earned his MFA from Maine College of Art &#38;amp; Design in 2025, and has also completed an MA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College and a BA in English from the University of Utah. 
Elective Affinities and Horizontal Exchanges questions the modern Western conception of an inner self and outer world by attempting to project the inner into the public sphere and to move thinking and the mind to the outside. Here, subjectivity is constructed on the wall and in the object. It is also an attempt, following Deleuze and Guattari, to explore the book form in its rhizomatic multiplicity, where the associations between texts illustrate the processes of deterritorialization (where books and text fragments are taken out of context) and reterritorialization (where they enter into new associations and meanings in relationship to other titles and fragments). My goal is to create formal and linguistic relationships that encourage the viewer to linger with the work, where any part of the work can be connected to any other. My intention is to remake my own identity through my connections to the discarded object. It is to recognize the provisional and rhizomatic quality of my own subjectivity, to acknowledge the inherent being and value in things, and to enter into a relationship of reciprocity with the material world.


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		<title>Yessenia Gerace</title>
				
		<link>https://mecamfa25.cargo.site/Yessenia-Gerace</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:02:34 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Maine College of Art &#38; Design 2025 MFA Thesis</dc:creator>

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	Yessenia Gerace@yessie.gerace

Yessenia Gerace is a multidisciplinary artist working with ceramics, concrete, and digital media to create autobiographical sculptures and installations. Her work is made through the lens of the Latine American diaspora, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and cultural hybridization. Gerace earned her MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art and Design and a BA in Studio Arts and Business Marketing, along with a Post-Baccalaureate in K–12 Art Education from Central Connecticut State University. Her work has been exhibited at Lighthouse ArtCenter (FL), Zand Head Gallery (ME), ArtSpace Gallery (CT), and Wesleyan Potters (CT). A recipient of the Hildreth Family Endowed Scholarship, she has been featured in The New Britain Herald, The Southington Observer, and West Hartford Press for her commitment to community, art, and education. Gerace is represented by Spectrum Gallery (Essex, CT) and is a&#38;nbsp; K-12 art educator residing in East Haddam, Connecticut. 
I am a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and digital media in the context of the Latine American diaspora. My work reclaims selfhood and resists Western frameworks through material hybridization and the evolving potential of language. With a feminist perspective, my practice is an act of care and refusal. I use text, clay, and concrete as a way to reconnect to the urban, suburban, and linguistic landscapes of my upbringing. Autobiographical narratives are the backdrop for sharing experiences of multiplicity and in-betweenness. These materials allow me to claim self and space while conceptually situating the work on liminal ground. By making artifacts of identity reclamation, I reimage cultural signifiers and symbols in order to create portraits, adornments, or paths of resilience. In doing so I offer the Latine diaspora an alternative representation, one of healing and opaque messages of resistance.


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		<title>Jenna Girolamo</title>
				
		<link>https://mecamfa25.cargo.site/Jenna-Girolamo</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:02:36 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Maine College of Art &#38; Design 2025 MFA Thesis</dc:creator>

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	Jenna Girolamowww.jgartbuzz.com
@jgartbuzz

Jenna Girolamo (b.1998) is an intrinsic, intuitive painter from upstate New York. She is currently focusing on healing process-oriented work at the Maine College of Art and Design (MFA, 2025) after earning her BFA from Nazareth University (Painting, 2020). In 2021, Girolamo was featured in Life in The Finger Lakes magazine as an Up-and-Coming Artist, and in 2020 was granted the title of “Student Of The Year in Studio Art” from Nazareth University. She has held solo exhibitions in Rochester, NY, and most recently, in Portland, ME, where she has shown at Zand Head Gallery for a solo installation of ((Intention)) as well as a two-person exhibition at Easthaus Gallery. Girolamo has been featured in The Portland Logbook newsletter and participated in a Q&#38;amp;A with MFA candidates, an e-flux education online article. Girolamo has co-curated the Student Art Show (2019-2020, Nazareth University) and Peach Fuzz at Maine College of Art and Design (2024). While developing her MFA thesis, Girolamo has assisted in teaching textile surface manipulation design, honors drawing, and foundations in painting. She plans to continue the unfolding exploration of alignment through the creative process. 
My work expands awareness of energy by exercising intentional connectivity to the Earth. The paintings reflect a geometric pattern derived from the Earth's vibration. The surfaces provide healing energies within the environment. This is emphasized through the unstretched canvas, natural dyes, surface stitching, and glass bead adornment to create each painting structurally. The steps of the creative process serve as a grounding point, forming a space that celebrates connectedness through wholeness. Energetic relations emerge not only in the work's final installation but throughout its entire becoming.


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	<item>
		<title>Maxwell Hamblin-Compere</title>
				
		<link>https://mecamfa25.cargo.site/Maxwell-Hamblin-Compere</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:02:38 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Maine College of Art &#38; Design 2025 MFA Thesis</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://mecamfa25.cargo.site/Maxwell-Hamblin-Compere</guid>

		<description>
	Maxwell Hamblin-Compere@vamoosemamoose

Maxwell Hamblin-Compere (b. 2000) is a trans, Choctaw artist from Norman, Oklahoma. His artistic practice explores generational trauma, matrilineal wayfinding, gender identity, oral history, storytelling, queer intimacy, and dreams. Their eclectic worldbuilding transports the work into the fictional realm of Eidolon, ruled by the Bird Mother and The Bramble. These studio deities assist in community performances, known as storytelling circles, where Hamblin-Compere and others embody alternative identities in order to deepen their compassion for alternative perspectives and share in a collective dream. In addition to these community sessions, Hamblin-Compare also creates “Portals to Eidolon,” which are site-specific installations dedicated to the communities in which they are presented, creating a dynamic dialogue between place and story. These installations are made from repurposed furniture upholstery, glitter, collage, riso prints, and found materials. The combining of these materials into a circular, anti-hierarchical symphony creates work that promotes anti-preciousness and equality. With each portal, important items and symbols are curated to represent the diverse community for which it is intended, creating an atmosphere of nostalgia and cross-cultural understanding. 


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