MOLT | Senior Art Thesis Exhibition

Nichols, Lenzner, Hinshaw, and Salathe Galleries

May 2 – 17, 2025

This year’s thesis exhibition, MOLT, features thirteen students exploring transformation, identity, process, memory, play, the body, and the environment. Material is transmuted into meaning in forms that will engage assumptions, deconstruct prior knowledge, and construct new worlds.

Senoir artists

Eleanor Chang-Stucki, Dylan Cleverly, Maud Etheridge, Daniel Lewis, Cameron Macdonald, Amalinalli Martinez-Hahn, Soeun Moon, Fia Powers, India Reinhardt, Luke Robinson, Mazzy Rosenast, Mila Stribling, and Jasper Summers

Statements

Eleanor Chang-Stucki

My work represents the tangled web of food, family, identity, and generational trauma—threads that shape who we are and how we connect with one another. In this piece, I aim to use food as an emotional language, reflecting on how something as seemingly simple as a meal can evoke both comfort and conflict. Food is a powerful symbol in my art, a source of care and sustenance, a marker of cultural heritage, and a site of tension. The familiarity and intimacy of shared meals are contrasted with the emotions that exist at the table, things left unsaid, memories too painful to revisit, and feelings too complex to digest. Family is at the heart of this exploration, representing both connection and fracture. I express the contradictions I see embedded in eating—nourishment and restriction, love and guilt, abundance and scarcity. This piece explores legacies of pain while attempting to reclaim moments of healing. I invite viewers to reflect on their relationships with food and family, and how these connections shape their sense of self.

Dylan Cleverly

Donald Trump issued a memo on January 20, 2025—his first day back in office—titled Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture that proposed a mandate of classical style in federal architecture to “beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States.” Meanwhile, as online alt-right movements gain traction, certain visual signifiers have become stand-ins for white supremacist rhetoric. White nationalist Twitter accounts use ancient structures as entry points toward Euro-supremacist ideologies. Keywords like ‘beauty’ and ‘tradition’ thinly veil rhetoric that posits modernism, globalization, and contemporary architecture as signals of regression from a supposedly lost pan-European, white heritage. 

American architects in the 18th and 19th centuries joined a lineage of European classicists, art historians, and architects in fashioning whiteness as a product of early civilizations by drawing from Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. This amalgamation reflects a newly-independent nation’s attempt to establish an iconography separate from that of Europe while architecturally justifying an ongoing economic reliance on chattel slavery. 

Architecting Whiteness in America riffs on cabinets of curiosities—aristocratic European displays that consisted mostly of colonial trade loot—which are oft-cited as precedent for the contemporary museum. These cabinets aimed to provide a succinct view of the natural and manmade world through objects and became precursors to anthropological exhibitions that asserted European superiority in natural history and art museums. Architecting Whiteness in America subverts this museological practice, turning critique towards those who have shaped hegemony. 

The accompanying text, available on display, provides a historiographic account of how whiteness permeated American architecture—beginning with the relationship between Neoclassicism and the scientific creation of racial hierarchy, and ending with the synthesis of Egyptian Revival into American iconography. Through this collection of art, sculpture, and literature, the viewer can physically investigate how whiteness shaped American architecture and iconography.

Maud Etheridge

As a descendant of colonizers, Confederate soldiers, and a great-great-granddaughter of a United Daughters of the Confederacy member, I acknowledge the inherited legacy I carry. Though my politics stand in stark opposition to those of my ancestors, my white body still perpetuates their legacy unless I actively work against it. This piece is part of my journey in understanding and confronting the system of whiteness and power in this country. I feel a responsibility to deconstruct my own whiteness and the violence inherent in my lineage. Without active allyship, my privilege risks becoming another tool of oppression.

This installation explores the influence of the Daughters of the Confederacy and their impact on U.S. culture post-Civil War. I deconstruct the American flag, the confederate flag, and UDC sashes into ribbons, reweaving them into organic webs, a nod to the Daughters' origins as knitting circles. This also symbolizes their role in promoting white supremacist and Confederate narratives in public education during Reconstruction. These webs are suspended with invisible fishing line, demonstrating how structures of white supremacy create forms of oppression that are invisible to some because of their privilege. I have collaged on the walls both archival, current images, and newspaper articles connecting the efforts of the daughters of the confederacy to current political events, proving the work they've done is still embedded within American values and systems of oppression. 

The Daughters of the Confederacy are often overlooked, but they played a crucial role in shaping the narrative around the antebellum South. Through monuments and textbooks, they have woven the heritage of white supremacy into our culture, operating from the shadows to sustain this legacy. My work seeks to illuminate their influence and challenge the historical narratives they've helped to craft.

Racism and White supremacy are embedded into our existing society and structures. The recent presidential election has forced these issues to the surface. Pitzer College is a progressive bubble where most people readily acknowledge America's roots in white supremacy, yet outside this bubble many people remain unaware of its ongoing presence. I aim to disrupt this bubble and urge white radicals to reflect on their history and actively dismantle their own involvement in colonization, white supremacy, and genocide.

Daniel Lewis

On September 5th, during one of the most extreme heat waves in Southern California history, a devastating fire was deliberately ignited just north of Pitzer College near Baseline Road and consumed over 54,000 acres of land. This fire reduced entire ecosystems to ash, destroying wildlife, habitats, and thousands of trees. In the aftermath, firefighters and essential workers labored tirelessly to contain the flames, clear the scorched landscape, and remove fallen trees. As I learned from speaking with the fire department on Mt. Baldy, much of this wood—over 100 cords—was destined to be chipped and discarded as waste. 

Recognizing the value within this material and with permission from the fire department I obtained a small fraction of the burned wood to give it a second life through my work. Through repurposing this reclaimed wood, I created a collection of furniture that transforms these remnants of destruction into functional, enduring furniture: a coffee table carved from the hollowed remains of a burned log, a chair formed from two charred trunks, and a dining table assembled from fragmented pieces, where the scorched bark itself becomes an integral design element. 

This process naturally aligns with the Japanese practice of Shou Sugi Ban (Yakisugi), a traditional technique of charring wood to enhance its durability. Though I do not burn the wood myself, I embrace this process where it has occurred naturally—reframing the traces of devastation as a form of preservation. 

Furniture design, unlike most other forms of art, is meant not only to be observed, but touched, used, and lived with—it holds memory through interaction. By crafting functional objects, I am not just repurposing material, I am preserving history. The knots, rings and charred textures act as permanent documentation of the tree’s life–its growth, trauma, and endurance now passed on to the user. In doing so, this collection serves as both a meditation on resilience, and a dialogue on sustainability, and the ways in which destruction can give rise to new purpose.

Cameron Macdonald

Through an ever-mutating life practice of critical play, I transform my love of stories and games into an experimental tool of habitation. My work—whether as a gardener, game designer, educator, or artist—is an expression of queer love for a universe in flux and my faith that meaningful change happens through small gestures of being in community. 

Standing on the shoulders of countless giants, I draw from the theories of individuals like adrienne maree brown, Augosto Boal, Báyò Akómoláfé, Sage Crump, Lois Holzman, and Octavia Butler to develop organizational frameworks of relationality and biomimetic storytelling. These frameworks blend the processes of emergent identity formation and place-making through cooperative, game-based creation of narratives that emphasize reciprocity and care. Our protagonist, Tender, serves as a monstrous mirror in which I invite participants to recontextualize everyday rituals of waste. 

Where is Trash Monster called Tender? is a pervasive story about exploring the transformative possibilities of caring for garbage. Blurring the boundaries between familiar and imaginary, collaborative play becomes a joyful intervention into how we define ourselves through our connections to our surroundings. By reviving the Colleges’ waste, the emerging story (and body) of our protagonist Tender sharpens the mundane immediacy of trash and how the transformative labor of care (or lack thereof) is allocated to people, objects, and places.

Amalinalli Martinez-Hahn

Neuroscientific studies on autism have explored dendritic spine density and synaptic pruning, with conflicting conclusions. Some claim the structure of the autistic brain is overly complex, while others suggest it lacks complexity. Despite differences, both theories attempt to define “normal” brain function and pathologize autistic minds – aiming to eliminate these differences through interventions like genetic engineering. This impulse, though often well-intentioned, stems from eugenic ideology. Disability studies offers alternative perspectives. 

Three key concepts have informed this artwork: perseveration, bottom-up thinking, and crip time. M. Remi Yergeau describes perseveration as both an "awkward arrangement of the flesh" and “a compulsive mode of persisting within and against normative space,” marked by rigid excess and saturation – qualities reflected in both the form of the autistic neuron and pathologized behaviors like stimming. Bottom-up thinking, common in autism, involves understanding larger systems by processing and exploring complex details first, which cultivates special interests. For this project, I immersed myself in the perseverative urge to learn about my brain while embracing the tactile compulsion to sculpt and paint these forms. Crip time, coined by Alison Kafer, reimagines how time is used and understood, allowing flexibility and rejecting standardized productivity paces. This impacts not only the making process, but also environmental design by valuing spatial experiences beyond task completion.

With these three concepts in mind, I produced a sculptural form embracing complexity, rigidity, and intuition through a slow, deliberate wood carving process that aligns with my autistic traits. The result functions as a speculative model for a larger public installation that could be experienced from underneath and inside of the structure. Overall, I aim to express appreciation for natural variation within the human species and reject the “healthy body” as a measure of aesthetic value in both nature and the material world. This work invites reflection on how historically marginalized forms of embodied knowledge can act as deliberate aesthetic influences in art and design.

Soeun Moon

Using clay, water, photos, light, text, and sound, I confront the collective traumas of colonial oppression while exploring how history is remembered, forgotten, and reshaped by those in power. The dissolving of the clay mirrors the fading colonial history and its victims while the clay residue represents the lingering shadows of colonial oppression in the afterlives of Korean (in)dependence. Imperial Japan slaughtered countless Koreans from 1910 to 1945 and so many narratives, experiences, and voices were lost. Japan, while framing themselves as victims of U.S. imperialism, refuses to acknowledge their crimes or educate their people about all of their wrongdoings—this demonstrates how colonial histories are wiped from narratives by hegemonic powers. They continue shattering the dead and the living in the small peninsula.

This work highlights the death of countless souls. But death isn’t just about physical death: there are thousands of ways one can be killed. We died the day our country was seized. Death is embedded in all aspects of my work in connection with how contemporary Korea and its people are born and raised on the soil that holds the memories of death. Death means the death of a country, its people, future, past, and their stories. The lived experiences of colonial histories may be forgotten/erased with the death of all those who lived through oppression, but the memories of trauma from this era are passed down to future generations.

In honoring and passing down the voices of victims, my practice revolves around erasure, individual memory, and bearing witness—the stories of those who are forgotten moving through time and history; the stories the current generation of Koreans may never know. Actively interacting with space that holds suppressed dialogue exacerbates boundaries of historical memory. Simultaneously, they affirm silenced voices, protecting our cultural identity of resistance and healing. I created a space to mourn the lost souls; the souls that cannot peacefully rest, even in death.

Fia Powers

Food for Thought (Disconnection is Delicious) is a multi-sensory exploration of a slaughtered goat named Henry, presented in forms ranging from food to sculpture. By witnessing Henry’s death and working with parts of his body, I confront a process from which many people within industrialized nations are removed. 

Engaging with Henry’s remains, I question cultural fixations on cleanliness, convenience, and separation from the sources that sustain us. The transformation of Henry’s digestive tract—manipulating fragile membranes into a structure of its own—mirrors the violence that underlies sanitized systems of consumption. 

When oppressive structures persist, escape can be tempting. Through discomfort, I hope to provoke reflection on how we consume and the systems that perpetuate disconnection. 

Viewers are invited to eat, smell, and approach Henry’s body as it feels comfortable. After the exhibit, sculptures will be deconstructed and Henry’s remains will return to the earth through composting, rejoining the cycle of life and death. 

India Reinhardt

I am a painter portraying the performance of gender as an unsettling set of behaviors. By monumentalizing subtle oddness within portraiture, I draw attention to these behaviors through deliberate decisions in composition and rendering, claiming agency over the narratives I convey. I impose the presence of the painter’s gaze by creating visibly staged scenes and use a naturalistic style, revealing the careful construction of gender. The subjects of my paintings embody the act of masking to conform to prescribed roles– divulging the external façades people create to navigate societal expectations. The detail in which I render each scene highlights the awkwardness between what is perceived as "natural" and the uncanny reality that gender performances are constructed. By thinking intentionally about composition, saturation of color, symbolism, and positionality–I aim to expose an inherent weirdness that may otherwise go unnoticed. These paintings resist the candid essence of naturalism by utilizing the narrative impulse to depict how gender performance has seeped into our collective consciousness. Painting captures the beauty and idiosyncrasy of minute details which form the fabric of our reality and act as a powerful tool for commentary and transformation.

Luke Robinson

This project explores mixed identity through the construction of a tent with a painted interior. This tent embodies identity in relation to the environment, as a vessel to think about our effect on the environment and its impact on us. As a reminder of this relationship, when installed outside, the paintings can be altered by the elements, causing the piece to be shaped by something other than the painter. When the installation is outdoors, the sunlight illuminates and penetrates the canvas to reveal an inverse image of what has been painted. When the walls interact with the sunlight, the translucency of the paint and fabrics create a projection of light inside the tent, forming an inner being. The relationship between the light and physical materials is an interdependence and balance, like the assimilation and acculturation that occur in blending cultures. The camouflage fabric is a direct imitation of nature and reminds us how our environment shapes us. The upper lace section acts as a veil on top of the camouflage fabric, akin to the skin that weaves together a physical reminder of mixed racial identity. 

This project gives life to a traditional self-portrait by allowing the work to contextualize itself and adapt outside the gallery as an installation. Before becoming a part of the exhibition, the fabric becomes an object that carries embedded meaning from the sun, people, and any other natural elements from its time outside. The tent's walls are painted to represent the two sides of my family, which bleeds through the camouflage fabric. The camouflage is then the background and setting for the portrait as a web of lace and fabric reflecting identity and environment and the interplay between them. The tree-covered fabric also plays on the idea of a family tree, while the lace references marriage, particularly veils and pañelo in the Filipino tradition. The painting in the middle of the assemblage represents the individual as a product of these environmental and familial connections.

Mazzy Rosenast

Loose Ends is a series of seven weavings exploring how memories soften and lose precision over time. Slowly, we accumulate boxes of letters, stacks of journals, photographs, and other mementos - stemming from the intrinsic desire to document, commemorate, and collect. Do these objects bring us comfort, or are they simply a small glimpse into what we were thinking or doing on some odd day? How do the things we choose to collect in an attempt to remember our past shape how we remember it?

Through examining these items collected year after year in an attempt to preserve the love of those around me I explore the archive of my life. To mirror the fluidity and ever-changing nature of memory, I chose to look at each card for ten minutes and then weave a reinterpretation from memory. As I went back to retrieve this mental image of the card, the more the forms and images became further distorted, but certain colors and elements transcended my faulty memory. These woven pieces show how mementos can trigger certain memories to resurface, though never in perfect or accurate detail. 

This body of work not only serves as a personal exploration of memory and longing, but also invites viewers to reflect on their own relationships with their past. It challenges us to consider how we construct and reconstruct our memories, and how these reconstructions shape our present and future selves. Through the tactile and visual elements of the woven pieces, we are reminded of the complex interplay between memory, emotion, and the physical artifacts we use to anchor our experiences in time. Revealing a sense of longing for what once was.

Mila Stribling

My work looks at the intersections of materiality and sustainability. This project critiques mass consumption, reimagining “fast fashion” as a cyclical process in which discarded clothing does not clog landfills but instead decomposes organically and returns to the earth. In a world oversaturated with waste, I propose an alternative: garments designed through material constraints, where form is adapted to what is available. My process is a direct response to the excesses of the fashion industry, emphasizing slow craftsmanship and offering a small-scale, speculative path for reducing plastic waste while balancing aesthetics, social and environmental responsibility, and innovation.

On display is a small clothing collection that reflects a year of material experimentation. As companies turn to synthetics like polyvinyl chloride and polyurethane as cruelty-free leather alternatives, these materials remain environmentally harmful and lack the durability of real leather. In response, I experimented with and employed a variety of biodegradable materials such as Kombucha SCOBY, mushroom mycelium, bio-plastic, natural rubber latex, and discarded goat hide. This hands-on process was a journey of discovery, failure, and success, as I navigated the challenges of both creating raw materials and constructing garments from them. 

By working with unconventional, biodegradable materials, I consider the tension between ephemerality and permanence, and what it means for clothing to endure in a future where the earth can no longer sustain the burden of our waste. Rejecting synthetic materials, I give my interpretation of fashion rewilding with clothing that can be easily re-integrated into nature’s cycles. 

My pieces embody a post-apocalyptic response to the climate crisis. The aesthetic is not just a stylistic choice but also a conceptual framework of how fashion’s future may look, as we move closer to a world in which garments may need to be assembled from what is available. If fashion continues to be a major contributor to environmental degradation, scarcity will no longer be a choice but a reality. Yet, constraints can serve as a generative force and push designers to rethink material usage. Accepting natural processes of decay, I see sustainability not as a limitation, but as a creative and ethical imperative.

Theaster Gates suggests that “with location alone, you’ve got space. [However] with location and familiarity, intention and love, you’ve got place.” I hope to transform this largely unutilized space on campus into a place of pause and contemplation. By using clay dug from El Mirage Desert in the glaze applied to both furniture and tiles, I act as a steward of that land as I celebrate desert ecosystems.

Dry lake beds like El Mirage (home to Balancing Club) may first appear barren and lifeless but in reality they represent the slow, continuous cycles of life and death over vast spans of time. This lakebed, shaped over the last 100,000 years by wind and water, offers a humbling reminder of the forces of erosion that shape our planet—forces that move far beyond the scope of a human lifespan. While engaging with a material shaped by these slow geological processes, I am offered an opportunity to speculatively imagine the future, when all the El Mirage clay will have been transformed by time and heat into something new. Thus, my work takes the form of ceramic furniture and tiles, featuring textures and colors that pay homage to the vital land from which they are formed.

My work invites reflection on our relationship to time, place, and material, prompting us to become more present in the spaces we inhabit. Through this exploration, I hope to deepen our awareness of the slow, yet profound transformations that shape our world, encouraging us to reconsider our place within it and the cycles that govern both the land and our existence. By lining the entrance with tiles, I invite passersby into the space, offering them a place of rest and momentary relaxation that is physically separated from the whirlwind of paths surrounding it. When sitting here, observing others in this lively space of transition, I hope that people will find comfort in their stillness, and awareness of their significance on a non-human timescale.

Reception
Friday, May 2, 2025, 5:00 PM
Pitzer Clock Tower Lawn

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While exhibitions are on view, Pitzer College Art Galleries are open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 12:00 to 5:00 pm