As the semester marches on, the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery draws in dozens of students, faculty, staff, parents, supporters, and art aficionados to admire the work of the fantastic senior art studio majors for their thesis exhibitions. From Wednesday, March 23 to Sunday, March 27, 2025, the works of Reese Chahal ’25, Sophie Clapacs ’25, Jules Haberberg ’25, Olivia Kaplan ’25, Angelina Panarello ’25, Cooper Raposo ’25, Pelumi Sokunbi ’25, and Pat (Putt) Watcharapong ’25 were displayed. The Argus reached out to last week’s thesis holders to hear more about how they created their amazing works of art. All responses were received via text, except for Watcharapong, who replied by email.
“Kanamari Pond” by Reese Chahal
Artistic Process: [My thesis installation is a] series of familiar and unfamiliar objects that fill the space, to come together and create a familiar yet unfamiliar space. The intent is that the room itself is the work! For my senior studio art thesis I wanted to fill the space with soft, opaque, and smooth images and surfaces, as well as malleable and moving surfaces. For the moving work specifically, I fabricated a pneumatically controlled mechanical system that uses soft sensors I made with wool [and] stainless steel fiber for circuiting. The circuit I designed uses an air pump to inflate silicone actuators, which I designed the molds and metal supports for.
Inspiration: I was inclined toward sculptural work and including an element of motion in the piece was key to me, mainly because I wanted my thesis to include the research I’ve been lucky to contribute to the Soft Robotics Knitting lab at Wesleyan. I was inspired by [Assistant] Professor [of Computer Science Sonia] Robert’s work and wanted to explore the world of e-textiles, so I chose that as a medium for one of the moving pieces. The material choices heavily influenced my process and concept, so along with the silicone, I thermoformed acrylic sheets, and machined metal supporting frames/structures to emulate smoothness and flatness. For the installation, I wanted to explore how objects I’ve made would contrast with ready-made, prop-like objects I didn’t make, i.e. [a] watercooler, carpeting [on] the floor, miscellaneous wiring, [and] office chairs.
Message to Viewers: I hope viewers are receptive towards their own emotional reactions to the work. I’d invite feelings of uncomfortability, confusion, and reluctance. During the year I’d often ask for formal feedback on the work because the intention was to make an amorphous, formless space, an attempt at proof of concept. To me, it was kind of a visual approach to writing an essay, and the biggest priority was making it accessible to others. Reception from others is important in the process so that I can interrogate my own shortcomings and pitfalls in my understanding of the concepts.
“Box for One Thousand Years” by Sophie Clapacs
Artistic Process: My thesis is a 24’ × 20’ tapestry made up of square-foot silkscreen print on dyed muslin cotton, hand and machine stitched together. It is flanked on both sides by hung sequences of three 2’ × 3’ plywood and metallic vinyl laser cuts based on abstracted versions of the symbols in each print, which includes an AirPod, an apple, a picture of Dick Cheney, an ElfBar, a goat, and an emoji of a house.
Inspiration: I’m a double major in art studio and anthropology, and am interested in examining systems of linguistic development as the site of my work. I began by creating my own personal alphabet of images sourced from the internet to find the most algorithmically “perfect” version of these hyper-current objects that feel imbued with many avenues of meaning. I then worked to create a replicable composition that became the image of my prints. As I amassed hundreds of these prints, I began thinking about the wall as a space to both hold these prints and become a vessel for demonstrating iterations of this imaginary language I had created. I was drawn to creating a tapestry, as it feels historically significant as a hyper-traditional artistic practice. I borrowed certain aesthetic properties like color from traditional English tapestries, combining them with my own obsessive choices. I added the plywood cuts as another historical easter egg, replicating the form of a Jacquard card, a piece of technology that bridged 20th century fabric looming technology to later computational binary structure. The project became partially involved in my own obsessive language, but also a way of tracing aesthetics and labor from super traditional aesthetics into a more digital and comedic landscape.
I’m a printmaker, and I knew I wanted print technology to be at the front of my mind when creating this, not just formally but also conceptually. Silkscreen prints don’t feel as old-fashioned as other styles of printmaking but also aren’t as accurate as what your inkjet printer could create. They straddle this line of utility as a mode of information-spreading but also have their own visual sensibility. I like that this method sits at a sort of limbo between human involvement and totally inhuman replication. I chose to work with fabric because it also has its own history of labor and the human hand, and moves in a way that feels entirely non-structural. Everything I worked with was meant to show that a human being put time into the craft of production; nothing’s too clean, but nothing’s too abstract either. There’s a tension between the legibility and the static noise that all these figures create.
Message to Viewers: I don’t imagine viewers are taking away a lot of these super conceptual parts of my work. I was also really hopeful that what I would make could stand alone as a beautiful object, not just one that feels meaningful to myself. I kind of like that these weird obsessive moments are hidden and stem from an association game I was playing with myself. I hope people find pockets of interruption between the mass scale of reproduction that I was working on. Some people have told me they see my tapestry as a messy version of the periodic table of the elements, which I think is quite fun. The whole idea of that table was to turn the natural world into something categorizable, which sort of fits into the way I think.
“Autobiography of a Body” by Jules Haberberg
Artistic Process: I did a painting thesis that ended up having a bunch of elements that were more sculptural. The installation was a bunch of soft sculptures with paintings of my body on them, as well as collages of my body on the walls. I love painting because it’s such a physical, material process for me. I love to create things that are tactile and textural and engage my body and my senses in fun ways.
Message to Viewers: I don’t know. I’ve gotten a lot of different reactions from my installation—people have responded with awe, discomfort, joy, empathy, even fear. I don’t think there’s one experience I want people to have. I think I kind of just hope that viewers experience my vulnerability in my work in a way that makes them a little more aware of their own innate vulnerability: the vulnerability of having a body.
“Blurry Vision” by Olivia Kaplan
Artistic Process: My thesis had two large eyes with collages of photos, beads, and fabric on them; around them I made other fabric collages and some dresses. I use mostly fabric but also photos, beads, prints, and many different objects taken from different mediums of art I’ve enjoyed doing throughout my life.
Inspiration: My thesis is a description of a dream I have to become a fashion designer that I questioned and became disheartened with after studying abroad for a year and then how I am moving forward from the year abroad, still forever changed, but learning to go relatively back to normal and learning to do what I love again.
Message to Viewers: I hope they get excited by the colors of the art. I don’t think it’s super easy to understand the story and meaning behind it unless you know me and my experiences, but for those that do know, I hope they feel some nostalgia and a bittersweet feeling but also a feeling of hope. I was nervous about finishing this thesis and showing it publicly, but I ended up being very happy with it. I feel like it describes me and my life quite well.
“Expendables?” by Angelina Panarello
Artistic Process: My thesis involves 207 black squares dusted with oyster pigment on the wall, 2 pedestals, and a 14-foot-long floor installation. Everything in my exhibit other than the black paper is derived from oyster shells.
At Wes, I study biology, earth and environmental science, and art studio. I wanted my thesis to focus on sustainability, so I centered it on the Eastern oyster. Eastern oysters are a keystone species, meaning that they occupy a major role in supporting and regulating their ecosystems. Unfortunately, they are endangered because of overharvesting and water pollution. My thesis started as a conservation and restoration project for oysters. After more research, I realized that designing something to help oyster conservation would only perpetuate the problem without addressing the root cause. Destructive and polluting human activities are the reason that oysters are endangered. Designing solutions to problems we create instead of changing how we engage with our environment is a dangerous precedent to set for conservation efforts. What ended up in the gallery was a physical manifestation of my reaction to how we have addressed the climate crisis thus far.
To highlight the environmental cost of my thesis, 207 black squares show outlines of oyster shells that were used in my exhibit, none of which exist anymore. The pigment outlining them is derived from each shell. The floor installation is a gradient from oyster shells to lime mortar, a material derived from the shells. This piece was meant to visually communicate that all the materials in my show are derived from oysters. This visually connects to two columnar pedestals, which draw attention to the form and materials of the gallery itself. One pedestal held Indiana limestone, the material from which the CFA was built, while the other held a gilded oyster shell. The pedestals interrogate what we value and why, pitting modernity against the natural world.
Inspiration: Our modern lifestyles depend on the materials and products we use every day. As such, we cannot address the climate crisis if we are too uninformed to identify what lifestyle changes we must make. Valuable change requires knowledge, and I think one starting point for learning what must change is understanding the cost of our lifestyles. To highlight this, everything in my exhibit is derived from Eastern oysters. My goal is to simultaneously demonstrate the importance of oysters as a material and highlight the biological and environmental cost of the objects in my exhibit.
Message to Viewers: My advisor, [Assistant Professor of Art and Assistant Professor of Design and Engineering Studies] Christian Nakarado, taught me about the Honorable Harvest, a Native ecology that governs how humans interact with the sovereign natural world. When following the principles of the Honorable Harvest, one asks for permission to use a material, takes only what they need, uses everything they take, and sustains the environment for current and future generations in return. Throughout my process, I repeatedly asked myself, “Is this worth it?” Creation is destruction; although one object is made, many others must be destroyed in the process. Often, people are unwilling to question whether the cost of their lifestyle is worth it. However, asking this question is the only way to identify what we must change or sacrifice to protect the natural world. Within the field of design and beyond, I hope people come away from my thesis ready to question how much they take to sustain their lifestyle, how respectfully they use and value the things they take, and how they are protecting the planet from which their things were taken. Only then can we build a sustainable world for us and our planet.
Vote! Demonstrate! Educate yourself! VOTE! We are the only force standing between ourselves and our planet. Protect it while we still can!
“Echoes in the Woods” by Pat (Putt) Watcharapong
Artistic Process: My thesis consists of 12 charcoal drawings, ranging from the size of a flashcard to a seven-foot-wide page. With the help of my advisor [Associate Professor of Art and Program Director of Studio Art Julia Randall], I arranged them based on chronology as well as their familiarity towards each other and the viewer.
I am a charcoal fiend. You can work it into paper so much, and [make it] so dark, and then erase it out to almost white again. For ideation, it’s great because you can get the basic tonality in fast and not spend a lot of time carving out shapes. When you want details, you push stuff in, blend it, erase the parts where light hits the object, and add more marks where shadows are. You can go so fast but still get super specific if you want. [Charcoal is] super versatile if you don’t care about color.
Inspiration: I was always interested in horror, be it movies, books, manga, true crime, video games, or online creepypastas. I was initially exploring body horror, but through many conversations, I realized that the narrative is the most attractive aspect of horror to me. Not the specific stories themselves, but how they are told. Throughout the past 2 years, I’ve been listening to horror podcasts and videos while I do artwork, and I was particularly drawn to a Reddit story called Stolen Tongues that I listened to on the CreepCast podcast. I decided to adapt some of the setting and imagery from the story and tell my own story with them. Over time, my work departed from what I would consider the horror genre, and landed in an area that’s mysterious and unsettling, but not necessarily scary.
Message to Viewers: [I hope viewers get] the experience of studying the details and seeing through the darkness of charcoal, piecing together a story without being told it directly, [and] an unsettling vibe that comes with being at the edge between the familiar inside and the foreign outside. (Special thanks to Julia Randall, [Artist-in-Residence] Keiji Shinohara, Tenzin Jamdol [’25], Michael Zheng [’25], Ava Liberace [’25], and Angie Collado [’25]!)
The above interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Sulan Bailey can be reached at sabailey@wesleyan.edu
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