Too Many, Not Enough: Senior Visual Arts Show 2025
Eight stories about the visual arts graduates and their final work.
On Tuesday, May 20, seniors who completed advanced work in Visual Arts, their friends and family, fellow students, and local arts enthusiasts crowded into 51’s Usdan Gallery to admire recent works by the graduates. Works represented a wide array of media, including animation, architecture, ceramics, digital art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, video, and others. They explored the themes of family and home alongside interactivity.
Ahmed Shuwedhi ’25 gave visitors to the exhibition a virtual reality view out of a window in his home country of Libya. Using an Xbox 360 camera, he created the inverse of a virtual reality headset. The camera senses the viewer’s position and changes the virtual reality environment based on their body movements.
“Instead of you putting on the headset, you are in the world, and the augmented reality world's interacting with you,” Shuwedhi explained. The project required coding and 3D modeling, both skills Shuwedi is working to build.
“The initial idea of the project was to mimic the feeling of being at home looking through a window to see what is happening outside, but I also wanted the image through the window to be moveable.”
Sarah Krekel ’25 began studying textiles and costume design at Bennington but soon became interested in sculpture, particularly portraying the history of garment work in a sculptural space.
They used biodegradable and food based materials for a hanging piece, which is made from agar powder. Krekel took photos of themselves preparing the agar powder into gelatin and then printed the photos onto the gelatin itself.
“It’s not a stable material,” they said. “So I was interested in exploring how people interact with it and how air, time, and heat oxidize and age it. I like that you can see the history that it has gone through from its creation to the state it is in now.”
Using photography and film, Ashley Alonso Flores ’25 documented a flea market in her home city. It’s called Swap-O-Rama, and it's located on 42nd and Ashland in Chicago, Illinois. The bilingual documentary allowed her to use her translation and filmmaking skills to capture the personalities and community of the place.
“The documentary showcases the cultural aspects of the market itself. I interviewed four vendors,” said Flores. “A couple of the vendors, this is their job. It was wonderful getting to know them and hearing their stories.”
Lily Osornio ’25 used collages of family photos and a 30”x40” copper-plate etching to create an altar for her father, who passed away last year. The piece incorporated Mexican traditions related to The Day of the Dead.
“This is a big, heavy piece for me; my father was my everything,” Osornio said. “It’s about grieving in various ways, grieving your family, grieving childhood, grieving that wonder you know that I will never have again. It's hard for me to accept that, but this is one way to do it.”
Gerald Torn ’25 made a series of nine paintings. “They are all in conversation with the concept of portraiture and the troubling of that category,” he said. Five are portraits of their loved ones using real and surreal elements and printed materials from them. Two are portraits of bodies in states of transformation. The final center painting is a self portrait that combines elements from each and is depicted mid-transformation.
“My work is heavily influenced by a lens of disability studies and the tensions of one's relationship to one's body, especially in relation to queer sexuality in concert with disability and how fraught and anxiety-ridden that landscape can be in the context of the wider society,” said Torn.
Margalit Duclayan ’25 was interested in women who have experiences with teen pregnancy, either being teen mothers or being the child of a teen mom or adoption. She interviewed five different women about their experiences and created a sculpture using some archival materials from their personal lives as well as some art referencing the Virgin Mary, “which I took as the mythological framework of a teen motherhood in my culture.” She added, “I created this piece as a way of sharing those stories.”
Three of the five interviewees visited the exhibition for the opening. “It’s totally overwhelming,” she said.
Chris Golovina ’25 is from Russia. While at Bennington, she came to miss the “gray, cheap, nasty” brutalist architecture she had grown up hating. “I started learning a lot about brutalism and what it means for the culture, for the people,” she said. “It is a means of oppression, so it makes sense why we all feel this way.”
She also came to appreciate how other artists have reflected on being Russian. She made a tile that featured a quote from Dostoyevsky in Russian. She translated, “It says, ‘every detrimental part of the Russian soul and every longing that Russian person has is for suffering.’ And that's what I've been exploring with my art and with what I've been making, with what I've been writing, just the pain but also the beauty within that pain. I am not praising brutalist architecture, and I am not 100 percent critiquing it. I am exploring the in between.”
Lorena Fernández Camba ’25 studied architecture and drama. Her mother is an architect, and one of the first buildings she remembers discussing with her mother was the Flatiron Building in New York City. The distinctive triangular building has been under construction since Camba moved to the United States. It is being renovated as luxury housing. She used her advanced work in architecture to reenvision the project.
“The opportunity to create housing in such a desirable city was interesting, but making non-luxurious housing was important to me.” In Spain, where Camba is from, everyone is able to gather in the street and have a sense of community. She asked, “how can I make a neighborhood in the building?” She designed the first three floors as public space, including a public garden, a market, and a restaurant, and meeting rooms, a library, co-working space, and basketball courts throughout.
“Skyscrapers provide housing for a lot of people, but if they could also provide space to interact, that could be a rich experience,” Camba explained.
Camba remarked on the show as a culmination of their time at Bennington. “It feels really special. I have all of my friends here, and we’ve gone through this together for four years. College is really individual, but the individual experience you gain is from interacting with everyone else. It’s great to present the work together.”