HELLO ETERNAL LOVING PRESENCE
The 2025 thesis exhibition HELLO ETERNAL LOVING PRESENCE brought together seven graduating artists from the Hunter MFA program whose practices engaged material and emotional risk with equal depth. Working across painting, sculpture, video, and installation, these artists grappled with memory, technology, and the uncertain spaces between personal and collective experiences.
While many works embraced vulnerability and generosity, each simultaneously disrupted visual logic and narrative cohesion through various methods of intervention, unfolding at times with insidious subtlety, and at others with blunt force.
Mariel Rolwing Montes paints emotional terrains where tender domestic memories skew into fiction, simmering beneath turbulent recall. Jacob Muilenburg builds thresholds of deferrals: frames, cling-wrapped images, and filtered surfaces that ask us to slow down by looking sideways. Katelyn Farstad propagates hybrid sculptures that evolve through mutation and unfold in a non-linear, self-seeding ecology. Yuhan Hu grows crystals on photographs of her late mother’s pilgrimage, transmuting absence into a slow, stony expression of grief. Marc Ferraro fuses furniture and pigment with deliberate restraint, presenting forms that withhold clear and immediate points of access. Shannon Pritchard haunts and hollows the familiar through her precise construction of uncanny wax objects, and Aashish Gadani mines viral ephemera to expose obsessive tendencies, transforming disturbing algorithmic patterns into hypnotic structures.
Together, these seven artists propose that presence—eternal, loving, or otherwise—emerges through rumination, disillusionment, heartache, curiosity, and the stubborn impulse to keep making meaning where none readily appears.
Mariel Rolwing Montes. Installation view of HELLO ETERNAL LOVING PRESENCE, Hunter MFA, 2025.
Mariel Rolwing Montes uses oil and acrylic paint to transmute psychologically charged and distorted memories into chaotic and imaginary destinations. In I love you so much (2025), based on a photograph she took when she was 17 years old of her grandmother’s garage, a horizon line stations straight while the rest of the room cinches upward—a subtle but deliberate provocation of distress. Surfaces like mirrors, windows, and glass are grimed and smeared with light blue strokes and circular, coffee-stain shaped blobs that carry a residue much like the artist’s act of recalling the memory itself: fractured, distant, and tarnished over time.
A moodily pigmented triptych, Friolenta (2025), makes cold manifest. In its left panel, a jolly snowman gazes downward at a cropped reflection of itself, blurring boundaries between reality and fantasy, while on the right, a concave, snow globe-like orb rises from the ground, distorting the landscape into a skewed winter tableau. Across the work, a series of miniature evergreens stitch all three panels together, but only offer a tenuous sense of stability. At the center, a kitschy, bunny-patterned blanket from the artist’s studio becomes a psychic veil, where light-hearted play and psychological weathering converge. While each panel appears siloed, the composition’s chilly stillness is disrupted by a radiator positioned at the painting’s base—an unexpected warmth that anchors the scene in the present day, jutting through an otherwise time-evading Antarctic.
In Tragic Chorus Sings (2025), a wooden hutch, painted with delicate transparency, displays a procession of cream-colored china, with each plate, teacup, and serving dish rendered like singers in a choir. One shelf inexplicably ignites—fire roars behind glass, contained, yet heavy with impending doom—while three red hobby horses thrust into the foreground, their rubbery, drooping heads animated by yellow reins, as if already beginning to melt. Mariel describes her intention to paint the scene as “a split second of a split second,” a moment suspended in tension, on the verge of scorching collapse.
Jacob Muilenburg. Installation view of HELLO ETERNAL LOVING PRESENCE, Hunter MFA, 2025.
Jacob Muilenburg’s work hinges on a perceptual proposition: what does it mean to see through filters, and how might obscured vision offer a sharper kind of focus? Sunglasses, recurring both physically and metaphorically, frame his inquiry—an accessory that limits visual information with the promise of clarifying and enhancing it. This logic extends across his installation, where material choices serve as indexical cues and allow evasion and intimacy to unfold for the viewer through delayed registration.
A series of freestanding sculptural frames trace thresholds from the artist’s apartment—the foot of his bed, the edge of a closet, and the entrance to his bathroom. Made of light wood and occasionally embedded with copper glints from penny-press souvenirs, their delicate construction maps out transitional spaces we rarely look at, let alone pause to question their origin.
Set apart from the installation are several wall-based works—what the artist refers to as “plastic wrap paintings”—that depict cropped scenes of domestic life, suffocated in taut layers of vinyl. Some surfaces remain visibly wet beneath their material cling and host a visual friction between image and reflection. These gestures of suspension, images held in flux that relentlessly resist resolution, withhold as much as they reveal. Muilenburg’s ambiguously “in process” aesthetic favors slow interpretation and lingers in indeterminate spaces, lenses through which the overlooked traces and silent architectures of interior life come more clearly into focus.
Katelyn Reece Farstad. Installation view of HELLO ETERNAL LOVING PRESENCE, Hunter MFA, 2025.
Katelyn Farstad’s body of work throbs with a kind of cellular presence, like a garden of forms that have secreted and mutated from one another. Over the past two years, her practice shifted away from the wall, resulting in a fleet of freestanding sculptural ceramics assembled from materials like acrylic, clay, oil, steel, wool, hair, muslin, and remnants of paintings she no longer wished to deal with.
For Farstad, these works emerged through a process she described not as serial but as propagation: a logic of clipping, embedding, and replanting. She looked to radios, urns, and reliquaries—vessels of transmission—as starting points to explore ideas that could hold an effective charge of thought and intensity. Her resulting compositions are both cohesive and discordant, collapsing painting and sculpture into dense hybrids that evade medium specificity. Her sequence of making rejects linearity, and as she put it, “I think less in terms of seriality and more like a field of intensity—like when you drop a petal into a pond and it ripples out. That’s the kind of sonic-boom situation I imagine.”
To engage with her work is to enter a perceptual system where form, texture, and color frequencies communicate beyond language. Her creations—amalgamations of boundless information that once vibrated and still glow—speak in ways untethered from effability.
Yuhan Hu. Installation view of HELLO ETERNAL LOVING PRESENCE, Hunter MFA, 2025.
In Yuhan Hu’s crystal-on-photograph installation, loss doesn’t announce itself, but coats and shrouds. Across a multitude of images printed on plain paper, fine crystals grow like hushed eruptions, presenting an elegant survey of concealed memories. Her process is laborious; she attaches seed crystals to each image, then submerges them in a solution of ammonium phosphate. As the crystals grow, they slowly overtake the photographs. Once removed from the solution, the growth halts and leaves behind fragile and glinting surfaces. Each image is altered by time’s slow chemistry—a surrogate, perhaps, for the infiltration of grief.
The photographs themselves—2,300 in total—were retrieved from her late mother’s SD card. They depict a solitary 2014 pilgrimage to Lushan, a mountainous region in China, that she took after leaving the family when Hu was only six years old to pursue a Buddhist monastic path. These images are all that remain from a period marked more by absence than attachment, and as Hu explains, growing crystals over the photographs became a way to “reimagine going on the trip with her.” Some crystals veil the tiny photographs almost entirely, while others gather at the paper’s edge, as if stalled mid-growth.
Being aware that this work was conceived and realized within six months of Hu’s mother’s passing speaks to the artist’s current mindset, yet the power of this poignant installation lies in its refusal to overstate. Rather than sentimentalizing death, Hu renders it as a process, an alchemical transformation that’s as much about patience and experimentation as it is about the pain of the unknown. The result is a moving, mineral elegy—one that crystallizes not just unsung memory, but all that documentation fails to hold.
Marc Ferraro. Installation view of HELLO ETERNAL LOVING PRESENCE, Hunter MFA, 2025.
Marc Ferraro’s sculptures and paintings unfold as poetic acts of rebellion: artworks that masquerade as familiar forms, meticulously constructed to disorient. His pieces flirt with the language of functional objects—side tables, ceramic vessels, interior flourishes—but each is deliberately derailed through material handling and surface manipulation. Built from found furniture or fabricated from scratch, his sculptures are unified through a surfacing process involving CelluClay, sanding, and pigment that transform disparate components into seamless forms that read less as assemblage and more as elusive design.
His paintings engage more with temperature than with color, shade, or tone. Muted hues shift from sunburnt oranges and reds to cool blue-grays and dusty browns, leaving the viewer in a suspended state that recalls the psychological affect of seasonal change. Ferraro’s works neither demand nor reject emotional response, but revels in the in-betweens. Through this technique, he achieves a subtle defamiliarization, recasting the familiar as something unknowable, yet certifiably chic.
Shannon Pritchard. Installation view of HELLO ETERNAL LOVING PRESENCE, Hunter MFA, 2025.
Shannon Pritchard’s site-specific wax installations blur reverence with artifice. In one domestic scene, wax-cast objects like lampshades, fans, and furniture become secular idols that feel suspended outside of time and place. Their presence, not immediately noticeable, seeps in as wax takes hold of the space and mimics an orchestrated reality, while insidiously unsettling it.
Pritchard, who works at Madame Tussauds, brings her expertise in lifelike wax figures into a new arena, one much less concerned with preserving celebrity likeness than with probing the threshold between the real and the constructed. In her sculptures, a carved knife or a bitten slice of cake becomes a point of tension, inviting both awe and sensory unease. She selects everyday objects and domestic spaces, then renders them slightly off-kilter, disorienting the recognizable and forcing the familiar to feel strange.
Aashish Gadani. Installation view of HELLO ETERNAL LOVING PRESENCE, Hunter MFA, 2025.
Aashish Gadani’s video Money Is Beautiful | Manifesting Wealth and Abundance Hypnosis (2024) is a mesmerizing litany of cinematic detritus: a 13-minute sequence of film fragments in which characters speak dollar amounts, ascending from $1 to $50 billion. As a former software developer, Gadani brings a forensic fluency with data into his practice, using a custom-built search engine to extract these moments from post-war film history. Reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) in its use of montage, Gadani’s work departs by offering a climactic structure shaped not by time, but by an accumulation of value. The result is both banal and trance-inducing: a rising incantation similar to ones you may hear in Sotheby’s, Christie’s, or Phillips that echoes secular prayer, capitalist mantra, and warped meditation. Displayed on a narrow LED strip typically found in gaming PCs and calibrated via Raspberry Pi, the format situates the work within a familiar digital aesthetic while quietly subverting its spectacle. “I’m just bored of showing video work on normal TVs,” Gadani told me, instead choosing a presentation that feels intimate, alien, and proportionally not far off from the shape of a dollar bill. Gadani’s method privileges the authority of the dataset over narrative logic. Clips remain visually raw and unstyled, and reveal the compulsions and aspirations embedded within our cinematic psyche. The tone is deadpan, which only intensifies the work’s emotional undertow. “I like the idea of a companion version that’s four hours long—punishingly boring,” Gadani says.
In a separate work, Gadani constructs a multi-screen sculpture from dismantled gamer chairs, five vertically mounted 24” monitors, a cinder block, and a custom-built PC. Cables spill outward in plain view, amplifying the monstrous physicality of the setup. Each screen plays footage pulled from the fringes of the internet: ritualistic tech destruction, glitch erotics, and acts of strange tenderness. In one clip, a woman appears to shoot fire from her rear end; in another, someone bathes a motherboard in water with devotional care. Categorized obsessively under folders like wet tech, the clips reveal a kind of structural delirium. There’s no satire here, just ambient documentation. The algorithm doesn’t editorialize, the viewer is implicated, and immense absurdity is the point.
