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From the Familiar to the Fantastic

The 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition gave a peek at the wide-ranging work of this year’s graduates
News Staff | Mon, May 26, 2025

At first glance, Megan Weeda’s oil paintings seem like comfortable, domestic scenes of bedrooms and parlors. But you soon notice that something is off. A dog lounging on the bed has six eyes and three collars. A chair seems to be overlapping another chair. It’s as if a printer jam had caused some images to render stuttered and askew.

Weeda, AG25, has aphantasia, or an inability to visualize objects in her mind, which is one reason she focused her Master of Fine Arts thesis project on the complexities of recollection. In the paintings, which are based on family photographs, she recreates and reinterprets her memories using repetition, mirroring, and blurring. “In doing so, I investigate the ways in which memory can be both a tool for certainty and a source of self-doubt,” she writes in her artist statement.

Yining Lee, “Solace in Rain,” 2024. Acrylic on Linen.
Chris Diani, from “I Just Want Them to Know That They Didn't Break Me,” 2025.
Peyton Michelle, “Daisy Dukes (Promise Me),” 2024. Acrylic on canvas.
Foster Boyajian, Between Gesture and Occurrence, A Dialogue with Hue, 2025. Acryclic on canvas.

The kaleidoscopic feel of Weeda’s work reflects the many perspectives included in “Through Shifting Lenses,” an exhibit of Master of Fine Arts thesis projects by the SMFA at Tufts Class of 2025. The works were on view at the Tufts University Art Galleries on the Medford/Somerville campus through Commencement.

Perspective changes at the click of a controller in Yulia Niu’s “Virtual Reality Dreamscape.” Exhibit-goers donned VR headsets to navigate through fantastical worlds Niu built with game engine software. 

MiJung Yun, “Volcano No. 6,” 2024. Pen and ink on paper.

Nostalgic photos and ephemera—a Rubik’s cube, an Etch A Sketch, a Duran Duran album cover—were the background to Chris Diani’s remembrance of “the sugar-high of pop culture in the neon-hued 1980s,” as he writes in his artist statement. But it was a difficult time to grow up gay. In his installation, he paired portraits of queer men with audio recordings of their recollections of the 1980s and their lives during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “It truly was the best of times and the worst of times,” he writes. 

One could easily get lost exploring Richard Farrell’s collection of drawings, small paintings, and musings that were tacked to the wall like the contents of an enormous bulletin board and reached clear to the ceiling. 

Taking up the full height of another wall, Foster Boyajian’s six canvases of abstract painting flowed into one another as she explored how color and scale influence physical and emotional reactions.

Soft sculptures by Hanniie, based on their experimental graphic novel “Big Miskates.”
Shuyler Dragoo, “Simulacra Goose,” 2025. Still from experimental new media performance.
Ari Grubb, “Salmon and Smelt,” 2025. Stop motion puppets.
Richard Farrell, “wheel of fortune.”

MiJung Yun’s intricate pen and ink drawings similarly billowed and flowed, as she captured the power of natural forces like waves and volcanic eruptions. “I mean them to be ecstatic, echoing the way I feel during the process of art-making,” she writes.

Bean bag chairs encouraged viewers to settle in to watch Ari Grubb’s short film “Anadromous,” a stop motion and mixed media animation that involves a meet-cute between two fish, an escape from an aquarium, and a colorful cast of sea creature puppets. Having struggled with queer identity growing up, “I repeatedly return to the themes of confinement versus freedom, repression versus expression, and self-doubt versus self-acceptance,” Grubb writes. And nothing says freedom like a salmon and a smelt roller-skating their way to an on-stage disco party, the finale of Grubb’s film.

Read more about these artists and all of this year’s MFA graduates on the SMFA at Tufts website.

Anguo Ping, “Untitled,” 2024. Oil on canvas.