March 29 - April 17, 2025
From SMU:
“The 2025 SMU MFA Qualifying Exhibition brings together four dynamic emerging artists—Sharmeen Uqaili, Taylor Cleveland, Carolina Yáñez, and Shinwoo Song—each presenting a distinct approach to contemporary artistic inquiry. This culminating exhibition showcases the artists’ thesis work as they explore themes of identity, technology, heritage, and perception through diverse media, including painting, sculpture, projection, textiles, and mixed media installations.
Each artist draws from deeply personal and conceptual frameworks, challenging viewers to engage with layered narratives of culture, memory, and constructed realities:
-
Sharmeen Uqaili bridges the celestial and the earthly in works inspired by Turkish illumination and Persian miniature painting. Her geometric compositions, painted on uniquely shaped wood panels, create portals into imagined realms where time and space dissolve.
-
Taylor Cleveland interrogates the nature of reality through AI, digital media, and material experimentation. His sculptural works and projection mapping installations, including pieces from Water Wars and Facades of Dallas (Hall), critique technological and institutional mythologies, blurring the lines between simulation and truth.
-
Carolina Yáñez subverts capitalist consumer culture and explores Tejana identity through textiles and photography. Works such asDon’t Mess with Texas Quilt and Dirty Laundry confront environmental responsibility, reproductive rights, and the body as a site of political control.
-
Shinwoo Song navigates the unconscious mind through mixed-media paintings that incorporate ash, clay, rice paper, and thread. His Veils of the Unseen series engages memory, identity, and transformation, questioning the intersection between personal and collective perception.
The 2025 SMU MFA Qualifying Exhibition offers a compelling dialogue between material and meaning, reflecting the contemporary landscape of art and social discourse. The opening reception on March 29, 2025, from 4–6 PM invites the public to meet the artists and experience their work firsthand.”
Reception: March 29, 2025 | 4–6 pm
Southern Methodist University Pollock Gallery (Expressway Tower)
6116 North Central Expressway, Suite 101
Dallas, 75206 Texas
Get directions