Tess Wei, Studio Art (Honors)

Edges and Reflections – Senior Art Exhibition

Edges and Reflections showcases the work for my Studio Art Honors major. My body of work investigates the thresholds between conditions of the physical and the virtual. The main vehicles for these investigations are oil paintings painted with palette knives. These paintings primarily depict Still Life scenes with bones, as well as cityscapes. Edge relationships are a central concern in my paintings. I interpret edges as marking boundaries—declaring spatial positions, the contours of entities, and the sites between a something and something it is not; they signal thresholds both physical and psychological (“to put on edge”). I am curious how reflections and mirrored surfaces are two-dimensional yet provide spatial illusions of the third and fourth dimensions. Therefore, within my paintings I examine and emphasize the multiple presences of forms by articulating and blurring the edge between objects’ material and virtual forms. These paintings are not a pursuit for accuracy in the sense of Realism. Instead, I search for an accuracy in capturing the aura of a space or an object, in concretizing and implying the intangible yet present dimensions of our reality. My gravitation to these themes does not have one particular origin but, instead, is the product of a series of moments, curiosities, and studies that have converged in my art. Therefore, I see my works as a culmination of studies—a serial examination of the liminal space between the tangible and intangible and how I can visually articulate this juncture.