![\"Detail](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/MFA-16-Thomas_detail.jpg\")
<\/a>Thomas calls his series of large, colorful self-portraits “Schizophrenic Masculinity.” The series\u00a0 explores his journey of self-discovery during his time as a student in the United States at Wesleyan and at UConn.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was really about coming the U.S. and discovering I was black,\u201d Thomas says about the inspiration for his paintings. \u201cOutside of the U.S., [being black] doesn\u2019t mean the same thing. There isn\u2019t the culture and expectations that are here, having to reconcile those expectations and struggling with that, finding it in many ways. I would say it shows the more activist side of my life, struggling with those questions and just growing up, to be many things at once.\u201d<\/p>\n
His creative process involves painting his face with different colors and taking photos that he can use as the foundation of painting on large square canvases, each with a different dominant hue. He says working with a large image both helps him to better see his work through the thick eyeglasses he wears while also allowing him to stay engaged more fully with the painting because he must use his entire body while painting.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd for the subject matter I\u2019m dealing with, faces and masks, it\u2019s the best format for the size,\u201d Thomas adds. \u201cI call it overwhelming intimacy. If you\u2019re ever that close to someone\u2019s face, you\u2019re either making love or a fight is about to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Bulger says she was attracted to UConn because it would allow her to live in a familiar rural environment that also provides the found objects from farm life that she uses to create her sculptures. By sheer coincidence, she asked her sculpture professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire to write a recommendation, not realizing that Jason Lanka, now an assistant professor of art at Sheridan College in Gillette, Wyo., was a 2005 MFA graduate from UConn.<\/p>\n \u201c[Coming to Storrs,] I wouldn\u2019t be suffering from a shift from being on the farm to moving to the city,\u201d Bulger says. \u201cJudith [Thorpe, MFA director,] told me in my interview that there are cows on campus. That kind of sold me.\u201d<\/p>\n Bulger uses wood, plaster, and twine in her works to suggest parts of farm tools with her sculpture and digital drawings based on photographs of her sculptures. Her work \u201cDisc One,\u201d for example, was inspired by a plow disc, the circular blade that turns the ground for planting crops. \u201cTandem\u201d is a pair of wood pieces with plastered gauze pieces attached in the shape of the plow blades, looking more look like boat sails.<\/p>\n \u201cI started to work with the idea of making multiples so the sculptures could depend on each other in the very similar way I depend on my siblings,\u201d says Bulger, who grew up in a family with nine children. \u201cMy work is inspired by the cultivated landscape. I find that the landscape itself in the form of rolling hills, plowed furrows \u2013 that shape constantly comes in.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAre We All Here?\u201d also includes videos by Don Burton, who incorporates humor and drama into his films to explore the anxiety of loss, decay, and irreversible change; works by Neil Daigle Orians, who combines printmaking, installation, sculpture, photography, and performance; and drawings by Kacie Davis, who reflects her intuitive sense of the relationship between making a physical mark with charcoal or graphite and a virtual mark with an Xbox controller.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 2016 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition: Are We All Here?\u201d continues at the William Benton Museum of Art, 245 Glenbrook Road, Storrs, through May 8. For more information, go to the Benton website<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>