Throughout the semester, we’re shining a light on the Art Department’s graduating MFA candidates as they present their final thesis exhibitions. These exhibitions are the culmination of years of dedicated study and artistic exploration, showcasing our students’ diverse talents and innovative approaches to art-making.
Tina Rose Rea Meister is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, textiles, film, and archival materials. Her studio practice explores queer identity through domestic and ecological spaces. “I’m particularly interested in thinking about interiors and intimate spaces, and ways in which we can both protect and preserve those spaces while allowing them to be felt and understood,” Meister says.
Meister’s MFA thesis exhibition will be on view in the Art Lofts (111 N. Frances St.) from March 4–7. In her studio, she will present a painting exhibition titled “Interior Natures.” In the Front Gallery, she will present a social practice textile project titled “Soft Spaces: Preserving the Sapphic Home Archive.” A smaller exhibition, “The Interior Archive,” will also be part of the show, and a queen-sized quilt will be displayed in the Gelsy Verna Gallery Case next to the ceramics studio.
A reception, free and open to the public, will take place Friday, March 6, from 5 to 8 p.m.
We asked Meister to share more about her work.
What inspired you to create these paintings?
These two paintings are from a new collection on display in my studio show. I’ve been thinking through expressive painting as a means for exploring how the body in landscape can find new language for the intimacy of the interior.
How did you create them?
My paintings often evolve and find their compositions as I work on them, usually wet-on-wet painting. While the social practice components of my work often involve detailed planning and documentation, painting is much more of an intuitive space for me to work. My figures emerge from gestural marks and find relationships to each other as the paint accumulates.
What do you hope viewers take away from your exhibition?
From my paintings, I hope that viewers come away with some understanding of my own interior, even if it remains beyond the space of words. From my textile exhibition, I hope viewers come away with a better understanding of the queer home and the joys, pains, and losses that come with it. “The Interior Archive,” as a micro-exhibition, is deeply interconnected with “the Sapphic Home Archive,” and aims to touch a bit more deeply at the relationship we have to archives as intimate spaces. From the quilt, I hope viewers just feel the joyful, enveloping, tactile landscape of queer dreams and love.