If you walked by and wondered what they’ve been setting up in Gund Commons Ballroom, look no further. On Friday afternoon, the space welcomed visitors to the 2026 Senior Studio Art Exhibition, a highly anticipated two-week showcase. This year marks a transition as it is the first time the senior exhibition has not been in The Gund, a change that prompted significant controversy among studio art majors and faculty members after the decision was announced last year.

The show highlighted the work of all 21 studio art majors’ yearlong capstone projects. Their capstones engage a wide range of media including embroidery, oil pastels and photography. The Gund Commons Ballroom has been filled with temporary white walls creating individual exhibition spaces, each belonging to a studio art major.

Many artists were inspired by personal experiences. Electrical Activity by Eliot Brown ’26 explores her epilepsy diagnosis and how she navigates her condition. In her artist’s statement, she wrote, “In 2023, I was diagnosed with sudden-onset epilepsy. Since then, I have navigated anger, anxiety, sadness and control as I was forced to adjust to a condition that has altered how I move through life.” Her work uses embroidery on photo portraits to translate neurological processes into something visible. “The images I construct are not a literal depiction of my seizures but a rendering of how I imagine them,” Brown said. The portraits presented in the series gradually gain clarity, going from blurry photographs to images with better focus, reflecting Brown’s own process of adjusting to her diagnosis. In addition to portraits, Brown used backlit brain scans with embroidery thread throughout to exemplify the clinical side of her condition. 

Aura Barinas ’26 focused on the emotional dichotomy of migration, exploring her fragmented memories living between the Dominican Republic and the United States. In an email to the Collegian, Barinas wrote, “The exhibition explores mundanity on the island. Moments that appear ordinary to locals who have lived their lives within the island’s boundaries leave a deep emotional impression on those who have relocated.” Barinas’ work, specifically her piece Que llueva, que llueva, la Virgen de la Cueva, encapsulates the memory of living in the Dominican Republic. “It captures a very nostalgic feeling for me of the rainy season in the Dominican Republic. It reminds me how, in our culture, no matter the weather or circumstance, we make the best out of a bad situation. We thrive in each other’s company and in creating community,” Barinas said about the piece. Her exhibition reflects the livelihood of the Dominican Republic using vivid and bright colors to imitate the energy of the Caribbean. 

Jamie McCreath ’26 similarly works with fragmentations through the use of intentional malfunctions, or “datamoshing” (a video editing technique that intentionally corrupts video compression by removing or manipulating frames), demonstrating the fluidity of identity. McCreath’s exhibition, Being is Movement, consists of a series of prints that use architecture, nature, text and his own body as visual metaphors to defy binaries created by society. Several of his pieces are pixelated and show an object or person fragmented by pixels, resembling a glitch. In an email to the Collegian, McCreath said his “exploration quickly led to thoughts and themes around gender, change and the body, especially under the Trump administration. Since each piece is a printed frame of a glitched video, they represent change despite being static works.” 

Shifting from McCreath’s focus on the fluidity of gender boundaries, Delia Preston ’26 explores the societal ramifications of being deaf in their series, Dinner Table Syndrome. Preston’s work uses a compilation of cropped paintings with blanks filling the space between each of them to illustrate the dizzying feeling of stepping into an environment made for hearing people as a deaf person. “The name itself derives from a phenomenon in the Deaf community referred to as ‘dinner table syndrome.’ The phenomenon traditionally references the experience of signing deaf individuals going home to hearing families that don’t sign, and the overwhelmingness and isolation they feel from their social environments,” Preston wrote in an email to the Collegian. Dinner Table Syndrome aims to confront audiences with the reality of inaccessible spaces and spark necessary conversations about disability to move toward a more inclusive society. 

Many students, studio art majors and non-majors alike, were initially upset that the exhibition’s venue was changed from a professional gallery setting to the much-less-prestigious Gund Commons. However, after this year’s exhibition, many studio art majors seemed to agree that while Gund Commons lacked the professionalism of The Gund, the lighting and gallery walls came together nicely. “The department did the best they could with the space they had,” Preston wrote of the venue change. “There were certainly areas in the presentation of the space I would’ve liked to improve (like the flooring being stained), but once we had our opening and people filled the space, it mattered less, and the little flaws we were noticing while installing went unnoticed during the event.”

The 2026 Annual Senior Student Exhibition will be on display in the Gund Commons Ballroom through April 3.