The show runs from April 10th – May 2nd, 2025. We look forward to your visit !
The 2025 annual Bachelor of Fine Arts/ Bachelor of Art exhibition showcases theses work prepared by graduating seniors from the 杏吧传媒 Art Department. The show is the culmination of their artistic studies at the University, and an opportunity to view student work before they enter the world as practicing creative professionals.
Each piece in the exhibition reflects the students’ dedication and growth, demonstrating the skills and ideas they’ve developed during their studies to explore new artistic challenges. From technical mastery to bold concepts, the work on display showcases the incredible talent and passion of these up-and-coming artists.
Featuring work by:
| Emily DeTroy | BFA with a Studio Concentration in Photography & Digital Art and Design with a Minor in Book Arts |
| Cecilia Marie Drysdale | BFA with a Studio Concentration in Ceramics |
| Emma Estes | BFA with a Studio Concentration in Sculpture with a Minor in Book Arts |
| Alyssa McNally | BFA with a Studio Concentration in Painting & Drawing |
| Jayda Ray-James | BA in Art & Entrepreneurial Studies with a Studio Concentration in Painting & Drawing |
| Katie Riley | BFA with Double Studio Concentrations in Painting & Drawing and Sculpture |
| Ryan Stresky | BFA with a Studio Concentration in Photography & Digital Art and Design |
| Madeline Twombly-Wiser | BFA with Double Studio Concentrations in Ceramics and Painting & Drawing |
| Laima Vinc臈 Sruoginis | BFA with a Studio Concentration in Painting & Drawing |
| Danna Wiggins | BFA with a Studio Concentration in Painting & Drawing |
Emily DeTroy
BFA with a Studio Concentration in Photography & Digital Art and Design with a Minor in Book Arts
Emily DeTroy is an artist working and living in Southern Maine. DeTroy鈥檚 artistic practice covers photography, collage, and book-making. Themes of her work span from the liminal and isolation to nostalgia and whimsy. Her recent photography focuses on mundane and everyday moments that are familiar or universal to the viewer but are often passed by or overlooked. As a photographer, Emily seeks out the interaction of shapes, shadows, reflective surfaces, and human impacted spaces. DeTroy鈥檚 work was recently included in the exhibition Photo A-Go-Go at The Bakery Photo Collective in December 2024.
My work uses photography to explore the connection between nostalgia and the mundane. The subjects that catch my shutter鈥檚 eye are found in everyday life; buildings in decay, my commute to and from school, and other human-impacted spaces. I find comfort in the mundane and overlooked.
My current body of work is comprised of in-camera collages made from reflective surfaces and shadows. The primary inspiration and source of this line of work is the display window of a long-running and beloved vintage shop in Auburn, Maine. I focus on the objects that make up the display window, objects that are overlooked time again and time again by passers by. The combination of vintage objects along with the way that the light plays and dances on the reflective surfaces instills a quiet nostalgia.
Cecilia Marie Drysdale
BFA with a Studio Concentration in Ceramics
Cecilia Drysdale is a ceramic artist who combines utilitarian wheel-thrown forms with hand-built sculptural elements. For Cecilia, clay is a way of expressing emotions and tackling topics such as personal events from their life, chronic illness, and mental illness. Inspired primarily by plants, fungi, and the idea of natural decay, Cecilia connects her personal life to life cycles in nature. By sculpting these ideas through clay, they find the beauty in death. Along with sculptural work, she enjoys painting landscapes and scenes from New England on thrown vessels. Cecilia Drysdale is currently completing their undergraduate studies at the 杏吧传媒 with a BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in ceramics.
My body of work shows the triumphs and roadblocks of growing up with a disability. Within this context, I explore difficult topics that pertain to me, such as coping with the fear of death. Through my exploration of nature, and death, I find beauty in skeletons and the process of decay.
I use clay as my main material when creating my works. These vessels are constructed on the pottery wheel, formed, and then shaped by hand. In my designs, I am inspired by textures in nature such as mycelium, veins, and roots. These elements interest me as they relate to how life connects, and how the human brain connects with every single moving part of the body.
For this exhibition, I created a body of work that expresses my experience of growing up with epilepsy, showing my perspective and my parents鈥� perspectives. I conducted interviews with them to gather their experiences on parenting a child with epilepsy. My ceramics show the different perspectives, stories, and memories that come from my past. For this body of work, I have created four different pieces that combine to tell a complete story of growing up with a disability. I have used different clay bodies for each vessel; one in a lighter clay, for my mother, a darker clay body for my father, and a brown clay body for me.
The audio of my parents and I speak through the three vessels. Including the audio creates the appearance of the art speaking directly to the viewer. My parents must have a voice in my sculptures, as their voices help convey the emotionally taxing experiences. I use the analogy of a sheep to represent my epilepsy diagnosis. The sheep can take the form of its regular self, but it also can be a hybrid of human and creature in my work. The sheep took form through distorted memory shown in my wall hanging. Through my work, I show myself growing up, as well as the start of my epilepsy diagnosis, and the birth of the sheep.
Emma Estes
BFA with a Studio Concentration in Sculpture with a Minor in Book Arts
Emma Estes is a soft sculptor working with fabric and felt. She also incorporates book making into her practice. Her subject matter includes hybrid animals such as the captivating cuttlefrog (a cuttlefish and frog hybrid)! Emma鈥檚 artmaking is inspired by a desire to bring herself and others joy and a sense of fun. In her free time, she likes to thrift for little guys, trinkets, and books and be creative and crafty. Emma also enjoys the company of her close friends.
Hybrid Haven is a collection of mini environments that form an immersive and imaginative world for the audience to explore. Each sculpture is both self-contained and interconnected. Together, they make up a larger scene in which each hybrid animal thrives.
This mixed-media series incorporates soft sculpture elements and book art techniques. The tactile nature and accessibility of the materials invites viewers to interact with the art on multiple levels. I use crochet, needle felt, and paper techniques in order to blur the line between art and play. The softness of these materials is intended to invoke memories of childhood stuffed animals and conjure feelings of comfort and nostalgia.
As an adopted Asian person growing up in rural Maine, I have felt separate and unlike my peers. There was no one to talk to about being one of the very few people of color in my hometown. The hybrid animals represent what it means to not be like everyone around you. They may look different, but they are still whole and part of a community.
Bringing joy to myself and others is vital to my artwork. Our real world is often difficult and scary to navigate, so my work allows for some escapism. My creations have personality, making them not just cute but also unique and unpredictable. Through my work, I try to convey complex ideas and feelings, such as diversity and otherness, while being whimsical and humorous. My world is a utopia for the creatures to live in harmony and to be themselves.
Alyssa McNally
BFA with a Studio Concentration in Painting & Drawing
Alyssa McNally is an artist born and raised in Maine. Growing up surrounded by nature and exploring remote areas has fostered her interest in nature and animals. Her current artwork focuses on themes of fantasy and mythology, influenced by a love for fictional stories from a young age. Alyssa combines elements of her Maine roots with her love for mythical creatures to create pieces that are narrative and representative of her life experiences. She has interned in both curatorial and graphic design positions and is currently completing her undergraduate studies at the 杏吧传媒 with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in Studio Art.
Creating artwork has always been a way for me to escape the real world and enter into a world that is malleable and shaped by my own imagination and ideals. When I鈥檓 planning a piece I first consider what I鈥檓 interested in visually exploring, then I tie in deeper themes and meanings as the piece progresses. I am inspired by mythology and the world of fantasy and how I can use that imagery to escape the dreariness of everyday life while grounding my work by pulling in real world environments or emotions.
Growing up in Maine has had a fundamental impact on who I am as a person and an artist. As a child my family was always extremely involved in exploring the natural world, doing activities that often left us in the sparsely populated areas of northern Maine, or simply in the middle of the woods somewhere. As an only child with a very active imagination, I pictured fantastical creatures lurking among the trees or create elaborate stories in my mind to make things more exciting. Today, I continue to be inspired by mythology, the way that stories are spread from person to person until they take on a fantastical life of their own. My love for fantasy and childhood experiences in Maine has fostered my interest in local folklore. In several of my paintings I pull from these feelings of nostalgic imagination, of the places I鈥檝e visited in the Allagash and Northwestern Maine, combined with Native folklore and stories from Maine logger men, to create a story that is uniquely my own.
Occasionally I like to use these fantasy and cryptid animals to portray feelings that I find difficult to talk about verbally. It brings me a sense of comfort to paint imagery I enjoy with a topic I find hard to approach. Several of my artworks have underlying tones of anxiety, paranoia, alienation, and overthinking. I struggle with these emotions quite a lot, and though I feel I鈥檝e gotten better at working through them over the years, I鈥檝e never felt comfortable speaking on them out loud for fear of being looked down upon or regarded with skepticism. My art allows me to express my feelings in a way that I hope can be seen by fellow artists and others who resonate with similar emotions.
In my thesis work, I aim to methodically portray an interwoven story of these myths and emotions. Each piece begins with planning through research and several sketches. When I paint, it鈥檚 akin to working on a puzzle, meticulously filling in areas color by color to render each piece of my sketch and bring it to fruition. In my paintings I鈥檓 often laying down shadows, mid-tones, and highlights section-by-section or figure-by-figure and touching up as necessary when the layers dry. It sometimes feels a little chaotic but very organic, placing colors where I deem fit and creating characters – much like weaving a story that could be passed along for generations. That鈥檚 a feeling that I鈥檇 like my audience to experience from my artwork as a whole.
Jayda Ray-James
BA in Art & Entrepreneurial Studies with a Studio Concentration in Painting & Drawing
Jayda Ray-James is a painter based in Portland, Maine, working in both digital and traditional mediums. Her artwork offers a vivid, fantastical, and introspective exploration of her identity as a Black woman, using bright, semi-surreal imagery. Primarily figurative, her work focuses on the female form and embraces a maximalist style. Through symbolism and allegory, she tackles themes related to her personal experiences and current events, creating new narratives. Jayda is currently completing her undergraduate studies at the 杏吧传媒, where she is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art and Entrepreneurial Studies with a concentration in painting. She has received the EICI Palette of Identity Award from USM and is currently working as a gallery intern at the University Art Gallery.
Tenacity is a series of paintings that serves as an introspective exploration of what drives my emotions and reactions to the personal and cultural conflicts Black women face. This work is an extension of myself, reflecting an ongoing dialogue between how I perceive society and how society perceives me as a Black woman. I expose my inner emotions and insecurities through the act of oil painting on canvas, while exploring emotional instability rising from conflicts such as the constant barrage of distressing news to perceptions of beauty and desirability.
Symbols and allegories combine with figures to form greater narratives in my work. Together, they create semi-surreal and fantastical paintings. Though not all are explicitly self-portraits, each painting focuses on central figures that convey emotions stirred by these experiences. Passionate is a piece that in particular uses a number of familiar symbols such as flames and swords to the heart to evoke a whirlwind of emotions鈥� specifically shock, sadness, and frustration鈥攖oward alarming world events and oppressive ideals. These are emotions I鈥檝e had to sit with and reflect on while identifying what I can and cannot control. The figures, whether they are physically fighting back against these ideals or struggles, represent a willingness to endure and show resilience despite everlasting hardships.
I embrace a maximalist style. Gestural brushwork and dynamic composition are key elements of my work, allowing the viewer鈥檚 eye to wander throughout each piece. Drawing inspiration from Impressionism, I use short, bright strokes of color to create depth and detail. The contrast in my pieces makes them striking, as bold hues paired with darker lighting bring them to life within a gallery space.
I draw strength from embracing vulnerability and being honest with myself. In this series, this embrace of truth reflects resilience and optimism amid conflict. Though my work highlights cultural and social issues affecting Black women and the wider population, these paintings also can resonate with the inner conflict many people experience, whether related to how their appearance impacts them or how their identity deviates from societal perceptions.
Katie Riley
BFA with Double Studio Concentrations in Painting & Drawing and Sculpture
Katie Riley is a mixed media artist based in Midcoast Maine. A lifelong science fiction enthusiast, Riley specializes in immersive sculptures that are visceral and otherworldly. In her recent work, Riley uses unorthodox materials and processes (thousands of hot glue strands, 40 cans of spray foam) to invite viewers into a world where industrial materials become delicately and eerily enticing.
My sculptures explore material transformation through process-driven obsession. By layering fine strands of hot glue over weeks or months, I create a man-made chatoyancy鈥攁n optical shimmer that shifts with light and movement. This meticulous repetition results in simultaneously rigid and fluid surfaces that invite the viewer鈥檚 shifting examination as they shimmer under specific and controlled lighting.
My sculptures act as portals to a reality just beyond our own 鈥攐ne that transports viewers into an environment that feels alien, yet eerily familiar. The forms I build are strange, visceral, and dynamic, existing somewhere between the biological and the alien. By creating large and often dark confrontational pieces, I aim to immerse the viewer in this foreign world.
The tension between material and form is central to my practice鈥攚here something industrial becomes delicate, and something chaotic is harnessed into precision. These works are as much about the obsessive labor of their creation as they are about the eerie, ambiguous presence they hold.
Ryan Stresky
BFA with a Studio Concentration in Photography & Digital Art and Design
Ryan Stresky is a freelance digital artist, animator, and hobbyist who uses colorful characters and designs to tell stories. His current piece 鈥楾he Forest Lies鈥� explores the power of the comic art form to deliver an expressive and engaging narrative. Stresky鈥檚 work aims to elevate the medium of comics 鈥� a form that is often overlooked in the eyes of the wider art community, yet thankfully, has gained more of the respect it deserves in recent years.
My body of work is focused on the practice of storytelling in comics and visual novels. My stories explore themes of found family and trauma, how the two relate, and how characters overcome their past through growing, maturing, and conquering with the help of others. It is an idea I hold close to my heart, being a story I have experienced myself and a plot I have always found fascinating in other stories.
This comic, 鈥淭he Forest Lies鈥�, sees our main character, Hope, get trapped on a dangerous mountain during a family vacation gone wrong. With her family seemingly gone, she needs to uncover the mysterious forces at fault, with the assistance of her new, but unlikely, friendships. It may sound typical at first, but through a blend of unique characters, comedy, and art, I hope to create a visually interesting and intriguing narrative.
My chosen medium is primarily digital drawing. While I respect and love a lot of other mediums, especially sewing, ceramics, and painting, I am most comfortable expressing myself through digital art. I have been drawing my whole life and the transition from pencil to tablet felt right. For my exhibition, however, it was important to me to present a physical element. I chose to represent my comics using large posters (similar to what you might see at a bookstore) and actual printed comics for viewers to thumb through. This physical presentation grounds my project and brings in a whole new perspective – something I have always wanted for my art.
My influences for this piece mostly derive from my childhood, where I could often be found either drawing or watching cartoons, which heavily influenced my current ambitions. Whether that is to continue working on my comic or to strive for more, animation is truly one of the most magical mediums around. And I owe it quite a lot, as without it, I do not believe I would have ever started drawing in the first place. In a way, it jump-started this whole thing, and I would not change that for anything.
Madeline Twombly-Wiser
BFA with Double Studio Concentrations in Ceramics and Painting & Drawing
Madeline Twombly-Wiser is a multidisciplinary artist who grew up in rural southern Maine with her younger brother and her parents. She gathers most of her inspiration from nature – particularly from bugs and animals. Her artistic mediums include ceramics, painting, printmaking, and the occasional foray into fiber arts. Madeline is currently a senior at the 杏吧传媒 where she is a studio art major with a dual concentration in painting and ceramics. Her recent achievements include having artwork in the University Juried Student Exhibition in 2024 and 2025. You can find her artwork on her Etsy shop, or occasionally at markets and gift shops.
My BFA exhibition portrays a conversation between my current self and my younger self. In this conversation I am reflecting on my childhood and how much I have grown from the shy kid that I was. It is a reassurance that there is nothing wrong with me for being more quiet or reserved than others.
In my show my two selves sit down at a picnic to have this conversation together. My portraits are framed by oil painted and collaged imagery of symbols that represent both specific memories, and the people and things I hold close to my heart. Ceramic bugs and small critters gather with us at the picnic because I鈥檝e always found the natural world both comforting and fascinating. We hang out with our bug friends as we eat together off of our favorite dishes. We are the same but we are different 鈥� separated by time and life experience.
Laima Vinc臈 Sruoginis
BFA with a Studio Concentration in Painting & Drawing
Laima Vinc臈 Sruoginis received artistic training in studio arts at the School of Visual Arts, Rutgers University, Hunter College, Columbia University, before earning a BFA in Studio Arts with a concentration in Painting and Drawing at the 杏吧传媒. Noteworthy mentors in her early development as a painter are Will Barnet, Emma Amos, and Emily Mason. She has exhibited her work both in Europe and in the United States. Her solo exhibitions include Paintings Inspired by Spirit at the Rendall Fine Arts Gallery in Wiscasset, Maine (2016), Moments of Illumination at SLA 307, New York City (2020), That Unspoken Word鈥擳he Poetry of Painting at Savickas Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania (2020), Laima Vinc臈 鈥� Paintings at Liudvikas R臈za Cultural Center in Juodkrant臈, Lithuania (2021), Whimsical Works on Paper at the Speers Gallery in Kennebunk, Maine (2024), Paintings on Place at the Emigration Research Center in Kaunas, Lithuania (2024).
The theme of the paintings in this show is resistance through culture. My paintings convey the rich folklore and folk culture of Lithuania at a time when this cultural history, like that of Ukraine, is threatened with erasure by a hostile foreign power. It is against this backdrop that my work becomes a visual and political statement on how small nations have as much right to exist in peace and freedom as larger ones.
Russia invaded Ukraine in a full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. The night before, Putin claimed on Russian national television that Ukraine did not exist as a culture. As I watched in horror from Lithuania, he rambled on that Ukraine did not have a language, history, art, literature, folklore. This is not true. The culture of Ukraine is deep and rich. Ukraine and Lithuania have shared a history dating back to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. We feel deeply for the Ukrainian people. My own country of heritage, Lithuania, is also now under threat of attack by Russia.
With these paintings I share a glimpse into a mystical Baltic world. Each work seeks to capture a brief moment from a folk narrative鈥攖he Summer Solstice procession, Diemedis, the Tree of Life, at dawn when angels are active, the luminous glory of the Divine Mother.
Danna Wiggins
BFA with a Studio Concentration in Painting & Drawing
Danna Wiggins creates paintings and drawings that celebrate the tradition of figurative art. Her work shows a fluency in drawing and structural awareness and confidence with anatomy, proportions, and complex poses. She paints figures within environments to interpret portraiture in a modern way. Her body of work ranges from the adventures of children suspended in moments of time to her current series portraying a person with symptoms of chronic illness. Wiggins has exhibited in juried shows at the University gallery each year from 2022 to 2025.
My work explores how joy and pain shape our identities, and the lives of people close to me. The figures in my paintings convey meaning through posture, gesture, and symbolic elements to convey emotions.
One series delves into moments of joy, as seen in High Five, a piece created for my grandson that celebrates how his imaginative spirit empowers him, with the dynamic gesture symbolizing the boundless possibilities ahead. Another painting, Climbing Tree, captures an intense, immersive focus where action and awareness merge, inspiring my granddaughter to shed all self-consciousness and embrace her true, fearless nature. The act of climbing itself symbolizes overcoming challenges. The third piece, Absorbed, portrays the quieter, more introspective nature of another grandson, whose ability to allow a peaceful moment on a rock to usher in a dreamlike state, where he experiences the profound beauty of the natural world.
The second series, in contrast, delves into darker territory, using the experience of my friend Bethany, who suffers from autoimmune diseases, to examine the spectrum of pain that shapes her daily life. In Iconography, nails piercing the figure symbolize the migraines caused by her temporomandibular disorder, while the moving floorboards echo the vertigo brought on by POTS and presyncope. Other symptoms, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and erythromelalgia, are reflected in the way the figure鈥檚 joints and complexion are rendered, alongside the symbolic image of a ribbon tied at her neck to physically hold herself together. The piece Hypertonic further explores the relentless pain of cranio-cervical instability, disc degeneration and RA, symbolized by the figure鈥檚 bricked back. The Verbascum flowers in the background symbolize the traditional associations with healing and protection, representing the courage that becomes an ally in her ongoing battle with pain. Finally, Forged is a visual representation of the persistent heat to her cheeks and chest, dislocated hip, bone-on-bone pain, and ligament damage from hypermobility disorder, conveyed through the figure鈥檚 clutching hand and cane. The flaming environment is an extension of the body feeling overheated continually.
Both the light and dark subject matter are enhanced through color harmonies and design strategies, which underscore the themes of each painting. The expressive figures within these narratives are complemented by chromatic and compositional approaches that elevate everyday moments, making them resonate more deeply with the viewer.
