The School of Visual Arts and ArtCake are pleased to present the MFA Art Practice 2025 Thesis exhibition “…From Inside the House” with work by Casey Correa, Natasha K. De Armas, Jacqueline Ehle Inglefield, Frank Rapant, Beckett Sky, and DW Zinsser. The artists explore the intersections of memory, identity, and transformation through diverse mediums and personal narratives in varied media from assemblage to immersive installations. Themes of recollection, home, displacement, desire, nostalgia, the unconscious thread through contrasts of scale, material, and emotion. Sculptural shrines and grotesque reliquaries explore queerness, spirituality, and harm reduction through intimate, devotional practices. “…From Inside the House,” challenges viewers to reflect on the interplay between personal memory and cultural identity while inviting engagement with experimental forms of artistic expression. At its core, the exhibition celebrates the rawness of emotion, the beauty of the unexpected, and the deeply human need for connection and transformation.

The exhibition will be open to the public every Saturday, July 5 through July 26, 2025, from noon until 5:00 PM at ArtCake, 214 40th St, Brooklyn, NY.

Please join us for a reception for the artists on Friday, July 11, 6pm – 9pm in the gallery. There will be a closing artists’ panel July 26 at 2pm moderated by David Ross, chair of the Art Practice program and former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Viewing by appointment is also available. Please contact ccorrea7@sva.edu

Casey Correa is an interdisciplinary artist working with collage, drawing, and assemblage to explore and embrace the tensions of contemporary life. Using everyday materials like t-shirts, iPhone photos, journal scraps, and found objects and appropriated imagery, her process follows the pull of unanchored desire, valuing fragmentation, failure, and reuse. Correa’s work sits with the crisis of the present moment, creating layered compositions that hold space for ambiguity, contradiction, and affective excess.

Natasha K. De Armas is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the emotional landscapes of memory, longing, and displacement. Drawing from her childhood experiences with fabric by her grandmother’s side in Venezuela and her journey as an immigrant, she layers textiles into collaged wall pieces and soft sculptures. Using intuitive stitching methods, she binds together abstract forms and figures, externalizing the complex feelings of loss, nostalgia, and absence shared by many migrants. Her sensorial, tactile works invite viewers to touch, reflect, and empathize, offering a perspective on the in-betweenness of migration. 

Jacqueline “Jackie” Ehle Inglefield is an artist who loves to experiment with materials to draw. Jackie’s focus is horses, horses of all sizes: life size percherons to ponies the size of pecans. The horses are made from multiple types of wire. Wire may explain the galaxies. Wire allows the artist to freeze the gesture of these galloping majestic beasts in flight, their most magical moment. These horses are like bubbles, rings of smoke, and vampires: they are challenging to photograph.

Frank Rapant is an artist, educator, and parent based in Upstate New York. For over two decades, they have exhibited work in photography, sculpture, video, and written word throughout the Capital District and beyond, engaging themes of memory, identity, and self-reflection. Their current body of work, Self-Portraits as The Princess, uses photographs of an antique wooden doll to question gender, selfhood, and revisit a childhood-in-distress. The photographs are paired with Rapant’s handwritten text on archival inkjet prints which are installed within an abstraction of their childhood bedroom. Rapant has exhibited at The Hyde Collection, and the University at Albany Museum, and has works held by the Permanent Collection of Union College, and by Baxter Street at CCNY. They hold a BA in English and Visual Arts from Union College, where they currently work in the Department of Visual Arts.

L.A. native and Middle East and European-based artist Beckett Sky creates vibrant, abstract, large-scale oil paintings and heritage textile works from an intuitive natural rhythm. A classically trained painter and former dancer and Gyrotonic trainer, her physical process-based practice is a spiritual exercise that helps her connect deeply with the greater internal life force behind the forms of all things. The acts of painting, embroidery, textile work and soft sculpture provide Sky a space to dialogue with ancient ancestors. Her involvement in art conservation and cultural preservation also connects her to the human continuum of craft and technique, vital to her practice. Natural elements and the colors and textures in her natural and historic surroundings are the foundation of her work. Sky keeps returning to palm tree bark and fronds, appearing in her native Los Angeles, as well as her Middle Eastern and Mediterranean surroundings.

DW Zinsser is a visual artist and master printer living and working in New York City. Zinsser's work explores the resilience of the queer body. Working primarily in drawing, installation and printmaking, Zinsser uses stippling and ink washes to create intricate, abstracted forms. They have a BFA from Pratt Institute with a concentration in Printmaking. Zinsser has shown at Essex Flowers, Harkawik, the Satellite Art Fair and Colnaghi Gallery and has completed the residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Center on Governors Island. They are a current artist in residence at the Elizabeth Foundation’s SHIFT residency and the Canopy program. DW uses symbolic objects and characters as offerings that accumulate into a cluttered shrine to grief. They employ an element of humor and kitsch, which serves as a coping mechanism for the shame retained within the body. Zinsser’s research into the overdose epidemic has rooted their work and subjects as archetypes within the larger narrative about addiction and how it affects the queer community.