Watch how seniors Tresean Bayu Adji (BFA ’25) and Middy Vella (BFA ’25) explore the intersections of their distinct practices as friends, collaborators, and studio neighbors.
In their joint exhibition “Raw Material” at the Frame Gallery in March, Tresean Bayu Adji and Middy Vella critiqued the visual chaos of contemporary advertising, where media saturation and the drive for profit create a sensory “arms race.” Drawing from the emotional tactics of cute and sensational aesthetics, their work distinctly reimagines these visual languages as tools for deeper personal and cultural inquiry.
Here, Adji and Vella reflect on the inspirations behind their individual practices, how their friendship and parallel studio spaces shaped their final year, and what it meant to create a collaborative piece that brought their perspectives together.
Tresean Bayu Adji
Tresean Bayu Adji (b. 2003, New Haven, CT) (he/him) is a multimedia artist whose initial appreciation for music videos and the internet has propelled him into a robust exploration of language and collage in digital and physical realms. His early works were influenced by IRL and technologically-mediated social cultures in the form of video mashups (YouTube Poop), and laid the foundation of digital found-image compositions that symbolically communicate a meme-y post-internet state of present day media consumption and vulnerable social practice.
Middy Vella
Middy Vella (b. 2003, Phoenix, AZ) (she/her) is a painter and printmaker using global aesthetics of “cuteness” to represent a dystopian relationship between nature and capital. Her work extracts features of consumer products that make them universally cute and “likable”—large eyes, flushed cheeks, useless limbs, and a small or nonexistent mouth—to investigate the manufacture of emotional object-human relationships. By re-contextualizing these characters from attention hungry text and images in advertising into delicately rendered drawings and etchings, Vella parallels capitalistic motivation with a humor and tenderness that exists in our consumption of personal, non-functional and collectable things.