On view over the weekend of November 8-10, 2024, the group show “Irish Exit” invited viewers to linger in memories and fleeting moments through four artists’ diverse exploration of paint, sculpture, and printmaking.

As it turns out, a shared studio is the ideal place to contemplate absence.

In “Irish Exit,” a group show by School of Art juniors Bethany Hwang, Helena Starzec, Suanna Zhong, and Mo Nash, The Frame Gallery was filled with indelible moments, emptied rooms, vacant scenes, and life’s lingering silhouettes. The idea for the show took shape as the artists found themselves working in the same studio space on the School’s fourth floor during summer 2024 — Zhong pursuing an independent study, Starzec working as a member of the School’s summer student crew, and Hwang and Nash serving as TAs for Pre-College Art. Below, each artist revisits a moment left behind through a featured work in the show, leaving traces for viewers to discover… but without a proper goodbye.

Bethany Hwang

“This is done in a completely new medium I’m exploring this year. I learned about batik and screen printing with dye during Addoley Dzegede’s Dye Lab. I was working with family photos, and this photo of me and my sister has a lot of sentimental value. We’re wearing dresses with the same pattern, which was originally my mom’s dress when she was in her 30s that my grandmother took and made two separate dresses. The whole bit was that we were ‘cut from the same cloth.'”

Helena Starzec

“This was a piece that started my whole semester body of work. It was very intuitive. I just walked outside of CFA one day and was looking at the tennis courts. I was like, fantastic, I should paint this. My experience with tennis courts is a very summery type of thing, which makes me think of my childhood at its best. I like reoccurring symbols. I started in the upper right corner and then made the choice to ignore most of the painting and just keep it white.”

Suanna Zhong

“I was taking this course in Computer Graphics, and we were learning about different ways you can manipulate images with computer algorithms. I was really interested in JPEG compression, because a JPEG file format is something we interact with every day. Basically, the more you export a JPEG photo, the smaller and worse the quality gets. So I thought it would be really interesting to contrast the low quality of the JPEG file format with other pieces that I either draw from life or that have more detail. It doesn’t feel like a portrait to me because I was so focused on getting the blocks so precise. I think it’s an interesting way to combine computers and art.”

Mo Nash

Mo Nash was unfortunately unable to attend the opening of “Irish Exit” due to illness. Their work intimately inspects their queer body and its relationships to others, physical embodiments of psychological experiences, self-imposed and self-inflicted mythological narratives, and personal and social identity broadly. They are interested in touch — between, with and for others — and finding comfort within objects, drawn to tactility in art meant to be touched, held, and loved.