This April, Temple University Rome presented the exhibitions of the 2022 Masters in Fine Arts candidates. Each year, the Rome Campus hosts a select number of students in their final year of study towards their MFA graduate degree in visual arts. This year, the artists were Stephanie Manzi, Todd Stong and Zifan Wang. The show included a group exhibition of recent works by the three artists, which opened on Tuesday March 29, and ran through April 16. At the same time, individual, week-long displays of each artist were displayed in the gallery. 

View the works of each artist below. 

Zifan Wang: "Whisper"

In her practice, Zifan Wang always listens to those whispers coming from the inner self. All the whispers are produced by the psychological and physical movement between two countries. The physical movements make huge differences to her social networks but these huge differences are shown up by all tiny moments. So that she visualizes these tiny and detailed moments on a large scale canvas as the poems to demonstrate how small things can become great and effective. Compared to her previous works which have a very strong sense of storytelling, her current works are more focusing on how color and mark making can cooperate together and talk by themselves. The color choices are based on moods and play with layers in painting. 

Todd Stong: "Born a Worm"

Todd Stong presents his MFA Thesis exhibition titled Born a Worm with works that create figurative narratives that explore winding currents of sexuality, desire, and pain as they flow through the world, mixing in and sometimes muddying its waters of war and disease, racial reckoning, ecological collapse, and intellectual ennui. Combining researched subjects and whimsical fantasy with western art historical forms and motifs, his work asks us to consider how individuals negotiate their agencies with and against larger hierarchical and collectivist systems. Whether working in ink, paint, or graphite, with the printing press or with brush, pen, and pencil, he views all his labor as a process of drawing, in which resulting images ultimately exist in a state of investigation and becoming.

Stephanie Manzi: "With/Out"

Stephanie Manzi, in her MFA Thesis exhibition titled With/Out displays a body of new paintings and collages created during her final semester at Temple Rome. The work shows her devotion to forming a language around landscape and environment through realms of abstraction. There is a sense of play, history, color and light that create the visual ecosystem across the work present. The title of the show, With/out refers to what is accompanied by, having possession of, indicating an action or opposition, a relationship to and a doing and undoing, as well as what is beyond the surface, what has been lost and what can be gained. The title and work try to speak directly to the process of painting through layered actions work to parallel contemporary environmental conversations.