Lost & Found (on top of everything else)
MFA Thesis Exhibit, Temple Contemporary Gallery (March 18th-21st, 2026)

“Lost & Found” is a series of love letters devoted to the intimacy of cloth and the narratives held within. Each collage-quilt-initial is assembled from discarded materials that were transformed via dyeing, scrunching, squishing, and stitching. These materials were scavenged from all corners of my life: my closet, my boyfriend’s closet, the streets of Philadelphia during a heat wave and trash union strike, the floor of the dye kitchen, etc… Stains, tears, and signs of wear are left intact while other sections are worked with needle and thread or plunged into a dyepot. This alchemy is an attempt to honor the material legacy and forge new agency. Much like cloth, text and language are integral parts of the human experience. Quite literally, I have been thinking about textiles as text (both share the Latin root texere, meaning to weave). Words and clothes are so commonplace that their combined abstraction has the power to invoke a deep personal resonance—everybody gleefully brings their own perspective to the work. In a lot of ways I think they become mirrors, portals, and doorways for self reflection & introspection. They are as much about me as they are you.

Show documentation by John Carlano. Additional documentation below by Priya Vaswani and artist.

X’d Out and Tied Up
gifted, thrifted, found, and donated ties collected by me; white(ish) textiles gathered from streets, gutters, and trash piles around Tyler campus; background quilt made in 2020 and over-dyed in 2026
65” square

O-Face
cotton and linen fabric shreds, scraps, slivers, and rags collected from artist’s practice, donation bins, and trash cans in Tyler; over-dyed yellow 64” x 64”

Rosebuds
boyfriend’s towels (abandoned after mopping up cat piss); MX dye; backed with vintage wool blanket
33” x 44”

Teeny
tapes, trims, lanyards, shoelaces, and ribbons collected by artist; donation bin sherpa; athletic tape frame stuffed with batting scraps; copious amounts of glue
60” x 62”

Diggin’ My Heel into the F Word
artists’ worn out/busted out/forgotten/lost crusty socks collected between 2015-2025; backed with vintage wool blanket
37” x 54”

*F lifted from 1911 issue of The Craftsman title font photographed at Philadelphia Museum of Art

My Big Ass A
t-shirts, shorts, tank tops, jeans found on street and dyed brown; pink pants and grey blanket found on trash day; background quilts made in 2020 by artist over-dyed and bleached with block paste
74” x 90”

*A set in Mason Serif as homage to poster from Andrew Fleming’s 1996 The Craft