Photography MFA Students Show Expressive Work in RISD’s Sol Koffler Gallery

The recent Graduate Photography Biennial in the Sol Koffler Gallery brought together works that reflect on material memory, inherited worlds, and the shifting spaces where images take form. Curated by Marley Trigg Stewart, public programs manager at the International Center of Photography in New York City, Every Time I Conjure a Stone, I Throw It included work by 15 first- and second-year MFA students whose practices stretch photography into sculpture, choreography, data, performance, landscape studies, and more. 

“There is a remarkable and voracious curiosity moving through this cohort,” says Photography Graduate Program Director Laine Rettmer. “They engage the photographic image with critical attention and formal speculation, each student bringing a distinct approach that is shaped by their point of view.” 

The title, drawn from the novel The Color Purple, evokes the power of intentional release and return. The artists work through and against material memory, which includes the textures of time, familial history, faith, and the shifting landscapes where these moments take place.

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Kyle Dong MFA 26 PH made images exploring how people experience sight. While fragmentation and deconstruction are common themes among art school students, Dong is examining each component of the photograph. In one piece, he uses holograms that allow the viewer to see the passage of time in one image. Another piece shows an open window next to an eye exam chart exploring the light coming in and out at the same time. “I look for moments of perception where sight shifts into insight, imagination, memory, and belief,” Dong says.

Wen Zhang MFA 26 PH is one of five students in the group who worked with Brown University faculty member Shura Baryshnikov to create a sense of movement in their photographs. Zhang focuses on performance in her practice, specifically exploring what she refers to as “woman time,” looking at time through a feminist lens. Her video shows a performance piece she made with the cohort in which she lay on top of a pile of coats and then asked the other students to pull them out from under her. The performance begins almost comically but becomes incredibly uncomfortable as it continues. “Drawing from aging, menstrual cycles, and hormonal shifts, the piece renders these often abstract sensations perceptible,” Zhang says.

When deciding what to create for this show, Lola Owett MFA 27 PH approached Rettmer with a wide range of ideas and decided to pursue all of them. The resulting images are a mediation between the darkroom and digital printing, relying on the integrity of the negatives to make straight prints. The elongated images were created with a plastic camera on medium format film, then digitally enlarged into murals. “This series, Fun House, uses toy cameras with plastic lenses to question the perfection often expected of both women and images,” Owett says. “These distorted multiples unsettle the idea of a unified feminine identity and a unified photograph, echoing the warped mirrors and fabricated surfaces of a fun house.”

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Wenhan Hu MFA 27 PH has a background in mechanical engineering, and he thinks about the mechanics of the image and how digital images are created, using glitches in rendering programs to make the final result. In his large-scale photograph, Debris II_C_#02, the camera records the interaction between his body and a projected found image, which becomes increasingly distorted, fragmented, and compressed. “As the image breaks apart, the usual line between who is looking and who is being looked at starts to blur,” Hu says. 

In addition to Dong, Zhang, Hu, and Owett, featured artists included Jake Benzinger MFA 27 PH, Tomorrow Chapman MFA 26 PH, Jessica Chappe MFA 27 PH, Renee Cornue MFA 27 PH, Alexa Nikol Curran MFA 26 PH, Elliott Golden MFA 26 PH, Virginia Hanusik MFA 26 PH, Victoria Pepin MFA 27 PH, Elysia Perkins MFA 27 PH, and Nji Tuma MFA 27 PH. 

As Stewart notes in the show program, “To look through a lens is to break something open. How do we point to a moment that has already left us? These artists are conjuring new features—breaking them open and beginning again.” 

Kaylee Pugliese
December 4, 2025