2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition: Victoria Mercado-Lues

Details

Brightly saturated and fantastical, Garden of Corporeal Fantasy explores the meeting of nature and flesh in oil paintings and ceramics. With invented creatures and visceral biological imagery, the works reframe the gaze towards the bodily through a lens of wonder — a less punitive lens than the centuries-long and still recurring traditions of bodies as commodified, objectified, or sinful.

This exhibition addresses our discomfort surrounding the body by combining it with the godly imposing presence of the landscape, like waterfalls and billowing clouds. In this combination, the work is imbued with a devotional, almost sacred quality, borrowing visuals of the holy and filling it with the biological. The sticky, hairy, fleshy becomes something worth staring at with open fascination, the same way we are in awe of exotic plants, or deep-sea creatures, illuminating the sublime inherent in the corporeal.

By zooming in on the glistening, wet thresholds, the work blurs the boundary between interior and exterior anatomy. Tendrils and drips converge to give birth to strange life forms and new worlds that explore sensuality, womanhood, and the fantastic.

Documenting a coming of age, Garden of Corporeal Fantasy acknowledges the fullness of becoming a woman: the awareness of feeling both precious and strange, once intimately known, yet foreign to yourself. In creating these fantastical ecologies, the work insists on its own terms for beauty, redefined through tender curiosity.