At this exhibition, walking into the gallery means stepping into 14 different ways of seeing the world all at once.
Candid Boise street scenes line one wall, while fractured layers of paint and photography across the room blur to create a dreamlike scene. Around the corner, creatures emerge that seem to have stepped straight out of a graphic novel.
The 2026 Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition opened on April 10 at the Blue Galleries on the first floor of the Center for the Visual Arts, featuring work from 14 graduating seniors. The exhibition serves as a capstone for BFA students and is free and open to the public, remaining on display through May 1.
The gallery shifts into a collision point of process, identity and the question every graduating artist is quietly trying to answer: what now?
For photography student Frannie Pasternak, the answer came when she finally took the time to slow down and start truly looking.
“This is the first year in a long time that I’ve had the opportunity to really work with my camera and have the things I capture truly mean something,” she said in her artist statement. “After years of experimenting and crafting, I noticed that capturing candid scenes is what I enjoy doing most.”
What she produced was a series of photographic prints, showcasing images taken out of instinct rather than staging. Pasternak used no heavy manipulation and did not attempt to overwork what already existed in front of her.
“I realized I don’t do well with a lot of editing or conceptual things,” Pasternak said. “I love taking documentary-type photos of things that are real and candid.”
Her images leave space for interpretation, and that openness shows up in how viewers connect to them in unexpected ways. One photograph taken of a Boise apartment, for example, reminded her mother of Chicago, making the two cities feel momentarily interchangeable.
Other reactions came from people recognizing details in Boise they had passed without noticing, suddenly becoming the focus of attention.
“I heard at least five people say, ‘I didn’t know we had that here,’” Pasternak said. “Most of them added that made them like the photos even more.”
To the left of the gallery’s walls, Ethan Meeker’s work explores the space between painting and photography, where images don’t settle into a single form.
What looks stable at first quickly shifts the longer it is viewed, with figures dissolving into texture and surfaces folding into something hard to pin down.
“I’ve been trying to get in between painting and photography more recently,” Meeker said. “I think historically, they’re a lot more similar than we like to think.”
In his artist statement, he expands that idea beyond his own practice, tracing image-making back through older visual systems.
“How is an image created, and what are the conditions for its manifestation?” Meeker wrote. “Photography is the central practice that my work gravitates around.”
Rather than answering that question, his art operates inside it. It doesn’t attempt to answer how images are formed, so much as it reveals how unstable they already are once they exist.
“This work is a reabsorption of my environment,” he said. “A confusing slur of images, meanings and causes.”
While Meeker’s world resists stability, fellow artist Savannah Humpherys’ work builds an entire world of its own.
Their series, Silverwatch, expands an eight-page comic they began developing throughout college into a full installation of digital prints, ceramics and mirrors. Instead of remaining on the page, the narrative is reconstructed in three dimensions, allowing viewers to step into fragments of the story as if they are moving through it.
At the center of that world is Salem, a character whose life begins to unravel after a display breaks in the antique shop where she works.
“Salem works at an antique shop to pay for college,” Humpherys wrote in their artist statement, “but what she doesn’t know is that one of the mirrors on display is haunted. That is until one day, she trips and breaks it.”
From that point, the work expands outward into a constructed universe of objects, creatures and environmental details. Beyond the illustrated scenes from the story, Humpherys builds physical components that function as evidence of a place that feels like it already exists.
At first, Humpherys didn’t plan to be part of the BFA exhibition at all, since Illustration majors aren’t required to participate in the same way as other studio disciplines.
“Initially, I wasn’t going to be in the show,” Humpherys said. “However, I changed my mind in favor of joining because I saw it as an opportunity to have a bigger goal to work towards. I think that worked, because now I’m finding that the exhibition has, in fact, made me more confident in my own abilities as a creator. ”
The exhibition itself feels in motion, where ideas are still being tested through material, process and form as each practice continues to evolve.
The 2026 Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition opened on April 10 at the Blue Galleries on the first floor of the Center for the Visual Arts, featuring work from 14 graduating seniors across several art mediums. The exhibition serves as a capstone for BFA students and is free and open to the public, remaining on display through May 1.
What remains is the sense that the work continues beyond the gallery, still moving forward as it leaves the walls behind.
