Hannah Dearman-So, Antara Krishnan, Amar Kumar, Matthew Pagoaga, Bella Pettengill, Theresa Provasnik, Mikayla Stout, Ambika Tiwari, Nolan Windham and Jasper Eliot
In Full Expression

April 21-May 9, 2025
Sprague Gallery

Bella Pettengill, Lily Liver, 2025, acrylic, flashe, spray paint, charcoal and burlap collaged on canvas, 24 x 36 inches


Sprague Gallery presents In Full Expression, a 5Cs group show of work by Hannah Dearman-So (Harvey Mudd ’25, engineering), Antara Krishnan (Harvey Mudd, ’27, physics), Amar Kumar (Claremont McKenna ’27, economics), Matthew Pagoaga (Pitzer, director of media studies production services), Bella Pettengill (Pomona ’24, studio art and cognitive science), Theresa Provasnik (Scripps, ’27, art and environmental analysis), Mikayla Stout (Scripps, ’25, studio art and interdisciplinary studies in culture), Ambika Tiwari (Scripps, ’25, math and minor in computer science), and Nolan Windham (Claremont McKenna ’25, economics and data science) and his collaborator Jasper Eliot.

While the selected pieces vary in subject matter, form, and medium, they have one thing in common: each fiercely and openly responds to the limits and crises of illness, the mundane, and the known. The intensity of their method and reflection gives rise to a sense of full expression with no reservation. This exhibition considers the many things full expression can be—including an expression of the self, a disclosure, or a selfless act of love and care—and the many things full expression can do. It may lead to new development and formation, or at other times, to delay, cancellation, or surrender, all of which, strangely, bring a feeling of relief and resolution.

Dearman-So’s strings of worn-out shoes—a lesser-seen part of a person—and quotes from people she knows well form a display of connection and trust intended to produce knowledge differently.

Krishnan’s mutated figure in a child pose, surrounded by stones, sharp-edged leaves, and sticks, explores the simultaneity of interior and exterior.

Kumar’s use of expressive brushstrokes is as unpredictable as his subject matter, clouds in flight, diverging from his usual practice in acrylic pouring without brushes.

Pagoaga’s film, which grapples with the anxiety of never reaching truth or meaning amid an overflow of information, flashes images of a sunspot, the Amazon forests, Amazon boxes, and coronavirus, imagining an X drawn between the four at the central moment of a loud, collective buzzing.

Pettengill’s landscape painting of ambiguous forms highlights the activity of shadows, each moving and transforming in order to stay related and attached to a thing.

Provasnik’s tulip vase and waterless floral arrangement take decoration and extravagance as a means of containing the passage of time—and seeing vitality even in decay.

Stout’s hanging faces, cast in a stiff expression from her own face, respond to the fear of restricted breath and movement, yet through their latex material, convey a surprising looseness.

Tiwari’s blue rug, born of multi-generational teaching within her family, uses high-contrast colors in response to her grandmother’s impaired vision.

Windham and Eliot’s transformed views of familiar scenes—a person dancing, cars and pedestrians, the beach—render time spatial and space temporal, reimagining human existence, its speeds and trajectories, in extended and reoriented spacetime.

In Full Expression opens on April 21 and continues through May 9, 2025. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with additional hours during events on evenings and weekends.

The exhibition is curated by Arts Director Julia Hong of the Harvey Mudd College Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts.