Honors 2027

Ito Garcia

My artistic practice explores love, mortality, and the unconsciousness of one’s identity. Using influences of my Mexican heritage and the traditions of Michoacán, I draw inspiration from Día de los Muertos and its understanding of death as a continuation of life rather than an ending. Through painting and sculpture, I work with mixed media such as clay, papier-mâché, fabric, wood, and paint to create three-dimensional works. I transform personal experiences, emotions, and social issues regarding the Latin community, into symbolic imagery, exploring the ways love and suffering coexist. Ultimately, my work reflects my belief that pain and love are inseparable, and that beneath our differences, we are all connected to the bones. 

Iris Jessen

Iris Jenssen primarily works as a painter, but has found great value in collaborative projects and illustration. As an environmental studies and art double major, she uses her practice as a means to understand and interpret the world; which parallels the value she finds in her scientific practice. Iris reflects the essential moment-ness, ecology, and freedom that arise in physical and personal environments. Her work remains distinctly in the moment through the use of saturated colors and nonfigurative forms to convey movement, urgency, and intensity. Every step of her practice is influenced by her best friends and collaborators, and is driven forward by deep conviction in central themes that reinvent themselves to account for bandwidth and an unrelenting love for the world.

Isabel Kaufman

My work is centered on the abstract parts of the self and the mind that cannot be neatly described. This includes the images my mind conjures in a dream-like state, often remnants of moments that become fragmented, floating around in my subconscious. 

As someone who experiences life in a highly sensorial (and often overstimulating) way, I think often about mental filtering and perception. When the world feels too bright or too loud, I turn to imagination as a place of re-calibration, reshaping my experiences through humor and surrealism. My mediums include painting, writing, spoken word, video, and sculpture, but my core medium is storytelling. 

I believe that making our unique psychic associations visible can bring us into greater presence with ourselves and each other. By noticing the personal connections that surface as we take in the world, we can begin to understand one another more deeply and connect beyond what is immediately visible.

Emily Taylor

I’m a multimedia artist from rural Pennsylvania, now based in Santa Barbara. I work across painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, sewing, and performance, often exploring care, repair, memory, and creating a sense of home. I’m especially interested in bringing processes associated with domestic labor into fine art, using acts of mending, weaving, and reuse as both materials and metaphors. My work is rooted in a rural Pennsylvania visual language and often reflects themes of resilience, comfort, homesickness, and hope. You can find my work on Instagram at @motherbluemountain.