Theresa Mai

My name is Theresa Mai, I am a junior majoring in Graphic Design and minoring in Mathematics. I mainly work digitally but also like to work with mixed media. The works that I have chosen to present are black-and-white themed.

About My Work:

For my abstract poster, I used a photo from a cat café I went to and cut out shapes in Illustrator that I would see in the photo. Using those shapes, I would form what is seen in my work now.

Another digital work that I have created is my social issues poster. The social issue I have chosen is gun violence and how it happens so often in the United States. The repeating words “in our thoughts and prayers” convey what people say every time a shooting or tragedy happens. The short melting candle represents the amount of time that has passed and the amount of gun violence that has happened and still occurs today.

My abstract landscape is a study of monochromatic colors using gouache paints. I thought of creating a whimsical bamboo forest. For the whimsical parts, I wanted to make a curved pathway, but you cannot see the end of the path and fill the atmosphere with bubbles as if it was a magical or playful forest.

In my music lyric cut paper project, I used black construction paper then cut out shapes and letters then glued them onto the white construction paper. The lyrics “I’m on your side for the rest of your life” comes from the song “Mother” by Porter Robinson. When I was first starting out my graphic design career, I listened to an album called “Nurture” which is where this song originated from. The song is about the relationship between a mother and child and how there is an unconditional love that never withers and is never outgrown. In the middle of my work, I created a mother protecting her child from the ghost behind her and the other smaller ghosts underneath her. I tried to incorporate the mother’s hair as the tongue of the ghost and if you turn the piece upside down, the pointed tips and black strokes can be seen as flames.