In an open room in the Flagg Building with blue pictures on the walls and red paper shreds on the ground, two second-year Master of Fine Arts students showcased their capstone pieces in Corcoran’s NEXT Festival, running from April 17 to May 16. 

At the end of each academic year, the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design’s NEXT Festival exhibits arts students’ thesis work and shows the public “what’s next” in the world of art, music, theater and dance, according to their website. “Subverting their Standards,” an art exhibit featuring the thesis works of Dylan Reynolds and Daysia Barr, showcases two large-scale mixed-media pieces that aim to challenge societal standards that control behavior and expression and help viewers understand the comfort they should have in expressing both feelings and identity. 

Second-year M.F.A student Dylan Reynolds created “Let’s Rage,” a mixed-media installation that includes a dorm-style bunk bed, with the bottom bunk featuring transparent red blankets and a tray for attendees to write what makes them “rage” on a red piece of paper. Attendees can then put the red piece of paper through a shredder, adding to a growing pile on the ground in front of the machine.

“I kind of wanted to lean into rage, not as something that should be feared or suppressed, but instead as something that, when given a healthy outlet, and when people can express it, can actually be used as a positive force for social change,” Reynolds said. 

The piece also includes a blue carpet with small mountains of red paper shreds spread across the rug and the room. Reynolds said the piece is a response to the “sh*tstorm” of a political climate that has developed since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022 and President Trump was reelected in November 2024. She said the piece was also inspired by her experience as a survivor of sexual assault, which presents itself in the dorm beds as an “anchor” for her own rage. 

“A lot of it started when Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. I mean obviously there was stuff going on before then, but for me, that felt like a pivotal moment and certainly something that changed a lot of people’s lives since then,” Reynolds said. 

Reynolds said she was nervous to present the piece as interactive work due to the “look but don’t touch” stigma of art museums, fearing that viewers would not understand the point of the interaction aspect, but has seen success in the project with the growing piles of paper shreds throughout the room. Reynolds said attendees were able to be a part of the environment of self-expression she wanted to create by releasing anger in a productive way.

“The feedback that I got was ‘Wow, this is really cathartic, this is really healing, this is exactly what I needed in this moment,’ and I think that’s exactly what I was trying to create,” Reynolds said. 

Reynolds said she began her work on the installation by asking people within her own community at GW about anything that makes them feel rage, she then collected their stories, printed the transcripts out and shredded them. She said she added these parts to the pillows on the ground that lean against the wall to emulate a dorm room.

Reynolds said having her piece featured next to fellow fine arts student Daysia Barr shares a message to viewers to overcome the stigma that people in minority groups should suppress their feelings. She said the two of them have been working together since the start of graduate school, and although she believes their art is “very different” in terms of appearance, as one is interactive and the other is not, the themes come together to empower self-expression.

“That’s kind of the title. ‘Subverting their Standards’ is kind of like a nod to carving out space in society for people who don’t have that space naturally,” Reynolds said.

Daysia Barr’s piece, “Gay Things and Where To Find Them,” is comprised of blue- and black-toned photographs overlapping each other across the wall of the room with different-colored maps and notebook pages featuring reflections from each person involved. Barr said they gathered 11 friends who are a part of the LGBTQ+ community and instructed them to take pictures of places and items in their lives that felt “queer” to them and write a note accompanying the photos on the wall. Barr said the photographs were printed using a risograph, a printing machine that creates dots to make up the images

“So, being gay in public feels like we are doing something radical when really the city could just loosen up a bit more,” one of the notes on the wall reads.

Barr said the piece began as an “experiment” and that she was trying to figure out how to create queer representation without the visibility of specific people. The photographs and notes are not attributed to their creators. Barr said although there is no way to trace the art to a particular person, viewers can get an idea of how they view the subject’s queer identity and personality.

Barr said after the group took photographs, they had them write about their identities and sexualities, which is presented in the form of notebook pages pinned to the walls. Barr added that they studied to be a psychologist as an undergraduate, which is their reason for using identity as a common theme throughout their work.

Barr said they were inspired to exclude the identity of their friends who participated in the piece by Edouard Glissant’s theory of opacity, which discusses the unequal power dynamic created when people demand knowledge from minorities to create a sense of empathy. 

“I want to drive home the idea that representation doesn’t always have to be representative,” Barr said. “And encourage people to think about the fear that is associated with visibility for queer people.”