2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition

My work employs notions of fantasy, memory and imagined utopia to explore ideas of radical possibility in personal and collective narratives. I am deeply invested in queer rest, rest as privilege, and anxious self soothing. Through my practice, I navigate the liminal spaces where fantasy and reality meet, inviting the audience into an alternative utopic timeline free from the constraints of hetero-monogamy, opening up possibilities and highlighting the ways that queer people connect with their inner child in order to rest, explore, and heal.

I Dream in Pictures of You (of Us) mines a psychological space informed by pleasure, and indulges a desire for slowness and rest in opposition to the feeling of overwhelm that stems from my daily struggle with anxiety. In this work, photographic juxtapositions of self-produced, archival, and found images flesh out a world that investigates the intersection of childhood memory, queerness, sex, and community. Growing up in the suburbs of Alabama, I appropriate imagery from an “idealistic suburban life” as a seductive fantasy of the simple, while also questioning its opposition to my queerness through a relocation of such ideals to a realm outside of reality, like a kind of escapism. The work allows for a space where many contradictory aspects of self can exist in harmony. 

Summer McCroskey (b. 1996 in Birmingham, Alabama) is an interdisciplinary artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA from Auburn University where she was awarded First Place in the Academic Essay Category by Jule Collins Smith Museum in 2017 and the Department of Art & Art History Merit award by juror Maddy Rosenberg in 2019. She has shown her work in various locations in Auburn, Alabama including Biggin Gallery (2018, 2019) and The Vault (2017, 2018). Summer’s work has also been shown at St. Cloud State University (2019), The Art Center Dover (2020), The Skeleton Crawl Virtual Art Experience (2020), and 25 East Gallery at Parsons School of Design (2022, 2023). She is currently an MFA candidate at Parson’s School of Design in New York, New York.