2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Collage with Clenched Fists & Pinched Socks
1970s-1980s National Geographics, glue, paper
8.5x11 in
2026

In Suspended Use; (ii)
found bookmarks, spirals
dimensions variable
2025

Alekz Thoms is a genderfluid multidisciplinary found object artist & griever from the U.S.
devoted to Nothing (the Poetics of) & the mundane. Their practice is collage based, with an
expansive personal definition of collage encompassing retrieval, collection, happenstance,
montage, assemblage, citation, aleatory, redaction, association, recollection, & fabulation. Just as
everything is Nothing, everything is collage.
Their art is preoccupied with remembering, or at the very least, meticulously noticing &
stewarding of all of the lost & left Nothings. Footnoting the exhibition with a zine of its creation,
photographing every discarded glove, cataloging every lost object they pass, collecting
bookmarks left in suspended use in donated books, recollecting what their late mother left & left
behind, digging through their own cavern of memory; they know that it’s the Nothings that make
up the foundation of our lives.
Using family archive photos, photos found on the sidewalk & in books, ephemera of their own &
that scattered in the streets, secondhand magazines, notes (their own & strangers’), scanographs
of their environment, they stack Nothings top to toe until they become an undeniable Something.
the things she left behind are replicated in clay from memory. The process is the art just as much
as the installed work is. Over & over, the material asserts its agency; failure by failure, an art
practice emerges.

Alekz Thoms (b. 1998, United States) is a genderfluid multimedia artist from across the U.S.
from Mississippi to New York. They received their Bachelor of Arts in 2020 from St. Olaf
College in Northfield, MN before attending the Fifth Year Emerging Artist program at the same
institution from 2020-2021, receiving the Laura & Phillip Muessig Award of Excellence in 2022.
They earned an APA approved Continuing Education certification as a Grief Support Specialist
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024, & a Masters of Fine Art from Parsons
School of Design in 2026. They’ve shown work in galleries in Northfield, Minneapolis, St. Paul,
& Manhattan.