MFA Thesis Exhibition
April 16–May 26, 2024
MassArt x SoWa Gallery and Doran Gallery
Boston, Massachusetts
Curated by Lisa Tung at MassArt x SoWa and Darci Hannah at Doran Gallery
Role: Participating artist
Presented across two venues, Botchorishvili’s MFA thesis unfolded as a divided installation investigating perception, self-representation, and the constructed nature of identity. Although materially distinct, the two presentations operated as interconnected environments, examining how the self is formed through images, repetition, reflection, and spatial encounter.
At Doran Gallery, Insta Identity took the form of an immersive photographic installation assembled from fragments of digital self-presentation. Through accumulation, repetition, and architectural arrangement, circulating images were removed from the intimacy of the screen and transformed into a physical environment. The work considered how identity is performed, multiplied, and reorganized within digital culture—treating image circulation as a perceptual structure rather than merely a social document.
At MassArt x SoWa, I Am. Am I? Who Am I? approached identity through material and optical uncertainty. Circular structures, reflective surfaces, and layered forms positioned the self not as a stable center, but as something continually altered through perception and encounter.
The Whisper and Maya extended this inquiry into reflection, impermanence, and the uncertain boundary between appearance and reality. In The Whisper, a poem engraved into a black mirror follows a Fibonacci spiral, drawing viewers inward while returning their own reflection. Maya presented an animated 3D hologram of a circle within a circle, accompanied by sound and suspended within a reflective sculptural structure. Its image appears vivid yet remains immaterial, changing with light, movement, and the viewer’s position. The work resonates with the philosophical concept of māyā—understood across several Eastern spiritual traditions as the unstable world of appearances through which reality is perceived. Together, the works questioned whether the self is a fixed presence or a perceptual construction: momentarily assembled through image, memory, reflection, and attention.
Together, the two installations proposed identity as neither singular nor fixed, but as a shifting field produced between inner experience and external representation, material presence and mediated image, seeing and being seen.
