Artwork titled “Computer Vision” by Caitlin Jones and Miela Foster, and “Return to Self” by Unique Hodge. The works are part of “Mixed Emotions,” a collaborative exhibition at GrowHouse NYC that explores the emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on a generation of young artists.
Photos courtesy of Miela Foster
When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill in 2020, Miela Foster, Unique Hodge, and Caitlin Jones were students at Harvard University.
Six years later, the trio is expressing the emotional impact of the pandemic on their generation through a collaborative art exhibition titled “Mixed Emotions” at GrowHouse NYC, 410 Marcus Garvey Blvd. in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The exhibition features 21 small-format works, including paintings, collages, sculptures and mixed-media pieces.
Foster and Jones graduated from Harvard in 2021, and Hodge graduated in 2022. The pandemic gave them pause to reconsider how they would “enter the world post-pandemic,” Foster told Brooklyn Paper.
“I studied statistics at Harvard, Unique studied biology, Caitlin studied history of art and architecture, and so we’re all coming from very different backgrounds, but post-pandemic, post-graduation, we all decided we all found creative practices, different practices, mixed media, painting, etc., and decided to kind of give artistry or creative work a real shot,” Foster said. “I think the pandemic was a very important moment for us to give ourselves time and space to take it seriously and to believe in ourselves.”
Artwork titled “Moss minded” by Unique Hodge and Caitlin Jones.Photo courtesy of Miela Foster
Foster became an artist-researcher and founded Foster The Studio, focusing on artwork that addresses invisible systems of oppression. The idea for the exhibition emerged from her ritual of rereading her journals at the end of each year. Last year, she focused on her “pandemic” journals and reflected on her generation’s experience and the push to “return to normal” as the pandemic revealed and exacerbated inequities, leading young people to reject “corporate structures.”
“We started our workplace in the pandemic; we started remotely, we didn’t see the value of this monitoring or like surveillance culture that I think a lot of corporate institutions kind of found themselves in, and I didn’t want to like think about all this stuff in isolation,” Foster shared.
Artwork titled “Polar Glow” by Caitlin Jones.Photo courtesy of Miela Foster 
Artwork titled “Waiting on the World to be made” by Miela Foster.Photo courtesy of Miela Foster
Foster reached out to Hodge and Jones, and together they developed a five-part framework for the exhibition that defined their early adulthood through contradictory, oscillating, layered, unresolved, and generative emotions. Foster explained that the exhibition serves as a visual representation of these feelings, and she hopes it encourages visitors to reflect while also serving as a form of collective therapy.
“We took a lot of our emotional grief of the pandemic and transformed it into a creative lens, so ultimately this show is really trying to give us a shared language to understand how we were feeling emotionally during the pandemic. The thesis is that that time was valuable for our collective development, for emotional intelligence, and that it’s worth exploring. I feel like a lot of therapy in the modern world is like very individualized. It’s an opportunity for like group therapy with like a group kind of like shared language,” Foster explained.
Foster, Jones, and Hodge collaborated on most of the artwork.
“We know that a lot of the art industry kind of prefers this idea of like a sole author, so there’s a lot of dual and tri-authorship in this work,” Foster explained.
The show opens July 11 from 5 to 8 p.m. and will be on view through Aug. 1.