Aja Trice's work in progress, tapestry, 2025
You'll Understand When You're Older
May 2 - 17, 2025
An exhibition featuring works by our senior art majors Ella Endo, Aja Trice, Vanessa Ho, and Isa Hahn.
Whether from a parent, mentor, or older sibling, many of us may recognize the title of the 2025 Senior Exhibition, “You’ll understand when you’re older,” as a remark meant to placate the presumably heavy or real curiosities of our younger selves. Our work recalls the dismissive, nostalgic, and protective connotations of this phrase, while recognizing that it unavoidably still applies to all of us.
Ella
I’d like to imagine a conversation with our ancestors, our mentors, our grandparents, our parents, our older selves. A conversation with people who know freedom and some who have lived without liberty. I think we can learn most from those who embody both.
I’d like to ask those burning questions we had as kids, the ones we would understand when we were older, and for them to be addressed in honesty. I’d like to encourage guests at the table to join a conversation between the past and future. I’m certain that, if we all choose to listen, their words would guide us towards a collective freedom.
Aja
Having “understood” now that I’m an adult, I’ve concluded that the supposed “understanding” I was told I’d gain with age is actually the realization that the “lack of understanding” I had as a kid was a blessing—one I’ll never again be able to access. My work investigates self-portraiture through abstracted imagery surrounding intimacy, loneliness, and memory.
Vanessa
“You’ll understand when you’re older” is a statement I persistently heard as a child, but it always went in one ear and straight out the other – until now. Ten years ago, if someone had told me that I was going to lose contact with my best friend at the age of 21, I would have instantly called it bluff. It was simply impossible. Not her. It made no sense. But, now it does, well, at least more than it did when we first met.
Isa
“You’ll understand when you’re older” was a phrase I heard often as a child — a frustrating dismissal disguised as an explanation. It implied that answers would come with age, that clarity was only a matter of time. But now that I’m older, I find myself understanding less, not more. The world feels increasingly tangled and opaque. What once seemed like truths have unraveled into ambiguity. This work sits in that space — the slow erosion of certainty, the absurdity of waiting for understanding that may never arrive. Perhaps “you’ll understand when you’re older” doesn’t mean the answers are waiting down the line. Maybe it’s a quiet admission that they never existed in the first place.