OFF YOUR MIND

Tessa Sagner
→MFA PR 2026

Tessa Sagner’s favorite color is red. If she could, she swears she’d use it here. Drawing on the visual elements of comics—such as panelling and frames within frames—she examines these containers with attentiveness and reuses them in paintings and prints. She is drawn to them for how they play with sequentiality, duration, and repetition. Time behaves differently in comics, she thinks: multiple moments can coexist; presence and antecedent can swap in an instant; and even interruptions across time and space would still make sense. Sagner also wants to gamify images and make them interactive. She is inspired by graphic novelists like Richard McGuire, Daniel Clowes, and Liana Finck in this regard. She once painted a six-foot comic (now trapped in her garage, tragically unphotographable) and delights in Where’s Wally.

In this piece, she’s especially interested in reprints and misprints, using them to alter two existing pieces: a reprint from v.1’s Fall 2024 by Cole Miller and a recreation of her own previous drawing. Her interest in the narrative power of art doesn’t stop her from indulging a little in the written world though. She still writes as she draws.

Tessa Sagner is a hopeful(!) and fearful(!

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