Memories are the thread of life.

This is the central point of Siyan Camille Ji’s Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition. Her primary argument is evidenced by the title of the exhibition: “Some images appear just once in a lifetime, all the experiences that follow are but their memories.”

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Upon walking into the exhibition at the USC Roski Graduate Gallery, a statement is plastered onto the wall which expresses the universality and ephemerality of the world of dreams. Curator Hattie Schultz described the multimedia exhibit’s focus.

“The exhibition meditates on liminal spaces — emotional, physical, and geographic — as sites where parallel planes of memory overlap and bleed together, forming memoryscapes,” Smith wrote.

The exhibition comprises four bodies of Ji’s artistic work: “Waves,” “In a Glimpse, Once Again,” “The flame still burns” and “You were here with me.”

“Waves” is the first collection presented and is the primary sculpture in the exhibition. Composed of archival prints on bamboo paper, Ji suspends varying replications of waves by hanging them with wire in a stacked fashion.

Looking at the sculpture from the front, the gradual cresting of the waves seems continuous, but from the side, it becomes clear that Ji individually separated each panel in suspension.

This duality of continuity and individuation once again reinforces the dream space Ji invokes throughout the exhibition. Rose Tsang, who studied with Ji at the California Institute of the Arts, attended the opening night of Ji’s thesis exhibition.

“It’s very ethereal,” Tsang said. “I see a lot of portals the artist wants us to enter into.”

Moving in a clockwise direction through the exhibition, Ji’s narrative of dreams becomes even clearer. The leftmost wall showcases her “In a Glimpse, Once Again” collection. Composed of natural images in a forestlike environment, Ji’s play on lighting provides several perspectives of the natural skyline filtering through the thick leaves of the trees.

This part of the exhibition feels serene and calming and appears to be in dialogue with the photography on the right wall of the room. Ji features different angles to present the natural landscapes. Ultimately, the two walls parallel one another by using similar schemes to create a dialogue between the photographs.

What connects these two collections is Ji’s third body of work “You were here with me.” Spanning the entire back wall of the Roski Graduate Gallery, Ji uses this collection to make a transition from naturalistic images to more nuanced, human images.

Some of Ji’s images include a finger gracefully hovering over a body of water, a hand grasping a bouquet of flowers, a view through a foggy window on a rainy day and two empty wooden rocking chairs.

By focusing on precise moments in the images, Ji forces the viewer’s attention from the broader perspectives of life through nature-based images to more specific moments that are relatable through various everyday objects.

Ji’s ability to masterfully maneuver the viewer through large experiences and intimate moments in life is a testament to her understanding of the relationship between dreams and memories which she underscores in all of her work.

“There’s definitely an aesthetic element,” Tsang said. “Everything blends together really well.”

Ji simultaneously weaves the tangible with the intangible, the magnificent with the mundane. All these moments in her individual photographs come to fruition in the final part of the exhibition: a film entitled “The Flame Still Burns.” The film is comprised of all the displayed images with additional lines of poetry captioned over the moving images.

In this final moment of synthesis, Ji once again reinforces the schism between the individuality and continuity of dreams.

Each photograph on the wall is a world or memory of its own, but by combining all the images into a single film, Ji makes a commentary on experience and that the memories are the momentum that carry images through life. Lily Przybylinski, a junior majoring in international relations as well as Italian, found the “The flame still burns” to be the highlight of the exhibition.

“The group of projections,” Przybylinski said, “added a nice layer of contextualization to the dreaming and memory aspect.”

Ultimately, Ji showcases her understanding of dreams by immersing the viewer into a space of dreamlike reverie while walking through her exhibition. The combined familiarity and newness of images creates a sensation of the dialogue between the conscious and subconscious, which dictates the nature of the dream world and its confluence with reality.

By using memories and the past as the source for her creations, Ji shows that experience is dictated by the memories we carry. Thus, her title “Some images appear just once in a lifetime, all the experiences that follow are but their memories,” rings true.

“[The exhibition] guides us through memoryscapes formed by shimmering dreams and profound moments of recognition,” Schultz wrote. “Giving materiality to the immaterial, Ji’s photographic practice transforms fleeting memories into visual poetry.”

Siyan Camille Ji’s thesis exhibition, “Some images appear just once in a lifetime, all the experiences that follow are but their memories,” will be on view until March 9 at the USC Roski Graduate Gallery.