In Chipped Teeth & Empty Bellies, the Parsons Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition for the Class of 2026, there is a formal inquiry that emphasizes the process of taking apart and breaking down; a formal curiosity that is also a hunger. Across different media, the sixteen artists of the exhibition call attention to the process of chewing, churning, digesting, and absorbing, of disassembly and reassembly, of destruction and play. There is the taking apart of a tool or a toy; the breaking down of a supply chain or a sentence, of institutional structures, social relations, cultural identities, or material histories; the hunger about the body itself as an assemblage of habits, techniques, technologies, laws, norms, and desires. If the title evokes Franz Kafka’s “hunger artist,” it also refers to the appetite for learning, for living; for asking questions, for critique, and for the reconfiguration of new forms–and play–that could also be described as dreamwork.