Reception: January 9, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
January 9 - February 8, 2025
Mandeville Art Gallery, UC San Diego

Participating Artists: Cuyler Ballenger, Maddie Butler, Coralys Carter, Nykelle DeVivo, Olivia Kayang, Moe Penders, John Singletary

Curatorial Advisor: Irene Georgia Tsatsos

The MFA in Visual Arts Preview Exhibition is an annual group exhibition showcasing work by soon-to-graduate MFAs in advance of their final solo thesis shows held in the Spring 2025 quarter. Acclaimed Los Angeles-based curator Irene Georgia Tsatsos worked as the Curatorial Advisor for the 2025 exhibition, where she conducted studio visits with the cohort and devised the exhibition’s title and theme.

For the time being, let’s say there are two kinds of moments: those of continuity, and those of inflection. The first might be an object in space, such as a physical boundary like a wall or a river or a home, and the other a point in time, such as when that boundary is challenged. You can diagram this in two dimensions on X and Y axes, yet these gridded points are, of course, imaginary, hypothetical. The spaces and times they plot can and do exist elsewhere, far from that grid. And these moments are constantly in flux, always evolving, impacting things and actions beyond them, sending out waves of change as beings in time.

You might think about an artwork—an object, a performance, writing—as a moment in space, a declaration of an incident. As a record. A fact, even. Yet within a larger context—say, a news story about contested destinations, or an institutional archive or exhibition, or a dinner table conversation—this so-called fact is part of a larger social environment, another durational context. It hovers and lingers, changing meaning along the way as it’s retrieved, added to, redacted, forgotten, and revived again, mapping and counter-mapping1 itself, as if following and crossing diverse migration paths2. Inevitably, differences of perspective, intention, and interpretation encircle this object, this ever-evolving fact, because norms, laws, and convictions change, even if materials don’t3. The movements between objects4 cultivate new facts synergistically. In this way, you are not locked into the present.

Time, like the power of invisibility,5 seems easy to understand until you try to explain it. Art objects function as artifacts of time travel, of historic narratives and future imaginaries made tangible in the ever-changing continuum of the present. This is a circumstance you must negotiate, regardless of the media at hand. Interstices6 are themselves material. Artworks become diasporic7 as they move through infinite contexts. Art is in a perpetual state of transition, always becoming something else as it is regarded by another.

Space and time, like memory, diagrams, and artworks, are subjective, open to discourse and judgment and the vagaries of social construction. Up, down, across, and spiraling around time, you do the work of this. You get to make the art. Aided by your invitation and your generosity, the rest of us then get to imagine other possibilities.

And with that, from this time being, I am sending you love from the future.

Image: Moe Penders, Regresando de Chalchuapa, 2024