This exhibition of nine second-year M.F.A. students presents works for their advancement to candidacy at the Claire Trevor School of Arts at University of California, Irvine.

Artists: Misha Davydov, Anastasia Denos, Minoo Emadi, Norma Hernandez Peña, Laura Li, Elizabeth VR, Anthony Martinez, Andy Monitel-Phillips, Alystair Rogers

Misha Davydov

"Handsome young men hug friends soldiers Pretty teen girls boys costume mask theater performance odd I Danced, We Danced (Accidents) pretty teen girls boys costume  Joking photo. Soldiers of the Soviet army What is it like to kill Soldiers on Parallel Bars Occupation on the horizontal bar мне стыдно / мне жаль Handsome boy boy toy toy gun military child Theater of Operations Shirtless Man Beefcake Strongman Young Guy Muscle Gay Interest mine MEN in Military Uniform, ORCHESTRA #650 soldiers mine Execution mine thrower gun rifle army Execution playing men soldiers Return Window Closed axe odd vtg photo СССР

I am not playing anymore.

Anastasia Denos

When the lyric poem is evaporated of its subjective content we are left with I, You, and the negative space between. Hand-scribbled redactions kiss inside two wilting figures. Woolen structures of language fail, while the inky substance of repression speaks. Alongside the romantic theater, a suite of minimalist wall works. The felted surface of the painting is cut up, like time in a day.
 

Norma Hernandez Peña

Desperately attempting to cling on to every single memory when the cracks in the everyday act as a vacuum into the vast blackness. Hernandez’s work is an ongoing dialogue on violence against women and motherhood.
 

Laura Li 

How Are You, Pacific Saury (2024) navigates the slippage of care and the ephemerality of intimacy in precarious spaces. Tracing the body, text, and string as an assemblage of memory and moments of eclipse, the work looks towards forgettings, gaps, uncertainties, impasses, and elisions. These illegibilities suture imagined itineraries of future, where the strings’ shapes are emerging and collapsing. This work unsettles “intimacy” from singularity and domination, inviting collective quilting of asymmetrical and unevenly legible “intimacies” that are otherwise both spiritual and communal: texts otherwise as oracles, cat's cradle otherwise as rituals, and viewing otherwise as evocations. It disrupts binary shorelines of time and being. Both a question and a prayer, How Are You, Pacific Saury whispers to bodies/spirits that endure and are still surviving through trauma and socio-political fissures. It beacons hope and respect, holding a dream for a non-extractive economy of relationality and queer kinship. 
 

Anthony Martinez interrogates the nature of aesthetic apparatuses and their historical use as Western strategies of ideological domination within the framework of land use interpretation and Western expansionism. 
 

Andy Montiel-Phillips weaves promiscuously between secular and spiritual referent to recontextualize embodied transcendence and absence. The work destills liturgical objects and environments to the cyclical drives of belief and doubt. 
 

Alystair Rogers is a thinker and maker who has been described as “strong in thought and soft in feeling”. His work embodies this tension too. Mr. Rogers is interested in the slippage between reality and the worlds we imagine, and questioning supposedly self-evident truths—time, gravity, space, hierarchy, permeability, endings, beginnings.
 

Elizabeth VR was conceived in an offline tweet to author an unboxing video. "Everyone wore halloumi shoes and was feeling vivacious. Basically, everyone was a sociopath ... and all the girls' hair was chignoned.” It kept her warm but everyone else confused. Because she’s a whore for freaks. In 1993 she pioneered eschatological chic, the part in her hair at the time was government mandated. Good fortune creeped slowly in as she listened to Tori Amos’ Cornflake Girl. La vita continua, though the half-life of grief is endless. Enough is enough is enough (best friend, enemy, and chess partner) Proving finance can meet romance, multitasking vs. multipleasure. Aloha also means goodbye.