2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition: (it’s about time) – Opening Reception

The 2025 Master of Fine Arts program presents the work of graduating artists Lucy Bell, Austin McCormick, Autumn Nicole, and Rose Schlossberg in (it’s about time). This exhibition is not only about deep engagements with time, but it is also about the spaces of our pasts, presents, and futures. The use of parentheses in the title calls to mind many meanings of the punctuation – a pause, a suspension, an interlude, but never an afterthought. This exhibition is its own parentheses, which frames and contains within it not just the artworks in these galleries, but the times, spaces, and experiences of the artists during the MFA program itself.

While some artists meditate on the past through silence and pauses, others project forward to potential uncertain futures where Earth may look very different. Still others convene their work in the present, gathering communities together, whether in communion or in anticipation. Some obsessively chart time and possible apocalypses, while others sit quietly with the slipperiness of memory. Time unfolds through the spaces of our lives – in homes, communities, nature, and the night sky – seemingly punctuated by moments and events that can feel at once both far removed and intimately close to us. Spanning diverse media, artworks in the exhibition delve into the ways that our constructions of time are both personal and private, and also communal and public.

We welcome you to please step inside the parentheses – it’s about time.

— Kristin Yinger, UCSB Ph.D. student in History of Art and Architecture