MFA Art 2023 solo thesis exhibitions

USC Roski School of Art and Design announces the MFA Art 2023 solo thesis exhibitions. All USC Roski MFA Solo Thesis exhibitions are open to the public and free. 

Vrinda Aggarwal: leave out
Opening reception: February 17, 6–9pm 
Exhibition on view: February 18–25, 2023
Born in New Delhi, Vrinda Aggarwal is an artist exploring the ideas of gender, identity, culture, institutional critique, and social change through performance art. Her work explores her growing up in New Delhi and studying in Los Angeles. A large aspect of her work deals with the perception of the female body across different contexts including location, religion, and social media.

Sola Yang: From 0
Opening reception: March 3, 6–9pm
Exhibition on view: March 4–11, 2023
Sola Yang is a Korean painter who portrays abstract representations of landscape and cityscape, elaborating on themes of life, place, and memory. Her paintings embrace both Korean historical events and her personal memories and imagination. Inspired by Korean ink calligraphy and Western postwar paintings, Yang utilizes expressive mark-makings and desaturated colors.

Jiayun Chen: MFA Art thesis exhibition
Opening reception: March 24, 6–9pm 
Exhibition on view: March 25–Apr 1, 2023
Jiayun Chen is an artist from Wenzhou, China. She is drawn to slow-paced artmaking processes, relying on drawing, sculpture, and installation as her preferred media; and is interested in language and the inevitable slippages that occur as a result of communication. Chen finds inspiration in social phenomena, creating work that twists the familiar through wit, humor, and the poetic.

Qijun Liu: MFA Art thesis exhibition
Opening reception: April 7, 6–9pm
Exhibition on view: April 8–15, 2023
Qijun Liu’s works tend to explore and reflect on observed phenomena through a conceptual practice; often embedded with a sense of absurd humor. Rather than imposing a solution to a psychological conflict or societal construct, she aims to ask questions about these observed phenomena. She draws inspiration from observations in her daily life, a mundane living state that everyone experiences, trying to see the social or cultural factors that have formed our ways of living and capture the ephemeral and subtle connections between things.

michon sanders: All I have to do is stay Black and die
Opening reception: April 21, 6–9pm
Exhibition on view: April 22–29, 2023
michon sanders artist’s statement: I create paintings that are representational of my experiences of Blackness, and the importance of the space and time in between. Using family photos as my primary reference material, I focus on the depiction of Black life, not the spectacle or its aftermath, but the moments of transition or pause, where next moves are being negotiated, connections are being made, and thoughts are being collected.

Kim Sweet: The Small Things Inbetween
Opening reception: May 5, 6–9pm
Exhibition on view; May 6–13, 2023
Principally a painter, Sweet’s work wants you to connect with a sense of remembrance and the poignancy of a singular moment in one and the same image. Her paintings are not intended to be representational in the truest sense; instead, they contend with the image as an echo of the memory of a moment. The allusions function as proxies for the allegories of the self and are meant to touch on the underpinnings of the collective unconscious without ever being wholly reducible to them.