LOS ANGELES — “Work from home” is a phrase that felt almost like an oxymoron before 2020. Work and home were disparate spheres; we had all but cordoned off spaces for leisure from those for industry and production. Now, however, the increasingly blurred boundary between labor and domesticity is an apt subject for artistic representation. This shifting landscape is the subject of the California Institute of the Art’s postgraduate exhibition, which features 24 artists who, after graduating from the university’s Master of Fine Arts program in 2024, make art in their domestic spaces. What emerges are fraught, mysterious inquiries into what home means to us as it increasingly becomes a place to eat, sleep, raise children, rest, and work.
Homes are both physical and emotional spaces, and their details — from childhood bedrooms to tiled floors to photo albums — provide entryways to these exclusive worlds. Chaska Jurado’s “De colores” (all works 2025) features a vivid archival pigment print of a vacant domestic interior with an open door and a swirling, turquoise — and very 1980s — linoleum floor. On an adjacent wall, this same floor transforms into a tufted rug, its thick, bright yarn knotted into the same nostalgic pattern in the photograph it faces (“Translation”). Common house materials both evoke and foreclose legible memories: Jennifer Van’s “Resilience” is a black-and-white image of an outstretched hand reaching toward the camera, positioned in front of a delicate, cropped face. The cryptic photograph stretches across 12 chipped wooden panels, the print interpolated by the lines dividing one slab from another.
At home, intimate attachments render even banal items with an unpredictable, mysterious power. In Amanda Teixeira’s “how to peel an orange or invisible acts of care,” thin golden thread ties petal-like orange peels in a hanging lattice structure, as though each piece of potential compost were actually an ethereal relic. Just beyond Texeira’s sculpture, Kyle Slevira’s “Flora” displays a white stalk that bursts into a mass of found textiles, each piece of fabric painted white and curled to resemble the inner folds of a tulip or ranunculus.
A home can often be like a black box: a system viewed only in terms of what goes into it and what emerges from it, without any details of its internal workings. This concept is literalized in Katrina Parker’s “Expanse,” a tightly woven, hanging cylinder. An LED at its top light emits a purple light that emerges on the other side as a purple illuminated circle cast onto the floor. In Jane Lee’s “Falling walls and floors,” a long white sheet hangs from a thin rod protruding parallel to a wall and pools onto the floor. Lee’s gestural swatches of oil paint disappear into the absorbent, folded fabric, giving the appearance of pastel shadows cast against a drawn, backlit curtain.
Anything made behind closed doors takes on a new charge. Seeing such artwork might have felt like snooping, had the actual meaning of many of these photographs, sculptures, and drawings not remained appropriately obscure. Some things aren’t meant to be seen — only glimpsed.
Work from Home: A CalArts Postgrad Exhibition continues at CalArts Reef Residency (The Reef, 1933 South Broadway, Los Angeles, California) through March 22. The exhibition was curated by Andrew McNeely.
