LOS ANGELES — In previous generations, a few key painters and photographers were primarily associated with Los Angeles’s artistic output: Ed Ruscha and David Hockney, for example, typified the city’s sun-bathed, midcentury modern look. With time, though, it has become more and more difficult to pin down the city’s creative production — now, there’s a cottage industry of cocktail hour critics (myself included, sometimes) who attempt to sum up what exactly is going on here. Nowhere is the futility of this guesswork more prominent than in attempts to critique the region’s MFA shows — especially at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where graduate students explore an irreducible range of materials and ideas across two recent exhibitions.
UCLA’s debut MFA thesis exhibition features three artists who each mine the materials and processes of commercial production. Yezi Lou’s standout paintings depict disarmingly expressive consumer objects staged in seemingly empty environments: In “Yachts” (all works 2025), a wide-eyed plastic duck affixed to a paddleboat looms over the canvas, its bubbly affectation suddenly eerie. Elsewhere, Sheng Lor’s sculptures reinvigorate a familiar object: the sewing loom. Swathed in impenetrable layers of yarn, these hulking monuments become nearly unrecognizable, as though consumed by the same fabric they typically utilize. Meanwhile, M. O’D-L’s large-scale, assemblage wallhangings employ industrial refuse to painterly effect, uniting debris to form abstract, coolly emotive canvases — like if Anselm Kiefer suddenly developed a love of tarps and discarded fabric swatches.
A second exhibition of graduate students reveals artwork with a more violent edge, in which vulnerable bodies — human and not — are imperiled. Alma Alvarado’s videos “between the body and the eternal” and “salt is the main ingredient in conservation” film the butchering and curing of an animal in gory, precise detail. The latter artwork is projected on sinewy, hanging mulberry paper reminiscent of this process’s final meat product. Death lingers: In the next room, ricardo nagaoka’s “Shroud” installation includes a steel coffin affixed to a breathing apparatus. The artist’s adjacent short film, “Shave,” stars a figure coating himself with shaving cream, spliced by clips of a shiny, sharp knife.
Threat feels omnipresent but elusive at UCLA’s New Wight Gallery, imbuing the second exhibition with a ghostly feel. Adam Thompson’s “Waxen Collage (Unabomber Cabin)” renders Ted Kaczynski’s infamous home using colorful wax, a fragmentary, pastoral composition that belies its occupant’s history. Jory Drew’s room-size installation, “Miracle Baby,” is similarly haunting: Red and black fabrics drape across metal armatures reminiscent of a house’s infrastructure, the surrounding floor filled with ceramic figurines and a cop car on one far side while a sound recording details, among other things, a fire’s aftermath.
UCLA’s MFA program has become formidable in recent years: Its Studio Art graduates, working across a range of mediums, regularly show at international galleries, and the program counts trailblazers like Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Analia Saban, and Mungo Thomson among its alumni. The current graduates are no exception. These artists demonstrate a vibrant spectrum of aesthetic inquiry — diversity that, like LA’s art scene, resists easy categorization.
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2025 MFA Exhibition #2: Alma Alvarado, Jory Drew, ricardo nagaoka, & Adam Thompson continues at New Wight Gallery (Broad Art Center, Suite 1100, Los Angeles, California) through April 11.
Exhibition #1: Sheng Lor, Yezi Lou, & M. O’D-L ended on March 14.
Exhibition #3: D.A. Gonzales, Maren Karlson, Zenobia, & Harrison Kinnane Smith will be on view April 17–25.
Exhibition #4: Samar Al Summary, Misty EunJoo Choi, & Ayla Gizlice will be on view May 1–9.
