Time Trap: MFA Group Exhibition
Time cannot be experienced outside of space and memory. Both individual and collective, time is increasingly commodified- claimed by corporations, cultural institutions, and industries that shape our lives. An invisible structure that shapes every moment of our existence, time marches forward relentlessly. It invites the question: are we ever truly in possession of our own time?
Time Trap explores our complex relationships with time, the spaces we inhabit, the memories we carry, faith and ritual, and the connective tissue of ourselves, bodies, and society. Art holds the power to create spaces where reflection and imagination thrive, offering moments of pause, resistance, and spaces to explore new perspectives.
In the act of creating and engaging with art, time becomes a form of self-determination, a quiet yet powerful resistance against this commodification or to spend it as you wish. Within an MFA program, the time artists invest is not surrendered, but reclaimed, dedicated to building insight, shared experiences, and community.
Through painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and installation, the works in this exhibition invite you to spend time with us in the Maass Gallery, reflecting on how time shapes your past, influences your present, and might elude your future. This exhibition invites you to consider the significance of moments.
Welcome to Time Trap.
2025 MFA Candidates
Frankie Kadir Vaughan
Kadir Vaughan’s art offers playful and self-aware engagement with performance and video, exploring blurred boundaries between entertainment, local access television, and reality. His works feature absurd and sometimes humorous characters reminiscent of classic dating shows and the aesthetics of early reality television. These characters, often comical, also reflect the strange sincerity that can accompany manufactured “reality” culture. Tinged with sardonic self-awareness, he invites us to question our participation in this spectacle and construction of authenticity. Can we experience his work as entertainment, reality and reflection?
Wendy Lipp
Hunting for the whimsical, Lipp invites us to find a reimagined understanding of “natural”. Priming a canvas of linen or cotton with rabbit skin glue, she reshapes identifiable figures, such as trees in a way that transcends the metaphysical, representing the organic with itself. Fueled by the essence of the mystery of what she cannot see and the curiosity that follows, her painting process begins with a spark of inspiration—to search a feeling. Reinterpreting the natural world, we can see the capture of a movement on canvas. Combined with the experience of color, perhaps there is an evocation to change our perspective on what was once intangible.
Jody Rasch
What catches your eye? What emotions stir as you look closer? Jody Rasch’s work explores the unseen dimensions of our universe, transforming images of scientific discovery into vibrant, scaled-up compositions that can immerse us in flowing shapes and color. Rasch’s works bring the invisible to life, making the abstract beauty of science tangible and material. Recently, Rasch has begun experimenting with materials and installation devices to create paintings that exist not only on the wall, but also suspended above us. This shift invites us to engage with the world as physical sculptural forms, prompting a deeper reflection on the intersection of art and science.
2026 MFA Candidates
Chris Borgia
Chris Borgia is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work captures moments of stillness in domestic life and greater New York City. Although subjects may appear to be random scenes and objects, Borgia explores themes of family, isolation, and change, revealing intersections of history and memory. By connecting images in ways that invite us to engage in our own narrative impulses, his work can prompt reflection on our own perspectives—and on those of others—encouraging us to reconsider our relationship to the world around us.
Tanisha D’souza
Drawn from memory, Tanasha D’souza approaches her artwork with a continuity of gesture and movement between recognizable and imagined spaces. She uses her paintings to connect us to a shared sense of home, identity, and belonging—a personal nostalgia of an immigrant in New York City. D’souza creates her paintings using scraps of used materials, engaging with a sense of loss for the past while making meaning of current experiences in the modern world. In her miniature paintings, the uneven surfaces are uncontrolled and random, signifying their previous life, now being reused in something new.
Adrian Gray
Adrian Gray is fascinated by the traditions of magic. Drawing on animism, Gray’s abstract imagery envisions worlds that parallel our own- metaphors for the traditions and rituals left behind as society became increasingly mechanized. Interactions between the natural world and everyday objects that once played central roles in shaping our pattern of life now fade into the backdrop of a technology-driven world. In Gray’s work, these objects are imbued with new significance, suggesting they possess a kind of agency and meaning often overlooked in modern life.
Nyssa Juneau
Capturing still life, living things, landscapes, and animals, Nyssa Juneau’s art invites us to reflect on natural beauty. Her work emphasizes unorthodox relationships to objects and canonical art history. The interplay of lines serves as metaphors, conditions of human experience and suggest pathways toward more sustainable living. Juneau’s fascination with accessibility and beauty is evident throughout her work, creating art that resonates with us and encourages inclusion and appreciation of the natural world.
Gabriella Mazza
Visualizing the celestial world of the divine feminine and ethereal, Mazza pictures herself through choices of colors, patterns and calculated compositions of spiritual deities. Robed in garments inspired by designer Anna Sui and contemporary and traditional fashion, these angels live atop our world in the astral realm, depicting notions of a feminine, nurturing elysian God. Weaving colors that are particularly foreign to nature- such as bright neon, eccentric pinks, peacock blues- are used, emphasizing the divinity of godliness, loftiness, and the exceptional glamour within femininity beyond the physical.
Yuka Nakamura
Yuka Nakamura’s work invites us into a space of world-building and discovery, where everyday objects and portraiture can become sites of introspection and exploration. From washing machines and stolen glances, to old magazines, Nakamura can find inspiration in people or common items, transforming them into points of connection and inquiry. Her diverse background as an artist, mother of two, and her experience living between Japan and New York provides a foundation for her work, which reflects the traversing and navigation of identities and cultural perspectives.
Christian Wilbur
An evocative representation of the complex emotions tied to love and loss, Wilbur’s work explores confusion, grief, and the bitterness of a formative relationship’s end. While healing may be part of the process, Wilbur’s practice extends beyond personal closure, daring us to confront our own feelings of mourning and broken connections.
Primarily a photographer, Wilbur works across installation and performance, embracing a more expansive, protean approach to his art. Often leveraging contemporary communication devices, Wilbur breaks traditional boundaries of how art is presented and received. His practice is not only about telling stories, but is also about creating an open, transformative space for us to feel and connect.
Animus Zhang
What does the world around you look like when you aren’t watching? Animus Zhang’s work invites us to explore this question. Moments we might otherwise overlook, the things we see in our everyday lives become the characters in Zhang’s stories. Each scenario offers a new perspective on the ordinary, revealing the extraordinary in the world around us. As you interact with Zhang’s work, you may find a shift in your feelings about ordinary objects and look at them with a new meaning.
International Students
Saba Emadabadi
Saba Emadabadi’s is a multidisciplinary artist whose works intertwines installation, sound, and narrative. Working across media, Emadabadi creates immersive environments that invite us to actively engage with the complexities of time, space, and experience. With this interdisciplinary approach of combining sculpture, soundscapes and storytelling, she challenges the boundaries of art-making, blurring the physical and intangible. With this approach, that is both conceptual and sensory, Emadabadi’s practice reflect the commitment to expanding medium-specific confines of contemporary art.
Ramina Jenabi
Ramina Jenabi, an artist from Vienna, explores the relationship between photographic stills and motion through film. Her art focuses on video installation and reflects surrealism and soul-searching. This analog medium, with its unpredictability, mirrors the complexity of human experience. Working with strips of film, Jenabi controls only what is captured in each frame and how long it is developed, letting the process shape the outcome. This loss of control is central to her practice—an opportunity to work with failures and let the medium take over.