Graduating artists in UC Santa Barbara’s Master of Fine Arts will show their work in the exhibition “Fault Lines” at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum (May 23–Jun 7). Featured artists include Tiffany Aiello, Alexis Childress, Hope Christofferson, Emily d’Achiardi, Negar Farajiani, Vivek Karthikeyan and KeyShawn Scott.
“Fault Lines” brings together each artists’ physical and conceptual lines of inquiry into a shifting, evolving conversation, where investigation and creating tensions and new worlds are possible. These artists break with linearity and overturn expectations for lines to mark boundaries. Collectively their work asks visitors to examine their own perceptions of fault lines as not only splits, but also openings in existing, constructed and imagined realms.
An installation by d’Achiardi challenges visitors’ understandings of fact and fiction through a generated experience with real and invented news headlines. Drawing on Buddhist and Hindu contemplative practices, Karthikeyan’s expanded cinema installation explores ways in which moving images can model our subjective experience of consciousness. Handmade anthropomorphic animal masks and paintings by Aiello engage with queer and neurodivergent identities at the intersection of simulation, reality and performance.
Christofferson’s creation of new realities connects human design to nature through living spaces for animals and humans. Childress pairs digital sculpture with a reconstructed corn field to highlight the systemic forces of racism and related experiences of isolation within rural topographies.
A full-scale grocery store aisle by Scott demonstrates how the physicality of barriers, like security glass in these spaces, spotlight the social and cultural policing of minoritized bodies. Farajiani exhibits three interrelated components: soft sculpture, video and public artwork, located outside the museum. Her project speaks to embedded networks of resilience and memory, both in materials and collaborators on campus and the artist’s homeland of Iran.
Fault lines, both metaphorical and material, disrupt our understanding of the nature of boundaries as impenetrable. Upon closer inspection, these apparent divides are invitations to transgress and generate anew. “Fault Lines” is organized by the AD&A Museum and the Department of Art at UCSB. Curatorial text is by Alida Jekabson, PhD candidate, and Kristin Yinger, PhD student, in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.