UC San Diego Visual Arts

Home
United States
La Jolla, CA
UC San Diego Visual Arts

The UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts encourages experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking in scholarly and artistic production.

https://linktr.ee/ucsdvisarts

05/05/2026

SOFT SPOT
Nicole Johnson UG student exhibition

Reception: May 4, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
May 5 - May 8, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

My work focuses on the practice and display of care for the subject. Often in powerless positions, my subjects are vulnerable to the gaze of the viewer. The concept of vulnerability is something I want to convey in my works. I aim to encourage the viewer to examine their attitude toward the powerless subject. I want to explore the concept of trust and how it is given or received, and when. I feel entrusted by my depicted subject to display their vulnerability delicately. The viewer is entrusted with the image of the exposed subject. Using elements like the dark and light contrast of charcoal I aim to provoke an audience to experience emotion or even discomfort, prompting them to form a relationship with the subject.

I’m also interested in the implications of representing personal archival photos in my current drawings and how a difference in scale, medium, and intent can transform the atmosphere of an image. I intend to transform a photograph so that the subject matter will evoke a different feeling as a drawing. I’m interested in changing the scale of a particular subject to understand the effect that its size has on the viewer’s perception of power.

04/27/2026

Auto-Insectification
Andrew Wharton MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: May 1, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 27, 12:00 - 4:00 p.m.
April 28 & 29, 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
April 30, 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
May 1, 11:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

Auto-Insectification traces the development of the archetype of the homunculus: the inhuman, human-made intelligence through which the human being reflects and reflexively constructs itself. Auto-Insectification denies the homunculus, searching for a new model of intelligence and humanity in the figure of the insect.

Through sculpture, video, sound, and interactive media the show presents an alchemist’s laboratory after he has renounced the work of the homunculus, instead choosing to turn himself into an insect. The detritus of his work to produce the homunculus litters the space, and technical artifacts produced to assist in his transformation loom.

Special thanks to the UCSD Visual Arts Department and the Russell Foundation for supporting this thesis project.

04/27/2026

Primordial Pneuma
Aambr Newsome MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: May 1, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 27 - April 30, 2:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

What if the objects around us are not still, but waiting—holding memory, spirit, and intention within their form?

This thesis exhibition explores ancestral veneration as it manifests through the body, the object, and image-making. Rooted in the artist’s engagement with myth, ritual, and sacred objects, the work considers how animacy is transmitted—through acts of making, through the repetition of everyday gestures, and through the enduring presence of familial spirits.

Across printmaking, sculpture, and storytelling, the exhibition proposes that objects are not inert, but active participants in spiritual and material worlds. These works suggest that spirits traverse the boundaries between life and death, inhabiting forms that carry memory, intention, and lineage. In this space, objects perform alongside the body, echoing the body’s role as a vessel for the soul.

Drawing from Caribbean and Indigenous spiritual practices, the exhibition creates a site of convergence where ritual, narrative, and materiality collapse into one another. Here, the sacred is not separate from the everyday, but embedded within it—activated through presence, repetition, and belief.

04/17/2026

RABBIT
Sophie Zhang UG student exhibition

Reception: April 20, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
April 20, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
April 21, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
April 22, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
April 23, 9:00 - 11:00 a.m., 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Why select a rabbit? Somehow all the forces inherent to us as humans are so similarly projected onto a rabbit - a compelling but nonexistent innocence, survival constructed by our inherent natural gifts - body and limb and brain. Rabbits and we are both vessels through which power and violence move like shadows. Therefore, is Rabbit to Us as We are to Earth, or to the universe?

There is a reality in which all of humanity’s answers to these rhetorical questions can be combined into a common thread, but the rabbit still escapes us. Though we may be compelled to live through the eyes of the rabbit, we can never truly do so. We can only use them as we would a clay vessel - a self portrait. This series tells the story of that portrait.

04/16/2026

Every Step Is Moving Me Up
Walker Hewitt MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: April 17, 5:00 - 9:00 p.m.
April 17 - May 1, 2026
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

In Every Step Is Moving Me Up, Hewitt is exploring themes of walking, q***r gathering, commitment, and what it means to be a neighbor. This body of work contends with the politics of being in community and sharing space, resources, and time. Through painted, ceramic and installative works, Hewitt reflects on how we construct and delineate space, how we articulate boundaries, and what it means to make a barrier more permeable. Hewitt identifies the sidewalk as a site of togetherness and discovery. A site where, and an instance how we can learn and practice mutual recognition, engage with the vicinal, and foster, maintain and steward community. Hewitt is curious about strategies to make the opaque, the impeding, and the impenetrable, into the porous, the traversable, and the translucent as a way of approaching a more horizontal and just future.

04/14/2026

choreographies of becoming ( a film )
erika roos MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: April 17, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
April 14 - April 17, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. or by appointment
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

choreographies of becoming ( a film ) is a site-sensitive installation and durational performance with 16mm film. In this work, I position the filmic apparatus – specifically, the celluloid film, projectors, light, and screen-surface – as a composite, complex, and interconnected body, as an organism, and as a performer. Through the interwoven, looping bodies of projector, film, and screen – which cast images of figures in shadow – this installation contends with how we hold memory: in movement, in muscle, in celluloid, in textile, in our relationships with one another. Central to this work are reflections on research and practice within contemporary dance, performance, and experimental filmmaking; q***r phenomenological research and writings on touch, contingency, and the affects of cinematic experience; critical materialist and agential realist concepts of complexity, interdependence, and entanglement; the phenomenon of missing time (known in geology as unconformities); and the phenomenon of the loop. Lineages of avant-garde film, performance, and expanded cinema practices within postwar Japan and the United States also inform this work.

04/14/2026

¿Quién Dijo Miedo, Muchachos? Si Para Morir Nacimos
Izzai Martinez Angulo MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: April 17, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
April 14 - April 16, 12:00 - 6:00 p.m. by appointment
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

This body of work, ¿Quien Dijo Miedo, Muchachos? Si Para Morir Nacimos, explores the fluidity of my gendered identity through photography, staging and performance, particularly influenced by my mother and the American wrestler Shawn Michaels. In addition, this writing covers the relationship I possess with my family and the way their cisgendered bodies negotiate my androgyny. By channeling the Mexican home through handcrafted wooden frames, a staged domestic environment, and constructed moments of intimacy, I invite the viewer to feel as if they are home with us, simultaneously negotiating their own gendered existence. While striving to maintain a post-historic body and image, this work demonstrates the complexities of existing in the in-betweenness of an established traditional Mexican culture and an androgynous identity.

04/14/2026

STORIES UNTOLD
Tessa Chan UG student exhibition

April 14, 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.
April 15, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Stories Untold is a collection of narrative-driven works shaped by a love of nature, fantasy, and storytelling. Drawing on cultural influences, these pieces explore vivid moments, imagined places, and fragments of larger worlds. I rarely show my art or writing but with this exhibit, I hope to begin sharing them more openly, hence the name Stories Untold.

03/17/2026

PERSONAL HISTORIES
VIS 106C class exhibition

March 18, 4:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Mandeville 201A (upstairs), UC San Diego

Artemisia Barber, Zoe Beggin, Ava Boado, Kimmie Graney, Sylvia Park, Lauren Reed, Sophia Regier, Alyssa Jimenez, Saanvi Kotia, Jennifer Lau, Mariana Mercado, Andrew Reyes-Gomez, Monalisa Rodriguez, Haohua Zhou

Address

9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA
92093

Telephone

(858) 534-2860

Website

http://visarts.ucsd.edu/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when UC San Diego Visual Arts posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The University

Send a message to UC San Diego Visual Arts:

Shortcuts

Want your university to be the top-listed University in La Jolla?

UC San Diego Visual Arts

05/05/2026

04/27/2026

04/27/2026

04/17/2026

04/16/2026

04/14/2026

04/14/2026

04/14/2026

03/17/2026

Address

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Contact The University

Shortcuts

Share

Category