As a rule, the showcases of graduating MFA students tend to push creative envelopes and bring a freshness of vision, off to the left of mainstream or commercial artistic interests. Conceptual moxie is often in tow, as once again happens with this year’s crop of artists from UCSB — Lucy Bell, Austin McCormick, Autumn Nicole, and Rose Schlossberg.
Whereas exhibitions in UCSB’s Art, Design and Architecture Museum (AD&A) tend to be a few months in duration, the annual MFA show is a short-run affair, so time is of the essence, and time is a central theme in this year’s MFA Theses Exhibition, dubbed (it’s about time).
Punctuation matters in this moniker. It posits that “this exhibition is its own parentheses, which frames and contains within it not just the artworks in these galleries, but the time, spaces, and experiences of the artist during the MFA program itself.” It’s a relevant but also necessarily loose mission statement, given each artist’s individualistic intent.
Entering the galleries, the entry space hosts a myriad of 32 small paintings by Nicole, under the title Flash, seemingly capturing fleeting sights and sensations of modern life and imagination, from crucifix-like telephone poles to cartoon cars and art-world tapping. A less light and breezy impression greets us in the presence of McCormick’s relief sculpture, part of a series called Future Fossil, with meticulously crafted but also decaying and crumbling visions of retro-futurist dread.
McCormick’s work, with its mildly satirical brand of what has been branded “Apocalyptikitsch,” expands exponentially inside the museum’s main gallery space, with five large sculptures, in rickety states of melting and set on pedestals that are seemingly teetering. “Seemingly teetering” could be a suitable analysis of his art’s form and thematic content, achieved with an impressively cohesive vision and formal articulation.
By contrast, the other half of the main gallery is given over to an elaborate and spacious installation by Nicole. Her set of paintings and sculptural works convey an ambience at once playful and disorienting in its vision of domesticity which also can be described as “seemingly teetering.” Doors, as metaphor and in fact, ground the assembly of parts in the installation, in the form of a half-demolished door frame in the center, a lopsided and a fantastical Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland–ish tiny door. Interspersed are finely painted scenes as seen through the framing device of windows.
Functioning on a more unapologetically meditative level, Bell’s art deals with spiritual practice and reflection and questions of faith, channeled into personal artistic terms. As an act of kinder, gentler gallery-minded subversion, Bell literally celebrates the ample space of the tall-ceilinged gallery in the museum by leaving its spaciousness intact.
The gallery space becomes a surrogate, church-like atmosphere, with white banners such as might be found in a house of worship, one small canvas, and brochures in which most of the text is blurred to the point of non-comprehension. Short phrases in readable type jump out: “sit here with me,” “be here with me,” and “every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.” With this brochure and continuing with her Prayer series of soft-focus paintings of church pews and interior details in the adjoining gallery, Bell suggests that the spirit and worshipful environment is more the point than the details of contextual/textual specifics or religious rhetoric.
Rose Schlossberg, “Timeline of Apocalypse,” 2024, Ink on paper | Photo: Courtesy 
Rose Schlossberg, “Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS,” 2024. Ink on paper | Photo: Courtesy 
Autumn Nicole, “To Know Someone Through All Four Seasons,” 2025. Set of 12 stained Tiffany Today glass, lead, solder, copper panels | Photo: Courtesy 
Autumn Nicole, “Did You Catch a Firefly” (Installation View), 2024. 70 8×10 paintings, and 250 hand-cast candles on mirrors | Photo: Courtesy 
Austin McCormick, “Future Fossil, 2025” (detail). Reclaimed styrofoam, detritus, reclaimed resin | Photo: Courtesy 
Austin McCormick, “Future Fossil, 2025” (detail). Reclaimed styrofoam, detritus, reclaimed resin | Photo: Courtesy 
Austin McCormick, “Future Fossil, 2025” (detail). Ceramic | Photo: Courtesy 
“Pillar” by Lucy Bell | Photo: Courtesy 
“Pews” by Lucy Bell | Photo: Courtesy 
Lucy Bell, “pew, 2025(2),” (detail). Oil on canvas | Photo: Courtesy 
Autumn Nicole MFA installation | Photo: Josef Woodard 
Autumn Nicole MFA installation | Photo: Josef Woodard 
“Future Fossil” by Austin McCormick | Photo: Josef Woodard 
“Future Fossil” by Austin McCormick | Photo: Josef Woodard
Meanwhile, back in the realm of time-mindedness, a more directly dire artistic encounter is navigated by Schlossberg, though in evocative and creative ways. Her “Apocalypse Timeline Experience” takes over and reshapes the museum’s back gallery with a claustrophobic installation luring us into its vortex. One “wall” is made of silver emergency blankets and the other a timeline of religious end game and predictions, from 365 CE to recent years, and leading to a dogmatically emphatic “NOW.” The “NOW” arrow points to a patchwork of shooting-star imagery on the back wall, a sign of our ephemeral shelf life in the cosmic scheme.
Were it not as imaginative and wittily exploratory as it is, Schlossberg’s work might give us existential shivers.
Her interest in the enigmatic confluence of art, mortality, human behavior, and social norms continues in a tidier fashion with a video piece, “To Show Me How To.” Here, she enlists an actress who had played the artist’s grandmother on TV to show her the process of thespian transformation. What ensues, with two women mimicking similar motions against a white backdrop turns into a lesson in social protocols and “proper” behavior of an earlier age, but doubles as an odd minimalist dance piece.
Time gets fuzzy in this intriguing pageantry of thoughtful young MFA artists, while waiting for no one.
The 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition (it’s about time) is on view through June 1 at UCSB’s AD&A Museum. See museum.ucsb.edu.
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