2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition: Fault Lines

The Art, Design & Architecture Museum and the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara are pleased to announce the 2026 Master of Fine Arts exhibition Fault Lines, featuring the work of graduating artists 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 Art, Design & Architecture Museum and the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara. 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.

Artist Biographies

Alexis Childress is a visual artist born in Illinois and received her BFA from Georgia State University. Inspired by Astro-Blackness, her work uses 2D and 3D digital sculpture and collage to explore Black American nationalism, systems of power, and the inception of a black identity framework within emerging techno-cultural assemblages, algorithms, and digital networks. Through a combination of installation and digital art, her work confronts the concept of constructed reality, creating worlds that become reflections of the broken systems of society.

Emily D’achiardi is an internet artist exploring the intersections of digital culture, memory, and intimacy. Emily received a BA in art history from Reed College and is currently pursuing an MFA at UC Santa Barbara. Emily creates digital works that use the browser as a site of memory, intimacy, and emotional residue. Her work foregrounds fragments, repetitions, and the quiet systems that script online feeling.”

Hope Christofferson works with nature to amplify human imagination. With a deep love for creative problem solving, she often looks at natural design and animal behavior to inform the work she makes. As an illustrator, her work stems from a hybrid source of transmutation and communication. Recently the California coastline has inspired a series of wondrously collaborative works that roam the shorelines of reality and dream, merging orchids, ferns, corals, and people into artworks that swim free in our shared fantasea.

KeyShawn Scott works across drawing and installation. His drawings celebrate Black culture while addressing Black experiences and challenging stereotypes. His installations critically engage with American education systems and the ways grocery store settings oversimplify complex systemic issues.

Negar Farajiani is a multimedia artist. Her thesis explores weaving as a social and embodied practice. Drawing on her experience as an artist, mother, and migrant, she approaches weaving not only as a material technique but also as a way of building community, memory, and resilience. With a focus on socially engaged art and networking, her work builds connections between individuals and communities. Through collective weaving, installation, and her essay film, the project creates temporary spaces for gathering and storytelling, both inside and outside the museum.

Tiffany Aiello’s thesis project explores the relationship between identity and nonhuman performance, using objects like puppets, costumes, masks and digital avatars as vessels for expression.

Vivek Karthikeyan is interested in reimagining moving image as a medium of phenomenological perception rather than visual storytelling. Drawing from disciplines including cognitive psychology, South Asian philosophy, and contemporary philosophy of mind, he creates immersive hybrid installations that combine traditional time-and-lens based video, sound, creative coding, and VR technology.