January 21, 2025
By Cory Jones

UCSD’s masters in fine arts program is well known for having great artists in its program and is held in high esteem for its visual arts department rankings according to US News and World Report. Seven artists are represented in the current group show at the Mandeville Art Gallery in the central area of the UCSD campus. It’s a vibrant neighborhood filled with the hustle and bustle of students on their journeys to learn their chosen trade but keep your eyes pealed, because you may see still see a lonely coyote wandering around the neighborhood from time to time.
Chief Curator, Ceci Moss, brought in a well-known LA-based curator, Irene Georgia Tsatsos, to assist with installation of this exhibit. She came to speak with all of these budding artists several months ago and returned for the opening reception on the evening of Thursday January 9th. The show is on view from now until February 8, 2025 and accessible Wednesday through Saturdays from noon to 8pm. The show is titled “I am sending you love from the future: MFA Preview Exhibition.”
Tsatsos beautifully closes her curatorial statement about this cohort band of soon-to-be MFAs like this:
“Time, like the power of invisibility,5 seems easy to understand until you try to explain it. Art objects function as artifacts of time travel, of historic narratives and future imaginaries made tangible in the ever-changing continuum of the present. This is a circumstance you must negotiate, regardless of the media at hand. Interstices6 are themselves material. Artworks become diasporic7 as they move through infinite contexts. Art is in a perpetual state of transition, always becoming something else as it is regarded by another.
Space and time, like memory, diagrams, and artworks, are subjective, open to discourse and judgment and the vagaries of social construction. Up, down, across, and spiraling around time, you do the work of this. You get to make the art. Aided by your invitation and your generosity, the rest of us then get to imagine other possibilities.
And with that, from this time being, I am sending you love from the future.”

If you were expecting another boring kind of love affair with computer-aided machinery, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that this year’s batch of UCSD MFA students are backstepping into multiple analog formats. From the vividly painted portraits and video siren’s calls in Portland-based artist Nykelle DeVivo’s beach walk blues, to the analog pixelation of photographic prints of the insides of a bus by El Salvadorian artist Moe Penders.
I had the opportunity to interview DeVivo about her work. In this series DeVivo sometimes appears in a dress, a luxurious gown or a glimmering coat of what looks like a tinsel jumpsuit – that may become a transformative spirit-channeling dreamscape attempting to connect souls similar to the dances of the African diaspora.
She was also fascinated with participation in rebellious fights for freedom and will willfully let you in on her political opinions which were recently highlighted in the New York Times. She also shared her experiences challenging authority in the dance between black or brown citizens and “the Popo”, escaping at least three times through sheer luck and thanks to the spirits who provided her safe escape from the clutches of “the man.”
When I spoke to DeVivo, she mentioned that this outfit that conjures spirits was based on a traditional outfit worn by West African communities. For instance the Ekuu Egungun worn by the Yoruba tribes in Nigeria for their Egungun Masquerade dances or the Zangbeto traditional voodoo (Vodún) guardians of the night by the Ogu (Egun) people of Benin, Togo and Nigeria.
DeVivo’s fancy suits also become a tool used to channel ancestors. In this case, her suit was a closer reference to “ghillie suits used by the US military as a means of assassination and how African American culture regularly “hacks” violent technologies/symbology for our own visual/sonic language.”

“The reflective sequin I used was in reference to a previous project, Flash Of The Spirit. Duppy is a Caribbean slang for spirit of ghoul, so to be a Duppy Conqueror implies that you have the power to destroy evil, which is essentially what the piece is about.”
It is also a really cool old-school reggae Bob Marley tune.
“The insides of a bus are where all manner of things happen (both commercially and mercilessly)” describes El Salvadorian artist Moe Penders. Moe recreated the inside of a bus and presented a story about how their great-grandfather was the first to bring a bus to the remote area where they lived. He was a merchant and would sell blankets and petates – a traditional palm fiber woven mat typically used for laying down. Panders was also interested what happens with analog photography and how the chemistry of photographic paper reacts under different conditions.
“Show me the money.
Show me the love.
Show me the Shoshonis dancing and singing their Numic tunes.”
-The author’s ramblings
If you feel like dancing, then dance, just watch the floor for those analog prints.

Spanish moss is an epiphytic flowering plant that grows on large tropical and subtropical trees, often seen in the low country of South Carolina. Spanish moss was the name John Singletary titled his work using oil and patina on a copper plate. Echo Tree is a larger oil painting on canvas that echos the forms seen in Spanish Moss. The Echo Tree is viewed only in a dark screening room presenting the video production of Cuyler Ballenger called “Boller Street” wherein a trip to Spain was documented.
Singletary mentioned that Spanish Moss is based on a folk tale about a man trying to escape death. Over time he succeeds and turns into a tree. The other story was from Henry Dumas, called Echo Tree, wherein two little boys try to talk to their dead friend through a dead tree (which is how the boys access their dead friend). The painting came first but to experiment with creating prints, he got a copper plate and etched the image onto the plate, made one print, then after time the plate continued to change color.
Dumas was an influential writer in the 1960’s Black Arts Movement and was shot and killed by a policeman in what was later judged a case of mistaken identity. Toni Morrison called him a genius for his riveting works.
What interested me most was that Spanish Moss was developed using an uncanny process. Singletary described his methods of transforming a copper plate into a green shaded patina from the careful addition of a sometimes-yellowish liquid waste applied to the face of his plate. This same process is also notably used for tanning leather hides. Yet another organic and analog process for textile artists.


The stories demonstrate time and decay as well as the artist’s time spent in Brookyln where he reflected upon the same color of copper pieces at the graves in the local cemetery. Singletary pointed out that for the vast majority of time, paintings were not viewed with modern day lighting but rather by candle light, moonlight, or daylight so that is why he wanted Echo Tree presented in a dark room with only a projected screen on an orthogonal wall who’s light could reflect onto the wall of the painting.
Perhaps both Singletary and DeVivo were channeling the spirit of Dumas.

Olivia Kayang’s “Flower without a name, Now I know your name,” invites the viewer to look closer to see its hidden flower. Is it in the way the shadow hits and reflects off the sheets? Or is the flower in between these five sheets of digital print vellum panels stretching over six feet tall? The story on Olivia’s heart was the loss of the violet “Saintpaulia.”
The story reflects on Baron Walter von Saint Paul-Illaire, who served as district commissioner of the Tanga province, now Tanzania. He loved these flowers so much he brought them home to Germany, and like so many African originals, they became replicated and re-named. This colonial process that dominated western culture in the 18th to 20th centuries is deserving of re-discovery. And Olivia asks that we try to see beyond just the westernized culturally referenced names and ask ourselves: What is in a name? Is there more behind the shadows?
Did Columbus really discover America if there were many peoples living here before they brought on so many plagues?
As you stare at these white sheets you may discover that there is no color and there are no flowers. In truth, Olivia chose to ask us to seek deeper truths than those which lie on the surface of the artwork.


Maddie Butler is interested in exploring multiple mediums. One is a tapestry developed by sewing together plastic Fresnel lenses (or magnifying sheets) – calling it a technology tapestry. Another is a technique called “contour” drawing in which the artist does not look at the page onto which they are drawing. The linkages between the visible realm in front of them is translated onto the paper manually, but without the assistance of a gaze as the mentally mapped forms are applied directly to paper. All drawings on this Cartesian plan are a mapping of the imagery in Butler’s mind, directly onto the page.
As an engineer, I think of contour grading as the method of smoothly contouring a slope to appear in a more natural state, a technique that was widely popular in the mid-1990s. It is useful when there is land to spare, and less so when you must build up to meet the population demands of a growing city.

Coralys Carter‘s work incorporates wooden loom pieces with her own “cyborg-ian” body parts including heads and torsos melded with lifelike fingers made from an amber-like substance. In tending to/ward she includes the back beam of a frame loom provided by a weaver in La Jolla. The piece also has the reed which is the part that threads the weave together. She is interested in the relationship between a maker and their tools and the intimacy in the making process.
Try to catch this futurist-analogue-amour exhibition before it closes on February 8th and be sure to sign up to the UCSD Visual Arts Department newsletter for more information.


