Half a Second or Less: 2026 Studio Art MFA Thesis Exhibition
Morgan Grigsby, Pass Them By (detail), 2025. Oil and enamel on wood. Courtesy of the artist.
Opening Reception: Fri. April 17, 5–8 p.m.
Half a Second or Less brings together the work of seven graduating studio MFA students who are shaped by change, attention, and duration. Across photography, painting, print, and sculpture, this exhibition traces how we register time, belief, intimacy, and history.
Rosalyn Jewel Farney creates images through experimental drawing and printmaking processes that explore the possibilities of light and iteration. Working with mixed-media sculptures and drawings, Maya Gauvin’s work operates at the threshold of botanical, mineral, and planetary scales, staging moments of suspended time. Spanning family archives, self-portraiture, and acts of care, Edward Gia maps diasporic memory and intergenerational longing shaped by his Ecuadorian Mexican American identity. In his atmospheric paintings, Morgan Grigsby examines land, light, and history in relation to Black Southern experience and the transformation of the Gulf Coastal Plains. By exploring the poetics of acoustics through sound, sculpture, and architectural form, Jo Kim examines how bodies experience space through resonance and gesture. Tiffany Katarina Smith investigates memory as mediated by digital technologies, translating family photographs through processes that foreground distortion, decay, and reappearance. By examining intimacy, belief, and Queer presence in the American South, Nolan Zunk transforms everyday objects into sites of ritual and care through portraiture and installation.
Together, these artists present practices that engage light, sound, memory, material, and place as evolving conditions rather than fixed forms. The exhibition invites viewers into a brief interval of heightened perception where light flickers, sound resonates, materials shift, and meaning remains in motion.
Half a Second or Less is organized by 2025–26 VAC Education Fellow, Mary Alice Smith, and 2024–26 PhD Curatorial Fellow, Maysa Martins.
Support for Half a Second or Less is generously provided by the Department of Art and Art History at the College of Fine Arts, University of Texas at Austin.