Art Studio Graduation Thesis 25’
Drifting
June 5 2025
AG25 Campaign video: “Drifting“
Seven new stories emerges, tied by a sensibility, a shared attention to what lingers. Each artist drifts through one or more of the following, fragmented histories, unstable landscapes, spiritual yearning, or infrastructural ruin. Their practices trace the flow of signs, bodies, and objects caught between worlds—whether cast-off then reassembled, or buried then unearthed.
For 2025’s Art Studio Grad Thesis, DART Magazine set the camera right in our home: Davis.
The M.F.A. in the @mariamanettishremartstudio at UC Davis is a two-year graduate program. Seven graduating MFA candidates will present their thesis work at @manettishrem as part of the 2025 Arts & Humanities Graduate Exhibition.
This April and May, DART Magazine studio-visited this year’s seven graduating MFA candidates from @mariamanettishremartstudio at UC Davis, and recorded behind-the-scenes of their thesis works into this page.
Nicole Irene Anderson
Intro
Nicole Irene Anderson is a painter and draftswoman who creates psychological, ambiguous compositions that respond to questions of place. She earned a B.F.A. in Painting/Drawing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and is a current M.F.A. candidate at the University of California, Davis.
Anderson has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Discovered: Emerging Visual Artist Grant from Creative Sonoma and is a recipient of the Mary Lou Osborn Award and Fay Nelson Award from the University of California, Davis. Her work has been documented in catalogs and featured in New American Paintings. Anderson is represented by Johansson Projects in Oakland, California.
An Emotionally Charged Reverie
Behind-the-Scenes for A Lethal New Species
In a drawing that spans fifteen feet, Nicole Anderson conjures a world where eucalyptus trees split through the air like lightning bolts. Rendered in charcoal and pastel on brown contractor’s paper, the work grew improvisationally without a predetermined plan into a emotionally charged reverie.
The composition began as an act of anxiety, after clearing her studio post-solo show, Nicole covered her white walls with sheets of brown paper to ease the tension of blankness. From this site of personal uncertainty, a new way of working emerged, more about instinct and driven less by clarity, which gives the work an emotional atmosphere. She calls the resulting landscape an “aftermath”: one side full of glowing, feverish color, like headlights flickering through a forest at night, while the other remains quiet, muted, almost ash-like. What connects them is light: how it distorts, hides, and dramatizes. Her drawings often take cues from photographs, shaky exposures, off-camera flashes, blurred objects in motion… All these make it dream-like, a fever dream that would never make sense, but shows your deepest fear or desire. Nicole held a lens for me to peek through her vision.
Raised in California, Nicole has long been drawn to eucalyptus trees: invasive, spectral, and oddly human. “They have this bad reputation. Their bark is strange. As a kid, I always imagined them as monsters.” In Nicole’s speculative world, plants aren’t background: they’re agents, survivors, even aggressors in a future ecology that’s not quite post-human but no longer governed by familiar logic.
While we talk, Nicole usually goes silent, she doesn’t explain everything. In those quiet moments, her drawings drowned me like water, swallowed me in, then dominated the space, became more than just landscape, but perception, trauma, and the act of seeing in partial light like dreamcore. As Nicole put it, “I want the work to cast a spell. To move people more than explain something.”
Writer Edgar Zhang Editor Rachel Wang, Yuchen Hou
Cella Costanza
Intro
Cella Costanza is an artist based in Sacramento, California, originally from El Rito, New Mexico. Her work explores the intersections of mythology, material culture, and environmental collapse, navigating these terrains with humor, tenderness and despair.
Through sculpture and drawing, she reconstructs speculative worlds, creating artifacts that blur the boundaries between past and future, fact and fiction. To be raised in Northern New Mexico, is to grow up sandwiched between the sublime and the apocalyptic. It can feel like living in a place that time, progress and modernity forgot, or a place that has purposefully hidden from all those things.
False Artifacts
Behind-the-Scenes for Give me no watches, I’ll have nothing to do with time
In a thrift store window in San Francisco in 2013, a blue plastic flip-flop with a kitten heel and slender straps lay nestled among piles of trinkets. It caught Cella’s eye. Twelve years later, that ordinary object lives on as the stone sculpture before you, as part of Cella’s reflection on myth, consumerism, and time.
Drawing from an Aztec folklore of a two-headed snake, Cella reimagines this deity of cyclical time as a mass-produced sandal. She fused two opposing worlds into conversation: one shaped by urgency, disposability of the now, and one anchored in the endurance of the past. The act of stone carving becomes a form of resistance, like turning a flip-flop into cornerstones in the time cycle. She responds to a culture that moves too fast and forgets too easily.
However, for Cella it’s never necessary to add sorrow to a world already full of heartbreak. Instead, she carves with a sense of playfulness and a belief in beauty.
Cella creates a permanence by carving stone, but even this permanence is conditional. Like the original sandal, the memory of the object may erode with time. She imagines a future viewer stumbling upon these sculptures and mistaking them for sacred relics, completely unaware of their mass-produced origins. This misread isn’t false; it’s the intention. Cella recalls the “inherently flawed” in archaeology and anthropology, where objects are shaped by shifting interpretations, and she mirrors that speculative logic. By planting these false artifacts, she plays with the gap between the known, the guessed, and the truth.
What we saw at Cella’s studio was unfinished, but that form might appear again as things waer off. When she sands down its surface, those uneven abrasions could come back as time pass. Eventually, what’s left? When decay takes place on this sculpture, is time drifting toward the snake’s head, or its tail?
Writer Edgar Zhang Editor Rachel Wang
Josephine Devanbu
Intro
Josephine Devanbu is a sculptor and performance artist whose work investigates longing, desire, and spiritual embodiment. Raised in Davis, California and trained at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, she is currently an M.F.A. candidate at the University of California, Davis.
Taking inspiration from Trika Shaivism and Ancient Tamil Poetry, her practice explores the space between desire and fulfillment. Recent works include large-scale clay sculptures inspired by the matal, a devotional form built and ridden by the lovelorn. Through salvaged materials and somatic gestures, she treats desire not as a flaw to fix, but as a force that shapes the world.
matal: building, riding, longing
Behind-the-Scenes for The Matal Improvisations
In Josephine Devanbu’s studio, you will ride through a world shaped by damp clay and tarnished metal, where everything hovers between vision and desire.
Josephine makes her sculptures, which she refers to as matal, by climbing up onto piles of clay and using the full weight of her body to mold giant yet delicate creatures, an ordeal to lift yet fragile enough to crumble at the touch.
Josephine’s matal series is an ongoing body of work inspired by a ninth century poem translated from Tamil, her father’s mother tongue. In the poem, a woman desperate to unite with God promises to build and ride a matal— a palm-leaf horse made and mounted by the lovelorn as a scandalous public platform from which to plead to their unrequited beloved.
My Friend, this I swear:
I shall shock all the earth
I shall do weird deeds
and ride the palmyra stem like a horse
With no sense of shame, I shall ride
the palmyra stem through every street in town
and women from all the lands will cheer me on.
From the Tiruvaymoli (translated by Archana Venkatesan.)
Josephine’s Spiritual Tradition, Trika Shaivism, regards desire as the most powerful force in existence. According to this cosmology, all phenomena arise from a single consciousness, Śiva, that chooses to limit and divide itself for the purpose of experiencing relationship, difference, and play. This initial act of self-division, or “carving itself up,” as Josephine introduces, is driven by a kind of primal, ecstatic longing to become many, to know itself through otherness.
With all these thoughts and inspirations, the matal stretches forward, but never promises an arrival. Instead, these pieces hold open the space between need and fulfillment. “What if your longing isn’t a distraction,” she asks, “but the very thread to follow doggedly?”
Writer Edgar Zhang Editor Rachel Wang, Ava Thorsen, Josephine Devanbu
Jamal Gunn Becker
Intro
Jamal Gunn Becker investigates the shifting boundary between the hidden and the visible, the structured and the disrupted. Working through traditional modes of making—painting, printmaking, sculpture, and text—he explores how meaning is constructed, withheld, or fragmented. His work often centers on language and the trace of the human hand, using physical mark-making as a way to counteract the slick abstraction of modern systems of messaging. In Becker’s studio, materials are layered, interrupted, or reassembled to highlight the tension between permanence and erasure, between objecthood and code.
Operating within the margins of systems—visual, linguistic, architectural—he constructs forms that feel both declarative and broken. Symbols appear half-readable; surfaces reveal the labor of making while refusing full transparency. Becker’s works do not explain. Instead, they hold space for doubt, memory, and partial understanding. In this way, he reframes authorship as something porous and contingent, rather than fixed.
Born in California, Gunn Becker received his BFA from ArtCenter College of Design. He currently is a second-year MFA candidate in the department of Art and Art History, at UC Davis.
Map of Absence
Behind-the-Scenes for Untitled: Signal Index & Unknown Provenance & Minor Compositions & American Darling
People in the city follow signs every day, most of us never question how these symbols build the logic of a place, why and how these signs decide our movement?
With street signs as its clearest remains, Jamal Gunn Becker draws on ceramic sculpting and printmaking to reconstruct discarded infrastructure. He dismantles and reconfigures the arrows, ridges, and textures once meant to instruct, unearthing traces that speak to the present and stretch across time.
Jamal inverts the street signs he collects. On their reverse sides, welding marks and burnt glue leave black scars, which seem to uncoil from the traffic anchors, forming veins of maps—of rivers, organisms, mountains, galaxies—parts of nature we have yet to observe. These marks are more than typographic; they act as a new language that describes a nonlinear time and fate. When stamped with symbols and printed in color, each sign carries its future: where it will be installed, what it will instruct. Once welded into place, its past, present, and future are sealed at once, all its dents, splatters, and burn marks are pressed into the surface as a scar that holds its record and a seal that ends its path.
To Jamal, the sign is a clay vessel, a container of information. Its polished outer face signals to the public, while its inner life is hidden beneath a narrow mouth, inscribing a story that cannot be read at first glance.
Jamal overlays and rubs the scattered traces of Davis’s water infrastructure on clay to reveal a blueprint of how the city is managed. These traces are not maps, and the stories they carry are no longer about the signs or infrastructure alone. They speak to the cultural and political life of the city, where decisions were made, where rules were placed, and where they eventually fell apart. What they reveal is a timeline of those who existed, of what they planned, how it shifted, and continues to unfold.
Writer Edgar Zhang & Rachel Wang Editor Yuchen Hou
Brenton Haslam
Intro
Brenton Haslam is an Oakland, CA-based photographer who examines American culture and the various landscapes throughout the United States through his obsessive documentation. Rigorously photographing themes like messages scratched into wet concrete, spilled food, graffiti, lost possessions, what we throw out, pop culture and consumerist iconography, the temporary spaces, neglected places, and commercial and industrial development.
To Brenton, what we buy, what we lose, how we communicate, what we build, how we get around, and how we use and maintain where we live are of great concern, no matter how absurd or mundane—to remind us to pay attention and ask us to care about this country’s potential.
Brenton received his BA in Studio Art from UC Santa Barbara and is an Art Studio MFA candidate at UC Davis.
A Story that Eye Witnessed
Behind-the-Scenes for
Diet Coke. Life’s A Joke
Brenton Haslam didn’t set out to create a “hierarchy of vision”—it emerged organically as the work developed. He began by photographing the ground, on scratched concrete, spilled drinks, found messages, then turned the gaze upward to fences, signage, bridges, and finally sky. In his studio, these images are meticulously arranged on a large blank wall, using strips of blue tape to mark out a grid, which wil be taken off during the show.
That flow from low, overlooked details to high, eye-capturing signs frames much of Brenton’s work. As an Oakland based artist, He documents the broken details of American life with an obsessive eye: crumbling infrastructure, decayed signage, residual pop-cultural, and neglected urban corners. His current project assembles hundreds of these images into a dense mosaic. Some are funny, others sting, many do both. When he zoomed in on the things people wouldn’t lay our eyes on twice, as an artist, he directed his gaze to the marginalized, where we recognize but never grow familiar with it.
These marginalized corners are woven together into a life we experience every day, but barely shout— people call it America. In Brenton’s work, it walks along crumbling freeways, flares from graffiti slogans, and flits between storefront signs. When flags he captured across different places and moments flutter above these photos, “America” seeps in from the edges as the absurdity of what we have, earn, and discard.
A patriotic desire to believe in the potential of this country intertwined with a deep frustration in Brenton’s eye. “I love this place,” he says. “But it breaks my heart.” His photos are warnings or invitations for people to notice or observe what’s falling apart and to care what it should be, and maybe through that attention, people can imagine, or make something better.
Writer Edgar Zhang & Rachel Wang
Joel Taylor Murnan
Intro
Joel Taylor Murnan (b. 1997 Grass Valley, CA) pursued his education at the San Francisco Art Institute and obtained a B.F.A. in Sculpture from California College of the Arts. Currently, he is a M.F.A candidate at the University of California, Davis.
Murnan’s work explores themes of land and control, drawing inspiration from his childhood memories of a pastoral landscape. Murnan’s sculptures capture the mood of the terrain, utilizing diverse mediums that offer a unique perspective on our relationship with the land.
Joel’s Monsters
Behind-the-Scenes for Moneotherid x purpureala & Moneotherid x mycetobracteum & Moneotherid x pseudocirripedia
Monsters—the figures rooted in nearly every myth, folklore, and collective memory —have long helped people name what they could not explain. In Joel Murnan’s studio, these monsters reemerge as markers of danger, uncertainty, and thresholds—both geographical and psychological.
Rather than literal creatures, Joel’s monsters are imagined offspring of damaged environments. Built from salvaged metal, broken tools, and found debris—objects that once served a purpose and have since been discarded—they embody the consequences of ecological collapse. “These monsters are what comes from the earth, from destruction,” Joel told us. “They rise from the ground and live off the toxicity we created.” They are not warnings of some distant threat, but manifestations of what already exists: future lives born from waste, survival, and mutation.
Over time, these monsters take on emotional and symbolic roles, shaped as much by cultural memory as by material. They become vessels for collective history and ecological critique, asking what it means to inhabit a world shaped by both myth and microplastics, by loss and continuity. In this sense, the monster becomes a figure of connection—a way to trace the fragility and resilience of the landscapes we share.
Joel also reflects on our own place in that landscape through the monster. “I wanted someone to feel unsure if it was pointing at them, or watching them,” he says. These sculptures resist simple interpretation; they neither clearly invite nor reject the viewer. This ambiguity echoes a saying he references: “Bad spirits draw you in and trick you. Good spirits warn you to stay away.”
In Joel’s practice, monsters are tools for navigating modern anxieties—embodiments of ecological memory, cultural displacement, and the strange beauty of survival. They are a companion species, born from the same earth we’ve poisoned, shaped by the same hands that built our cities.
Writer Livia Xie & Edgar Zhang Editor Yuchen Hou
Raquel Marie Tripp
Intro
Raquel Marie Tripp is an African-American artist creating narrative representational works of figuration from her northern California studio. Tripp is a Cota-Robles Fellowship recipient, and uses her studio practice to address contemporary concerns around the veracity of the image and the performance of identity. At San Jose State University she earned a B.A. in Studio Arts, a Teaching credential for art, and is anticipating receiving an M.F.A. in Studio Arts from the University of California, Davis.
“I use figurative works to explore the boundary between perception and recognition. Inside the small space between stimuli and response is a fragile coexistance with the unknown. I work to prolong that space of confusion, fear, and acceptance, by layering together unrelated and tanslucent imagery. The dark and at times hidden figures that I create call to mind the impulse to protect or hide culture, identity, and the corporeal body from threat. In my drawings and paintings I use naturalistic imagery of people and places to construct realistically believable, but explicitly not real, allegories about the perception of feminine bodies.”
Believing, knowing.
Behind-the-Scenes for Blithe Spirit
“One of the figures in this work is not drawn”, Raquel said. “Who?” I asked.
The figure’s form is held within absence. Dust from charcoal, clay, and paper pulp drifts from other areas of the drawing and settles across the surface, where Raquel carefully brushes it away, wipes it back. The figure is excavated, and a ghost, a trace, made visible through removal.
Thereby, the question shifts from what am I looking at to who was here. The fallen at the bottom of the drawing, including powdered pastel pigment, broken vine charcoal, scraps of spice scented sanded paper, becomes just as important as what’s left on the surface. Raquel keeps them, resisting the impulse to clean the drawing into an effortless final form.
She wants her works to be laid bare. Not framed by borders, not fixed to the wall, so they can be fully viewed.
“I think about unrecorded history,” she told me, “the narratives of the marginalized lives that don’t make it into the canon—but are still a part of the story..”
This philosophy runs through her process, In the way she layers charcoal, cinnamon, calabash clay, and earth from her father’s grave; in the way she works under shifting light, blinding herself with a rear spotlight to blur drawn and imagined; and in the way her drawings obscure clarity, resist passive viewing, and invite audiences to linger with her in uncertainty.
Her drawing asks the viewers to wait before deciding, thus noticing how belief works, how quickly it forms, how comfortably it settles, and how that comfort can be dangerous in a world where people are so often misread, disbelieved, or erased from the narrative altogether.
To believe is easy, but to know requires time, vulnerability, and a willingness to be changed. Through what eludes closure in her works, Raquel asks: Are you prepared to leave certainty behind?
Writer Edgar Zhang Editor Rachel Wang
Art Studio Graduation Thesis 25’
Behind the Scenes
June 5 2025
DART Magazine is honored to have been part of this process—to listen, to document, and to share the stories behind the scenes. Whether through clay, charcoal, salvaged metal, or spiritual invocation, each artist here has shown us what it means to create in the in-between: between gesture and thought, visibility and absence, destruction and rebirth.
To everyone who’s followed along, who’s read, watched, or wandered through these works: thank you. However far these artists drift next, something of Davis stays with them—and in turn, something of them stays here.
The physical booklet will be available in the lobby at @manettishrem throughout the show, June 5 to June 22, 2025.