Exhibitions

In May 2023, the Annual Student Exhibition Bodies in Space investigated the embodied process of making space in the world for self and community. The show included work in many—and mixed—media, and kicked off with an opening reception and awards ceremony.   

Independent Student Exhibitions 

New undergraduate student exhibitions open every two weeks in the 1,500-square-foot Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery, and limited calendar spots are awarded on the merit of a proposal.  

Sophia Alana Stevenson holds a BFA from Watkins College of Art, Design, and Film in Nashville, TN, with a concentration in sculpture. She is currently an MFA candidate at the USC Roski School of Art and Design working in video, performance and sculpture.  Stevenson’s thesis exhibition, …a perpetual sunrise, features a body of video installation work that investigates the experiences and perils of closeted queer relationships, connecting historical gay literature, films, and poetry to the present and personal. She also explores the idea of “queer longing,” which comes from self-discovery, reaching for the unattainable, and grappling with desire. Stevenson’s art has been included in exhibitions including The Skin I Live In at Lyles & King in New York (NY).

Los Angeles-based artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy explores the tension of living at the edge of a precarious paradise. Primarily working with oil painting, Bellamy also incorporates screen printing, animation, and video installation into her practice. Her work functions as collages that intend to deconstruct idealist narratives by exploring the political, social, and ecological implications of a false promise of paradise and false notions of progress. Through a critical and loving approach, Bellamy examines the phenomenological experience of the California landscape and proposes that we reimagine our relationship to the environment and examine the social structures that strain it. Bellamy creates layered compositions of overlapping and intersecting representations of culture, history, plant species, and sun phases that result in dream-like narratives or windows that give form and visibility to unseen or alternative possibilities.

This exhibition is curated in collaboration with Lauren Guilford, writer, curator, and art historian based in Los Angeles. She is a candidate in the USC Roski Masters in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program.

When my brothers and I were young, our mother would have us accompany each other wherever we went. This request was often placed on my older brothers as I am the youngest. When they resisted, as teens do, asking “why do I have to go?!” our mother would respond exclaiming “Para acompañar!”

In this context, loosely translated, para acompañar means: for the purpose of accompaniment. To accompany, in a world structured for individualism is a political and philosophical stance. This stance is where this exhibition finds its traction. Through paintings, installation, video, and performance Sanchez engages us directly in the gallery space to explore how we are accompanied by many things at every moment including spirits, objects, places, and values. The work questions the legitimacy of arbitrary distinctions such as life/death, alone/together, and past/present and explores how we may carry these ideas with us. Para Acompañar calls for a self-reflexive conversation between the artist and viewers, asking us to think together about how the lenses through which we experience the world accompany and influence our judgment of the world. Sanchez offers not a space of passive viewership but an invitation to participate, to be vulnerable, to give and receive.