PROCESS: between idea and form

The School of Art Student Gallery presents PROCESS, a group exhibition featuring the work of first-year Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students. On view through April 8, 2026, the exhibition offers a glimpse into the early stages of graduate research and studio development.

PROCESS brings together work by Aria Evans, Galateia Kefalas, Mike Lau, Maria R. Martin, Nona Niroumand, Sara Sattari, and Fan Xia. Working across installation, performance, photography, painting, ceramics, and multimedia practices, the exhibition reflects the breadth of approaches within the MFA program.

The participating artists draw on a range of lived experiences and interdisciplinary backgrounds—spanning dance, theatre, philosophy, and lens-based media—to approach making as both research and inquiry. Their work engages questions of identity, memory, migration, queerness, embodiment, and the shifting meanings of home and belonging.

Across the exhibition, the body, material, and environment emerge as key sites of investigation. Performance and self-representation are used to explore emotional and psychological states, while installation, ceramics, and photography consider how memory and space are constructed and perceived. Questions of displacement, nostalgia, and personal and collective histories surface through processes of fragmentation, repetition, and reconstruction.

Rather than presenting resolved outcomes, PROCESS foregrounds experimentation and development. At this stage in the MFA program, students are actively testing ideas, refining methodologies, and establishing the foundations that will shape their thesis work.

PROCESS is on view in the School of Art Student Gallery, Taché Arts Complex (150 Dafoe Road, Room 158), University of Manitoba, through Wednesday, April 8, 2026.