2025 MFA Exhibition showcases 11 artists

Claire Fall Blanchette

“Tangled Currents”
Joseph Gross Gallery
(Photo by lydia see)

“Tangled Currents” uses eight historic landfills along the Santa Cruz River in Tucson as a framework to examine the sustained consequences of human activity on a local ecosystem. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the City of Tucson operated landfills directly along the banks of the Santa Cruz River. Filled in or built over, the landfills are hidden reminders of the relentless human impact on the environment, some even threatening to upend efforts to revitalize the river.

Each of the sculptures in “Tangled Currents” represents one of these sites and offers aspeculative solution for their remediation. Arranged in a loose map, the forms are scaled to represent the shape and depth of the respective landfills. Reishi fruiting bodies (Ganoderma lucidum) twist and bend from each of the sculpture’s sections. Like a web of roots, the mushrooms make visible the unseen network binding the sculptures together.

Eight drawings accompany the sculptures and pull from various sources related to the monitoring of landfills, including maps, contamination prediction models, and scientific diagrams. Layered within are hand-drawn interpretations of the microscopic mycelial systems painted with collected reishi spores. The abstracted marks oscillate between the micro and the macro to encompass the complexities of human and non-human relationships, creating an opportunity to reflect on our implicit participation in both. Reishi fungal networks can clean toxins from soil and water through mycoremediation.

As one member in a greater ecosystem, mycelium secretes enzymes that can break down toxins and plant matter, helping revitalize the soil and make space for new life. Mycelium has evolved reciprocal relationships with other organisms to increase their collective chance of survival, in contrast to humans, who have created stark separations between ourselves and the natural world. Mycelium’s inherent processes unveil alternative ways of existence that move away from the anthropogenic perspective.

“Tangled Currents” presents human-nonhuman partnerships as a way toward a more sustainable and symbiotic future. It suggests an alternative to human-centered ways of thinking by examining natural processes for guidance in developing a mutually beneficial world.

Semoria F. Mosley

“What goes on in my house … stays in my house?”
Joseph Gross Gallery
(Photo courtesy of artist)

I know two things to be true. “What goes on in my house, stays in my house,” is a phrase I grew up on. To be born is to carry ancestral karmic debt.

In examining pressures of the U.S. racial wealth gap as it pertains to overworking for stability and intergenerational family estrangement, born are a set of reactionary instances that continue to manifest generationally and domestically. Instances such as the banishment of Black children from their homes, ancestral trauma, guilt, lack of boundaries and secrecy make me interrogate my existence by asking, “What role does incarnation, power and choice play in our upbringing?” Since we all have to be children, that innocence is not only meant to be broken but is also imperative and introductory. Who and what has the right to take our innocence? Selfishly I have asked, why?

bell hooks once said, “Someone can be in a domination of power but still be helpful.”

Materialized as a diaristic video installation reflecting on my upbringing in the Deep South as a young girl and an only child, there is an evident connection between contemporary child rearing practices of Black Americans and the tactics of control used on Southern plantation systems.

The phrase was and is used to deter outsiders from tugging on personal and domestic issues – which has historical context. I assert that Black Americans have adopted conservatisms as a survival strategy. The more an enslaved person could keep hidden from their master, the more potential for personal autonomy. Translated to the present, there is shame in being perceived. The domestic space assigned to us is our first incubator for hiding.

Throughout my childhood being directed to the corner meant assuming a position of punishment and embarrassment. Suggesting the corner of the gallery as a point of origin, the work radiates left and right alluding to both opening up and confinement. Largely deconstructed, an image of my childhood home is printed on adhesive vinyl and made to function as a stage for the performance of obedience and disobedience. By purposefully exposing the interiority of domestic space, I situate myself within the realities of dealing with our own mess through transparency, resistance and liberation.

I dedicate this installation to myself and the mothers of my lineage who were neglected. For mothers and fathers who needed to be seen so much that their children were weighted by the choice to disguise emotional unavailability as tough love. To the children who have blossomed into adults that were tasked with proving themselves beyond the capability of proof, perfect ain’t real. To the children that have blossomed into adults but watched their mothers disguise their pain, I don’t know what to say. I am still processing.

Karina Buzzi

“aurora” 
Center for Creative Photography
(Photo of Buzzi courtesy of artist)

I am a curandeira in a lineage of curandeiras from Brasil. My practice elicits a dialogue between spirituality, the body, and photography. Through performance and time-based media, I engage with materials imbued with personal and ancestral significance, exploring memory, reproducibility, and transformation. 

In “aurora,”  I merge 19th-century wet plate collodion photography with contemporary video techniques, creating an interplay of light, shadow, and time. Monitors embedded within a plexiglass pedestal reveal an ethereal figure suspended in swirling silver nitrate, evoking alchemical processes. A second video — a music performance inspired by the oldest known Babylonian lullaby — is experienced through a Rolleiflex camera, emphasizing mediated vision and historical fragmentation. Sung in both English and Portuguese, the lullaby is recorded on a deteriorating magnetic tape recorder, oscillating between silence and feedback to underscore themes of translation, distortion, and intimacy. 

Expanding the work’s sensory and interactive dimensions, a tape recorder and a small box made of Palo Santo wood invite the viewer’s engagement. Presence activates the installation’s performative space, requiring movement — walking around images and objects, leaning in, playing the tape recorder, and sensing the aroma of Palo Santo.

Vanessa Saavedra Ceballos

“En Memoria Digna”
Center for Creative Photography 
(Photo courtesy of Arizona Arts)

“En Memoria Digna” exists at the intersection of a Día de los Muertos altar and a photo wall of a family living room, where artistic translations of objects and images representing the lives and memories of Cecilia Yépiz (1971-2021) and Anapaola Jaramillo (2007-2020) come together. I first learned about the femicides of Cecilia and Anapaola through social media and sensationalist articles and images. After speaking with their families and friends, I seek to interpret a fraction of their essence through representative paintings and objects reminiscent of those altars and family spaces. Getting to know them through the memories of their loved ones has been a profound honor. 

Objects and images serve as narrative tools that help us associate memories with people. A Día de los Muertos altar facilitates these associations. We remember our loved ones through the food, drinks, and sweets they enjoyed, offering these as a tribute. In a traditional Mexican living room, family photographs are often displayed as a way to preserve and recall significant moments. All the objects in this display, though mostly recognizable, hold a deeper meaning for their families and friends, encapsulating aspects of Cecilia and Anapaola’s essence. 

Through this multimedia installation, I strive to contribute more humanity to the narratives of Cecilia and Anapaola and provide them with a space of their own —one that exists beyond the alarming statistics of femicide. I seek to recontextualize them against media portrayals by emphasizing who they were, how they lived, and what made them unique. 

I am deeply grateful to their families and friends for entrusting me with their memories and allowing me, through my hands and my gaze, to attempt to reflect a small glimmer of the light they shared with the world.

Benjamin Davis

“Familiar”
Center for Creative Photography
(Photo courtesy of Arizona Arts)

My immediate family has never visited Niagara Falls together, even though it is only a three hour drive from our home in Upstate New York. Yet, the well known tourist destination is present in many of the photographs taken by both sides of my extended family. The images are acts of proof, evidence revealing their visits to the sublime. Lesser-known waterfalls also appear in our family albums. They are meditations nestled between snapshots of family gatherings mirroring how they occur in the landscape and establishing the waterfall as motif in my families’ visual history. Instead of functioning as a grandiose force of nature, cascading water is a common occurrence. 

The waterfall imagery is a metaphor in my work for the crushing force of alcoholism and addiction. Mental health goes undiscussed in my family, but our shared photographic archive offers a glimpse into moments left undocumented. Using their photographs as a point of departure, I reinterpret familiar landscapes and create an opportunity for connection with my family members, both past and present. Responding to their images, I create photographic conversations and poetic fragments. The accordion books containing these photographs depict unfolding visual conversations between generations. By incorporating their images into my growing photographic archive, I am reflecting on family history and the weight of unseen struggles. 

One family image depicts a bucolic country scene and was reproduced as a series of identical cyanotypes then toned in whiskey over 17 days. The resulting prints were sequenced onto a video timeline and printed to 16mm film. Displayed using a movie projector fitted with a custom looping apparatus, the projected image cyclically decays in reference to repeated patterns of declining mental health and substance abuse. After the sequence is finished, it plays again and the cycle perpetuates. 

“Heirlooms,” an oversized drum leaf bound book, contains images depicting keepsakes my family has saved alongside the detritus of my parent’s daily lives. Precious objects sit on shelves above piles of mail and the walls are adorned with photographs that span generations. My family home functions as an archive, collapsing multiple generations into one space through the things we hold onto.