Joshua Evans, “Fantasia” (2024) (all images Daniel Larkin/Hyperallergic)
Joshua Evans’s “Fantasia” (2024) sums up how many people are feeling proper now. The determine is mid-metamorphosis — however doesn’t seem to have a lot of a selection or to be having fun with it that a lot. Regardless of his lack of fully-formed ft, and the uncertainty and gloom surrounding him, the determine trudges the trail forward. “He is trying to negotiate who he is going to be … but it’s not entirely clear yet,” Evans defined to Hyperallergic. “It’s happening regardless.” As many people deal with the fallout of Trump’s second time period, and its many unwelcome modifications, “Fantasia” seems like a portrait of our zeitgeist.
The Roman poet Horace as soon as suggested that “when life’s path is steep, keep your mind even.” In fact, that’s simpler stated than achieved with the market collapsing, and the rule of legislation unraveling. The artists on this 12 months’s College of Visible Arts Grasp of Positive Arts cohort are updating Horace’s outdated adage with contemporary metaphors about navigating the treacherous and unsure path. As we enter an unsure future, these MFA artists supply well timed reflections to attempt to chart the journey forward.
Ruoxi (Jarvis) Hua, “Homesick Alien” (2024)
In “Homesick Alien,” Ruoxi (Jarvis) Hua provides two uneven painted panels of New York’s East Village at night time. The longer a viewer appears on the works, the extra incongruous they grow to be. On the left, the visitors sign submit and its mast arm don’t line up with the visitors signal on the fitting, which can also be partially cropped. The longer one dwells on the work, the extra misdirected one feels. As Hua defined, “I made the sign that way to stir things up … I wanted to give more ambiguity to the painting.”
Nathalie Marti, “Starless” (2025)
Nathalie Marti’s sculpture “Starless” (2025) addresses the rising hostility in direction of marginalized individuals in the USA by incorporating the crimson, white, and blue of the American flag with none stars, alluding to the diminishing luster of the nation’s democratic beliefs. Within the sculpture, a younger hen has fallen from the nest, whereas a crimson hand forbids it from returning. In the meantime, a white hand is lifting the opposite birds within the nest excessive above. “It’s about the people who are left out,” Marti defined. She deftly portrays the invisible hand of the market, which inflicts a lot hurt to susceptible individuals, as a faceless perpetrator.
Hyunjun Yang, “Stroke the Cock” (2024)
Hyunjun Yang takes on one other system of energy and marginalization in his drawing “Stroke the Cock” (2024), wherein a person is choked by his personal penis. Yang approaches poisonous masculinity from a extra unorthodox corporeal angle, inspecting the unhealthy relationships males can have with their sexualities, households, and wider communities by satirizing the connection that many males have with their very own penises. Within the drawing, Yang defined, “the penis has had enough because the man is addicted to masturbating,” critiquing the dearth of self-control and respect for others that many mistake for freedom.
Element of Isa Yixin Yang, “The Equation of Love I” (2025)
Isa Yixin Yang takes up this household definition of affection in her searing work “The Equation of Love I” (2025), inviting every of us to consider the love we obtained in childhood and the paths it laid out for us. Yang’s mother and father methodically tracked each expense they incurred on child-rearing from ages 4 by way of 23. On the partitions of the gallery, she frames the ledger of those bills. Subsequent to it, she hangs documentation for a home she bought for her mother and father, after which a debt clearance certificates certifying that Yang not owes her mother and father, which they signed. As Yang defined in her artist assertion, “in creating this work together, we built a new kind of love — one that no longer feels like a debt, but a clean slate.”
Within the works at SVA’s 2025 MFA Thesis present, the trail is typically direct; in others, it’s extra metaphorical, delicate, and even obscured. All of those artists, nonetheless, are responding in their very own approach to our unsure instances, with some providing potentialities for personally and collectively blazing a path forward.
Tianjing Chen “Wonder by Wonder” (2024) (animated gif by writer)
Aleksy Cisowski, “Untitled” (2025)
Hao Shen, “You are the Other Part of Me” (2025)
Anqi Gu, “Seashore Weaver” (2025)
Manuela Arnal, “Arriving” (2025)
Erin Rehil, “The Dream Explorer’s Study” (2025)
Amanda Wong “March 13 2024” (2025) 
Lexi Fleurs “everything is shit” (2025) (animated gif by writer) 
Nivia Hernandez, “Con cada ojo, with each eye”, (2025)
Jieun Cheon, “Pulse from Months (from the Chapter: the Calendar of the Permutations of 1000 Arms).” (2025)
Feyzi Kutay Tufekci, “P4N1C 4774CK (Panic Attack)” (2024)
Boo Chen, “Pedicure” (2025)
Ninja Ningyi Jiang “To be (born) in NYC, You Should Be Very Happy,” (2025)
Xinyu Liu, “Time is not lost, it is freed” (2025)
Lev Pinkus, “One For Jane (the spirit of my partner in love)” (2025)
Austin Clay Willis, “Room Set” (2025) 
Taerim Terry Kim, “Wall to wall 25-MA003″ (2025)
Moyan Sun, “Behind the Eybeall” (2024)
Thavika Savangwongsakul, “It’s all about ME ( ˘͈ ᵕ ˘͈♡) (OR NOT)” (2024-25)
Lily Hyon “Stack of Maids” (2025)
Questioning Paths, the 2025 College of Visible Arts MFA Positive Arts Thesis exhibition, curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, is on view on the SVA Chelsea Gallery (601 West twenty sixth Avenue, Ground 15, Chelsea, Manhattan) by way of Could 6.
