Aqueous Nerve

The Belkin is pleased to present an exhibition of work by the 2024 graduates of UBC’s two-year Master of Fine Arts program: Francisco Berlanga, Alex Gibson, Tiffany Law, Jesse Ross and Morgan Sears-Williams. This program in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory is limited each year to a group of four to six artists, who over the two years foster different sensibilities developed within an intimate and discursive working environment. Through interdisciplinary group critiques, weekly seminars, artist talks, open studios and advisor discussions, students develop advanced techniques and expand critical concepts to emerge with a particular direction for their studio practice. 

Francisco Berlanga 
Francisco Berlanga (b. 1997) reflects on his relationship with his Mexican identity as a second-generation immigrant through the lens of Craft. He attempts to understand how one can inhabit a culture while being partially absent from it. He engages in discourse with his own identity through the creation of traditional Mexican manualidades or crafts. His practice engages with concepts of inaccessibility attempting to bridge the gaps between his personal and cultural identities by forcing connections between them and trying to understand the limitations that these identities impose upon each other. 

Alex Gibson 
Alex Gibson (b. 1994) is a queer Barbadian artist who filters digital and material processes to generate and archive memory through image, video and installation. As an immigrant genderfluid artist, their work focuses on queer identity, space and temporality. Gibson’s work has been exhibited at Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy; Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver; Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver; Tomato Mouse, New York; and Artists Alliance, Bridgetown, Barbados. 

Tiffany Law 
Tiffany Law (b. 1994) is a Hong Kong artist who expands the materiality of drawing and printmaking phenomenologically. She comprehends the experience of spatial beings’ embodied movements by creating traces and surfaces. Her recent works incorporate rocks found in the Lower Mainland, making rock-pigmented prints that invoke the incarnate temporality, memory and loss entangled with land and landscapes. 

Jesse Ross 
Jesse Ross (b. 1991) lives and works in Vancouver. He is of predominantly settler heritage (English and Scottish) and also holds ancestry as a member of the Stó:lō (Skwah) Nation. His practice deals with figuration, embodied knowledge, surface and indeterminacy as a means of transformation. Jesse Ross is a recipient of a SSHRC Graduate scholarship. 

Morgan Sears-Williams 
Morgan Sears-Williams (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultivator based in Toronto and Vancouver. She has exhibited her works across Turtle Island and internationally. Morgan Sears-Williams was the recipient of the Roloff Beny Award in 2022, the Pandora Y. H. Ho Memorial Award and the Artscape Youngplace Career Launcher in 2017. She received a graduate scholarship from SSHRC in 2023 and has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council, including the Chalmers Professional Development and the Career Catalyst in 2021. 

Aqueous Nerve: UBC Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition is presented with support from the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. For more information about Aqueous Nerve, contact Jana Tyner, jana.tyner [at] ubc.ca or visit here. For more information on the MFA program at AHVA UBC, contact ahva.grad [at] ubc.ca or visit here. Admissions for the September 2025 intake will close in early January 2025. 

We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.