4/2-5/3/2025. The culminating exhibition of the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program at UCSC presents new projects developed through concentrated inquiry over a two-year period and offers a window into the artists unique long-term research projects that expand beyond the gallery space.
Opening Celebration – Wednesday, April 2 – 5-7pm
Artist Talks: Wednesday, April 9 & 23, 5-6pm
What does it mean to inhabit the landscape as a body? Is it a vessel or animated commons—porous, shifting, and shaped by external and internal currents? The Mexican idiom Cobija de Tripas, or Gut Blanket, conjures an image both visceral and comforting—another body that enfolds and surrounds us. When landscape is a gut blanket, we are perpetually in relation: bound not only to one another, but also to the environments we traverse and the invisible threads that tie us to everything else. If comfort, vulnerability, and troubling interdependence are braided together, where do our bodies end and the world begin?
Artists Fernanda Rappa, Jorge Palacios, ilia dolgov, Robert Johnson III, Alberto Miguel, Kate, Jonas Banta, and Amy Blondell invite us to peer into darkness, search for restoration, nurture intimate border-crossing ecologies, weave archival memory, imbibe community care, speculate on Martian foraging, and metabolize eternity. Research-based, multimedia, and performative art projects function as a collective Gut Blanket—raising questions about how human, nonhuman, and environmental bodies exist in a perpetual negotiation with cultural and ecological forces.
The artworks in Cobija de Tripas are part of a long lineage of environmental and eco-minded artworks that also include the Land Art movement. Land Art or Earthworks artists such as Ana Mendieta and Robert Smithson expanded boundaries of art by the materials used and the site-specificity of the artworks. However, the works featured here diverge from Land Art in that they treat the Earth not just as a medium or an access point to an idea, but as a part of oneself, of one’s body. The artists in Cobija de Tripas forge visual pathways through which we can interrogate ecology and even climate crises with interdisciplinary art practices. In her 2024 book about Central American emerging artistic strategies, art historian Kency Cornejo introduces the term visual disobedience. The artworks in Cobija de Tripas contend with this idea of visual disobedience, whether by disobeying museum and gallery expectations, colonialist definitions, or local and national borders. The artists featured in Cobija de Tripas set themselves apart from environmental art movements of the past by creating imaginaries of post-border, decolonial worlds. Their work shows that through action, practice, and visual disobedience, these futurities can begin now.
The Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program invites their graduate students to explore how the world can change through experimentation and community-based practices. Art is not created in a vacuum. Artists involve themselves in the space and communities around them. The role that artists have in analyzing, critiquing, and reconstructing various systems and structures reveals itself in social practice: it centers around engagement and impact rather than solely the physical creation of a work. Using multi-medium styles alongside social practice allows artists to expand the boundaries of creative expression, while offering a critique of the politics of display in museums and galleries.
ilia dogov Workshops Registration
EASP MFA student ilia dogovFridays April 12, 19, or 26 12-2pm, Sesnon Faculty Gallery
Friday, April 12, 12-2pm
“Semi-cut, sub-alive” workshop with Ilia Dolgov
Together with plants we will feel, think, and move around the border between past and hope, individuality and collectivity, spoken and unspoken. Each meeting is guided by its own topic (in the title)
Friday, April 19, 12-2pm
“Deepdreams” workshop with Ilia Dolgov
Together with plants we will feel, think, and move around the border between past and hope, individuality and collectivity, spoken and unspoken. Each meeting is guided by its own topic (in the title)
Friday, April 26, 12-2pm
“What there will be for us across the border” workshop with Ilia Dolgov
Together with plants we will feel, think, and move around the border between past and hope, individuality and collectivity, spoken and unspoken. Each meeting is guided by its own topic (in the title)
ilia dogov Workshops Registration