The San José State University (SJSU) Master of Fine Arts 2024-2025 cohort presents their Lift Off 2025 group exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art San José, curated by Zoe Latzer. The group exhibition, titled Who ‘am’ I, without you? will be displayed in a two-part exhibition. Part 1 opened on April 4, 2025, at ICA San José, and the second exhibition opened on June 19, 2025.
In addition to their solo thesis exhibitions, SJSU MFA Candidates participate in a group exhibition and collaborate with MA Candidates in Art History and Visual Culture to create the annual Lift Off Catalogue. Hosted in 2025 at the ICA San José, the twelve students showcase a wide range of mediums, including painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, photography, digital art, and multidisciplinary installations.
Part 1: April 4th, 2025 – June 8, 2025 Participating Artists: Andrew Marovich, Chelsea Stewart, Erin de Jauregui, Mary Morse, Samantha Saldana, and Timna Naim. (Profiles in a previous post)
Part 2: June 19, 2025 – August 24, 2025 Participating Artists: Michelle Frey, Xiao Wu, Lisa Heikka-Huber, Mona Farrokhi, Sam Swenor, and Shea Windberg. (Profiles below)
Michelle Frey is a visual designer, painter, and installation artist working in San José, California, and completing her MFA at San Jose State University. Her provisional pictorial prints and sculptures are gestural extensions of her thoughts in tactile mediums, as well as site-specific exhibits. Frey vacillates between figuration, observation, and abstraction in paint, paper, wood, and pewter. Her work responds to the effects of current events, unseen caregiving, and labor that keep families and the environment functioning. Her current art practice focuses on interactively sharing aesthetic rituals of processing grief and the gravity of loss through various materials.
Xiao Wu is a digital media artist currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at San Jose State University. His skill set spans various areas, including coding, real-time interactive multimedia programming, web interactions, and AI.
He reflects on subtle changes in societal norms and the impact of technology on daily life. By experimenting with new technologies and aesthetics, he aims to translate his thoughts into tangible objects and spaces while also exploring and redefining the boundaries of digital media.
By integrating cutting-edge technologies into his art, Xiao aims to push the boundaries of digital media and engage audiences in meaningful experiences.
Lisa Heikka-Huber is a transdisciplinary artist working on her MFA in Spatial Art at San José State University. Born in Los Angeles, CA, Lisa comes from a family of accomplished sculptors. She moved to the Washington, D.C. area for high school before returning to California to pursue her studies in glass blowing at Shasta College. She holds a BFA in Sculpture and Small Metals, a BA in Political Science focused on global water policy, a Museum and Gallery Practices certificate, a minor in Art History and in Scientific Diving from Cal Poly Humboldt.
In addition to her MFA studies, Lisa is pursuing an MA in Social Sciences through Cal Poly Humboldt’s Environment and Community graduate program, where she continues to explore the intersections of art, science, and environmental advocacy.
Shea Windberg is a contemporary photographer who engages with an experimental and process-driven approach to the film medium. Blurring the boundaries between photography and abstract painting, Windberg uses analog techniques such as reprinting, re-photographing, burning, and chemical manipulation to create richly textured, highly caustic images that explore memory, anxiety, materiality, and impermanence. Their work challenges traditional notions of photography as a documentary medium, instead emphasizing the transformative potential of material process and the instability of perception. Windberg conveys a chaotic, anxious, and raw condition of being through the deployment of abstracted, deteriorating images that consist of industrial landscapes, fragmented bodies, and a world on the precipice of consuming itself.
Through digital media, graphic design, and professional knowledge of corporate marketing and communications, Sam Swenor builds graphic systems that take a stand, hold information, educate others, and communicate visual messages through digital and physical touchpoints. Her work operates in the space of institutional critique as it pertains to artifacts that have been displaced through time, with a focus on Hellenic antiquity.
Sam Swenor currently works at eBay as Lead Designer, Global Communications and as a Lecturer at San José State in the Department of Design. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from Chapman University in 2017, and she graduated with her Master of Fine Arts in Digital Media Art from San José State University in the fall of 2024.
Mona Farrokhi is a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work explores visual noise, sensory distortion, and interactive technology. Trained in industrial design and based in the Bay Area by way of Tehran, she blends procedural visuals, projection mapping, and spatial systems to investigate how perception breaks down—how glitches, hallucinations, and interference shape self-image.
Her installations utilize tools such as TouchDesigner, StreamDiffusion, and Kinect sensors to track bodies, process image data, and fragment reality in real-time. Projects like DOYOUSEEitNOW and The NOISE I See examine neurological and optical phenomena such as visual snow and derealization.
Her approach is both technical and personal—built by hand, wired from scratch, and shaped by feedback, distortion, and the tension between presence and misrecognition.
The San José State University (SJSU) Master of Fine Arts 2024-2025 cohort presents their Lift Off 2025 group exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art San José, curated by Zoe Latzer. The group exhibition, titled Who ‘am’ I, without you? will be displayed in a two-part exhibition, which opened on April 4, 2025, at ICA San José, with the second exhibition to follow in summer 2025.
In addition to their solo thesis exhibitions, SJSU MFA Candidates participate in a group exhibition and collaborate with MA Candidates in Art History and Visual Culture to create the annual Lift Off Catalogue. Hosted in 2025 at the ICA San José, the twelve students showcase a wide range of mediums, including painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, photography, digital art, and multidisciplinary installations.
Zoë Latzer, Curator and Director of Public Programs at ICA San José, presents a question from Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence: Who ‘Am’ I Without You? as the title for the San José State University 2025 MFA exhibition. In the context of the Anthropocene and the sixth extinction—a time defined by both devastation and interconnection- the MFA graduates all explore and grapple with their understanding of being artists during a time of technological advancements and socio-political turmoil.
Andrew Marovich is an MFA in Spatial Art whose work addresses questions of process, puzzles, and riddles. He is a skilled craftsman and mixes media, but always comes back to working with hand-done metalworking processes.
Chelsea Stewart was born in 1997 in San Mateo County, CA. She lives in San Mateo and works in Palo Alto, CA. Stewart is currently attending San José State University while working towards her MFA in Spatial Arts. Stewart completed a residency in the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto, CA, and currently works as the Gallery Manager at the Pamela Walsh Gallery in downtown Palo Alto.
She was a 2022 Content Emerging Artist Awardee and featured in Content Magazine’s issue 14.3, “Perform,” published by SVCreates, as well as in issue 12.4.
Erin de Jauregui is an MFA Candidate in Photography who focuses his work on time, place, and storytelling. His work takes the viewer on a journey to see the world through an unimaginable perspective. He will be showing photographs that challenge perceptions and tell innovative stories.
Mary Morse is an MFA candidate in Spatial Arts at San José State University, working in various mediums while exploring texture, color, and memory in her work. Her interdisciplinary approach enables her to create work that is unique, introspective, and innovative. She is showcasing work that combines soft materials and rigid forms in felt, incorporating painting and metalwork into her installations.
Samantha Saldana is a lens-based interdisciplinary artist whose scholarship explores community social justice issues, identity, family relationships, and intersectionality. Saldana is a graduate of the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University, Monterey Bay, and is currently an MFA candidate in the Photography Program at San Jose State University.
Saldana’s work engages accessibility to arts education, advocacy, and mentorship opportunities.
Timna Naim is an MFA candidate in Spatial Arts whose work is playful, tactical, and socially engaging. They work primarily in clay and utilize performance, social practice, and experimental glazing techniques to make the fantastical tangible. See their performance art, ceramics, sculpture, and installation at ICA San Jose.
#69 – Conrad Egyir Conrad is a Ghanaian artist based in Detroit, working in figurative narratives of the African Diaspora. His work blends religious and West African folk iconography within domestic scenes, portraying a deep understanding of the history of portraiture. He utilizes shaped canvases and relief elements to reference stamps and postcards as metaphors for migration; journals, books, binder tabs, and chapters as metaphors for time and the archiving of ideas.
In our conversation, Conrad discusses his process, the inspiration to this current series as well as his guiding life philosophy.
His exhibition will be on view in the ICA San Jose’s Main Gallery in conjunction with Conrad Egyir: A Chapter of Love, a Facade Project at the ICA San José through February 20, 2022.
Conrad Egyir: A Chapter of Love and Conrad Egyir: Chapters of Light are generously supported by program partner Facebook Open Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Pamela and David Hornik, Tad Freese and Brook Hartzell, and Applied Materials. Follow Conrad at @conrad_egyir and conradegyir.com On view at Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose (https://www.icasanjose.org)
This episode’s music is “408” by Jack Pavlina. read more about Jack in issue 14.1 Winter 2022, released Date Dec. 9, 2021 Follow Jack at @jackpavlinamusic Spotify: https://bit.ly/jackpavlina
Martha Sakellariou is a 49-year-old artist who began her journey earning multiple degrees from the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece. She went on to obtain her MA in printmaking from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2005 she worked as the Creative and Art Program director for a climate change awareness program for Friends of the Earth, London. In 2013, her family moved to the Bay Area where she now holds a studio space as an independent visual artist with the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto.
Sakellariou’s work has strongly focused on the concept of home and the tensions, realities, mythologies, and allegories of everyday life—the rituals and relationships which shape what we consider our shelter. The shelter-in-place order has certainly challenged the process by which she composes her art, as the dynamics with family and her own internal dialogue reshape what “home” means. The concepts that had previously brewed and steeped internally have now played out in a myriad of forms, manifesting with new meanings. The very act of quarantining at home brings an unprecedented emotional toll, especially in the face of ongoing uncertainty. While intense, the situation has led Sakellariou to moments of profound creativity and learning opportunities. In her mind, reality is “a dichotomy—dream and nightmare scenarios overlapping—so I understood the significance of that moment not just empathetically but tautologically.”
“Nobody should direct what art should be, where it should take place, when and how and by whom it should be done.”_Martha Sakellariou
At the beginning of the pandemic, Sakellariou was in survival mode, shifting her attention to recalibrating home life and observing the world in transition. During her daily walks, however, her artistic instincts called to her, creating a need to communicate something significant. She came upon a serene and beautiful home, envisioning the image of a woman blowing a balloon projected onto the house. After introducing herself to the homeowner, she created a photo mural on the house of the woman inflating a balloon. “The balloon represents a bubble—a place of safety, protection, and containment, but also implies life in an echo chamber, isolated, disconnected from reality.” This beautiful overlay of realities speaks powerfully to many in their current situation. Even in isolation, Sakellariou has found a way to engage an audience and the wider world. She has since created a total of six temporary photomurals on various houses in her Palo Alto neighborhood, which just goes to show that art can be created anywhere. “Nobody should direct what art should be, where it should take place, when and how and by whom it should be done.”
Like locking puzzle pieces, Scott and Shannon Guggenheim—or “Stannon” as their staff fittingly knows them—are the producing entity and owners of 3Below, the new home of Guggenheim Entertainment since the closing of the Retro Dome, San Jose’s previous realm of movie and sing-along fun. 3Below delivers top-quality surround sound as you view an indie film or enjoy a classic flick in the cozy Theater 2.
3Below is also the home of the ComedySportz show and provides acting classes, sing-along to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and theater productions. No matter what you come for, your experience is curated by creators driven by the need to provide entertainment that promotes joy. In our conversation, Shannon was sure about the journey to opening, the road they have been on through COV-19, and the spark of hope they feel as they can see the light at the end of the tunnel as they slow to reopen.
Shannon shares her own experiences through SIP and announces a new production series they are dreaming about called “San Jose Stories.” The series will consist of interviews with locals that are then developed into an improv interpretation.
Social Media: 3belowtheaters 3below if featured in issue 11.0 “Discover” 2019. ________________ This episode’s music is “Tang” by Chris Emond. Follow Chris on Spotify, http://bit.ly/ChrisEmond.
