On Oct. 11, 2025, the CalArts MFA Class of 2025 opens Proxy, Chimera, Oracle at CalArts at The Reef, the Institute’s new cultural platform and venue in Downtown Los Angeles. Curated by critic, curator, and educator Nora N. Khan, the annual postgraduate group exhibition features work by 34 artists, all recent graduates of the CalArts School of Art’s MFA programs in Art, Photography and Media, and Art and Technology.
Proxy, Chimera, Oracle includes sculptures, films, paintings, and a range of hybrid, mixed media works, many of which take up afterimages as material. A bright light, prolonged exposure—an afterimage is the lingering visual that follows overstimulation of the eye. A sensation remains even after the source is gone: the memory of a structure, a presence, taking form as imprints, traces, shadows, and blur. The exhibition presents aesthetic and imaginal strategies for living in the wake, after homes, communal spaces, safe havens, and any semblance of certainty have been evacuated.
“The 34 artists in Proxy, Chimera, Oracle understand that the wake is best approached obliquely—through scores, assemblage, and rituals. Art seeds at the edges, an attempt to control the fallout of the wake,” Khan explains in her curatorial statement. “Each work functions as both diagnostic tool and survival manual, revealing how we live in multiple wakes simultaneously: in the aftermath of empire, in structures that persist through perceptual shifts, in the continued catastrophe of the present. They respond to psychic debts induced by loss, theft, and enclosure with imaginal strategies towards alternative exits.”
Participating artists include: Adriana DiNapoli, AJaeCea Carlie x Luisa Pinzon, Alexandra Pasquale, Anatola Araba, Catherine Wang, Chinning Liu, Dar San Agustin, Erika Keck, Hengyu Wang, Ione Wang, Jade Smrz, Jake Thornton, Zengjie Chai, Jayson Mittman, Jeffrey Martín, Kiko Thomas, Masha Sheinina, Mei Gong, Meixi Liu, Michele Lorusso, Pedro Alejandro Verdin, Raymond Ren, Rica Kagawa, Rocky Hayden, Sining Zhu, Siqi Fan, Siyona Ravi, Smonica (Si Ming) Lin, Sophia Le Fraga, Taylor Thomas, Ti lee, Yanying Zhu, Yulya Valuy x Dasha Avdeeva, and Yuqiao Zhang.
Across two weekends—Oct. 18–19 and Nov. 8–9—a slate of public programs will be staged at The Reef, including artist talks, theoretical lectures, discursive panels, performances, readings, curatorial walkthroughs, and more. The weekend will also include poetic oracular interventions by CalArts faculty Carribean Fragoza, Muriel Leung, Matias Viegener, Brian Evenson, Gabrielle Civil, Kini Sosa (Critical Studies MFA 24), and Rowland Smith III (Critical Studies MFA 24) and chimerical sounds by Stanley Zappa (Critical Studies MA 25). Both weekends have been organized by curatorial researcher Erica Min (Critical Studies MA 25).
A complementary exhibition publication gathers the secret, hidden writings and texts central to each artist’s practice, along with buried material drawn from the curatorial process and rich, wide-ranging conversations about the ideas that made Proxy, Chimera, Oracle possible. The publication was edited by Khan and Min, designed by Becca Lofchie (Art MFA 20), with the support of current Reef residents Valerie Costa (Art MFA 25) and Ingrid Yu-Ju Tai (Art MFA 25).
The annual CalArts postgraduate show is intended to provide context and visibility for recent graduates, as well as an opportunity to connect with the larger Los Angeles art community. Previous iterations of the exhibition have been organized by Malik Gaines, Meghan Gordon, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Andrew McNeely, Audrey Min, Catherine Taft, and Aurora Tang, among other notable curators.
