Shifting Ground: Master of Fine Arts Candidate Exhibition II

Shifting Ground: Master of Fine Arts Candidates Exhibition II

Gary R. Libby University Gallery + Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery, University Galleries, The University of Florida

Artists: 
Samuel Aye-Gboyin
Emily Conaty
Rubin Gabeau
Karina Yanes
Elmira Yousefi

As Flounder Lee, one of the curators, elaborates on his introduction to this exhibition, “the ground is stable until it isn’t. It shifts beneath our feet, either slow and imperceptible or sudden and catastrophic. It carries histories—of labor, migration, resistance, love, and loss— yet it is not fixed. The artists in "Shifting Ground" engage with the material and metaphorical instability of place, memory, and identity. Their works
chart the tensions between permanence and change, presence and absence, the future and the past. This exhibition explores how the act of making becomes an excavation, a navigation, and a negotiation between what shifts and what remains.”

“As the ground moves, so too does the labor that shapes and reshapes it, leaving traces in its wake. Labor is embedded in every portion of this exhibition—as subject matter, as material, as gesture, and as process. It is present in the weight of what is built and what is demolished, in what is repurposed, stitched, formed, and reimagined. Labor here is both visible and invisible, a force that sustains and a burden that marks. This exhibition does not romanticize labor, nor does it obscure its realities. It deals with the rhythms of making and unmaking, about survival and persistence, as well as the ways work inscribes itself onto bodies, materials, and landscapes. In this space, labor is not only the physical effort of creation but the ongoing negotiation of place, memory, and meaning.”

Flounder interprets and summarizes the works in the show:

Elmira Yousefi shifts and displaces fragmented landscapes from Tehran to Gainesville. Humor helps turn the impossibility of reconstructing home into an ongoing process of adaptation, reconfiguring place, memory, and unstable ground. The video and sculptural installation moves mountains to connect distant locales.

Emily Conaty traces the aftermath of intentional fire through oil paintings that weave together myth, ecology, and family history. Transformation is both destruction and generative—a cycle of clearing, loss, and return. The work honors the continuous labor of tending to what remains and grounding oneself through memory, ritual, and change.

Karina Yanes layers ceramic, embroidery, and censorship to explore cultural suppression, architecture, space, exclusion. The project examines labors of love, loss, and resilience, using material traces as acts of resistance. Watermelon, ceramics, and tatreez shift from tradition into a symbolic stance, holding ground to prevent erasure.

Rubin Gabeau has created a sculptural meditation on existence and transformation. Four figures stand at the thresholds of life’s stages, where myth, psychology, and transcendence converge. The installation grounds itself in a shifting architecture of the self—where meaning is built, unbuilt, and continually remade.

Samuel Aye-Gboyin reconstructs a Ghanaian game kiosk as a layered site of communal play,
resourcefulness, and migration. Spaces built with care, yet always at ungrounded with the risk of demolition. The installation utilizes scent, sound, and video to capture shifting memories and highlight the labor of surviving and thriving.

Flounder concludes, “Together, the artists featured in Shifting Ground unearth, reconstruct, and reimagine. Their work reminds us that the ground is never truly static and that what we stand on is always in motion. Through labor, material, memory, and form, they offer ways of navigating shifting terrain—finding footholds, marking paths, and creating spaces for what comes next. These artists are moving from their graduate studies into the world and an art world that is continually shifting but setting the groundwork for futures where they can thrive.”

The exhibition is co-curated by Jesús Fuenmayor and Flounder Lee.

Exhibition-related Programming
Reception: April 18, 2025, 5-7 PM

Additional information
The graduate program in Art History at the University of Florida offers a global art history program covering a breadth of content from across time and space. The program also offers a graduate certificate in curatorial studies. For more information, please visit: https://arts.ufl.edu/academics/art-and-arthistory/programs/art-history/degrees-ways-to-study/

About University Galleries
The University of Florida University Galleries’ mission is to be a platform for relevant and experimental art research and a place where pressing contemporary conversations are amplified and shared with the university and expanded communities. The UG advances the School of Art + Art History’s commitment to the visual arts by offering an experimental space to bring people together around art and ideas, improving accessibility and inclusivity through direct student and community engagement; increasing the school’s visibility as a center for critical discourse around artistic research, production, and scholarship, leading with preeminent programming.

University Galleries are comprised of three art galleries. Gary R. Libby University Gallery (GRLUG) provides the greater Gainesville community with a contemporary venue that explores new directions in visual art, incorporating historical perspectives. Exhibitions feature nationally and internationally known artists, studio art faculty, and MFA graduating thesis projects. The Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery and the Constance and Linton Grinter Gallery of International Art present art exhibitions that are organized by graduate student curators, in conjunction with the director of the galleries, allowing students to learn experientially
about curation, organization, and exhibition making.

Parking Information
Reception Parking
The closest parking to the Gary R. Libby University Gallery is the lot behind (to the west of) Tigert Hall. From University Avenue, enter campus via Buckman Drive and turn left onto Union Road. Follow Union Road through the 4-way stop. The parking lot entrance is on the right just past Walker Hall. Parking restrictions for this lot are lifted at 5:30pm.

For more information, please contact the University Gallery at (352) 273-3000 or visit our website at www.arts.ufl.edu/galleries.

About the College of the Arts
The College of the Arts is one of the 16 colleges and more than 150 research centers and institutes at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. The College of the Arts offers baccalaureate, master’s and Ph.D. degree programs in its three institutionally-accredited schools — the School of Art + Art History, School of Music and School of Theatre + Dance. The college is home to the Center for Arts in Medicine, Center for Arts and Public Policy, Center for World Arts, Digital Worlds Institute, University Galleries and the New World School of the Arts in Miami. More than 100 faculty members and approximately than 1,200 students work together daily to engage, inspire and create. The college hosts more than 300 performances, exhibitions and events each year. Faculty and students also exhibit and perform at other local, national and international venues. To learn more, visit www.arts.ufl.edu.

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