The School of Visual Arts and ArtCake are pleased to present the MFA Art Practice 2026 Thesis exhibition “Finding Here” with artwork by Niki Brisnovali-Grillakis, Anna Gordy, Julie Jablonski, Meghan E. Jones, Em Koch, Artemis Lyu, Richard Montañez, Sarah Parker, and Talia Steinman.
This close-knit group of artists connects through questions around belonging, memory, “placefulness,” migration, de- and re-construction, endurance, and liberatory joy. Visit their group exhibition to experience a wide range of mixed-media work that grapples with seeking resolution, informed by interdisciplinary research.
What will you find? A reimagined Garden of Eden that you can enter and play inside of; a surreal, narrative landscape paintings with embedded residue from New Orleans; costumes for an absurdist bird opera about the housing crisis; wind-activated drawings paired with Wile E. Coyote and abstracted rock formations; an installation of suspended coils that echo iron fences from Greece and beyond; large-format “photo paintings,” printed on the back of photo paper, then further manipulated; delicate yet substantial illuminated barnacle sculptures and video that explores underwater cave diving; redactive poetry on the New York Post and an inflatable Hulk toy in a Dorothy Gale costume; and 2D, 3D, and video collage that reinterprets Judaica through details of NYC sidewalks.
This group of artists channel tenderness in feeling unsettled towards playful processes. They use pre-existing objects, reference imagery and symbols, and cultural and political narratives as source material to transform, subvert, or even create new speculative worlds through. The question becomes: is it even possible to clearly see where and who we are—and if it is, what could bring us there, both as individuals and as a collective?
Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, July 10, 6:00–9:00pm at ArtCake, 214 40th St, Brooklyn, NY. There will be a closing reception on Thursday, July 23, 6:00–9:00pm. The show will be open to the public 12pm-5pm on Saturday July 18th and other times by appointment. Please contact Sarah Parker at 575.770.0424.
ARTIST BIOS
Niki Brisnovali-Grillakis (b. 1999, New York, NY) is a Greek-American artist based in New York. Her work explores the dynamic interplay of identity, belonging, and memory. Drawing inspiration from architectural elements, such as the ironwork of her childhood home in Greece, she creates unique patterns that blend the old with the new. Using materials such as aluminum foil covered with plaster gauze, she constructs installations that connect her personal memories and history to a broader collective experience.
Anna Gordy (b. 1976, Macon, GA) is a San Antonio and New York City-based artist and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor. She is a true interdisciplinary artist who works across many types of media, but her first loves and current focuses are ceramics and fiber. Anna’s work addresses trauma and healing through expressed themes of hope, safety, and belonging, with particular attention to bodily autonomy, civil/social protest, and the pursuit of joy.
Julie Jablonski is a Colorado-based interdisciplinary artist with a formal background in painting and drawing. Indulging in experimentation, Jablonski merges 2D, 3D and digital art making, blending traditional and unorthodox methods resulting in exploratory amalgamations of sculpture, photography, collage, and nontraditional mark-making. Drawing from her background in psychology and a life spent amid the red rock formation of the American West, Jablonski explores place and human experience through the geological idea of pressure over time.
Emily (Em) Koch (b. 1998) is a painter and mixed media artist who creates layered landscapes that unfold as surreal terrains. Koch’s practice begins outside the studio, with collecting and studying the residues of her urban landscape in New Orleans, Louisiana. Everyday motifs like ironwork, symbolism, and insect ecology then start to inform the work, asking how meaning and narrative emerge within a fragmented space. Using canvas and found surfaces, gesture and illustrative rendering, her paintings allow moments of the mark-making process and the materiality itself to shape the composition. Meghan E Jones (b. 1979) draws on her photojournalist background to destabilize the traditional photograph, developing it as a material that behaves like memory. From printing photographs on the back of photo paper where heavily saturated colors drip off the surface, to stapling 3D photo sculptures that crawl up telephone poles, each piece becomes less a document and more an abstract emotional record. Combining photography, sculpture, and painting, Jones’ work critiques how photographic memory is a terrible archivist and instead moves fluidly between shared experiences. Fan Lyu (b.1993) is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist based in New York. By incorporating the extreme experience of cave diving into her artistic practice, she focuses on how people move and survive within unfamiliar, unstable, and often invisible systems. Her practice spans installation, painting, video, and other media. Lines and light flow through her works, becoming recurring visual structures in her practice. She uses delicate and fragile materials to create installations, using them as metaphors for the vulnerability of desire as something always displaced. Richard Montañez (b. 1998) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice primarily operates through methods of subversion, redaction, and culture jamming. He excavates various forms of media, making space for the emergence of his own voice from beneath the coded languages and symbols of propaganda, pop-culture, and art history.
Sarah Parker (b. 1975, Shawnee, Oklahoma) is a multi-disciplinary artist living off-grid in Northern New Mexico. She examines our survival in this modern world by playing with the absurd and dressing up as birds using costumes that she creates. Her work tackles issues like the housing crisis with community-based projects, animating oral histories, and performance.
Talia Steinman (b. 1992) is an anti-Zionist, Ashkenazi artist making collage in New York City from a Jewish Diasporist perspective. She invokes Jewish frameworks through playful ambiguity, iterative layering, obsessive collecting, and transforming old and new together. Between digital and physical formats, she actively abstracts and combines details that range from urban fragments to Judaic objects and symbols. Her works span assemblage, photography, Riso printing, painting, video, bookmaking, and more, and she often makes digital collages on-the-go with her phone.
