This Time Tomorrow: Group exhibition | Boston University MFA Painting 2024

Téa Chai Beer.                  Cody Robert Hook Bluett.               Sarai Bustos

Huakai Chen                     Natalie Conway                               James Gold

Abbi Kenny                       Yingxue (Daisy) Li                            Julia McGehean

Sayak Mitra                       Stephanie Petet                              Jacob Salzer

Sidharth Shah                   Sophie Thervil                                 Ellen Weitkamp

Morgan Lehman Gallery is pleased to present This Time Tomorrow, an exhibition showcasing fifteen artists from Boston University’s 2024 Master of Fine Arts Painting program. 

The capstone exhibition holds space for a cohort that has developed a distinctive bond through frequent exchanges of communal meals, ideas, jokes, supplies, and knowledge. This Time Tomorrow marks the time they officially

go their separate ways, leaving behind a record of this fleeting––but wholly transformative––moment of togetherness. Grounded in a shared education and commitment to painting, the exhibiting artists collectively reflect on two existential questions posed by The Kinks in their exhibition’s namesake song: “Where will we be? What will we know?” Exploring the perception of time, Huakai Chen, Stephanie Petet, and Yingxue Daisy Li feel their way through abstraction by allowing each painting to develop at its own pace. Over varying durations, these artists cultivate inventive forms, responding with both intense grit and thoughtful touch. This intuitive balance activates a present state of continuity that radiates through their substrates and beyond. 

Abbi Kenny, James Gold, and Sidharth Shah reference the quantifiable aspects of time, carefully measured through sequence and duration. As Kenny sources imagery from cookbooks and Gold from instruction manuals, they precisely render cultural histories in contemporary circulation, while Shah drafts the emergence of a fragile future impacted by extinction. Each artist considers the time and labor implicated by their sources, developing mechanically minded processes that complement their investigation of the handmade.

Several artists in this exhibition have an innate sensitivity to image-making unbound by the conventions of pictorial space. Through varied applications of assemblage, Julia McGehean, Sayak Mitra, and Jacob Salzer cultivate a dialogue between the fixed identity of material reality and the intangible. Casually sourced objects are supported by a painterly language intertwining the acts of thinking, speaking, and seeing. Conceptually, Natalie Conway and Téa Chai Beer eloquently compress visual information, building gestural portraits of mind and body through incremental layers of

color and line. Conway sands down tactile beds of gesso to reveal underlying text and texture, while Beer composites moving figures to capture the multiplicity of the self in real time. 

Ellen Weitkamp, Sophie Thervil, Sarai Bustos, and Cody Robert Hook Bluett offer emotional interpretations of people and places that consciously expand beyond observable evidence. Their paintings, composed of subjective slippages that divest from their source, create direct suspensions between now, then, near, and far. Driven by intricate facets of the artist's experience, each deliberate decision highlights articulate sensibilities in technical mark-making. This Time Tomorrow is simultaneously rooted in personal and collective histories; the artists interpret time by layering motifs of fragmentation, (re)construction, and wholeness with the fluidity of daily life. As they move together into a period of transience this exhibition renders the fullness of an unknown future as it gradually unfolds for fifteen individuals––for now as one.