Elsewhere, Otherwise: UBC Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition 2026

The Belkin is pleased to present Elsewhere, Otherwise, an exhibition of work by the 2026 graduates of the University of British Columbia’s two-year Master of Fine Arts program: Yihk Qu Chan, Violet Johnson, Amanda Kachadoorian Jordi, Nevada Lynn, Scott Massey and Golriz Rezvani. This program in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory is limited each year to a small group of five to six artists. Their contributions to this exhibition are the result of intensive feedback and development within an intimate and discursive working environment. During the past two years, these artists have worked closely with their advisory committees, engaged with their fellow MFAs in weekly group critiques and reading groups, artist talks and open studios, and built relationships with their peers and the faculty of the department’s art history and critical and curatorial streams to develop their own aesthetic, theoretical and historically grounded artistic practices.

Elsewhere, Otherwise: UBC Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition is curated by Melanie O’Brian and presented with support from the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia and Martyn Golding.

Yihk Qu Chan

Yihk Qu Chan (Canadian, b. 1997) unpacks the cultural and sociopolitical systemic traumas she has inherited as a second-generation Hong Kong-Canadian settled within the tensions of colonial legacies. Her research looks at intergenerational immigrant relations and the invisibility of Asian labour under Western hegemony, while her studio practice centres the intimacy of the personal and explores how the materialization of time through ritualized art-making may soften the delineations between one’s memory, the present and their imagination of the future. Yihk Qu, an Anglicized namesake, is a textual synthesis of her identities as Natalie Chan and 易翹—a pairing of characters which come together to mean “to exchange the meaning of excellence,” and reflect an ethos defined by a desire to seek what transformative potentials can be found through translating across cultural borderlines. She holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University, co-founded the local Vancouver arts collective Withintensions and continues to enjoy educating, illustrating and tattooing alongside her conceptual work.

Violet Johnson

Violet Johnson (American, b. 1999) is a mixed Native and Euro-American artist, a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe and a Yurok descendant. Johnson’s analogue photo-sculptural practice directly engages with bodies of waters along the Pacific Northwest Coast from Washington to California as a means of tracing significant sites and memories of her personal and familial histories. By directly engaging with gathered water from significant sites – rivers, lakes, ocean, creeks and taps, water takes on a form of mark-making and storytelling. Johnson holds a BA from the University of Oregon. 

Amanda Kachadoorian Jordi

Amanda Kachadoorian Jordi (b. California, 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, whose practice examines global migration, bureaucratic systems and cross-border identities through sculptural installation, photography, printmaking, painting and video performance. Jordi investigates how bureaucracy shapes everyday existence, drawing on familial and personal experiences of migration through systems of governmental control and cultural exchange, while continuously navigating those systems and examining how the body and psyche is formed through surveillance, movement and in-betweenness. Jordi holds a BA in art practice from the University of California, Berkeley and was artist-in-residence at Bread&Salt in Barrio Logan, San Diego (2019). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Ahoi Galerie in Altstadt Luzern, Switzerland (2024) and Oceanside Museum of Art, California (2021). Her work was featured in New American Paintings, Pacific Coast Issue #163 (2023).

Nevada Lynn

Nevada Lynn (Canadian, b. 1973) is an interdisciplinary Red River Métis artist of mixed European ancestry whose work explores Indigenous resurgence, relational care, and visual storytelling through research-creation and material practice. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she has taught, and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts (2024) and the Fred Herzog Award for Visual Art and Community Engagement (2025). Lynn lives and works on the shared, unceded territory of the Skwxwú7mesh and Lílwat Nations in Whistler, British Columbia.

Scott Massey

Scott Massey (Canadian, b. 1971) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work connects specific inherent material qualities to concepts of deep geologic and astronomical time/spacetime. Using an experimental methodology while often incorporating subverted apparatus in the development of his work, Massey posits an “astro-material poetics” as the foundation of his practice. He accentuates and amplifies phenomena, heightened through artificial means or slight manipulations, proposed in speculative formations of precarity. Through a combination of considered material selection, industrial fabrication processes, artisanal craftsmanship and restrained gesture, Massey’s works endeavour to engage deep-time references alongside our comparatively transitory lifetimes. Massey holds a BFA in photography from Emily Carr University, and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada.

Golriz Rezvani

Golriz Rezvani (Iranian Canadian, b. 1980) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting and drawing, with a recent focus on installation and bread as a central material. Her work examines bread as both a medium and a domestic social artifact. Working with installation and readymade forms, she transforms this culturally loaded material through acts of marking, erosion and alteration. Her practice engages questions of gendered labour, care under conditions of inequality and the politics embedded in acts of nourishment and deterioration. Rezvani holds an MFA from Azad University, Tehran and a BFA from Soureh University, Tehran. Rezvani has participated in numerous juried and solo exhibitions and has worked as an instructor at Emily Carr University and Vancouver Film School. She is a recipient of a 2024 SSHRC Graduate Scholarship.