Thank You in Advance:
2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition

April 4 - May 10, 2025
USF Contemporary Art Museum

April 25 - Exhibition Tours - SPOTLIGHT! A Festival of Design, Art & Performance

This annual exhibition features Master's Thesis work by the 3rd year Master of Fine Arts candidates in the USF School of Art and Art History. This year the featured artists are Jocelyn Chase, Olin Fritz, Adrian Gomez, Michael Lonchar, Emily Martinez, and Tom Rosenow.

 

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

View and download a pdf of the Thank You in Advance: 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition catalogue. The 52-page full color publication is available to students and museum visitors without cost, and includes an essay and MFA artist profiles by Laurie Rojas, and texts by USFCAM Director Margaret Miller, and USF School of Art & Art History Director Andrew Scott Ross. (13MB)

 

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

View and download a pdf of the Thank You in Advance: 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition exhibition checklist.

 

VIRTUAL TOUR

Explore this virtual 360 degree interactive walkthrough of Thank You in Advance, the 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition. For the best experience click the View Fullscreen icon in the lower right of the window. Virtual tour Courtesy of USF Access 3D Lab, Dr. Laura Harrison.

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jocelyn Chase

Jocelyn Chase (b. 1984, Springfield, MO) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans sculpture, ceramics, painting, zine-making, darkroom printing, and gallery installations. Their art explores the interplay between dynamic flows and situational forms through various material processes. Across all mediums, Chase addresses the inherent loss of meaning and representation found in technocratic systems. From 2008 to 2022, Jocelyn lived and worked in NYC as a media arts technician for exhibitions in art museums while continuing their darkroom and studio practice. Jocelyn earned a BFA in Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2006) and is about to complete an MFA in Studio Art at the University of South Florida (2025). Jocelyn’s artwork has been exhibited across the United States and in Germany, Greece, and Taiwan.

Website: chasejocelyn.com
Instagram: @chasejocelyn_

Olin Fritz

Olin Fritz (b. 1997, Phoenix, AZ) makes art with a capital "F." One so supple it changes you on every level and your entire outlook on life. Exploring the interplay between humor and elegance, attraction, and discomfort his practice transforms the banal and discarded into animistic objects that are both glamorous and grotesque. By employing techniques that borrow from Surrealism and Camp, Fritz invites viewers to navigate spaces of tension and contradiction, where beauty emerges from unease, and the familiar becomes uncanny; a Frankenstein collage of everyday materials, collected over time in junkyards, yard sales, and nature. Having grown up in the Arizona desert breeds an awareness of cast-away things. Everything becomes useful, resonating, for example, with California Desert junk assemblages. These things amass to create a kind of relic. All seem to sprout from a form, like a growing tumor, they become bulbous and extravagant, sterilized from the implication of their original context.

Adrian Gomez

Adrian Gomez (b. 1994, Seattle, WA) is an interdisciplinary artist who examines the intricacies of being a first-generation American. Drawing inspiration from pre-Colombian motifs, religious icons, and culturally significant objects he makes works that take form as sculptures. Examining personal history, loss of traditions, and the cyclical nature of labor, his works emulate a snapshot of his lived experience. Adrian received his BFA in Ceramics at the University of Washington (2018). He continued his education at Tyler School of Art (2019) and participated in a two-year residency at Pottery Northwest (2022) in Seattle. Currently finishing his MFA at the University of South Florida, he is working towards expanding his practice through the use of new processes in metals, sound, and video.

Website: adriangomezart.com
Instagram: @adriangomez.art

Michael Lonchar

Michael Lonchar (b. 1997, Waterbury, CT) is a multidisciplinary artist working with sculpture and video to create large-scale installations about his experiences with mental health. Using primarily wood, Lonchar builds structures that contain symbols used to express euphoric and dysphoric emotions. Living with bipolar disorder, he tries to show the emotional extremes of his life in relation to memories of his personal history. Lonchar’s style fluctuates between the minimalist and the maximalist. The structures are often barren and utilitarian, but after careful surface treatments and use of found objects, they convey deeply personal, even sentimental, ideas. Michael Lonchar earned his BFA at the Minneapolis College of Fine Art and Design in 2019. He has shown at several notable institutions, including Franconia Sculpture Park, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine, Currents New Media, and Heiress Gallery, among others. Lonchar had his first solo exhibition, In the front door, out the back of the head, at REVERB Gallery in 2024.

Website: michaellonchar.com
Instagram: @michael_lonchar

Emily Martinez

Emily Martinez’s (b. 1999, Queens, NY) work investigates fantasy and myth in fashion, religion, and gender. She combines these elements to empower the figure and create a form of escapism through fictional landscapes and narratives that foster a theatrical and heightened sense of reality in which brown figures take center stage. She is focused on elevating brown bodies in the tradition of painting through scale and color. Often drawing from Renaissance paintings or Mexican murals that depict Christian beliefs and extravagance, Emily subverts the motifs of these periods by using those themes to develop new worlds around spectacle, sexuality, womanhood, and magic. She received her BFA from the University of Central Florida in 2022 with a minor in Latin American Studies. Emily lives and works in Tampa, FL, and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of South Florida.

Website: martinezemily.com
Instagram: @emily.mart1nez

Tom Rosenow

Tom Rosenow (b. 1996, Lancaster, PA) is an experimental printmaker whose work investigates contemporary experiences within Internet Culture. Through varied techniques, he translates digital collages of personal photos, memes, video stills, and found imagery into analogue prints. Seeking to subvert the disposable nature of the online content he references, he creates “time capsules” by way of archival art objects. Through using bitmap patterns (converting a tonal image to black & white dots) there is a sense of both deterioration and flattening within his work. No matter the context of the source images, the visual hierarchy is often completely leveled. By placing politically charged imagery next to low-brow jokes, he simulates the experience of consuming online content via recommendation algorithms (ie. Browsing the “For You Page”). Tom Rosenow received his BFA from The Pennsylvania State University in 2020. In the Fall of 2023, he received the Graduate Student Research Collaboration Award which propelled the research of his current body of work. This grant culminated in his first solo exhibition in Florida, Analogue Dreams of Electric Sheep.

Website: tomrosenow.com
Instagram: @tomrosenow

 

Thank You in Advance is supported in part by The Stanton Storer Embrace the Arts Foundation, the USF School of Art & Art History, the USF College of Design, Art & Performance, the Allen W. and Janet G. Root CAM Endowment, the Kathleen Binnicker Swann Endowment, and the Sara Richter IRA Operating Fund.