Graduate students in fine arts are metaphorically collaging their studies together for their latest exhibition.

The UCLA Department of Art is hosting its annual Graduate Open Studios on Friday at the UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios. Graduate student in fine arts Nehemiah Cisneros said the event will feature works spanning each artist’s graduate career. Fellow graduate student in fine arts Farshid Bazmandegan said the public will have the opportunity to view the graduates’ individual studios as well as exhibitions in communal galleries all under the same roof.

“Public means many things,” Bazmandegan said. “It can be other colleagues from other departments. It can be museums and galleries. It can be (the) general public, and that’s a really beautiful aspect of this event is (it’s) open to everyone to come and engage with our practice.”

During the Open Studios, visitors will see Bazmandegan’s latest work with steel oil drums, which he said have been flattened and imprinted with symbols to bear personal and political significance surrounding his Iranian identity. Tying into his ongoing explorations of identity politics and displacement, he said his references include his mother’s handmade Persian carpets that adorned his home in Iran. Bazmandegan often uses nontraditional materials in his collage-style art, and he said he dug through his family’s archives to incorporate personal documentation, such as his paperwork to become a United States citizen.

“I’m really interested about the history of objects and items, and this is a big part of my practice,” Bazmandegan said. “Every item in my studio has that rich and political or social identity and value behind it.”

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The inherent freedom to mix other mediums within a sculpture is what led Bazmandegan to pursue the artistic practice in his graduate studies, he said. Previously, Bazmandegan worked with photography and video as an undergraduate. However, he said the roots and foliage he found in the forest surrounding his campus inspired him to experiment with the new medium. Amid the uncharted territory of his new life and identity in the U.S., Bazmandegan said working within the forest resonated with his notion of being uprooted.

Apart from finding a new medium, he said his undergraduate program introduced him to the term “institutional critique,” which reflected how his earlier works directly investigated facets of his life and the surrounding environments. Since then, Bazmandegan said he strives to consider differing points of view when working on historically charged works.

Graduate student in fine arts Raghvi Bhatia said she considers contemporary art to be a religion, which led her to devise her own religion as part of her artistic practice. Bhatia will have ceramic sundials on display during the event alongside a 4-by-4-foot calendar, which she said is composed of 91 tiles. She also said she created a language based on shapes rather than the alphabet since a sacred language is a structural pattern across religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

“I’m not necessarily saying, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of angels that are used in Catholic imagery, so I’m going to put angels and use angels in my work,’” Bhatia said. “I’m not necessarily using specific things. I’m picking elements that occur mutually across the five big religions and then develop those same elements in my practice.”

Throughout her time in the graduate program, Bhatia has worked with various mediums across departments, but she said she primarily works in 3D. But over the course of crafting the body of work showcased in the exhibit, Bhatia said her conviction to reorient religion has only grown.

Encompassing the walls of the gallery, Cisneros said his large-scale paintings emphasize content over structure. He tends to keep the source material for his narrative paintings hidden, but he said he draws from different time periods dating back to the 1800s. This source material is then altered and cut loose from its context to adopt a new meaning. Because of this, he said, it is not crucial for viewers to understand his sources of inspiration to engage with his work, as he prefers them to see what narrative they contribute to the discussion.

“My main concern is for the work to function visually to mass audiences,” Cisneros said. “When you get closer, you can dissect the poetry if you want to. But first and foremost – formally, visually – I want the work to excite conversation and to make people want to stare longer.”

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Based on what one of his undergraduate professors told him, Cisneros said he pushes himself to incorporate a great deal of detail at the often-neglected bottom of a painting as part of his continuing mission to challenge his painting skills. He said the upcoming event is a way to visualize how all of the statements made by his work over the years tie together to demonstrate what he has learned thus far.

“It’s a display of all the different tools in my conceptual or formal toolbox that I’ve learned throughout undergraduate and graduate school,” Cisneros said. “With any major, you pick up things – inspired from your cohort or inspired from your professors or things that you just experienced throughout living life – and graduate school’s really helped (me) organize those and know where to place them.”