AHUA 2025 Spring Exhibition: (Un)natural Confluences

The AHUA Annual Art Exhibition provides the UCI community with the opportunity to cultivate their artistic skills and showcase their art, develop connections across disciplines, provide meaningful exposure to the arts, and support efforts to make the arts a stronger, more pervasive part of the UCI student experience. The AHUA Art Exhibition provides a discursive space for individuals from all backgrounds to find common ground, allowing for a variety of ideas to surface and collaborative initiatives to follow. The exhibition provides aspiring artists with valuable exposure to, and the opportunity for dialogue with, collectors, other artists, and the UCI community.

The theme of the ’24-’25 exhibition is “(Un)natural Confluences.” The Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, and within a small fraction of that time, the force of humanity has woven numerous threads of interconnected existence between nature and society. By placing ourselves within the natural processes of the earth, streams of knowledge, infrastructure, and culture have become intertwined to create lands and seas of memory. Humans have emerged from nature through evolution, creating a confluence of the pre-human world with the start of the Anthropocene. The term “Anthropocene” frames the vast lifespan of the Earth as a planet within the collection of human-centered experiences that are defined by our culture, politics, etc and ultimately labeled as “history.” Throughout our existence, how have we, as minuscule entities, utilized and become inseparable with the world we live in?