The School of Art at California Institute of the Arts has opened its annual postgraduate exhibition, Slow Fiction, Flashing Nostalgia, at The Reef in downtown Los Angeles. Curated by Nahui Garcia, the show presents new work by 29 artists from the 2026 MFA graduating class, drawn from the programmes in Art, Photography and Media, and Art and Technology. It remains on view through Saturday, November 21.

The exhibition's title pairs two different ways of moving through time. Slow fiction, as the curators describe it, is the deliberate practice of imagining possible futures; flashing nostalgia is the sudden, hazy recall of a distant past. The 29 artists work between those two poles, some building speculative worlds and others sifting through memory, archive and inheritance.

The materials on show are correspondingly wide-ranging. Some pieces incorporate layers of paint peeled from the floors of CalArts studios, grounding the work in the artists' immediate surroundings. Others reach further back, drawing on archival photographs from the New York Public Library Picture Collection and on the utopian dreams of the 1960s. The futures on view take cues from sources as varied as Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Carl Jung's theory of the unconscious, autonomous feminist communities in rural areas and expressions of joy through queer futurism.

Across sculpture, installation, painting, video and photography, the artists consider the uncertainties of everyday life alongside the pressures of global crises. A limited-edition poster designed by Mexico City-based Panama Studios accompanies the exhibition and is available free to visitors. Gallery hours are Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, noon to 5pm, with weekend visits by appointment.