Main Projects is pleased to present Signal Boost: New Voices fromVCUarts MFA Program, the gallery’s second annual exhibition highlighting new voices from Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts. Featuring work by Hammet Reavis, Frances Adair Mckenzie, Clara DeWeese, Katy Layman, Phaedra Beauchamp, Elizabeth Schweizer, and Megan Koeppel, the exhibition brings together artists working across sculpture, painting, photography, glass, and textiles.
Now in its second year, Signal Boost continues Main Projects’ commitment to creating opportunities for artists at pivotal early moments in their careers. The exhibition offers a charged cross-section of practices shaped by questions of perception, material intelligence, and the unstable boundaries between object and image. Across the works on view, the world is measured, fractured, rendered, dyed, cast, and reassembled - not as a way of resolving meaning, but as a way of making its instability visible.
The artists in Signal Boost approach materials as active agents. In Hammet Reavis’ caliper works, tools designed for precision become strange systems of suspension, holding delicate objects in states of tension and scrutiny. Frances Adair Mckenzie’s cast glass sculptures draw from her broader investigations into digital materiality, stereoscopy, and the ways technology mediates vision, yet they remain insistently physical - weighty, reflective, and uncertain in their presence. Phaedra Beauchamp’s glass Timepiece similarly turns to a material defined by both fragility and transformation, allowing a skeletal candle form to suggest ritual, duration, and organic structure.
Elsewhere, the image is treated as something equally unstable. Clara DeWeese’s photographic work fractures the portrait into a field of layered surfaces, where recognition is interrupted by the processes of collage, compression, and reconstruction. Katy Layman’s paintings carry the logic of the screen into physical space, rendering everyday scenes through the visual codes of games, interfaces, clues, and rewards. In these works, looking itself becomes participatory - a mode of navigation shaped by systems we may not fully control.
Megan Koeppel’s naturally dyed and quilted works offer another kind of interface between body, material, and memory. Drawing from botanical sources, fiber traditions, and the language of abstraction, Koeppel approaches quilting through a contemporary lens, allowing inherited techniques to become sites of experimentation, reuse, and transformation.
Together, these artists reveal a generation of makers attentive to how things are held together - materially, visually, and conceptually. Their works do not simply represent the conditions of contemporary life; they test the tools, surfaces, and structures through which that life is perceived. Like a signal altered through transmission, Signal Boost gathers practices that are still forming, still sharpening, and already resonant.
Signal Boost: New Voices from the VCUarts MFA Program will be on view at Main Projects from June 4 through June 19, 2026.
Participating artists:
Hammet Reavis, Frances Adair Mckenzie, Clara DeWeese, Katy Layman, Phaedra Beauchamp, Elizabeth Schweizer, Megan Koeppel.