Love would feel like this

MFA Thesis Exhibition

by Inga Manticas

April 14 -18, 2026

Reception: Friday, April 17th, 6-8p

If I had one wish …

Love would feel like this consists of drawings and sculptures that grew up together in my studio. It’s a forest, a river of new substances, a procession of characters with disputed and shifting identities, material marriages, corkboards of a conspiracy theorist, and whatever else might be attracted to this place. 

I am trying to communicate with beings whose spirits and material forms are very different from my own. Beings who we can feel but cannot see or name, who exist two places at once, who have hundreds of identities, who are the opposites of themselves, who contain all the rest of us. What practices and processes can put me in touch with plants, land spirits, gods, animals, hills, rivers, gems, gnomes, ghosts, past or lost selves, the numinous and ineffable? 

I wonder what I can say to them and what I can give them, and I try to hear their responses. I wonder, how can I love them? How can I feel their love back? How can I feed or house them? Should I?

How can I speak about them to others? Should I?

Some more questions that made this show: 

While I’m making an object, am I taking commands from a spirit who wants to inhabit it? 

Or, when I make an object (a body), does a spirit arrive to inhabit it, choosing it based on its material and spatial characteristics?

Or, does the material create its own spirit?

What kinds of drawing practices can reveal what is invisible in the space around us? 

What languages do I have access to, by way of my interaction with the material world? 

How can I eliminate the distinction between a body and a place, a body and a landform?

What spiritual work happens in the forest, and what spiritual work happens in the studio?

How many new bodies can I make for myself?

More About Inga 

Inga Manticas is a visual artist from northern California, now living between North Carolina and New York. Their studio practice joins drawing, frottage, found object assemblage, metal and ceramic sculpture, and the development of new sculpture materials. 

In their work, Manticas reaches towards connection with spiritual and other-than-human beings. Rooted in personal encounters with unknown presences in the landscape, their work luxuriates in the mysteries of how identity, consciousness, and power manifest in the material world. They draw inspiration from fairytales, environmental histories, animist cosmologies, and their own fantasies of alternative embodiment.