It’s not over when he comes. Or is it? The adult confronts his uneasy transformation: the aging child stares into the mirror and restructures the possibilities for who he was and will become. It’s not over when he comes is the thesis exhibition of Andy Nicholas Li (M.F.A. '25). Arranging images and sculpture in multiple scales and materials, Andy examines symbols and fantasies of masculinity where race, animality, selfhood, and sexuality demand questions on our innate sense of what is true. A boy shoots an arrow. A tower stands, a stud of horses. A muscular white man expects something from you. Internalized in our collective psyche as individual fears and desires, these mechanisms reveal where the categories of man, boy, queer, and gay perpetuate and play with power.

With drawings, paintings, sculpture, video, and arrangements of the artist’s possessions, Andy installs a poetic probing inside conflict: meeting the perimeters of care and violence, toy and weapon, lust and loss.

In the following essay, Andy pulls together the theoretical and personal threads for this body of work.