The gallery was luminous with white monochrome lighting. Among faint whispers, each rug hung with vivid color and imagery poured out across the room, reflecting across the astonished audience members’ faces.

“I’m Scared,” an exhibit by Master of Fine Arts art student Angela Anh Nguyen, opened Thursday at the Roski Graduate Gallery. The exhibit attempts to answer and explain the intersection of humanity and technology by materializing the immaterial, documenting online phenomena through physical artwork.

“It began with the fact that I was essentially forced to try something new, because that’s what I wanted to do in this program. What’s the point of an MFA program if I’m not experimenting?” Nguyen said. 

She experimented with the exhibit, featuring pieces made through tufting, a type of textile manufacturing used to create a surface with a pile and that can be employed to create rugs.

“I wanted to do something different with it, because it’s such an interesting tool,” Nguyen said. “It’s a gun, which is so violent, but the way that the product sits at the end … is soft and cute.”

One of the most complex pieces of the exhibit, both visually and conceptually, is “A Raymond Williams Reprise: Keywords 2.0.” The rug is in response to a 1976 book by Raymond Williams called “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.” 

“He wrote this book that’s essentially a dictionary of words that are used in culture in society,” Nguyen said. “I was just noticing that these words that were used in his book were being used in contemporary discourse and online discourse in a completely different way.” 

From there, Nguyen made it a visual centerpiece of the exhibit. The goal was to recreate the book, which she succeeded in by framing the rugs around each other to appear as pages with the selected terms from the book.

“A Lover’s Discourse” is a two-part piece commenting on romantic relationships with collages of messages, voicemail transcripts, memes and mysterious imagery. 

Nguyen said the piece is about the digital mediation of amorous relationships, as she was sitting on an archive of emails and text messages of a man who was harassing her for years. 

“I wanted to make something a bit more personal,” Nguyen said. “I didn’t think I was capable of making work about myself. I mean, all of the work is essentially me, but this is, content-wise, what I suffered from, and I think that’s meaningful.”

Finally, the most interactive piece of this exhibit is “7/6/25 – 7/13/25, approx. 12:50-1:00 AM PST,” a live snapshot into this moment on social media and an example of the captivation of social media scrolling. The piece itself mimics scrolling through a revolving conveyor belt that shifts the tufted fabric up. The content of the fabric, along with the scrolling motion, captures live social media usage and allows the audience to sit and engage with it on benches. 

“I feel like everyone doomscrolls, and a lot of time while we’re doomscrolling, we’re not processing anything,” said Michael Tran, a first-year Master of Fine Arts art student. “I’m wondering what kind of major global news I’ve missed while I doomscroll.”

In tandem with the “I’m Scared” exhibit, the Roski Graduate Gallery also featured a back-of-house mini “Query Show” featuring Nguyen’s work, along with contributing artists’ pieces in reaction to the themes of “I’m Scared.” 

“She invited people who worked on the conveyor belt and then other artists that are in her community, as well as her own thesis committee, to then make a mini show that’s in relationship to her show,” said Jennifer West, director of the MFA art program at USC and contributor to the “Query Show.”

The “Query Show” allowed for extended artist interpretation on these topics and feedback among creatives. An overwhelming and unavoidable theme in the “Query Show” was constant interruption by cell phone notification sounds and interference, spooking and tricking audiences. 

“That shows an interface with technology that we use all the time,” West said. 

In unison, the “I’m Scared” and “Query Show” present a united perspective of humanity against all odds of technological advancement, and the persistence of artistic expression through physical and mechanical representation. 

Nguyen said the title of the exhibit came from fear around the current era of anxiety. 

“It became a joke with all my friends, where they were just like ‘She’s scared again,’ ‘Of course she’s scared,’” Nguyen said. “So I just decided to make that the name of the show because I think it embodies how we feel every day.”

“I’m Scared” will be on display at the Roski Graduate Gallery until Feb. 20.