While varied in form and content, the projects pull strongly towards understanding cultural, generational, and familial relationships, and interpolating personal experiences to more universal understandings of each artist's place in the world. In the current reordering of the globe and a dawning era of cultural isolationism, 2025 will likely be remembered as a rupture point that delineates a before and after in terms of artists’ freedom of expression. While they may not have imagined it as first-year students, the SVA MFA class of 2025 stands as a testament to the excellence of American higher education. These students should feel exceptionally proud of their accomplishment. I trust that their vision, creativity, and resilience will help carry us through what is to come.

- Noelle Théard

At a moment when we collectively sense the excruciating limits of visual evidence, the works gathered explore that which sits at the edge of sight, beyond capture, and on the edge of detection. We find complex practices that seek out imperceivable experiences, buried memories, and ignored or lost narratives. The students acknowledge dominant ideological and aesthetic framings while developing artistic, experimental imaging techniques to redirect the eye, to gesture at a whole lifeworld beyond vision and the frame. Together, they conjure suppressed sites and stories of navigating contingency and freedom, of constraint and possibility, of the churning destabilization of displacement and exile.

- Nora Khan

As they grapple with issues of connection and disconnection, alienation and communion, freedom and control, the artists assembled in this exhibition and its related screening program reexamine reality and interrogate the ways in which we collectively navigate its complexities. Their emotionally, intellectually, and aesthetically resonant thesis projects remind us to look, to question, to feel—and to act. Together, they demonstrate the power of lens-based media as a beacon of hope and possibility to collectively see the world anew.

- Nat Trotman

Over the past two years, our daily lives have been profoundly transformed as political divisions, public health concerns, and economic shifts have rewoven the very fabric of society. For the 2022 MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media graduating class—the first to enroll in the department during the Covid-19 pandemic—these conditions have comprised an inescapable yet productive context for their work. Each of the twelve artists whose projects appear here has created their own powerful aesthetic statement, but through their individual material and stylistic choices, each has also responded to the contemporary moment. The result is a uniquely coherent yet varied thesis exhibition.

-Nat Trotman

As the world continues to alter at a rapid pace due to the pandemic, the 2021 MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media graduating class focuses on ideas of modern living from around the globe. Throughout the exhibition, the viewer is confronted with the complications of growing up on the internet, the implications of mass media and pop culture, and feelings of dense urban living. The artists within deal with design elements to help tell their pertinent stories; patterns emerge throughout the show and serve to synchronize the group as a whole unit.

-Kris Graves