Exhibition

MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media presents an exhibition of photography, installations, and video pieces by five MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media students, organized by Randy West and Erin Davis and written about by Noelle Théard.

Noelle Théard, Senior Photo Editor at The New Yorker, states, “There is nothing quite like art school. For two or three years of your life, you immerse yourself in the challenge of self-expression through visual means. Usually, this takes a highly personal turn, since how can you truly know what you are trying to say without taking the time to get to know yourself and what drives you? You have access to the best facilities, professors give their focused attention to your growth, and experts in the field come to tell you more about what awaits on the other side of the degree. When you have done it right, you spend most of your hours quasi-obsessed with the ideas that drive your work. Your peers are invested in your artistic growth, and you learn how to both give and take critique. When the process works as it should, you emerge a stronger artist and a more interesting person. Seeing yourself in a long-running river of creative output that came before you, the challenge is to contribute something that both acknowledges what has been done before, but more importantly, it is to add something new to the discourse. The students of the SVA MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media have done this and more, pouring hours into their projects and thoughtfully defending their work to earn their degrees. I am encouraged by the quality of their work and inspired by their commitment to their art practice. 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.”

Artists featured in this exhibition are:

Alejandro Abarca, The Language of the Gun

Rummaging through the collective North American imagination, Alejandro Abarca’s film and installation works revive archetypes like the cowboy, saint, and priest, invoking acid Westerns of yesteryear. Underlying the canonical references are those that read history against the grain by centering Mexican American icons, alluding to the complexities of borderland identities in the American southwest, particularly in Texas, where Abarca is from. There is no easy or fixed sense of being but rather a disorienting collage of icons from which Abarca draws his inspiration.

Shaohan Fang, En Route

In meticulously executed photographs, Shaohan Fang stages images that interrogate the precipice of adulthood, centering a young woman’s fraught relationship with questions of home. Created in Wenzhou, China, the photographs tap into the tensions between ideal life and reality that most young adults feel upon turning 30, an age that universally signals full adulthood. En Route signals that this arrival is always a few steps ahead of expectations, and that transition itself might be a permanent state of being.

Lia-Alexi Manfredi, Free Skate

Creative and rooted in the real-world subculture of women, queer, and nonbinary skateboarders, Lia Manfredi’s Free Skate celebrates the individuals that make up this dynamic community. Manfredi’s engaging portraits, short-form video projected onto a sculptural installation of a quarter pipe, and takeaway zines make for a comprehensive exploration of an alternative to the male-dominated sport of skateboarding. The work feels genuinely collaborative and attunes viewers to less visible worlds of women, queer, and nonbinary skaters.

Sunmin Park, She is my shadow, I am her echo

Interrogating the mother-daughter relationship, Sunmin Park’s immersive video installation activates performance by representing three generations of women in a push-pull dynamic inherent in the familial bonds between them, centering physical touch and conversational exchange between them. The alternating tension and fluidity in the video and audio works reveal a complex and layered relationship among subjects that sometimes coalesce and at other times contradict each other.

Ari Temkin, The Jewish Dataset

Versed in nascent AI technology and committed to interrogating its methods of making meaning, Ari Temkin’s Jewish Dataset activates these digital tools to interrogate how Jewish culture is represented, reflected, and maligned in these technologies. Like a conductor of an orchestra, Temkin creates structures through which both humans and technology collaborate to create new forms of meaning, for better or worse. Using real-time events as a starting point, Temkin cracks open a view into how new technologies are replicating old stereotypes with absurd and astonishing results.

Written by Noelle Théard