In Passage

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “In Passage,”an exhibition featuring works by 15 students from the MFA Computer Arts class of 2026, curated by Sophia Maria Takvorian (MA 2025 Curatorial Practice). The exhibition will be on view from Wednesday, June 3, through Wednesday, June 17, with its opening reception on Thursday, June 11, at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor, New York City. 

“In Passage” exhibits the works of students who are pushing boundaries, embracing experimentation, and interrogating the conventions of their artistic and sociocultural moment. “Passage,” meaning the act or process of moving through, under, over, or past something on the way from one place to another, comes from the word “pace,” to step or stride, originating from the Latin “pandere”: to stretch. This exhibition illuminates that stretching of the space between the onset of a journey and its destination, that narrow way through to the other side of something, or a lingering within the bounds of a threshold.

Passage can connote movement, transit, time in motion, or an excerpt of a story. Its activity prompts us to also consider its antithesis: pause, reflection, rest. In an age when technology and culture feel rapid, entropic, and exponentially expanding, it appears as if existing society is hard to grasp. “In Passage” invites viewers to move through the space with a fluidity and openness of the mind, to expand their imaginations, and to take pause and center their focus.

The exhibition gestures toward this idea of passage in works like Transit from Ronnie Ahlborn, who explores the multiple realities we constantly move through and between, projecting visual essays onto transparent and reflective surfaces. Positioned on either side of the surfaces, viewers can simultaneously see themselves and each other, experiencing this digital world of projection, reflection, and refraction that tends to divide. In Hyeonghoo Cho’s Floating Wishes, an interactive public sculpture is activated both by the movement and lingering of its audience, exploring spatial transformation shaped by an accumulation of movement and presence rather than immediate reaction.

Elsewhere,  students ask viewers to slow down within this passageway, to concentrate their awareness and linger in the tranquility of these immersive realms they have created, like in Olha Velykholova and Daniel Mao’s De-Stress or in Tiffany Wu’s Bloom / Drift / Flash / Fall. Conversely, in Zachary Dresher’s Orgone, viewers are invited to engage in notions of history, cognition, and the body, contemplating how structures of power are reified both consciously and passively.

The artists of this show offer a meditation in motion, asking viewers to hold their attention steady and create a space for contemplation and repose in its many shifting rhythms, loops, and dissolving boundaries.

The artists in this show include: Ronnie Ahlborn, Calais Chen, Hyeonghoo Cho, Zachary Dresher, Xiaoyue Feng, Alexia Hartogensis, Bixuan Ji, Maya Khalil, Marzena Milowska, Pinmo Shu, Olha Velykholova & Daniel Mao, Tiffany Wu, Akshita Yadav, and Jieqi Zhou.

The MFA Computer Arts program at SVA emphasizes creative experimentation and a multidisciplinary approach to making art with computers and emerging technologies. Dedicated to producing digital artists of the highest caliber, the department guides each student in developing a personal artistic style through a course of study tailored to their needs. Students from around the world come to study in this two-year degree program, which has earned nine Student Academy Awards. For more information, visit mfaca.sva.edu

The SVA Chelsea Gallery is open to the public Tuesday through Friday,  10am to 6pm. It is fully accessible by wheelchair.