Syracuse University MFA thesis exhibition and screening
March 10–15, 2026
Film screening: March 10, 7–9pm
Scandinavia House 58 Park Avenue (btwn 37th and 38th Streets), New York, NY 10001
Exhibition opening reception: March 12, 6–8pm
Microscope Gallery 525 West 29th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001
Panel discussion: March 14 2–4pm, Leigh Ledare, Emma Hapner and Stephanie Wang-Breal in conversation with the curator.
Microscope Gallery 525 West 29th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001
In the exhibition Harsh Is Where We Live, curator Evan Starling Davis presents a group of artists exploring what it means to reside in a world seemingly at odds with morality itself. Practically, the exhibition serves as a gathering space, interweaving the work of seventeen emerging artists responding to the sociopolitical conditions they embrace and refuse. It asks viewers to pause and breathe—to reflect. To listen. To reconsider what has been perceived as immovable truth. From this space emerges the possibility of a new vantage point: one that reconsiders our relationship to the world, our upbringings, and the environmental forces that have shaped our ways of seeing.
Across media and methods, works in the exhibition trace how large-scale forces—capitalism, patriarchy, colonial histories, technological mediation, social surveillance, among others—settle unevenly into everyday life. What emerges is not a singular image of crisis, but a series of lived registers: bodies carrying memory, landscapes marked by erasure, relationships strained by power, and interior worlds shaped by uncertainty.
Harsh Is Where We Live treats “harshness” not as spectacle, but as lived texture—something felt in the body, rehearsed in daily routines, metabolized through image, sound, gesture, and refusal. The exhibition unfolds as a constellation of registers and responses: some loud, some quiet, some unresolved. Together, they reflect the uneven ways reality presses upon us, and the strategies artists develop to survive it.
Participating artists: Reyad Abedin, Umar Bashir, Teddy Berg, Atienah Cape, Jared Dominique, Carla Erausquin, Taylor Gearhart, Sophia Hashemi, Huimin Huang, David Kossack, Dasol Park, Duyen Pham, Sarah Rokh, Sanjana Sharma, Marianna Smith, Carl Voss, Jiayue Yu
Evan Starling-Davis is an American-based writer, producer, and curator conjuring portals through story—excavating everyday realities layered within the unseen, the forgotten, the fantastical, and buried beneath the surface of society. As an Afrosurrealist, he doesn't just study narrative—he alchemizes it, remixes it, and curates it within pedagogies of care. From critical literacy programming to immersive installations and film, every project hums with theory, bio-mythographic spirit-work, and refusal to leave imagination at the door.
The College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University has a tradition of excellence in educating cultural leaders that goes back more than 150 years. Students in art, design and film and media arts enjoy the benefits of an intimate and rigorous interdisciplinary program with access to the resources of a major university; small class sizes; an award-winning and diverse faculty; and semester residency programs with mentoring from prominent artists and curators. Recent graduates have received numerous exhibitions, awards and residencies, including Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, screenings at the Cannes Film Festival and a MacArthur “genius” grant. With semester residency program opportunities in Los Angeles, New York City and Berlin and New York City and such Syracuse institutions as Light Work, the Everson Museum of Art and the Urban Video Project, the college has built an educational environment that thrives on critical thought and action.
