Exhibition

SVA presents “The Visit to the Museum,” an exhibition of illustrated artwork by 20 students in the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program, curated by Viktor Koen, chair of BFA Illustration and faculty in MFA Illustration as Visual Essay. The exhibition will be on view from Thursday, May 15, through Tuesday, May 27 at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 15th floor, New York City. 

“The Visit to the Museum” explores a story where a realistic pursuit turns into a surrealist one; it starts with the search for the painting of a lost relative and results in a protagonist who finds themselves stripped of everything—from clothing to their sense of security—mental or physical.

Time and space continuously twist exponentially in a small provincial museum where expected artifacts unravel into unexpected chaos. Ancient columns, Egyptian sarcophagi, taxidermy, whale bones, buzzard specimens and paintings of questionable value compose a magnificent wunderkammer from which there’s no escape.

A limited set of characters appears only to facilitate the protagonist’s progressive bewilderment by turning his simple purchase proposition into a Gordian knot. Page after page, an initially typical visit to the museum devolves into a time warped sequence of events with rare illustrative potential. Time, space but also individual artifacts and their symbolic details make for the perfect springboard towards a series of images that show and tell elaborate depictions of situations the mind’s eye is often incapable of seeing. 

This multitude of pictorial opportunities translated into a variety of approaches, spanning from picture books that faithfully follow the storyline to cut out paper collages cut by laser, mystery objects in narrative frames, bold portraiture, delicate artifact drawings of personal value and multiple meanings, complex diorama triptychs full of anything one could imagine, detailed architectural blueprints of how madness could unfold from one room to another, alternative suggestions of what a museum galleries can look like, visual documentation of long lost personal and familial history, puzzles that compose by decomposing the mysteries at hand, some recreating the riddle through museum brochures confusing more that they inform and optical illusions that simultaneously reveal what is and what is not to the naked eye.

Artists featured in this exhibition are Presenting works by Bernardo Bagulho, K Downs, Jennifer Emrich, Kailee Finn, Casey Grenier, Siyang Lim, Sitong Liu, Elaine Mou, Nancy Xi Nan, Manasi Patankar, Yuan Peng, Alexandra Smith, Alison Staffin, Mansi Vinay, Ran Xu, Yayun Yang, Yiou Zheng Miki, Hao Zhou, Beatrix Zhou and Dan Zhou

The MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay at SVA is designed to maximize students’ opportunities as figurative artists, from the conventional gallery wall to the full range of 21st-century media. The program fuses the development of creative thinking with technical and communication skills. Additional focus is placed on best practices in navigating the visual art marketplace while empowering students to choose making art as a way of life.

The SVA Chelsea Gallery is open Monday through Saturday, from 10:00am to 6:00pm, and closed on Sundays. It is fully accessible by wheelchair.