Transcending Perspectives

Alessandro Seccareccia,

Featuring: Agnes An, Alejandro Aguirre, Khalilah Asaka, Billy Hancong Chen, Hannah Daigle, Mercedes Fernández, Lu Gao, Guy Grabowsky, Kelly Han, Chris Jackson, Ellen Kirkpatrick, Lang Lang, Prince Nwaohuocha, Azusa Pan (also known as “World”), Lindsay Perryman, Kanishka Puri, Alanna Reid, Alessandro Seccareccia, Emma Sobel, Jalyn Turner, Jonah Siegel, Alvin Ukpeh, Vasudev Vashisht, Vriddhi Sawlani, Way Wang, Wei Wei, Keke Yang, and Xuecen Zhang.

The artists in this exhibition unveil visions that reside in the realm of the extraordinary. Their works subtly emerge, as if from the periphery of our vision, beckoning insistently for our undivided attention and discerning gaze. Brought into the sharp relief of clarity, these images unfold their once veiled meanings. They reside in a space that is both known and otherworldly, straddling the line between the familiar and the foreign. These photographs dwell in the ambiguous terrain that blurs reality and imagination, consciousness, and dreams, charting a course through the overtly known to the covert, the suppressed, or the intimately dreamt to reveal certain truths. This exhibition was curated from current students from the MFA Photography Program at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

About the Artists

Alejandro Aguirre / The Parts of Transportation

Alejandro is a Brooklyn-based photographer who is a current MFA photography student at The New School. He was born and raised near Denver, Colorado and graduated from Colorado College with a philosophy degree, joined the military, and earned his Green Beret. In conjunction, he worked for the USPS as a rural carrier for close to 17 years, living an unexceptionally exceptional life. Life at the office can be mundane, perpetual, and purposeless, but it can also be adaptive, fulfilling, and purposeful. Postal routes have shaped his photographic perspective, illuminating the subtle changes in everyday existence and enhancing his ideas of light as transformative, process as poetry, and communication as privilege. All these features play heavily in his photography and help him depict stories that are unfolding and seemingly unfinished, revealing forgotten aspects of the human condition.

Khalilah Asaka / Father

Khalilah Asaka is a photographer from Baltimore, MD. She is currently based in Manhattan, New York where she studies at Parsons School of Design. Her text-driven projects explore memory and the subconscious, and aim to capture her ever-changing relationship with her past. Her double exposures and pixelated time-reels carry a dreamlike presence, challenging viewers’ perception of what is real and what is fake.

Billy Hancong Chen / Untitled

Billy Chen is an artist based in New York City. Born and raised in Shanghai, he moved to New York alone to pursue education at the age of 14. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 2021. During college, the darkroom attracted him as a space for personal contemplation. The medium presented itself as a means to expand thoughts and clarify his relationship with different societies. His work interrogates the surface of images and the conventional perception of images as flat objects. Billy crafts sets of paper maché objects and photographs the assemblage iteratively. By overlaying plains of image space, Billy draws parallels between the hidden depth of images to hidden layers of cultures. Billy’s work was included in the group exhibition “Sip from the Skull: Chapter I” by Agora, “Liminal Edifice” at Gallery MC, and Pingyao Photography Festival 2023. Billy is currently pursuing his Master degree in Fine Art Photography at Parsons School of Design.

Hannah Daigle / Lin and Willow at Home

Hannah Daigle is a photographer and mixed media artist from New Orleans, LA. She is currently based out of Brooklyn, New York and her work explores intimate familial relationships and the human connection to AI via memory vs reality.

Mercedes Fernández / Two Sisters and a Third

Mercedes Fernández is an image-maker based in Brooklyn, NY. They are currently expecting the completion of a Master of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in July 2024. Mercedes primarily works with the body in relation to the environment they are placed in. She observes the absurdity of everyday life and the performance of being. Through digital manipulation, humor and absurdity, their work questions how bodies interact with their surroundings and objects. The bodies in turn become objects themselves, devaluing the canon of objectified bodies.

Lu Gao / Untitled

Lu Gao (b. 1997, China) is an artist working with photography based in New York. Gao graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing, China (2020); she then resided in a Zen monastery in Hunan, China for two years where she studied Zen philosophy alongside her studio practice. Gao will receive MFA in Photography at Parsons School of Design in June 2024. Gao has been exhibited in the Pingyao International Photography Festival (Pingyao, China), CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), Alliance Française de Pekin (Beijing), Photoville (New York), and All Street Gallery (New York), among others.

Guy Grabowsky / Untitled

Grabowsky’s photographs range from pictorial to abstract and are created with and sometimes without the camera. He utilizes a hybrid and expanded field of photography — combining traditional with unorthodox forms of analogue and digital production. At times Grabowsky blends materials including tape and acrylic with drawing, expressionistic gestures and minimalist motifs of repetition as a form of mark-making. Here, process is crucial not just as a method of production, but also conceptually. Grabowsky allows a serendipitous spontaneity to inform the visual dynamism and poetics of the images he constructs. Many of the photographs are the result of having navigated through both digital and analogue spaces. This navigation is a way of constructing images. Grabowsky’s methods of intervention allow him to manipulate the indexical and pictorial space, altering expectations and perceptions associated with our understandings of ‘photograph’ and ‘image’.

Kelly Han / Untitled3

Kelly Han is a lens-based artist from New York City. Born in South Korea, she immigrated to the United States at the age of 10. She studied art in New York and Florence, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art Studio from State University of New York at Geneseo. She is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography at Parsons School of Design.

The influence of the artistic community in Florence shaped Kelly’s aspirations to become a photographer, as well as fostered her deep passion for travel. Her extensive explorations around the world have endowed her with a broad international perspective, which is reflected in her photographs and videos. Embracing the streets as her canvas, Kelly captures life as it unfolds with a sense of boundless possibilities and excitement. Through her art, she challenges our preconceived notions of different cultures.

Chris Jackson / Brief Candles

Chris Jackson is an interdisciplinary artist from Chicago and currently working out of New York City. He received his BFA from Columbia College Chicago in Theater Performance and is currently working towards his MFA in Photography from Parsons / New School. In 2014 Chris co-founded and served as Producing Artistic Director of Pulse Theater Company, A Jeff Award winning 501 (c) (3) Performance-based company currently operating out of Chicago. He is the recipient of the Black Theater Alliance award for Best Director of an Ensemble for his production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which received widespread acclaim.

Ellen Kirkpatrick / Weight Of Water 2

Ellen Kirkpatrick is a visual artist living and working in New York City. Kirkpatrick’s work is expansive in medium. She produces photographs, videos, projections, drawings, paintings, and sculptures that surround but are not limited to topics of surf culture, sociology, philosophy, climate change, feminism and aging. She is committed to art that engages with her community and initiates change.

At present, Kirkpatrick is researching the myth “Echo and Narcissus” from Ovid’s Metamorphoses through underwater video and photography as well as documenting food delivery bikers in NYC. Kirkpatrick’s practice extends to collaborative projects. She is co-writing a book with a botanist in México on native plants. Also, she is exploring the relationship between her grandmother and lipsticks in a social experiment made possible by FaceTime and willing participants on the streets of NYC.

Lang Lang / Island On Land

Lang Lang is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist and the founder of the creative studio No.29. Graduating with a BFA in Fashion Design from Parsons, she is currently on the cusp of completing her MFA in Photography. Since 2020, Lang Lang has been devoted to launching evolving projects both in Shanghai and New York, emerging from dialogues on art, design, and innovation. Her work captures immersive sensory experiences, inviting audiences into the realm of experimentation and discovery.

Prince Nwaohuocha / Baby Boy

Azusa Pan / “World”

Lindsay Perryman / Momo and Maya

Lindsay Perryman (b.1997) is an artist that unravels the intricate interplay of identity, exploring the nuances of African American queer experiences. Through their use of photo, they combine their work with vibrant intention, aiming to evoke emotions that transcend time. Perryman’s work focuses on the complex nature of what it means to be oneself.

Kanishka Puri / I Become a Tree When I See One

Kanishka is an artist and researcher exploring concepts of eco-feminism, neutral placemaking, the effects of violence and politics on women. She is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Photography at Parsons School of Design, where she is further developing a research-based practice that aims to produce multimedia interdisciplinary work and extend it to community-based social practice. She interprets photographs by rephotographing, collaging, and layering them by various printmaking methods. In 2024, she received the Student Research Travel award to investigate the rising Island Feminism in Hawaii. She was also awarded a 50% merit scholarship by the Parsons School of Design.

Alanna Reid / Garden Party

Alessandro Seccareccia / Cement dinosaur

Alessandro Seccareccia is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Gatineau, Quebec, a small city situated directly on the Quebec/Ontario border across from Canada’s capital, Ottawa. He was raised by Italian immigrants in a predominantly French-Canadian neighborhood situated in a historically complex socio-geographical area. The subjects of society, diaspora, and economics are common themes found throughout his photographs. Alessandro obtained his BFA at Concordia University in Montreal and is currently enrolled in a Masters of Fine Arts program at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Emma Sobel / Two Sisters and a Third

Emma Eaton Sobel is a lens-based artist raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She earned her BFA from the University of New Mexico. She explores growing up in a culture of objectification, personal trauma, and her relationship to self and others. Sobel makes work with a personal narrative, utilizing her body and staged sets —investigating how we view women, her identity, her fears, her memories, and the society she lives in. Sobel has exhibited her work throughout the United States and Internationally—most recently in China at the Pingyao International Photography Festival. In addition, at SITE Santa Fe, Arizona State University, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Salina Art Center Kansas, Yuma Art Symposium, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Photoville New York City, SPE Nationals, and Le Pave D’Orsay in Paris, France. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Art in Photography at Parsons School of Design The New School.

Jalyn Turner / Joel

Jalyn Turner is a freelance photographer from the Pacific Northwest currently based in Jersey City, NJ. Jalyn’s work centers individuality and the private moments of relationships by engaging the viewer through a shared knowledge of clichés inspired by the world of film and fashion. She currently attends Parsons School of Design and plans to graduate with her MFA in Photography in May 2025.

Jonah Siegel / Untitled

Jonah Siegel is a Vermont and New York based artist whose work looks intently at the functions and material of photography. Siegel received his Bachelors of Arts from Castleton University (2022) and is currently an MFA photography candidate at Parsons School of Design. Combining photo, sculpture, and installation, Siegel works to muck out the stalls of the photographic medium, in hopes of unearthing a truth of its materiality. His focus on the material and shape of the photographic language rests on a self proclaimed presumption that photos are an inherently sculptural medium.

He has been included in a number of group and solo shows around New England and New York City including shows at Gallery MC in New York City, Photoville Festival, and was awarded jurors choice in 2022 for the 120 regional show in Glenn’s Falls, New York.

Alvin Ukpeh / Untitled III

Alvin Ukpeh’s work is centered around identity, masculinity and culture using himself and his body as a subject, object and operator. He is currently based in New York City completing a Photography MFA program at Parsons School of Design. He is originally from Nigeria and misses his mom’s signature dish called Yamarita sauce.

Vasudev Vashisht / River Monster

Vasudev Vashisht is a lens-based creative researcher-practitioner combining a range of analog, digital, and alternative processes to question and understand the contemporary natural landscape. He is a graduate student in the Photography School at Parsons School of Design and is a current awardee of the Parsons Student Research Award. Currently, he is researching a photography-based climate justice project in the mining regions of the Peruvian Andes to address environmental and social challenges.

Vriddhi Sawlani / Untitled

Vriddhi Sawlani is an artist from India currently studying for my MFA photography at Parsons School of Design. Her work revolves around the theme of grief, exploring how it manifests in different senses. Through mediums like photography, installation, and sound, she aims to create immersive experiences that evoke deep emotional responses from viewers.

Way Wang

Way Wang is an artist whose practice contemplates the intricate nature of memory, exploring how the ongoing act of revisiting the past shapes our understanding of both individual and collective histories, particularly arising from the ambiguity of Taiwanese identity. Engaging in an interdisciplinary approach that includes found text, archival images, artist’s books, poetry, and performances, Wang employs ephemeral materials such as ashes from burnt papers and dust gleaned by sanding large-scale pigment prints. The choice of materials unveils Wang’s ritualistic and labor-intensive endeavor to navigate the complexities of personal and national memories.

Wei Wei / Bailizhou 1

Keke Yang

Keke Yang was born and raised in China and has lived in the U.S. for nine years. Yang holds a BA in Photomedia from University of Washington, and an MFA in Photography at Parsons School of Design in New York. Yang is a conceptual artist whose work is a profound exploration of the fluidity of existence, challenging the boundaries of materiality and perception. Drawing inspiration from the cultural experiences with the fluidity of gender identity, her work manifests these concepts through photography, video, and installation, as well as performance.

Xuecen Zhang / UNTITLED

Xuecen Zhang is a New York based artist born in Shanghai, China. Her journey in art began with studying Graphic Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, currently enrolled in the Master of Fine Art program at Parsons School of Design. Her art includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, and crochet which delve into the nuances of atmosphere, concentration and expression.

Organizations

Parsons School of Design

A pioneer in art and design education for more than a century, Parsons School of Design is one of the most prestigious and comprehensive colleges of art and design in the world. Critical thinking, collaboration, and reflective practice are at the heart of a Parsons education. Located in the heart of New York City, the school offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the full spectrum of design disciplines. A student-centered curriculum allows for both focused and interdisciplinary learning to master concepts, technologies, and research methods that cut across a wide array of fields. By synthesizing theory with craft, and combining art and design studies with the liberal arts and business, Parsons prepares its students to shape scholarship in their field and make art and design that matters. Its faculty of notable artists, design practitioners, critics, historians, writers, and scholars exemplify an extraordinary breadth of vision. The graduate Photography program functions as a 21st-century studio and think tank. The goal of the 26-month program is to prepare graduates to define the creative role of photography within contemporary culture, as practicing artists and scholars. Challenging participants to move beyond current paradigms—to anticipate and set trends, rather than follow them.
NYC Parks

NYC Parks is the steward of more than 30,000 acres of land — 14 percent of New York City — including more than 5,000 individual properties ranging from Coney Island Beach and Central Park to community gardens and Greenstreets. We operate more than 800 athletic fields and nearly 1,000 playgrounds, 1,800 basketball courts, 550 tennis courts, 65 public pools, 51 recreational facilities, 15 nature centers, 14 golf courses, and 14 miles of beaches. We care for 1,200 monuments and 23 historic house museums. We look after 600,000 street trees, and two million more in parks. We are New York City’s principal providers of recreational and athletic facilities and programs. We are home to free concerts, world-class sports events, and cultural festivals.