A new exhibition at the Arthur Ross Gallery features work by two graduating MFA students.
4 min. read
Artworks by the two master of fine arts students graduating in the Class of 2025, Eissa Attar (left) and Alvin Luong, are in a thesis exhibition at the Arthur Ross Gallery through a new collaboration with the Weitzman School of Design.
Attar and Luong are the only two students in the Penn MFA Class of 2025. Usually about 15 students are in each MFA class, however, the School intentionally restricted the size of the cohort due to the current reconstruction and expansion of Weitzman Hall on 34th Street.
Attar, who is from Saudi Arabia, decided to add a master’s degree in city planning and stayed an extra year. Luong, who is from Canada, delayed starting the MFA at Penn because of the pandemic. As a result, the two became a class of their own and will graduate together.
“We are kind of in a little zone of exception,” noted Sharon Hayes, professor and chair of the Fine Arts Department, at the exhibition opening. “For us, it’s a magical opportunity.”
Hayes said the collaboration between the Gallery and the School is “a transformation of weight and of meaning.” The exhibition is “a culminating aspect of the curriculum,” that allows students to bring their work to the public, she said, and “engage with a form of making—exhibition making—that they will continue to do again and again and again, and that requires all sorts of negotiations, compromises, expansions.”
Eissa Attar (left) and Alvin Luong.
Knowing that their thesis pieces would be in the Gallery and working directly with Zimmerman to curate the show, was “really expansive and also highly pragmatic for a working artist,” Luong says, including thinking strategically about written statements, having support of a professional installation team, and working with a graphic designer. “Showing up to the gallery was incredible.”
The MFA thesis exhibition has been held offsite for the past several years. “We’re thrilled to have it back on campus,” said Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, inaugural faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery, at the opening. “Together, we’re committed to creating a space where interdisciplinary dialogue is encouraged, the academic mission of the University is amplified, and the creative practices shaping our world are brought to the forefront.”
‘Poetic reflections’
The work by both students “deals with histories that are inscribed in geographies, both relating back to their identities,” Zimmerman says.
The title of the show, “Scattered Earth, Sounded Depth,” draws from both students’ practices. “It evokes an archaeological process, an unearthing or revealing of poetic reflections and submerged histories,” Zimmerman says. “Scattered earth speaks to the notion of burial and displacement in Eissa’s work, while sounded depth refers to Alvin’s plumbing the depths of time.”
An interdisciplinary artist and urban planner, Attar’s practice includes photography, video, and printmaking with “an overall meditation on sand in his work,” Zimmerman says.
For example, Attar’s “Extract You Again” is a series of sand drawings on acetate layered over images of consumer products and waste, reflecting on cycles of consumption and erasure in Saudi Arabia’s evolving landscape. Featured in a small room within the gallery, “Prayer Rock,” is a stop-motion animation projected onto real sand on the floor showing writing on stones that is erased and rewritten.
“A lot of times I think about what gets eroded and about the desert as something that also consumes, and the consumption objects and the redacted figure in the context of Saudi Arabia,” Attar said during the opening.
Luong’s large-scale 15-minute video installation,“Corals of Bidong,” features underwater footage of coral, connecting the history of Malaysia’s Bidong Island as a refugee camp following the Vietnam War to its present-day use as a coral research facility. The accompanying 11-minute video, “Camp Atlanta,” shows an aquarium in Atlanta where corals seized by U.S. customs are cared for during legal proceedings. Situated between the videos is a sculpture, “Cot,” that mimics the steel-rod structures that are used to grow coral underwater in Bidong.
“Alvin is finding moments of parallels between the lives of the refugees and the lives of the coral that are farmed off the coast of Bidong Island and end up in other countries,” Zimmerman says.
During the opening, Luong noted that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. One of the refugees who found safe harbor on Bidong Island was his father, who was resettled in Toronto. The first contemporary commercial shipment from the coral farm went to Canada. “That little footnote to the history of the coral farm became everything for the project,” said Luong, who has been on several grant-funded research trips to the island since the summer before coming to Penn in 2023.
The resulting artwork “imagines an afterlife” for those who drowned and perished, “the refugees shapeshifting into corals,” Luong said, creating “a contemporary myth” that collapses the history of the island during the refugee crisis with its role as a contemporary commercial farm that exports corals to the same places that refugees, like his father, who were resettled from the island through humanitarian visas.
In her concluding remarks at the opening, Hayes addressed Luong and Attar: “Your work gives us new understandings of aesthetic form, new methods of challenging simplistic assumptions and pathways to expand our horizons that will follow for years to come.”
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