School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Synthesis, 2026

Building on two years of successful collaboration, ART on THE MART’s Spring 2026 season spotlights emerging talent from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), the internationally recognized Chicago institution and one of the world’s leading schools of art and design.
Synthesis is a newly commissioned program created by SAIC graduate and undergraduate students, who have paired up to produce 14 original works. Organized around the theme of “Synthesis,” the project challenges students to consider the monumental scale and architectural specificity of THE MART, exploring how visual projection and sound can converge seamlessly within its façade and surrounding urban environment. Each student pair—one leading the visual component and the other the audio composition—brings distinct expertise in materials, technologies, and collaborative methodologies. Together, they develop integrated works that treat light and sound not as parallel elements, but as interdependent systems shaped by the site.
Synthesis was developed under the guidance of Jan Tichy, an ART on THE MART alumnus whose commission Artes in Horto – Seven Gardens for Chicago premiered during the platform’s inaugural year in 2018, and Austen Brown, a Chicago-based sound artist and educator. Both Tichy and Brown are faculty members in SAIC’s Department of Art & Technology/Sound Practices.

Migratory Bodies
Projection: Mehraneh Salimian
Sound: Sierra Zucker

Migratory Bodies examines the phenomenon of bird collisions during migration, when millions of birds pass through the city along a major flyway and are disoriented by glass and artificial light. Many collide with buildings, falling unseen onto the sidewalks below. The work follows a young immigrant girl who discovers an injured bird while playing hopscotch; through this encounter, echoes of migration and displacement emerge, linking human and avian journeys.

Open Object
Willa Jaymes - Projection
Alexander Morgan - Sound

Open Object explores the relationship between the body and architecture to create intimacy at a massive scale, collapsing the distinctions between body, sculpture, and space.

Singing Skin
Projection: Grecia Corado
Sound: Sivan Gilbert

Singing Skin reimagines the body as rhythm—an uncontainable pattern that challenges the tendency to view femme-presenting bodies as fixed and consumable. The projection and vocal meditation create a tension between structure and overflow, transforming THE MART’s façade into a breathing surface for a shared, embodied experience.

Consume(d)
Projection: Chelsea Pipino
Sound: Mue Wu

The Mart serves as a symbol of commerce, housing luxury goods and showrooms. By transforming its façade into a womb-like container and placing a human figure within it, the work explores the tension between individual and system: a society continually “overfed” by a capitalist economy, yet constrained by the very forces that sustain it.

Fire Reverie
Projection: Zhenye Feng
Sound: Charlie Gross

Thousands of years ago, early humans lit bonfires in dark caves, casting shadows onto stone walls within resonant acoustic spaces. Guided by this moving light, they created some of the first works of art, responding through music and dance. By transforming the limestone façade into a digital cave, the work bridges the modern metropolis with early human history.

Duet
Projection: Sonia Park
Sound: Niamh O’Callaghan

Duet transforms the MART into a rhythmic device of light and sound, generating a synthesis within public space. By exploring the bond between these mediums, the work renders the relationship between light and darkness through sonic and optical contrast. A lingering, liminal atmosphere emerges—where movement and rhythm intertwine, and a dance between illumination and obscurity unfolds in an eerie, suspended space.

BR34KD0WN
Projection: Leean Yoo
Sound: Viris Olivarez

BR34KD0WN examines how deeply technology shapes everyday life—from communication and social networks to infrastructure and identity. Beginning with Breakout, one of the earliest arcade games, the work fractures the screen into circuit boards and electrical pathways, tracing the movement of data and energy through digital systems, akin to the Chicago 'L'. Sound and image build in tandem: structured rhythms and visuals destabilize, collapsing into fragmented light and motion, reinforcing a narrative of connection and overload.

Surface / Interface
Projection: Yilin Jin
Sound: Emma Lynn Draga

People are shaped by the movements of the city, even as its complex spatiotemporal dynamics are produced by those who inhabit it. The sound captures the shifting tempos of urban life, with the E-Mu modular synth mirroring the flow of bodies through streets and along the CTA. Surface / Interface offers a point of connection to Chicago while prompting reflection on the rhythms of everyday experience.

What Reaches
Projection : Junho Jeon
Sound : Zeynep Karahasan

What Reaches explores collective forgetting and the disconnect between events and their reception within contemporary media flows. Visually, the façade carries 16-bit binary streams moving upward, drawn from data tracking public responses to specific incidents and tracing how spikes of attention distort and quickly dissolve into indifference. Reflected off the Chicago River, these streams cascade toward spectators across the water, turning THE MART into a transmitter. Sonically, the installation treats the site as an acoustic filter between speakers, spectators, and THE MART: low frequencies dissipate near the source, while high-frequency inhales and exhales travel farther, reverberating off the façade.

Sprawl / Liminal
Projection: Javi Dou
Sound: Alexander Morgan

THE MART meets the river and its banks with a horizontal stance, offering an approachable perspective on the lived experience within this vast urban morphology. Modern life increasingly drifts toward liminality. Driven by layered motivations, we move through heterogeneous spaces, producing a zoetrope of city life—a corridor of flickering, cacophonous vistas. As the concrete landscape obscures the horizon, it compresses memory into a sedimented, multi-layered existence.

Azul Mentiras
Projection: Rose Martinez
Sound: Rui Yu

The work unfolds as a poem through simple rectangular forms that reveal a quiet hierarchy, with those above watching as others descend into implied confinement. Sound guides the narrative with tones of warning and uncertainty, while thread-like elements act as signals of caution. At its core, it reflects on systems of control and conditional belonging, drawing a parallel between the selective planting of non-fruiting ginkgo trees—valued only when manageable—and the treatment of immigrants. As long as they conform, they are accepted; once they no longer fit the design, they risk becoming undesirable.

Refusal
Projection: Abdulrahman Hamd
Sound: Jackson Fabiyi

The façade of THE MART is treated as a fixed, authoritative surface—monumental, stable, and certain in its presence. Across it, a continuous flow unfolds: shifting, unstable, and resistant. It cannot be read or decoded, only encountered as excess and interruption. The work employs a persistent rhythm and untamed melody to explore the tension between permanence and flux—where structure remains intact, but meaning continuously changes.

Asian Carps
Projection: Linton YNGJIN Lee
Sound: Haizhen Gao

Though both belong to the Cyprinidae family, koi (carp) are domesticated, cultivated, and prized, while Asian carp—originally introduced to control algae, weeds, and parasites—are now labeled invasive and prevented from entering Lake Michigan. This contrast parallels how Japanese, Korean, and Chinese identities are collapsed into the category of “East Asian” and framed as model minorities. After the Chicago River was engineered to reverse its flow, carp continued to swim instinctively against the current, creating ecological risk for Lake Michigan. Asian Carps examines how systems construct value and difference through control, context, and unintended consequences.

Moon Tether
Projection: Kayoko Lang
Sound: Lex Dembosky

By deliberately reframing a phenomenon rooted on a cosmic scale as an intimate occurrence, Moon Tether engages viewers’ inner awareness of the world around them, evoking a deep sense of unity and connection with the universe. It explores tidal phenomena arising from the relationship between the Earth and the Moon.