FREEFRALL

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BFA Thesis Exhibition at The Cooper Union
Exhibition Design / Editorial / Photography

FREEFRALL is a play on words that combines “free fall” and “free for all.” The exhibition explores how viewers interact with the pieces inside a gallery room. What if they were encouraged to take a piece of the exhibition with them? What if the exhibition was empty by the night of its closing?

I made 100 ring-bound zines in the format of a word flip book. Each page contains a fragment of a photograph and a single word. Viewers can read the words one by one or several at a time, depending on how they interact with the zine. There is no narrative order in the writing, which encourages multiple read-throughs. The contents paint a vague picture that is refined by each viewer’s interpretation and physical interaction.

Each zine hangs from a hook on the gallery wall, and viewers are welcome to pick one up and take it home. The display asks how a gallery space can break the sacredness of exhibition viewing and test the social code viewers have learned not to disrupt the exhibition. Once a zine leaves the gallery, ownership of the object transitions from the exhibition to the viewer. The remaining hooks become the gallery’s skeletal remains, demonstrating the transaction between the exhibition and the viewer.

On the opposite wall, photography prints depict construction sites and physical barriers that divide public space. I captured these scenes through small windows in construction walls, though at times a construction worker stopped me and told me I was not permitted to photograph the site. This ambiguous state of permission parallels the parameters of the exhibition, where viewers experience confusion and surprise at the unexpected freedom they encounter in a restricted gallery space.

Folded zines on the gallery floor trace the silhouette of the gallery’s interior architecture. Their pages contain a concrete poetry composition of the line “We cannot bear this anymore.” The folds reveal parts of a black and white photograph printed on the back of the paper, which can be seen in full by unfolding the entire zine.

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2026

Semin Park

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