BFA Senior Honors Studio | The Magician's Choice

BFA Senior Honor Studio
The Magician's Choice
March 21–May 17
80WSE | Broadway Windows*

with:

Sierra Cole
Kaveh D’Rosario
Alice Ningci Jiang
Kangju Lee
Yuxi Ma
Tech Nix
Cassie Piña
Chloe Rady
Owen Roberts

The Magician's Choice is a group exhibition curated by 80WSE Director, Howie Chen, and features the artwork of nine BFA Studio Art Majors in the final year of their undergraduate studies at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development’s Department of Art & Art Professions. 

Art and magic share an uncanny ability to reveal reality through appearances. Both rely on staged encounters where perception, belief, and attention are subtly directed. Magic takes the tension between freedom and constraint as the basis of its craft. Among the classic techniques in stage magic is the Magician’s Choice, a form of equivocation in which a spectator appears to choose freely while the outcome remains predetermined through strategies known as “force” and “control”. The device takes familiar forms such as a card selection trick or a mentalist’s routine that leads participants to believe the choice is theirs. In contemporary life, the illusion of freedom operates in a similar way, masking the gap between individual agency and the invisible systems that shape our actions.

Earlier cosmologies understood magic as mysterious forces believed to animate the natural world through hidden correspondences between bodies, objects, and events. With the rise of Enlightenment rationalism, magic gradually shifted from a supernatural explanation to performance centered on the figure of the magician and the craft of conjuring. By the nineteenth century, illusionists demonstrated mastery not over invisible spirits but over everyday perception through techniques such as misdirection and equivocation that guide attention and belief of the audience.

The logic of the Magician’s Choice echoes throughout modern institutions and social life. Participatory democracy, consumer capitalism, and digital life each promise agency through choice while quietly structuring its conditions through their own mechanisms of control and force. The artists in this exhibition move within these dynamics. They draw on familiar apparatuses such as boxes, frames, formats, and invitations to engage the viewer. Opening toward uncertainty, the works move from containment toward transformation to reveal how the structures that organize choice might also produce outcomes that escape their logic.

*Broadway Windows is a series of five street-level display windows located at the corner of Broadway and East 10th Street. The installations can be viewed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.