SUNY Old Westbury Art Lab presents To Leave Without Arrival, an interdisciplinary multimedia installation by SUNY Old Westbury alumna Rachel Jungeun Oh, on view October 5–30, 2026. Supported by a FY2026 Support for Artists grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the community-based project explores housing insecurity, migration, displacement, memory, and belonging through collaboration with Korean immigrant women experiencing housing instability.
Developed through weekly art-making sessions, documentary video, conversations, and immersive installation, To Leave Without Arrival focuses on the everyday gestures through which dignity, agency, and identity persist under conditions of instability. Rather than representing housing insecurity solely through images of hardship, the project attends to ordinary acts of care and choice—making a bed, preparing food, folding clothes, choosing what to wear, cleaning a shared space, or deciding what to create.
The project also considers the ethics of visibility and representation. By attending to what is shown as well as what remains private, the work questions how vulnerability is documented and whose stories are made visible. Personal memories and recollections of life before entering a shelter further challenge the reductive category of “homelessness,” foregrounding the complex histories of relationships, work, family, desire, loss, and belonging that continue beyond present circumstances.
A recurring motif of movement between shelter and the outside world informs the installation. Drawing on the image of an airport baggage carousel, where objects appear to arrive yet remain in perpetual circulation, the work reflects on departure, uncertainty, and the absence of a definitive destination. To Leave Without Arrival considers how a sense of self can persist through displacement and how care, memory, choice, and creativity can become forms of self-determination.
Along with To Leave Without Arrival, Oh will also present Island Child (2025), a three-channel immersive projection-mapping video and spatial audio work that reflects on memory, dreams, and cultural identity. The work is Oh’s master’s thesis project, completed in Hunter College’s MFA Integrated Media Arts program. Combining experimental animation, Korean lullabies, ocean imagery, and layered sound, Island Child explores how memory and cultural identity are carried across generations. Inspired by the artist’s grandmother’s declining memory and vision, recordings of her fragmented singing become a vessel for preserving the emotional traces of home, care, and cultural memory.
Artist Biography
Rachel Jungeun Oh is a Korean-born interdisciplinary media artist and educator based in Long Island, New York. Her practice merges physical and digital environments through immersive audiovisual installations, experimental animation, cyanotype, and projection mapping. Her immersive audiovisual installations reflect her own experiences of migration, exploring how personal and collective memories of displacement move through time and space via the resonance of sound and image. Her practice interrogates the complex relationships between the individual and society, observing how systemic violence and forced absence shape the emotional landscape of those who are compelled to leave.
Returning to her undergraduate alma mater, Oh is a proud alumna of SUNY Old Westbury, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts and graduated Summa Cum Laude. This deep connection to the university makes her upcoming exhibition, To Leave Without Arrival at the SUNY Old Westbury Art Lab, a significant professional and personal milestone. Building upon the foundational artistic development she received at Old Westbury, Oh later earned her Master of Fine Arts in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. She currently passes her knowledge on to the next generation of creatives as an adjunct instructor teaching visual communication and interactive media.
Support & Acknowledgment
This project is made possible with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA 2026). Exhibition space is generously provided in kind by the Art Lab of the Social and Environmental Justice Institute (SEJI) at SUNY Old Westbury.
SUNY Old Westbury Art Lab
ART LAB at SEJI, Room 107, Woodlands Hall 1
SUNY Old Westbury, Old Westbury, New York 11568
The ART LAB and SUNY Old Westbury Social and Environmental Justice Institute ART LAB is collaboratively operated by the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery and the Visual Arts Department of SUNY Old Westbury. Founded in the context of SUNY Old Westbury Social and Environmental Justice Institute (SEJI), which embodies SUNY Old Westbury’s historic and ongoing social justice mission, it is housed on the lower level of Residential Hall 1. SEJI is a living-learning environment that enhances student education through civic engagement and applied learning, thus sustaining initiatives for social justice locally and abroad. ART LAB focuses on interdisciplinary exhibitions, performances, and creative activities that draw attention to social and environmental justice issues while creating opportunities for professional artists, students, and faculty to display their work.
For more information, contact via email Hyewon Yi, director of Art Lab and the campus' Amelie A. Wallace Gallery.