My graduate research project centers on ventilation as a condition in which boundaries are never fully closed. I examine how light, air, and sound move through space, producing constant negotiation rather than fixed separation. Alongside this, I consider fragments of place—the attempt to move closer to something distant, yet never fully grasp it. Ventilation becomes both a poetic framework and a starting point, allowing me to think through permeability: what passes through, what lingers, and what escapes. For me, this mirrors the diasporic experience, where memory and place remain partial, shifting, and at time never resolved.
Chorus #2, 2026
Barn beam, corrugated metal, cement, wood, candy wrappers, light bulb, electrical wiring
Base: 23 × 22 7/8 in
Beam: 100 × 36 5/8 in
Installation view
Untitled #1 Ventilation, 2026
Found Wood, mesh window screen
88 5/8 × 87 1/2 in
Installation view
Untitled #2 Ventilation, 2026
Found Wood, door, wrappers, fan
78 5/8 × 70 in
Installation view
Thanks for the images @patgarciajr_
Thanks to all the minds that help developed this project and the guidance needed to finish my thesis!
Introducing BENDY SOHN for GOOD FORM I, the Yale Sculpture MFA Thesis Exhibition for 2026.
GOOD FORM I runs from February 28 - March 9. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, March 6 from 6-8 pm.
Sohn’s practice often explores the poetics and politics of repair, longing, and intergenerational inheritance through sculptural, installation-based, and multimedia forms. He examines how memory, longing, and ephemerality shape the systems and the spaces we attempt to call home.
He is particularly interested in what is missed by not being in Liberia, his home country—and how the mundane becomes a site of yearning. Everyday gestures and object mechanisms gain new significance when experienced from a distance. The absence of home becomes something he pursue— familiar yet never fully grasped. He is drawn to what can– and cannot— be transmitted when one is physically, emotionally, or socially removed from the place they long for. This tension between proximity and distance, between memory and material, influences how one’s contemplate longing, inheritance, and the limits of connection.
Graphic design identity by @az.fang@hanajelovsek s
