The Birth

Join us for the Exhibition Reception of The Birth by Low-Residency MFA alum, SEIVIN.  Shortly after graduating from the MFA program in the summer of 2025, SEIVIN was invited to create an installation in the Broad Street Studio at the front of the Hamilton Building.  Known for elaborate and colorful site-specific tape installations, he transformed the glass gallery into a dynamic, entangled experience solely using tape.  

Inspired by the nature of the Broad Street Studio itself, he explored the tension between visibility and interiority and focused on creating an experience that viewers could enter, not just observe.  Through an organic process of layering and interweaving bands of tape, he embraced the unexpected forms that began to emerge as the material amassed together and eventually resembled the shape of a womb—an enclosed, living form inviting viewers to enter and pass through.  

A celebration of birth and renewal, the installation and the passageway it invites suggest the moment when all humans begin equally—before the restrictions of societal boundaries or meanings.  Naturally echoing this idea of equity and diversity, the colors of the tape represent a different race, a different identity—all intertwining to create a single living organism of connection and coexistence. What each strand holds individually, the whole holds together. The Birth reminds us that our first enclosure was not one that divided us, but one that held us together.

Reflecting on the process of entering the completed work himself, the artist recalls his own unexpected experience of being reborn—an experience that punctuated the core of the piece: that beneath all the differences that define us—race, culture, language, skin color—there is a shared essence, a common origin we all carry.

Video to watch the installation process here.

About the artist: 

SEIVIN is an American artist based in Wilmington, Delaware, who investigates the unintended visual language that emerges within transitional spaces such as construction sites. Working across installation, painting, and material reconstruction, he focuses on peripheral elements—temporary tape, traces left by workers' movements, raw materials, and incidental accumulations. By displacing functional materials from their original context and repositioning them between image and structure, he reveals the formal logic latent in incomplete and provisional states.

SEIVIN received his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Low Residency, 2025) and his B.A. from Syracuse University (2007). Notable solo projects include a performance and installation in Sam Chung Dong, Seoul (2020) and the installation The Birth at Broad Street Studio, Philadelphia (2025/2026). His work has been the subject of critical writing by art critic Jae Gul Lee and art writer Elizabeth Johnson, whose 2026 essay examined the relationship between construction sites and the unconscious in his practice.

He finds artistic possibility in the spaces most people pass by without a second glance—places considered far removed from aesthetic value.