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Call For Works: MOVEMENT/S
February 28 All day
Emerson Contemporary seeks critically engaged photographic series and lens-based works for a three-week exhibition considering ideas and issues related to “movement/s.” This topical and timely show is a part of an upper-level seminar on Curatorial Practices in the department of Visual & Media Studies.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Artists are welcome to submit 3-5 artworks for consideration. Works should be from a cohesive series, exhibition-ready, and ready to hang. We expect to select several works per artist (rather than one piece per person). Format-wise, media could include photographs captured or created using historical or contemporary processes; videos or projections; photomontage or sculptural photographs; experimental or new media; or installations that include or allude to photography. Genre-wise, works could include fine art, documentary, conceptual, or archival.
ARTIST CRITERIA AND LOGISTICS: This exhibition opportunity is for emerging artists and photographers, broadly defined. We especially encourage those from historically under-represented communities to apply. Artists must live or work in the Greater Boston area and be able to drop off and pick up the selected works to the gallery. The gallery is not able to accept shipped works or pay for shipping. The gallery cannot provide framing, but does have an extensive equipment inventory available for use including high single-channel projectors, iPads, monitors etc.
DEADLINE for submissions is Thursday, February 27th at 11:59pm
*There are no fees to submit work for consideration or to participate*
LINK to application form: https://www.cognitoforms.com/MediaArtGallery/MOVEMENTS
QUESTIONS? Email EmersonCuratorialPractices@gmail.com No phone calls pleas
CALL NARRATIVE: A photograph is never fully still and nothing remains truly static. The act of photographing is inherently active, requiring the photographer to move towards or follow a subject, to observe, to respond. Photographs aid in our understanding by collecting singular moments and circulating in a world of relentless flux.
Our era has rapidly oscillated between inertia and eruption — from massive lockdowns to global protest. This endless movement is crucial for progress but can be overwhelming individually. How do we process and picture this whiplash of stasis paired together with speed?
Movement/s, a student-curated exhibition at Emerson College, seeks photographic and lens-based works that engage, capture, and reflect “movement.” The call welcomes artworks that examine movement as an idea — whether anticipated or abrupt, chaotic or controlled, internal or external — as well as those that document political and social, environmental and scientific, physical and abstract movements. We also solicit series that explore the role of photography as a tool for change, organization, or revolution as well as those that question the fluidity, fractures, and futures of movement. Whether we fight, fly, or freeze, “moving through” can also be a transformative pause or confrontation and invite those interpretations as well.
We especially seek projects that challenge binaries — action/inaction, progress/rewind, agitation/anxiety, construction/destruction — to map where we have been, where we are stuck, and how we might navigate, connect, learn, and move forward. Our exhibition aims to be a reflection of and meditation on our time — from its perpetual motion, shifting tides, restless energy, to continuous evolution. We look forward to seeing how artists incorporate and interrogate Movement/s at this inflection point — as the weight of history presses against the present and the fierce urgency of now foreshadows the future.
