What Distance Holds: An MFA Thesis Exhibition Featuring video installations by Sarasa Kikuchi and Rui Shen
2026-04-21 12:00 - 2026-05-10 18:00 (America/New_York) | Media Art Gallery
Sarasa Kikuchi, 13 Hours Ahead, video stills, 2026

Sarasa Kikuchi and Rui Shen invite viewers into the contemplative textures of fluid identity, invisible labor, and immigrant guilt, exploring what remains amid absence with innovative aesthetics and immersive strategies that invite viewers to linger and feel.

View the trailer

Sarasa Kikuchi — 13 Hours Ahead

Six-channel spatial cinema

Thirteen hours separate a mother in Japan from her daughter in the US. In Kikuchi’s immersive six-channel installation, that gap becomes something one can feel in their body: two lives unfolding in parallel, connected, yet never quite touching. Through quiet domestic scenes, layered soundscapes, and a fractured screen arrangement, 13 Hours Ahead asks what it means to love someone you can only reach across time zones. It holds space not only for the immigrant who left, but for the parent left behind — a perspective rarely given its full weight.

Rui Shen, Elsewhere, installation view, 2026

Rui Shen – Elsewhere

Video Installation

Shen considers the continuous becoming of identity. The moment one tries to answer who they are, something shifts. Shen’s installation uses a single word, I, — the most personal word in any language — to meditate on the essence of becoming.

A fan stirs the suspended surface of horizontal screens upon which projections of “I” form and dissolve. They gather, briefly cohere, then scatter again. The quiet circuit demonstrates how alive it is, always moving, always just beyond the labels we reach for.

What Distance Holds Opening reception: April 22, 2026, 5 – 7 PM at 25 Avery Street, Boston

On view April 21 – May 10 · Tuesday through Sunday, 11am – 6pm

Free and open to the public.

Second Nature: A Photo Exhibition Presented by the Spring 2026 Photo Practicum Class
2026-04-27 12:00 - 2026-04-29 18:00 | Huret and Spector Gallery
This exhibition features photography by students in the Photo Practicum course who spent their semester working on one specific project. The resulting works encounter themes of time, growth, exploration, and a sense of self. Each project uniquely asks questions about the world we live in and how we occupy it. Students worked with analog and digital photography, along with bookmaking and mixed media, to create their various projects.Presented by Doris (Leping) Cao, Kaileigh Clark, Natalie He, Andrés Herrera, Yixin Hu, Danny Kennedy, Lilli Drescher, Grace Kinney, Ela Moss, Hammond (Shi) Qi, Kiki Tobor, Maya Wang, and Wendi Zhang.Opening reception: April 27, 6-9 PM.The exhibition can also be seen during gallery hours from 12-6 PM, April 27-April 29.

* Please note: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place Alleyway. Visitor registration and ID are required for visitors without an Emerson ID. Emerson Community need not RSVP. Contact mailto:contemporary@emerson.edu contemporary@emerson.edu for help registering before your visit. Hours are Monday through Friday, 12-5 pm.

Thin Places: Thresholds of Transmission
2026-09-15 12:00 - 2026-12-12 18:00
Thin Places: Thresholds of Transmission

September 15 – December 12, 2026

Emerson Contemporary, Media Art Gallery, Boston, MA

Sabrina Ratté, PLANE of INCIDENCE, Single-channel video (still), 2024.

Thin Places: Thresholds of Transmission brings together works by Beatrice Glow, Megan and Murray McMillan, and Sabrina Ratté that explore the unstable boundaries between object-hood and atmosphere, material presence and ephemeral experience. Across sculpture, moving image, and installation, the exhibition considers how contemporary artistic practices are shaped by forms of ecological, technological, cosmic, and sensory transmissions that exceed fixed or stable material states.

The artists included in the exhibition approach matter not as static substance, but as dynamic process: something continuously shifting across thresholds of visibility, perception, and relation. Astrophysical systems, environmental histories, speculative fictions and digital simulations become intertwined fields through which viewers encounter forms that are at once tactile and immaterial, intimate and planetary. Across the exhibition, distinctions between the virtual and the physical, the speculative and the real, are in doubt.

Beatrice Glow, Textures of Time, single channel video, 2025.

Beatrice Glow’s materially grounded installations trace the movement of cultural, ecological, and historical forces across global systems of exchange, connecting sensory experience with environmental transmutation. Megan and Murray McMillan’s sculptural and video-practice translates cosmic and environmental phenomena into embodied spatial encounters, activating relationships between gravity, perception and physical form. Sabrina Ratté’s speculative digital environments imagine hybrid ecologies in which technological systems and organic forms merge into continuously evolving atmospheric worlds.

Megan and Murray McMillan, This Collapsed and Expanding Breath, Three-Channel Video Installation, 2025. Installtion view, The Jamestown Art Center.
