Subversive Dreams: Allison Maria Rodriguez
2020-08-01 08:00 - 2020-09-13 17:00 (America/New_York)
Emerson Contemporary, presents “Subversive Dreams,” an exhibition featuring digital video animations by Cuban-American visual artist Allison Maria Rodriguez.
The exhibition is also featured as a Special Project in the AREA CODE Art Fair, New England’s first art fair dedicated exclusively to regional artists. Images from the exhibition are available.

“Subversive Dreams” features work from the “Legends Breathe” series, an ongoing project based on interviews with different female-identified and non-binary artists about childhood fantasies that assisted them in overcoming trauma. This project speaks to a strategy of survival activated through the power of creativity and invokes the imaginary, a force that is socially embraced in youth, but suppressed in adulthood.
Each of the six videos, which are installed together as an interactive installation, explores these individual fantasies, highlighting their uniqueness, their commonalities, and their inherent power. One primary element evident in all the fantasies is a harvesting of strength and transcendence through a deep connection to the natural world. The work is populated by endangered species and threatened habitats, conveying a link between the trauma and healing of our planet to that of the individual.
Artist Statement: “There is power in creativity. There is strength in reimagining.”
“Subversive Dreams” reclaims the concept of fantasy as a tool of empowerment for social change, not as a method of escapism. Declared worthless in a capitalist society centered around white patriarchal notions of productivity, fantasy and play are the building blocks in creating something new – they are exercises in resistance and in the possibility of reimagining our world.
Operating at the intersection of environmental and social justice, this work also illustrates a harvesting of strength and transcendence through a deep connection to the natural world. It conveys a link between the trauma and healing of our planet to that of the individual. Ultimately, “Subversive Dreams” emphasizes the interconnection of our universe and celebrates the power of the imagination and its crucial role in the process of actualizing new ways of being.
This project was funded in part by a grant from The CreateWell Fund.
About Allison Maria Rodriguez
Allison Maria Rodriguez is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in video installation and new media. She creates immersive experiential spaces that challenge conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. Her work focuses extensively on climate change, species extinction and the interconnectivity of existence.
Through video, performance, digital animation, photography, drawing, collage and installation, Rodriguez merges and blends mediums to create new pictorial spaces for aesthetic, emotional and conceptual exploration. She uses art to communicate beyond language – to open up a space of possibility for the viewer to encounter alternative ways of connecting to the emotional realities of others.
About AREA CODE
On view August 1-31, 2020, AREA CODE is an inaugural art fair presenting work by contemporary artists with ties to New England. Informed by values of collective intelligence, transparent experimentation, and open access in the wake of COVID-19, the Fair has been developed in collaboration with a volunteer team of Boston-area curators, and will be free for exhibitors and viewers.
Through online and decentralized in-person experiences across Boston, the Fair will feature works from New England’s most inspiring art galleries, nonprofit organizations, and individual artists (including recent graduate students) without gallery representation. Along with the Fair’s Main Section, AREA CODE will debut curated sections of performance art, drive-in or drive-by outdoor presentations of digital/video art, and storefront displays, along with live programming. For more information: www.areacodeartfair.com.

Video and Digital Art Drive In, Area Code Art Fair
2020-08-20 08:00 - 17:00
The Area Code Art Fair drive-in screening offered a wide selection of artistic content, ranging from abstract glitch art, computer generated rhythms and sounds, and Zoom karaoke, to moving personal testimonials and critical, documentary short films. You can review a complete list of artists. In addition to the screening, the Drive In displayed six independent light projections created by Liz Nofziger, Maria Servellon, Zsuzsanna Szegedi, Ellen Wetmore, and Stephanie Benenson’s “Harbor Voices,” to be showcased directly onto the walls of Salem State University’s O’Keefe Sports Complex. Their selections were accompanied by a creative light installation on the glass facade of the complex by light artist Joey Nicotera of Retonica.

Read more about the process and project details on Emerson Today.
The drive-in took place in conjunction with AREA CODE—New England’s first art fair dedicated exclusively to regional artists—and in collaboration with the North Shore’s Creative Collective, Salem State University Center for Creative and Performing Arts, and City of Salem. The evening event is sponsored by LuminArtz, a non-profit organization that highlights local and regional artists who create innovative light art experiences.
The event was curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Distinguished Curator-in Residence at Emerson College. Emerson Contemporary’s Exhibitions Manager Jim Manning serves as the Manager of Digital Content and Pamela Hersch of LuminArtz is the Technical Director of the event. The one-night experience was organized in partnership with John Andrews of Creative Collective, an organization that works to support and provide opportunities to the creative workforce across the North Shore. Special thanks to the City of Salem and Mayor Kimberley Driscoll for supporting this project and the creative community.

Memorials: As Monuments Fall. Panel: Artist Activist Tory Bullock, Art Historian Cher Krause Knight, Artist Activist Zsuzsanna Szegedi.
2020-10-14 18:30 - 20:00
The two Memorials panels are organized in collaboration with Professors Anya Belkina and Cher Krause Knight, and inspired by their co-taught class Boston Memorials Revisited and Reimagined: Public Art and Virtual Modeling. Bringing together artists, activists, architects, urban planners, and scholars, the conversation centers around issues of memorial design and how our relationships to memorials can be understood and contextualized in terms of audience response.
The recent surge in the removal of public monuments—whether by the public and/or by the cities and towns that own them—will be our topic this evening. Panel: Artist Activist Tory Bullock, Art Historian Cher Krause Knight, Artist Activist Zsuzsanna Szegedi. Moderated by Curator Leonie Bradbury.

Bundlehouse: Rising into Something Else
2020-10-27 08:00 - 2020-11-24 17:00
Bundlehouse: Rising into Something Else is a multi-media exhibition distributed across Emerson College’s campus that features performative videos, photographs, and new works on paper by Nyugen Smith, a first-generation Caribbean-American artist based in Jersey City, NJ.
The subtitle for this exhibition Rising into Something Else is taken from a scene in the book The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, where the enslaved protagonist Hiram Walker begins to drown while attempting to save the slavemaster’s son from drowning in a river. As Hiram begins to go under, he remembers ‘legions of the lost,’ and while he descends feels himself ‘rising into something else.’ Smith explores water as an in-between space with vast potentialities: water as history, as culture, as memory and metaphor for the plight of Africans in the diaspora, complicated by the legacy of slavery.
The project is a metaphor for the traumatic experiences that people of color face in the United States, further instigated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Smith recognized the point during the pandemic where he himself felt as if he was sinking in ‘the water’ and when he began ‘rising into something else’. According to Smith, we are at a moment in time as a society, where collectively, Black people are ‘rising into something else’. Not lost in all of this, is the fact that we are living through a pivotal moment of a changing climate where water is bringing upon us an unprecedented level of devastation around the globe and within this, we are collectively ‘rising into something else’.
The exhibition takes place across multiple locations and times, and extends Smith’s ongoing Bundlehouse series that was developed as a response to the past and present conditions of African diaspora with the aim of creating a vision of renewed futurity. The various sites of this exhibition are distinctly transitory, as the exhibition materializes within the liminalities of sidewalks, hallways, lobbies, and other threshold spaces. These placements, although informed by Covid-19 safety precautions, poignantly echo the artist’s larger project: self-becoming in life’s in-between spaces.

Kerry Tribe: Artist Talk + Screening
2021-01-26 18:00 - 20:30
Kerry Tribe Artist Talk and Screening
Bright Family Screening Room, Paramount Center, 559 Washington St. Boston, MA
Wednesday, March 16, 6:30pm – 8:00pm (in person). Artist Reception to follow
Please join us for this special, in person event held in conjunction with the exhibition Onomatopoeia on view in the Media Art Gallery until March 27, 2022. Tickets are available at the Paramount Center Box Office starting at 5:30pm on the day of the event (Wed, Mar 16). Tickets are free and general admission.

Tribe will present a lecture and screening of several early autobiographical videos including Here & Elsewhere, (2002) a two-channel projection featuring British film critic and theoretician Peter Wollen and his daughter Audrey. As the interview unfolds, their conversation touches on history, memory, intersubjectivity, temporality, epistemology and photography; H.M. (2009) a two-channel presentation of a single film based on the true story of an anonymous, memory-impaired man, the famous amnesiac known in scientific literature only as “Patient H.M.” In 1953, when he was 27 years old, H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery intended to alleviate his epilepsy.The unintended result was a radical and persistent amnesia. The Aphasia Poetry Club (2015) A cinematic-scale three-channel video installation narrated by three individuals who have aphasia, a neurological condition caused by damage to the language centers of the brain. As they share their thoughts and stories, their words trigger elaborate arrangements of character animation, still photographs, and live action footage.

Presented by Emerson Contemporary and The School of The Arts at Emerson College

Georgie Friedman: Hurricane Lost
2021-01-27 08:00 - 2021-04-04 17:00
Exhibition imagines a better future as it dramatically visualizes extreme weather phenomena.

Georgie Friedman: Hurricane Lost transforms the entire Emerson Contemporary Media Art Gallery into a singular site-specific, fully immersive, sculptural video installation referencing our changing climate and extreme weather.

Boston Globe Review by Cate McQuaid

WBUR radio Feature by Amelia Mason

The eight sculptural video forms that comprise Hurricane Lost span the gallery’s 1,700 sq. ft. floor-plan and rise upwards toward the 20 ft. high ceilings. A soundscape created by indie sound artist Radio Sloan swirls around visitors as they choose their own path through the visual storm. The video forms of Hurricane Lost are based on the shapes of hurricane cloud walls, while their spatial layout mimics the circular wind patterns. As visitors intuitively navigate the curved video-covered sculptures, they are invited to contemplate their relationship to both the natural and built environment. According to Bradbury, Hurricane Lost inventively addresses the climate crisis not by providing more scientific data, facts, and figures, but rather by enticing a visceral, emotive response through an immersive sound and light environment.

Presented in conjunction with the 2020-2021 national Feminist Art Coalition (FAC) project, the exhibition references our changing climate and extreme weather phenomena from rapidly melting glaciers and resultant sea-level rise, to warming oceans, which increase the intensity of hurricanes and lead to more frequent, and more-often-catastrophic weather events. Visually metaphoric and experiential, Hurricane Lost captures the inherent power of nature and visualizes the effects of our changing climate. Despite its meditative, aesthetically provocative presentation, Hurricane Lost serves as a powerful call to action as it asks whether we can imagine a different, better future. And if so, whether we are willing to change the way we act and make the choices needed to get us there, Bradbury said.

This exhibition received funding support from the Mass Cultural Council.

About the Artist

Georgie Friedman (USA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects include large-scale video installations, single and multi-channel videos and several photographic series. She is interested in our psychological and societal relationships to mild and severe natural phenomena. She investigates a wide range of powerful atmospheric and oceanic conditions, and is fascinated by the power of these natural elements in relationship to human fragility. She utilizes photography, video, sound, installation, engineering and the physics of light, all in order to create new experiences for viewers.

Friedman is currently based in Boston, MA and has lived, worked and exhibited nationally and internationally. She has been commissioned to create site-specific video-based public art pieces and has exhibited in national and international venues. Friedman earned her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in conjunction with Tufts University and her BA from UC, Santa Cruz. She is a Lecturer in the Art, Culture and Technology program at MIT, and her previous teaching appointments include: Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston College, LUCAD, and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among other institutions.

Tamiko Thiel: Rewilding the City
2021-02-18 14:30 - 16:00
Tamiko Thiel: Rewilding the City
Please click the link to join the webinar.
Join artist Tamiko Thiel for a virtual artist talk and AR workshop. Thiel’s artworks explore the intersection of space, place and cultural memory. Thiel’s most recent AR project ReWildAR offers a vision of how Washington D.C. can be ‘rewilded’ to create a thriving, sustainable environment for nature in the city.
In the first half of the event, Thiel will give an artist talk with a general yet personal overview of different technologies and uses for VR and AR art. The second half will present a deeper dive into topics ranging from dramatic structure for interactive experiences to platform choices to address conservation and archiving of artworks.
Participants are encouraged to download ARpoise, Thiel’s free and open source app, from the App Store or Play Store. Upon opening the apps there is a list of demo works by her and her partner /p. During the talk, she will give tips for viewing other artworks of theirs on ARpoise around the world.
Artist website and Instagram
This event is co-presented by Boston CyberArts

Public Encounters: Using New Media Technologies to Build Community featuring Pierre Friquet
2021-03-10 18:00 - 20:00
In part 1 of this 3-part public programming series, Pierre Friquet, Violeta Ayala and Pamela Hersch share how they use emergent technologies to build and connect new communities online and in person.

Join artist and immersive interactive designer Pierre Friquet as he discusses VR, narrative design and traumatology. Via tools of fiction like world-building and innovation like social VR, Friquet explores how we can build connections and a sense of belonging in digital space. The talk is addressed to artists, designers, developers and psychologists, or whoever interested in seizing the opportunity of VR to create virtual worlds and online communities.

Pierre Friquet is a digital artist who creates immersive worlds. His intent is to make people reconnect with their body and sense of self through art and technology. Coming from a film background, Friquet focuses on creating content for the 3rd digital revolution, which is designing Reality through spatial computing. Passionate in virtual reality since 2010, he has designed more than a dozen XR experiences (interactive, fiction, documentaries, dome, music videos). His latest independent VR work is SPACED OUT, selected at Sundance New Frontier 2020. It’s an aquatic VR experience which uses the first waterproof VR headset by Ballast Technologies, that allows users to be submerged in a swimming pool while breathing from a snorkel. Artist’s website: https://pierrefriquet.net/

Public Encounters: Using New Media Technologies to Build Community Violeta Ayala
2021-03-17 18:00 - 20:00
Join artist, writer, and film director Violeta Ayala as she discusses the making of “Prison X: The Devil and The Sun,” an immersive ‘play’ staged in VR created using the 3-D painting technology Tilt Brush. Set in Bolivia’s San Sebastian prison, “Prison X: The Devil and The Sun” immerses participants into the social dynamics of the prison while simultaneously placing them in a world of Incan and Quechan mythology.
Violeta Ayala is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, artist and technologist. She is the first Quechua member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Violeta’s credits include the VR animation Prison X (2021) and the award-winning documentaries Cocaine Prison (2017), The Fight (2017), The Bolivian Case (2015) and Stolen (2009). Her films have premiered at A-List film festivals including Sundance and Toronto, distributed in cinemas, broadcasted on PBS, Channel 8, Señal Colombia, Ibermedia, World and online platforms such as Amazon Prime and The Guardian. She has won over 50 awards including a Walkley (Australia’s Pulitzer) and nominations for the IDA (Los Angeles), Rory Peck (London), Platino (Panama) and Fenix (Mexico). Artist website: www.violetaayala.com.

Public Encounters: Using New Media Technologies to Build Community Pamela Hersch
2021-03-31 18:00 - 20:00
Join experimental video artist and musician Pamela Hersch as she discusses light as a public intervention in urban spaces and her use of the open tool suite TouchDesigner to create dynamic projection mapping installations.
Pamela Hersch is a Boston-based, multidisciplinary artist originally from Mexico. Her primary focus is at the intersection of art and technology. In her projection-mapping and video artwork, Hersch plays with properties like time, scale, texture, color, juxtaposition of raw footage with graphics, and the combination of organic and artificial elements to tell a story and to transform spaces. She has collaborated with producers, musicians, and dancers, aiming to represent their distinct sounds and personality by creating visual content across a spectrum that includes photography, music videos, lyric videos, and live show visuals. Artist’s website: http://pamelahersch.com/

A Shared Vision: The Lillian Farber Collection
2021-09-16 08:00 - 2021-10-29 17:00
“It hasn’t mattered who the photographer was, living or dead, acclaimed or unknown. Neither has the pedigree of the print; vintage, self-produced, staff-produced or mass-produced. All I had to do was love it.”
Lillian Farber

A closeup of an artichoke, a gritty urban subway scene, a portrait of a smiling little boy – every collection of images reveals something about its owner. Lillian Farber (1920 – 2007) was captivated with photography, its historic and contemporary processes, equipment, tools and techniques. Farber’s collection celebrates the varied ways that photographers choose to depict the world around them. She was not particularly interested in recreating a specific history of photography, but rather collected intuitively based on her personal and intellectual interests in either the artist, the time period, or the aesthetic qualities of the work. One of her greatest joys was sharing her collection with others.
This exhibition presents a selection of works from what once was a much larger collection as Farber generously gave away a number of pieces in the last few years of her life – and frankly –not all the remaining works fit on these gallery walls. Though now housed at Emerson College, and on view in a gallery setting, these works will ultimately be installed in common spaces across the Emerson campus to honor Farber’s original intent that these works be displayed as an easily accessible “teaching collection” in the places where students learn and congregate.
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As part of the Emerson-Marlboro Alliance the college has received 200 photographs known as the Lillian Farber Photography Collection. Lillian Farber served for many years as the chairwoman of the Marlboro Board of Trustees’ finance committee. A New Yorker by birth, Mrs. Farber moved to Newfane, Vermont in the mid-1970s, where she became the vice president of Zone VI Studio, a small, vibrant photography equipment company. She had an artist’s eye for photography, and over the course of a lifetime built a distinguished collection that includes works by Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Aaron Siskind, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand, Eugene Atget and Lewis Hine, among others.
In 2006, she donated the collection to Marlboro College for teaching purposes. Now, the collection will be stewarded by Emerson College. This exhibition was organized by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Distinguished Curator-in-Residence in collaboration with Photo Historian and Affiliated Faculty Susan Doheny. After the exhibition is complete, the works will be installed throughout Emerson’s campus.

Sky Hopinka: Present Joys
2021-09-22 08:00 - 2021-11-07 17:00
Image Credit: Sky Hopinka,

An enrolled member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka uses personal and collective memories to destabilize traditional colonial narratives and critique cultural systems, such as ethnography, museology and anthropology, that continue to depict indigenous cultures in limited and static ways.

Hopinka combines the power of visual storytelling with an interest in semiotics to illuminate the role image and language – in the form of poetry, songs and historic texts – play in shaping cultural identity. Textural fragments are juxtaposed with symbolic and abstract imagery in video, photography and 16mm film to explore personal and historical understandings of different native homelands, the stories they hold, and their interconnectedness.
Collectively, the works included in “Present Joys,” present an ecology of self. They collapse a linear sense of time as historical events are acknowledged as actively informing and coexisting with the present while they shift back and forth. Other in-between potentialities, such as the ways in which landscapes evoke history, language holds culture, and music elicits memories, are thoughtfully layered within each individual piece to add further complexity and nuance.
This exhibition received generous project support from the Mass Cultural Council

Sky Hopinka Artist Talk (Emerson Only)
2021-10-08 12:00 - 13:30
Join us for a unique opportunity to meet Sky Hopinka and hear more about his art and career.

Sky Hopinka: maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (In person, Emerson Only)
2021-10-08 19:00 - 20:30
Co-presented with the Bright Family Screening Series, the Roxbury International Film Festival, Living on Earth podcast, DocYard and Emerson Contemporary.

Directed by Sky Hopinka, documentary, chinuk wawa with English subtitles, 82 minutes, USA, 2021.
This film follows Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier’s wanderings through each of their worlds as they wander through and contemplate the afterlife, rebirth, and the place in-between. Spoken mostly in chinuk wawa, their stories are departures from the Chinookan origin.
Film screening will be followed by a Director’s Conversation and Q&A. Film Preview
For more information on the Bright Family Film Screening series: Fall 2021 Program

Sky Hopinka maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (virtual)
2021-10-28 20:00 - 22:00

Goethe-Institut: Immersive Storytelling - How Emerging Media Create Agency and Social Change
2021-11-18 13:00 - 15:00
The network meetings aim to highlight and virtually connect women and gender-marginalized people from Europe and North-America working in the creative industries and around immersive technologies to create new international connections and foster potential cooperation. These Meetups are planned as a series of events with a different focus for each event. This meeting is presented by the Goethe-Institut Boston in collaboration with Women in Immersive Tech Europe.
Featuring artists and filmmakers Rashin Fahandej and Rebecca Merlic in conversation with curator Dr. Leonie Bradbury. The speakers will address how they use virtual reality and immersive storytelling as tools for co-creation, healing and social change.
Introduction by
Dr. Leonie Bradbury is the Henry and Lois Foster Chair of Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston, USA. She directs Emerson’s platform for visual art “Emerson Contemporary” focused on presenting and commissioning new media art, performance art, and emergent technologies within a socio-political context. In 2020, she was a collaborator on the AREA Code Art Fair and curated and organized a drive-in movie theater experience featuring light projections and digital video art. Previously, she served as the Director of Art and Creative Initiatives at HUBweek, an innovation festival showcasing intersections of art, science, and technology.
A respected authority on both the creative and scholarly aspects of contemporary art, Dr. Bradbury has more than 20 years of experience in public programming, developing new work, creating compelling and innovative exhibitions, and promoting artists as thought leaders. Her dissertation Artwork as Network: A Reconceptualization of the Work of Art and its Exhibition questions how contemporary works of art relate to network culture and, alternately, how do networks redefine our understanding of specific works of art. At Emerson College, she teaches a professional practice seminar Curating Contemporary Art as well as a course on The Moving Image in Contemporary Art.
Presentations by
Rashin Fahandej is an award winning artist, independent filmmaker and assistant professor of emerging and interactive media at Emerson College. Her projects center on marginalized voices and the role of media, technology, and public collaboration in generating social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” she defines her projects as “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces. Fahandej is the founder of “A Father’s Lullaby, “ a multi-year community co-creative initiative that highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Fahandej is the recipient of the 2021 Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Digital Music & Sound Art and 2019 Foster Prize at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. She has served as a Boston Mayor’s Office Artist-In-Residence and lead artist at American Arts Incubator Austria at ZERO1 and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs where she launched the “Future of Inclusion Lab”initiative in partnership with Ars Electronica.
Rebecca Merlic retreats between Tokyo, Munich and Vienna. She graduated with distinction at the Academy of Fine Arts. She specialized on analogue and digital art as well as architecture. Her work is strongly influenced by alternative ways of society and transgression in socioeconomic conventions as well as new forms of artistic and architectural production employing new technologies. During her masters she was able to study at Astushi KITAGAWARA Lab at Tokyo University of the Arts GEIDAI. She is a holder of the Marianne von Willemer Prize 2020 for digital media and the PIXEL,BYTEs & FILM residency supported by the BMKOES, ORF and Arte Creative. Currently her work is on display at bildraum07 on her first solo show TheCityAsAHouse 都市が家になるとき+ GLITCHBODIES WIP hosted by ARS ELECTRONICA.

Participation via VR headset, Windows PC and Mac OSX (beta version) in 2D mode and live stream via Zoom.

RSVP to participate via AltspaceVR | Code: KVK567
Link to participate via Zoom

Please note:New users will have to first download the app and then make an account inside the AltspaceVR application. This works on all platforms like PC, Mac OSX, Oculus Quest, etc.

Download the app
Here’s more about technical requirements and how to join the meetup.

Kerry Tribe: Onomatopoeia
2022-01-26 08:00 - 2022-03-27 17:00
Emerson Contemporary proudly presents Kerry Tribe: Onomatopoeia, a solo exhibition by the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker, on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street, from January 26 – March 27, 2022. Free and open to the public, the gallery is open Wednesday – Sunday from 12-7pm.

Created between 2010 and 2021, the works selected for Onomatopoeia reflect the artist’s longstanding interest in consciousness, memory and the limits of linguistic communication. Rigorous and thoughtful, Tribe’s practice synthesizes cinematic, journalistic and conceptual approaches in probing and affective works of art that privilege the viewer’s embodied experience in the gallery.
The exhibition is anchored by two quasi-documentary videos. The Last Soviet (2010), revolves around a storied Russian cosmonaut stranded in orbit as the Soviet Union collapsed beneath him. Speaking in English and Russian, with subtitles in both languages, the work’s two narrators offer divergent perspectives on the fate and feelings of the lost cosmonaut and those awaiting his return. The narrative gains new resonance as Americans grapple with the toxic effects of state-sponsored disinformation. The second, Afasia (2017), in subtitled English and Spanish, pairs the musings of a photographer whose ability to communicate was radically altered after a left-hemisphere stroke with Tribe’s own faltering description of her efforts to re-learn a foreign language. The effect is one of empathic understanding and mutual curiosity about life at the limits of language.
A selection of Tribe’s lesser-known works on paper extend the inquiry in two dimensions. Silkscreens based on a cognitive test used to assess one’s ability to inhibit cognitive interference, along with two new “scratch drawings” that reproduce philosophers’ attempts to diagram our perception of time, encourage viewers to reflect on the unfolding of their own conscious experience. Two photographic prints from 2017, Black Tourmaline (front) and Black Tourmaline (back), will be shown in the U.S. for the first time.
In Forest for the Trees (2015), a monitor nestled among potted plants and apple boxes silently flashes one word after another in a string of aphorisms suggesting a subject in search of agency and understanding. In contrast, Fantastic Voyage (2020) has no set place in the gallery and provides no visuals; visitors are invited to listen to the recording on their personal devices as they take a walk in the gallery, the neighborhood or their home.
Born and raised in the Boston area, Onomatopoeia is Tribe’s first major exhibition in her hometown, and viewers’ first opportunity to experience these particular works together. In tandem with the exhibition, the artist will present a lecture and screening of her early autobiographical videos in March, 2022.
About the Artist

Kerry Tribe is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of solo presentations at SFMOMA; The High Line and Anthology Film Archives, New York; The Power Plant, Toronto; Modern Art Oxford and Camden Arts Centre, London. Tribe was the recipient of the Presidential Residency at Stanford University, the Herb Alpert Award, the Creative Capital Award, the USA Artists Award, and she was the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Tribe’s work is in the public collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Whitney, the Hammer Museum, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, LACMA, SMAK Ghent and the Generali Foundation, among other institutions. She has served as a visiting faculty member at Stanford University, UCLA, CalArts, Harvard University, and ArtCenter in Pasadena. Tribe received her MFA from UCLA, attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, and received a BA, magna cum laude, from Brown University.

GlitchKraft v.2 Allison Tanenhaus and Friends
2022-03-07 08:00 - 2022-05-06 17:00
GlitchKraft v.2. Allison Tanenhaus + Friends Alex Kittle, Ben K. Foley, Property Materials, Lauren Klotzman, and stickipictures
On view at Southern New Hampshire University’s McIninch Gallery, March 7- April 30, 2022.
GlitchKraft is a multimedia exhibition of glitch art, the creative practice of interfering with or intentionally altering digital image files for aesthetic purposes. The exhibition showcased glitch art by Allison Tanenhaus and others with the art taking many forms, digitally projected onto the gallery walls, windows, and displayed on monitors.
“GlitchKraft is a celebratory display of digital errors, an ode to the interrupted image. Images that are usually limited to be viewed on a screen – mobile or otherwise – here are projected larger than life onto every surface of the gallery to create a technicolor ‘glitch-world’ that will surround visitors and allow them to be fully immersed in light and sound.” -Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Curator
For the GlitchKraft exhibit, Allison Tanenhaus collaborated with color-bending, mind-scrambling, new-media friends and local artist collaborators, including Alex Kittle, Ben K. Foley, Property Materials, Lauren Klotzman, and stickipictures. Together, they embrace electronic error, circumvent computational constraint and transcend technological overstimulation — culminating in an immersive, ephemeral glitchscape made to overload the senses.
Reviews:
Boston Globe

Will Pappenheimer: Artist Talk and Demo
2022-03-25 12:00 - 14:30
Will Pappenheimer (webinar)
Friday, March 25, 1:30-3pm
Will Pappenheimer is a Brooklyn based artist working in new media, performance and installation with an interest in spatial intervention and the altered experiences of the artwork as site. His current work explores the collage of the virtual and physical worlds in the recent medium of “mixed reality.”
He is a pioneer of augmented reality (AR) art and a founding member of the AR collective, Manifest.AR formed in 2011
This event is co-presented by Boston CyberArts
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body
2022-09-21 08:00 - 2022-11-06 17:00
Image above: Emilio Rojas, Heridas Abiertas, 2013–ongoing. Performance, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.
—Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987
tracing a wound through my body is the first traveling survey of the contemporary and multidisciplinary practice of artist Emilio Rojas (b. 1985 Mexico City), on view September 21–November 6, 2022 at Emerson Contemporary. The exhibition brings together works spanning the past decade including live performances and interventions, documents of performance sustained in video and ephemera, photography, sculpture, installation, and poetry. Recognizing the act of tracing dualistically, tracing a wound through my body both reexamines the artist’s corpus and reckons with the legacies of colonial and border traumas. For Rojas, such reckoning renders palpable visible and invisible wounds through the radically political instrumentalization of his body.
The included works relate to Rojas’ migratory experience and his rigorous research-based practice. Drawing upon queer and decolonized methodologies, his performative works interrogate extant structures of colonialism and border politics. The exhibition takes place in a moment in which nativist rhetoric and xenophobic immigration legislation in the United States and beyond deepens wounds already open. Rojas’ works not only confront the historical precedents for such trauma, but also speculate upon Chicana cultural theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s proposition of the wound transforming into a pathway for healing.
tracing a wound through my body will be on display at the Media Art Gallery with works installed throughout Emerson College’s campus, including the Huret and Spector galleries, Tufte Stairwell, 2 Boylston Place, Little Building Lobby, and The Iwasaki Library.
The exhibition is accompanied by a public programming series and an exhibition catalog featuring new scholarship from Ethan Madarieta, Laurel V. McLaughlin, Mechtild Widrich with Andrei Pop, and Rebecca Schneider; an interview with Ernesto Pujol; a creative writing contribution from Valeria Luiselli; and new poetry from Pamela Sneed and Emilio Rojas. Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body is curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin and organized by Lafayette College Art Galleries, Easton, PA with travel administered by Artspace New Haven.
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. He holds an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada.
As a queer Latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space.
His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth.

Public Programming
Thursday, September 22, 5–7:30 PM. Artist Reception. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery St. Boston, Ma 02111
Friday, September 23, 2-4 PM. Performance of A Vague and Undetermined Place (a Gloria), 2019. Location: Boylston Place Alley. 10 Boylston Place, Boston, MA 02116
Saturday, September 24, 2-4 PM. Performance, A Vague and Undetermined Place (a Gloria), 2019. Location: Boylston Place Alley. 10 Boylston Place, Boston, MA 02116
Friday, October 14, 12–1 PM. “Go Back To Where You Came From” A Performance-lecture by Emilio Rojas. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA 02111
Friday, October 14, 4-8 PM. One-on-one performance, A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father, 2015–ongoing. Location: The Iwasaki Library, 3rd floor, Walker Building, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA
Saturday, October 15, 12-4 PM. One-on-one performance, A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father, 2015–ongoing. Location: The Iwasaki Library, 3rd floor, Walker Building, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA
Sunday, October 16, 12-4 PM. One-on-one performance, A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father, 2015–ongoing. Location: The Iwasaki Library, 3rd floor, Walker Building, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

Live Performance by Emilio Rojas "A VAGUE AND UNDETERMINED PLACE (A GLORIA)"
2022-09-23 12:00 - 16:00
Emilio Rojas performs A VAGUE AND UNDETERMINED PLACE (A GLORIA)

Boylston Place Courtyard
September 23, 2022, 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

This performance and installation examines what artist Emilio Rojas terms “border pedagogies,” or teaching opportunities to question and reimagine national borders. Rojas will be inviting participants to draw the U.S.-Mexican border on transparent paper, which he then layers and projects on a light box to reveal its variations in the imagination.

While the border has become an increasingly urgent topic for national immigration, ecological, and human rights legislation, people can rarely recall the shape of the border—its curves, twists, and turns. It is as Gloria E. Anzaldúa theorized, a “vague and undetermined place.” In exchange for their drawings, he will offer visitors a paleta, or a Mexican popsicle, made with fruit that crosses this border, reminding us of the immense personal, political, and economic complexities embedded within borderlands.

Live Performance by Emilio Rojas "A VAGUE AND UNDETERMINED PLACE (A GLORIA)"
2022-09-24 14:00 - 16:00
Emilio Rojas performs A VAGUE AND UNDETERMINED PLACE (A GLORIA)

Boylston Place Courtyard
Saturday, September 24, 2022, 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

This performance and installation examines what artist Emilio Rojas terms “border pedagogies,” or teaching opportunities to question and reimagine national borders. Rojas will be inviting participants to draw the U.S.-Mexican border on transparent paper, which he then layers and projects on a light box to reveal its variations in the imagination.

While the border has become an increasingly urgent topic for national immigration, ecological, and human rights legislation, people can rarely recall the shape of the border—its curves, twists, and turns. It is as Gloria E. Anzaldúa theorized, a “vague and undetermined place.” In exchange for their drawings, he will offer visitors a paleta, or a Mexican popsicle, made with fruit that crosses this border, reminding us of the immense personal, political, and economic complexities embedded within borderlands.

Emilio Rojas Performance "A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father"
2022-10-13 08:00 - 2022-10-16 17:00
A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father
The Iwasaki Library
RSVP required leonie_bradbury@emerson.edu
The live performance and installation, A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father, presents Rojas’ deconstructions of the popular novel, Pequeño Hombre, one of many written by his estranged father, who bears his name. In a gesture of rejection and simultaneous creation, Rojas cuts out the texts from the English translation and uses the remnants to create new poems within a domestic setting with a desk, rug, and lamp.
The performances with the texts range from the use of an X-Acto blade in the artist’s mouth to collaborations with the artist’s mother and intimate conversations with viewers. Collectively, they attempt to rewrite the book, with the exact same words, but with a completely different narrative, always centering the dialectic of presence and absence of his own father. Rojas invites viewers who have conflicted relations with their fathers (“daddy issues”) to partake in a one-on-one performance to write poetry with him.

Artist Performance + Talk GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM!
2022-10-14 12:00 - 13:30
GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM!

Artist Performance + Talk by Emilio Rojas

Media Art Gallery
October 14, 2022
12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.

GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM! is a lecture/performance by artist Emilio Rojas. It moves away from this xenophobic phrase and investigates the history of colonialism and border trauma. This lecture considers his practice in relation to decolonization, de-linking, archives, queerness, and contaminations into public space. It is not an attempt to re-write history but rather to view it from a different lens, in a non-linear way which opens spaces of transition and possibility, remembrance and healing. It urges us to ask ourselves: How are we complicit with the past we inherited? How are we accomplices of the history being created in the present?

Emilio Rojas Performance "A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father"
2022-10-15 08:00 - 2022-10-16 17:00
A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father
The Iwasaki Library
October 15-16, 2022 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. RSVP required leonie_bradbury@emerson.edu
The live performance and installation, A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father, presents Rojas’ deconstructions of the popular novel, Pequeño Hombre, one of many written by his estranged father, who bears his name. In a gesture of rejection and simultaneous creation, Rojas cuts out the texts from the English translation and uses the remnants to create new poems within a domestic setting with a desk, rug, and lamp.
The performances with the texts range from the use of an X-Acto blade in the artist’s mouth to collaborations with the artist’s mother and intimate conversations with viewers. Collectively, they attempt to rewrite the book, with the exact same words, but with a completely different narrative, always centering the dialectic of presence and absence of his own father. Rojas invites viewers who have conflicted relations with their fathers (“daddy issues”) to partake in a one-on-one performance to write poetry with him.

Border Pedagogies, Queer Kinships, and Archival Resonances: Tania Bruguera and Emilio Rojas
2022-11-05 18:00 - 20:00
Border Pedagogies, Queer Kinships, and Archival Resonances: Tania Bruguera and Emilio Rojas in Conversation.
Moderated by Laurel V. McLaughlin.
Saturday, November 5th, 7-8:30p.m. (Doors open at 6:30p.m.)
Dessert Reception to follow. RSVP required EVENTBRITE
Location: Bill Bordy Theater, 216 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02116
Join Emerson Contemporary for a conversation between artists Tania Bruguera and Emilio Rojas, moderated by Artspace New Haven Director of Curatorial Affairs and Emerson guest curator Laurel V. McLaughlin, on the occasion of the book launch for Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body (Emerson Contemporary, 2022). Rojas and Bruguera will discuss the numerous research threads that intertwine in Emilio’s practice, survey, and the catalog structure. Departing from the atemporal and overlapping sections that compose the exhibition and catalog—the cut, the line, the scar, and the corpus, Bruguera, Rojas, and McLaughlin trace the intersections of border pedagogies, queer kinships, and archival resonances.
Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body (Emerson Contemporary, 2022) is available in print-on-demand through Blurb, or through an open-source link on the Emerson website. The bilingual exhibition catalog features an introduction by Michiko Okaya and Néstor Armando Gil Carmona, new poetry by Emilio Rojas and Pamela Sneed, an interview with Ernesto Pujol, and essays by Valeria Luiselli, Ethan Madarieta, Laurel V. McLaughlin, Rebecca Schneider, and Mechtild Widrich with Andrei Pop.

EL Putnam: PseudoRandom
2023-01-25 12:00 - 2023-03-26 18:00
Emerson Contemporary proudly presents EL Putnam: PseudoRandom, a solo exhibition featuring recent works by the Ireland-based video and performance artist on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street, January 25 – March 26, 2022. Free and open to the public, hours Wednesday – Sunday from 12-7pm.
The exhibition explores aesthetic encounters through digital performance by implicating the artist, technology, and the viewer. On display will be performative videos, a large scale projection, digital landscape “paintings” and an exploratory series of generative digital animations. Putnam examines performance art beyond lens based media, while questioning the ways time and space collapsed during the pandemic.
The exhibition is anchored by a large-scale projection All Kinds of Disintegration (2020). Shot in the summer of 2020 using a smartphone, the piece presents a layered collection of short vignettes captured during the first period of COVID-19 lockdown. The maternal is re-imagined in unfamiliar ways though a co-created transformative landscape using performed actions, moving image, and sound. A new video series Foundations (2022-23), is presented on three individual, yet connected monitors to form a color saturated triptych. Putnam uses datamoshing, a form of intentional image glitching, to create the dramatic dreamy visual effects. She thinks of the series as a type of digital watercolor painting.
Two performative video works Context Collapse (2020) and Interlooping (2021) explore new virtual performance modalities as all in-person performance opportunities were canceled during the pandemic. Both performances were instead livestreamed for online audiences. Context Collapse was created in response to the many pandemic public health restrictions which caused the closure of schools, workplaces, and other public spaces as people were encouraged to “stay home.” This compression of one’s personal, professional, and family spheres introduced a new type of context collapse. By contrast, Interlooping addresses the relationship of the performing human with technology, the non-human, and our collective being. EL Incorporates wool refuse accumulated during the disruption of the international wool trade in Ireland as a result of COVID-19.
Emergent (2020-2022) is a new series of generative animations developed through Putnam’s daily digital sketching practice of creating generative animations through p5.js. Emergent is a portrait of the artist’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic as it visualizes the data tracked through a fitbit. Instead of focusing on the intended use of the fitness tracker as an accurate record keeper of physical activity, Putnam draws attention to the gaps in data collection, the goals not met, and the capacity of physical activity to exceed sensory quantification.
Additionally, Putnam will create and perform two new, live performance works Ghost Work and Friction as part of the exhibition programming. Putnam uses wearable electronics as part of her performances to explore our gestural relationship to digital technologies. Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri define “ghost work” as the hidden human labor that powers our digital systems. In the performance of this title, Putnam acts as the human mediator between two generative animation systems, making visible the labor that responds to and produces data, as her body acts as the database of lived experience. A collaborative performance, Friction, created and performed with German sound artist David Stalling will debut in March.

EVENTS

Artist Reception: Wednesday, January 25, 5-7:30PM. RSVP required on Eventbrite.
Ghost Work, Live Performance by EL Putnam, Wednesday January 25, 6PM.

Media Art Gallery

Ghost Work, Live Performance EL Putnam: Friday, January 27, 12-1PM.

Media Art Gallery

Friction, Live Performance by EL Putnam and sound artist David Stalling, Thursday, March 23, 6PM.

Media Art Gallery

El Putnam, Artist Talk, Friday, March 24, 12PM

ABOUT THE ARTIST
EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher working in performance art, video, sound, and digital media. Her practice focuses on borders and entanglements, particularly the interplay of the corporeal with the machinic. Through her artistic practice, she is interested in exploring hidden histories and emotional experiences, testing the limits of their un-representability as she takes the familiar and makes it strange. In particular, she probes our gestural relationship to digital technology using wearable electronics in live performance, through the creation of responsive multimedia installations, and the crafting of short moving image and sound pieces.
Treating art as inherently participatory, her work opens intersubjective spaces that offer multiple conceptual and aesthetic points of entry for the audience through alchemical diffractions of experience, cultivating new modes of embodiment. In addition to creating works that are rich in cultural and political meaning, including the biopolitics of motherhood in Ireland, she is interested in how aesthetic pleasure can be used as a critical strategy, or as a means of captivating audiences in order to expose them to provocative ideas.
EL actively presents artworks and performances in the United States, Europe, and beyond, and has been a member of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group since 2009. Originally from the United States, she is Assistant Professor in Digital Media at Maynooth University, Ireland and lives in Co. Westmeath, Ireland.

EL Putnam: Artist Reception and Performance
2023-01-25 18:00 - 20:30
Join us for a celebration and unveiling of the new spring exhibition EL Putnam: PseudoRandom. Artist will perform a newly created piece “Ghost Work” live at 6PM. Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri define ghost work as the hidden human labor that powers our digital systems. In the performance of this title, Putnam acts as the human mediator between two generative animation systems, making visible the labor that responds to and produces data, as her body acts as the database of lived experience. Please RSVP to be placed on the guest list.
EL Putnam is an artist-philosopher working in performance art, video, sound, and digital media. Her practice focuses on borders and entanglements, particularly the interplay of the corporeal with the machinic. Through her artistic practice, she is interested in exploring hidden histories and emotional experiences, testing the limits of their un-representability as she takes the familiar and makes it strange. In particular, she probes our gestural relationship to digital technology using wearable electronics in live performance, through the creation of responsive multimedia installations, and the crafting of short moving image and sound pieces.
Treating art as inherently participatory, her work opens intersubjective spaces that offer multiple conceptual and aesthetic points of entry for the audience through alchemical diffractions of experience, cultivating new modes of embodiment. In addition to creating works that are rich in cultural and political meaning, including the biopolitics of motherhood in Ireland, she is interested in how aesthetic pleasure can be used as a critical strategy, or as a means of captivating audiences in order to expose them to provocative ideas.
EL actively presents artworks and performances in the United States, Europe, and beyond, and has been a member of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group since 2009. Originally from the United States, she is Assistant Professor in Digital Media at Maynooth University, Ireland and lives in Co. Westmeath, Ireland.

Live Performance: "Friction" by EL Putnam and David Stalling
2023-03-23 18:00 - 19:30
Putnam acts as the human mediator between two generative animation systems, making visible the labor that responds to and produces data, as her body acts as the database of lived experience. A collaborative performance, Friction, created and performed with German sound artist David Stalling will debut in March.

EL Putnam Artist Talk
2023-03-24 12:00 - 13:30
Friday, March 24, 2023
Join us for a audio-visual presentation on EL Putnam’s artist practice. Putnam will discuss recent performance and video works.
Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street
