Emerson Contemporary

Thin Places: Thresholds of Transmission
2026-09-15 12:00 - 2026-12-12 18:00 (America/New_York) | Massachusetts
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.

Keiken
2027-01-26 12:00 - 2027-03-27 18:00
Keiken (経験), meaning “experience” in Japanese, is an artist collective that pioneers a collaborative approach to creating immersive worlds through embodied, empathetic technologies, and deep world-building. In using speculative and participatory storytelling, they blend science fiction, consciousness research, gaming, and emerging technologies to create experiences where the digital and physical merge, and where audiences step inside alternative realities.

Through these experiences, visitors encounter contemporary Japanese perspectives on some of the most pressing questions facing societies today. In their first U.S. presentation, Keiken’s artistic practice explores lived experience, perception, and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital and post-human era. Rather than accepting dominant narratives about the future, the collective creates immersive environments that allow audiences to role-play alternative forms of existence, test new social structures, and imagine different relationships between technology, ecology, and community.

Internationally recognized for their innovative artistic practice, Keiken received the Chanel Next Prize in 2021 and the Lumen Prize in 2024. Their work has been presented at major international venues including the Venice Architecture Biennale, MUNCH in Oslo, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, and the collective has served as artist-in-residence at Somerset House in London.
