Emerson Contemporary

Kerry Tribe: Onomatopoeia
2022-01-26 08:00 - 2022-03-27 17:00 (America/New_York)
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.

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.

Sky Hopinka maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (virtual)
2021-10-28 20:00 - 22:00
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 (In person, Emerson Only)
2021-10-08 19:00 - 20:30

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: 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

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.

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/

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 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/

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Subversive Dreams: Allison Maria Rodriguez
2020-08-01 08:00 - 2020-09-13 17:00
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.

Investigating the Material feat. Sarah Trahan and Zsuzsanna Szegedi
2020-02-23 14:00 - 16:00
Join us for an intimate conversation in the gallery with spacetime artists Trahan and Szegedi and the exhibition curator as they discuss their experiences collaborating with machines as each artist investigates digital technology through its imperfections. Learn what happens when the work of art has no center and exists across multiple media, both virtual and real, as it manifests the various stages of an unfolding process.

Spacetime (x, y, x + t) is a multi-dimensional exhibition that features experimental works by regional and international artists, features digital projections, 3D printed objects, inkjet prints, virtual reality drawings, video, site specific light installation, and a dancing robot.

Performativity of Objects feat. Katherine Mitchell DiRico and Nicole L’Huillier
2020-02-02 14:00 - 16:00
Join us for an intimate conversation in the gallery with spacetime artists DiRico and L’Huillier and the exhibition curator as they explore non-human performativity through movement, sound, and light. We’ll discuss the agency of objects and how the art works on display are in a continual state of becoming.
Spacetime (x, y, x + t) is a multi-dimensional exhibition that features experimental works by regional and international artists, features digital projections, 3D printed objects, inkjet prints, virtual reality drawings, video, site specific light installation, and a dancing robot.

Spacetime (x, y, z + t)
2020-01-21 08:00 - 2020-03-15 17:00
Katherine Mitchell DiRico, Stilling Time. 2020. Mixed media installation.
Spacetime (x, y, z + t) is a multi-dimensional exhibition in the Emerson Contemporary Media Art Gallery that features experimental works by regional and international artists Katherine Mitchell DiRico (US), Monika Grzymala (GER), Nicole L’Huillier (CL), Zsuzsanna Szegedi (HUN), and Sarah Trahan (US).
The exhibition features digital projections, 3D printed objects, inkjet prints, VR drawings, video, site specific light installation, and a dancing robot. In putting together this exhibition, Bradbury considered how our perceptions are challenged and consequently change when artists include a durational element into an otherwise object-based artistic practice. Additionally, Spacetime includes both subtle and dramatic sonic elements that, when combined with drastic scale shifts of the various installations, contribute to a compelling immersive exhibition experience.
https://vimeo.com/430152669?share=copy

The works included in Spacetime (x, y, z + t) investigate the dynamic relationships between objects, their materiality, and demonstrate how an idea, object, or artistic concept can ‘travel’ across time, multiple media, and physical locations. Together these five artists’ aesthetic experiments offer an exploration of the rapidly changing intersections between the physical and the digital, objecthood and performativity, and expose how the virtual and the real interact in new ways as a result of current technological advancements.
According to curator Dr. Leonie Bradbury, “What interests me in these works is a broader theoretical concept of ‘art as event.’ These objects, ideas, and material manifestations are assembled as dynamic relational forms, but only temporarily, as they will soon be dismantled and re-distributed back into the studio, the file cabinet, or returned to a computer folder. As such, these works – and this exhibition – are in a continual state of becoming.”
In 1905, Albert Einstein demonstrated that space and time are both relative and integrated and are essentially the same thing: a single unified entity called ‘spacetime.’ Spacetime is a dynamic entity that fuses the three dimensions of space (x,y,z) and the dimension of time (t) into a single, four-dimensional continuum. In curating the exhibit, Bradbury explored the question of what happens when an artwork becomes an event that exists in the four dimensions of Einstein’s concept of ‘spacetime’ – rather than as an object in space and/or time.
About the Artwork
Katherine Mitchell DiRico‘s room-sized installation Stilling Life in the Project Room brings together an assembly of technology, objects, video, movements, and light to question the constructed nature of reality. These materials exist in varying degrees of completion, imploring us to combine their relationships anew each time they transform. Traversing between the virtual and the material, and quite literally between two separate spaces in the gallery, Stilling Life challenges the viewer’s ability to locate oneself in time and space. Various materials – light, air, mirrors, reflections– are moving at different rhythms to create a dynamic installation that is always changing, and therefore continually becoming; much like current relationships to the real and mediatized worlds we inhabit.
Monika Grzymala’s virtual landscapes Maze_VR_one and Maze_VR_two, are autonomous, immersive, spatial drawings, designed to exist in virtual reality (VR) and can be understood as simulated spatial structures. When the viewer puts on the VR headset, they “fly” through a seemingly endless web of lines, a spherical, cosmic-looking installation while listening to the soothing sound of the artist’s heart beat. These VR drawings are an extension of Grzymala’s sculptural practice whereby she creates room sized sculptural installations using tape called “space drawings” or raumzeichnung in German. On view will be Raumzeichnung (stretch), a video work that shows the deconstruction of such a site-specific drawing and one-time kinetic sculpture (duration 7 minutes) that took place in 2016 as part of a collaborative performance project.
Nicole L’Huillier‘s robotic sculpture The Dancer (2020) explores the performativity of an object as it moves across space and ‘draws’ through movement in time. The result is an unstable and irregular vibrational dance triggered by sounds emerging from its own body as the resonant frequencies of its material composition causes the object to move. Thus The Dancer dances as a way of embodying its own noise. This object is animated by sounds that are drawn as a dance across space and time. Exploring other levels of animacy and performativity, this vibrational body exists in a continuous dialogue between gravity, resonance, and trance.
Zsuzsanna Szegedi‘s latest work In the Fracture (2018-2020)explores the dynamics of control between human and machine, made visible through the lens of digital photography and related physical outcomes. Using a 3D image scan of her body as a point of origin, Szegedi visualizes the human-machine power dynamics through a virtual reality video simulation, a digital projection on raw clay and two 3D printed prototypes. While exploring the dimensions of space and time within the digital photographic imaging process, Szegedi shows how this medium produces distortion, breakage, and a disrupted image. In doing so, she magnifies the limitations of current imaging technologies.
Sarah Trahan’s multimedia installation Hand of the Machine (2019 – 2020) investigates digital manufacturing through its imperfections. What we commonly understand as a uniform and infinitely repeatable dialog between user, computer, and 3D printer belies a much more nuanced and imperfect system. Communication breakdowns, bugs, and evidence of the unpredictable nature of hot plastic become apparent as we look more closely. Impressions, abstractions, and mutations are interpreted through lenses, light, and ink. Hand of the Machine halts the fabrication process to focus on these aberrant details: anomalies build up, forms break down, and are reconstituted into new structures ripe for exploration.

Indigenous storytelling with Larry Spotted Crow Mann
2019-12-08 14:00 - 16:00
Join award winning author, poet, and Nipmuc storyteller Larry Spotted Crow Mann as he contextualizes the exhibition with local histories, traditional stories, and poetry. The art of Native American storytelling has been passed down for thousands of years. They give life and meaning to everything in the Universe and offer lessons of love, courage, kindness, respect, humility, truth, and wisdom. The stories teach us the skills to interact with our environment as a living being and codify those teachings within our own existence.
About the artist
Larry Spotted Crow Mann is a citizen of the Nipmuc Tribe of Massachusetts. He is an award winning writer, poet, cultural educator, Traditional Storyteller, tribal drummer, dancer and motivational speaker involving youth sobriety, cultural and environmental awareness. Mann is also a board member of the Nipmuk Cultural Preservation,an organization set up to promote the cultural, social and spiritual needs of Nipmuc people that also serves as an educational resource of Native American studies.

“Future Traditions: Theorizing the Native Avant Garde” Talk by Emerson professor Dr. Adam Spry
2019-10-24 18:00 - 19:00
What does it mean for Native writers and artists to embrace the avant garde, along with its deep mistrust of the traditional? In this talk, Dr. Spry will discuss the history of the rise of Native American experimental art and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries—and its surprising roots in the U.S.’s efforts to promote the idea of Native artistic ‘tradition.’

Future Ancestral Technologies: nágshibi
2019-10-17 08:00 - 2019-12-15 17:00
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies: nágshibi is a multi-media Indigenous-centered science fiction exhibition using creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future and promote a thriving Indigeneity. Nágshibi is the Hidatsa word for ‘to be past, to be after’ or ‘to exceed, to go beyond.’ The exhibition, an approach to creating art objects, videos, and performance with the intent to influence global consciousness, included a 21-foot tall canvas tipi, a two channel video installation, performative video works, photography, and ceremonial regalia created by the artist.

Regarding Future Ancestral Technologies, Nagshibi, Cannupa Luger states: “In this ongoing series, I prototype designs for objects and their use. I test rituals and conduct ceremonies. This project operates with the assumption that these ‘artworks’ will become customary in the future. I create a space of futuristic vision in which societies are nomadic, tipis are solar-powered, and humans create their own functional regalia to live through ceremony in acknowledgement of land.”
About the exhibition
Future Ancestral Technologies debuted in 2018 in the form of an immersive exhibition at the University of South Dakota. A series of land-acknowledgment performative actions have since followed and manifest as video works, several of which will be on view in the Emerson Contemporary Media Art Gallery. The project continues through the prototyping of dwellings, clothing, tools, and videos that illustrate a world in which artificial intelligence and virtual reality support ritual and ceremony. Though currently viewed via exhibitions and in other art world contexts, this project operates under the assumption that these artworks will become useful in the future.
Exhibition Reviews
Boston Globe
Boston Art Review

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Indigenous Science Fiction, The Imagination and Long-Term Thinking
2019-10-16 18:00 - 19:30
A reception was held Wednesday, October 16, in the Jackie Liebergott Black Box Theater at Emerson’s Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street, followed by the talk Indigenous Science Fiction, The Imagination and Long-Term Thinking, where artist Cannupa Hanska Luger was in conversation with author and historian of science Dr. Jimena Canales. The conversation was presented by Emerson’s Media Art Gallery and Long Now Boston, an organization that fosters long term thinking. It was moderated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Henry and Lois Foster Chair of Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College.

GlitchKraft Artist Talk: Allison Tanenhaus, Ben Foley, and Lauren Klotzman
2019-10-03 12:30 - 15:30
Artist Talk Featuring exhibiting artists Allison Tanenhaus, Ben Foley, and Lauren Klotzman
Video Art Performance MEMORY RECOVERY : : AFTERDARK REVISITED by Lauren Klotzman.

GlitchKraft Artist Talk: Alex Kittle
2019-09-20 12:00 - 13:30
Artist Talk featuring illustrator, art historian, and film curator Alex Kittle
Since 2018, Kittle has been devoted to women filmmakers, creating portraits and zine biographies as a way to share their stories and works in an accessible way. She also co-hosts a monthly screening series and discussion group called Strictly Brohibited, which highlights women-made films in a welcoming community for women and non-binary film fans. Visit @panandscan and @strictlybrohibited for more information.

GlitchKraft Glitch Workshop
2019-09-14 12:00 - 15:00
Glitch Workshop with Allison Tanenhaus
One-on-one guidance on iPads (and BYO devices), with preloaded images and apps.
