off the pedestal - Artist Reception
2024-09-17 17:30 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | Massachusetts
Come celebrate off the pedestal, a multimedia group exhibition featuring visual artists Laura Anderson Barbata, New Red Order, and Paula J. Wilson. This exhibition is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from August 1 – October 5, 2024. The exhibition is free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm.

Laura Anderson Barbata, Indigo, 2017

Curated by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Leonie Bradbury and Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, off the pedestal speaks directly to the national phenomenon of the removal of Confederate and other racist monuments in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Although monuments are generally presented as permanent, timeless, and expressive of universal values, this exhibition proposes that public memory could be more effectively addressed and activated through ephemeral expressions.

Laura Anderson Barbata’s multidisciplinary performance work Indigo is a call to action in response to the violence and murder of Black persons at the hands of the police. A group of sixteen resplendent characters clad in hand-dyed fabrics, woven details, and ornate stitching, many standing at the height of stilts, powerfully demonstrate the textile art aspect of Barbata’s vision.

New Red Order’s large-scale video installation Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples. They base their critique on historical events, and the pacing of the digitized imagery, accompanied by skillful sound design, transports viewers into their speculative reveries.

Paula J. Wilson’s performative video Living Monument and 2D wall work Thyself monumentalize Black female bodies through dramatic scale and bold gestures. Her work elevates embodied histories and reminds us that joy and celebration are crucial parts of resistance. This exhibition is part of Emerson Contemporary’s Regarding Monuments: Visualizing Hidden Histories, a multi-year initiative that includes exhibitions centered on monuments, several public art installations, and a technology incubator.

Artist Talk: Laura Anderson Barbata
2024-09-18 17:00 - 18:00 | Media Art Gallery
As a part of Laura Anderson Barbata’s work in Emerson Contemporary’s off the pedestal multimedia installation, the artist will be giving a talk at the Media Art Gallery on September 18th, from 5:00-6:00pm (doors open at 4:30 pm).

Barbata’s inspiring performance work Indigo is a call to action in response to the violence and murder of Black persons at the hands of the police. A group of sixteen resplendent characters clad in hand-dyed fabrics, woven details, and ornate stitching, many standing at the height of stilts, powerfully demonstrate the textile art aspect of Barbata’s vision. Come celebrate off the pedestal, a multimedia group exhibition featuring visual artists Laura Anderson Barbata, New Red Order, and Paula J. Wilson. This exhibition is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from August 1 – October 5, 2024. The exhibition is free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm.

Laura Anderson Barbata, Indigo, 2017

Curated by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Leonie Bradbury and Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, off the pedestal speaks directly to the national phenomenon of the removal of Confederate and other racist monuments in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Although monuments are generally presented as permanent, timeless, and expressive of universal values, this exhibition proposes that public memory could be more effectively addressed and activated through ephemeral expressions.

New Red Order’s large-scale video installation Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples. They base their critique on historical events, and the pacing of the digitized imagery, accompanied by skillful sound design, transports viewers into their speculative reveries.

Paula J. Wilson’s performative video Living Monument and 2D wall work Thyself monumentalize Black female bodies through dramatic scale and bold gestures. Her work elevates embodied histories and reminds us that joy and celebration are crucial parts of resistance. This exhibition is part of Emerson Contemporary’s Regarding Monuments: Visualizing Hidden Histories, a multi-year initiative that includes exhibitions centered on monuments, several public art installations, and a technology incubator.

How to Commit Crimes Against Reality: ARTIST TALK with New Red Order
2024-09-26 18:00 - 19:30 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
*Doors open at 5:30pm

“Do you want to realize your fullest potential? Be your truest self? Act with confidence? Attract abundance? Alleviate anxiety? Experience clarity? Know your purpose? Be the change you want to see? Be truly present? Experience real freedom? Change the world? Be a part of the solution? On some level, we all want to feel this way, but sometimes in our globalized, capitalist, settler-colonial society it feels impossible. Which is why the New Red Order is developing a dynamic system to help our accomplices achieve all of this and more. This sneak peek of our free introductory video, Never Settle, will tell you what you need to know to take control of your life today!”

As a part of New Red Order’s work in Emerson Contemporary’s off the pedestal multimedia installation, the artist group will be conducting a workshop on September 27th, from 2-3:30 pm at Emerson’s Media Art Gallery.

New Red Order’s large-scale video installation Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples. They base their critique on historical events, and the pacing of the digitized imagery, accompanied by skillful sound design, transports viewers into their speculative reveries.

A "Give it Back" Workshop With New Red Order (NRO)
2024-09-27 14:00 - 15:30 | Student Performance Center, Little Building, 80 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116, United States
Give it Back Workshop

New Red Order (NRO) will unpack their “Give it Back Program” which recruits, normalizes, and promotes the ongoing practice of voluntary land return from settlers back to Indigenous peoples through a multiplicity of swerving artistic and political strategies including: advertising, network creation, promotional videos, public art, performance and organizing. NRO will work with students to help devise strategies for how their own work can expand past the limitations of art and into the world to create material changeNew Red Order will be conducting the workshop on September 27th, from 2:00 – 3:30 pm at Student Performance Center, Little Building, 80 Boylston St. RSVP your spot at the workshop right here.**RSVP required for non-Emerson guests

New Red Order’s large-scale video installation Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality examines the contradictions inherent in a society built on both the longing for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples. They base their critique on historical events, and the pacing of the digitized imagery, accompanied by skillful sound design, transports viewers into their speculative reveries.

Emerson Contemporary Awarded $80,000 Grant From The Andy Warhol Foundation
2024-10-22 00:00 - 23:59 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Emerson Contemporary is excited to have received a generous $80,000 grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in support of our exhibitions and programming over the next two years. This contribution will have a profound impact on the gallery’s ability to present innovative and engaging visual art experiences to our community and fully support the artists we are exhibiting and inviting to our campus.

﻿Over the past five years, under the leadership of Chair of Contemporary Art and Distinguished Curator in Residence, Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Emerson Contemporary has developed a “teaching gallery” with an emphasis on presenting mid-career artists with time-based media practices, including video and performance and those that explore emerging technologies such as augmented, virtual, and extended reality (AR/VR/XR), the only of its kind in New England.

Emerson Contemporary amplifies the voices of living artists who broaden how we understand our present moment and help us reimagine what is possible. We encourage experimentation, commission new works, and support artistic research through technological support and mentorship. In support of this mission, they actively seek to create opportunities for working artists to engage with new technologies, software tools, creative technologists, and the faculty expertise on our campus that are otherwise not accessible.

In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The foundation manages a dynamic grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the foundation has given nearly $300 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations across the country and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.

This grant will enable us to bring a range of exhibitions featuring both emerging and established artists, foster critical dialogue through public programming, and provide valuable educational opportunities for our audience. Says Bradbury, “The Foundation puts visual art and artists at the center of their work. Their commitment to the arts is inspiring, and we are honored to be among the recipients of their support. We look forward to the exciting and impactful work made possible by this grant.”

Louis Cameron: NOW IS THE TIME
2024-10-22 00:00 - 2024-12-14 23:59 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Emerson Contemporary Presents: Billboards, posters and text-based works in “Louis Cameron: Now Is the Time” Exhibition explores the civil rights movement, gun violence, and hip hop culture.

Emerson Contemporary proudly presents Louis Cameron: Now is the Time, featuring billboards, posters and text-based works that explore the civil rights movement, gun violence and hip hop culture. It is underway, on view through December 14, 2024 at Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery in the heart of downtown Boston.

The free exhibition features several large-scale, wall-mounted vinyl text pieces from the ongoing Hip Hop Onomatopoeia series, a body of work that explores the conversation on gun violence within hip hop music. The works are text based, using the onomatopoeia of gun shots in hip hop songs as their reference. Cameron focuses on onomatopoeia because of its emotional resonance. Additional works from the Excavation and Displacement series are also on view.

Exclusively for this exhibition, Cameron designed a limited-edition take home poster titled

I Got To Have It, serving as a monument to Hip Hop culture and black music in Boston. It features a poem that peels back the layers of a song to reveal its connections to the history of Black music. Indicative of Hip Hop’s sampling culture, the poem is composed of a source song and the song titles that it sampled from.

Notably, these sampled songs touch on key points in the lineage of Black music such as James Brown, the Blues, and spirituals. The poster addresses urban realities and gun violence, the self-determination of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, and features the title of a song that refers to the African American spirituals such as Wade in the Water. The choice of typeface provides a reference to Hip Hop culture for the presentation of the poem.

Additionally, Cameron will present the “I AM… Portfolio” a group of posters addressing the recent violence against Black men and disregard for their lives in America. The title refers to rally calls and protest chants from the 1960s to the present. While violence against Black people is center stage in the current American cultural conversation, presenting a project by Black male artists – including Sanford Biggers, Rashid Johnson, and Shaun Leonardo, among others – offers valuable insights and counter representation.

Louis Cameron was born in Xxxxxxxx, Ohio, USA; lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He earned a B.F.A. from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia.https://www.louiscameron.com/

Woop! Woop! What’s That Sound Noise? (Interactive Lecture)
2024-11-18 00:00 - 23:59 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Presenting, a workshop on Hip-Hop culture with Dr. Brent Smith

Back in 1993, Hip Hop culture had reached twenty years of life and was boldly making its way through emerging adulthood. Its emcees and other artists challenged boundaries on self-expression, self-determination, and even community. The soundtrack of our societies and our lives would come to make way for insights wrapped into Sound of The Police (KRS One), U.N.I.T.Y. (Queen Latifah), C.R.E.A.M. (Wu Tang Clan), Now I Feel Ya (Scarface), How Many Emcees (Black Moon), Streiht Up Menace (MNC Eiht), and more. Hip Hop of 1993, arguably one of its greatest years, prompted or provoked us like a siren: Woop! Woop! What’s That Sound Noise?

Join us for a community talk led by Dr. Brent Smith as we explore this topic in relation to our current exhibit, Louis Cameron: Now is the Time.

Emerson Contemporary proudly presents Louis Cameron: Now is the Time, featuring Billboards, posters and text-based works that explore the civil rights movement, gun violence and Hip Hop culture. The exhibition features several large-scale, wall-mounted vinyl text pieces from the ongoing Hip Hop Onomatopoeia series, a body of work that explores the conversation on gun violence within Hip Hop music.

The M.F.A Thesis Shows: Christopher Lee & Asma Khoshmehr
2024-12-02 00:00 - 2024-12-05 23:59 | Huret And Spector Gallery, Tufte Building
Emerson’s Master’s in Fine Arts candidates, Christopher Lee and Asma Khoshmehr share deeply personal stories of their family’s past, interpreted through new media.

This exhibition will have a reception on December 5th from 6-8pm.

Memory Lost by Christopher Lee

Memory Lost is a multimedia installation that probes the fragile nature of human memory through the lens of AI generated media. Drawing inspiration from the artist’s personal experience witnessing his grandfather’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease, this work explores the parallels between artificial intelligence and human cognition. The installation revisits formative moments from the artist’s life from childhood through adulthood, using AI to reconstruct and reinterpret these memories.

By highlighting the biases and limitations of both AI and human recollection, the piece invites viewers to contemplate the ephemeral quality of our lived experiences. Memory Lost serves as a poignant meditation on mortality, loss, and the imperfect mechanisms through which we preserve and recall our past, challenging us to consider the essence of what makes us human.

Throughout his artistic journey, Chris has been driven by an innate curiosity to acquire new knowledge, leading him to constantly push the boundaries of his creative toolkit. Early in life he explored drawing and painting before developing a deep affinity for music. By high school Chris had built up a home studio filled with guitars, synthesizers, and other gadgets. As an adult, Chris briefly explored a business career before realizing his true calling lay in creative work.

He enrolled in Emerson College’s Film & Media Art program to work with other artists and to find a personal and professional outlet for his creativity. Since then, Chris has contributed to dozens of student and independent projects, specializing in location sound recording, sound design, and mixing. His personal work leverages diverse digital technologies, reflecting his evolution from a young artist to a versatile multimedia professional adept at integrating multiple artistic disciplines.

Act.No.06: 1001 Nights in Zanzibar by Asma Khoshmehr

Act.No.06: 1001 Nights in Zanzibar is a multimedia installation that uncovers the silenced stories of forced child marriages and political persecution following the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964. The work explores a 1971 presidential decree that allowed officials to forcibly marry underage girls, including many women in the artist’s family. These policies led to deportation, imprisonment, confiscation of family properties, and decades of silence about the trauma endured. Asma, the first in her generation to uncover this hidden history, conducted years of research, discovering the secret stories of many women in her family impacted by these events. She traveled across Tanzania, Kenya, Oman, UAE, and Iran to gather testimonies, family documents, and archival records, piecing together her family’s survival through forced marriages, captivity, and eventual escape.Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights and Scheherazade’s storytelling to transform a vengeful king into a compassionate leader, Asma’s project reflects her hope to mirror Scheherazade’s journey. It combines archival materials, 3D laser scans, virtual reality experiences, and video art, exploring how storytelling can confront power and inspire transformation. By sharing these stories, this project reflects on how Scheherazade used storytelling to change a vengeful king, drawing attention to the tyrants of today who continue to use women’s bodies as tools of revenge in war and revolution.Asma Khoshmehr is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work combines immersive storytelling, documentary filmmaking, and new media. With a BFA in Performing Arts and currently pursuing an MFA with a focus on new media, her practice draws deeply from her East African and Middle Eastern heritage, exploring themes of generational trauma, forced displacement, and political sexual violence.

Asma’s work has earned recognition through prestigious awards and residencies, including the MacDowell Fellowship, the MASS MoCA, Andrew Freedman Home (AFH), and the ON::VIEW Artist Residency. She has also received the Carole Fielding Grant from the University Film and Video Association (UFVA) and the Virgin Unite Grant. Her international journey includes a scholarship to study Beijing Opera at the Shanghai Theater Academy and mythology at Sanskriti Kendra in India.

School of the Arts: Art Party
2024-12-05 00:00 - 23:59 | Emerson Contemporary
Art Party Alert!

Get ready for Emerson Contemporary’s FIRST EVER ‘Come Make Your Own Art’ Party! – Featured workshop artists are: Rikiesha, Robin Danzak, Jay Antidesign.

Join us for an evening of zines, posters, snacks, and creativity alongside fellow artists and dreamers. Relax, unwind, and let your imagination run wild! Let’s celebrate the power of art together. Don’t miss it! Also free pizza and hip hop music.

Supported by:Dean Kate Eichhorn, School of the ArtsLeonie Bradbury, Curator-in-ResidenceRobin Danzak, Health & Social Change Major

What You Are I Was, What I Am You Will Be
2024-12-09 00:00 - 2024-12-13 23:59 | Huret And Spector Gallery, Tufte Building
The B.F.A Photo Practicum

Emerson’s College presents the Fall 2024 Photo Practicum, What You Are I Was, What I Am You Will Be.

Featuring works by the following artists:Madison BrownTianyun Chen Xinzhu DongMadeleine Feldman Ilana Grollman Elie Largura Arthur Li Rian NelsonBianca Pupo Anna Schoenmann, Willow Torres Madla Walsh

This exhibition will have a reception on December 9th from 6-8pm at the Emerson College Huret & Spector Gallery.

Call for Artists
2025-01-10 08:00 - 2025-02-10 23:59 | Massachusetts
CALL FOR WORK 2025 Regional Media Art Showcase

This exhibition aims to present a snapshot of current visual art culture, with a focus on innovative media art installation through the work of artists based in New England. Juried by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Assistant Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, and Artist and Curator Allison Maria Rodriguez.

DEADLINE for submissions is Monday, February 10, midnight. Selected artists will be notified by April 2, 2025 and will receive a $1,000 artist fee as a stipend and to help offset any exhibition production costs. APPLICATION FORM

﻿DESCRIPTION

New England Regional Media Art Showcase, a group exhibition, will feature screen-reliant and/or lens reliant artwork by artists based throughout New England. Intended to enable practitioners at every stage of their career to exhibit a signiﬁcant aspect of their practice, and/or to expand their existing practice into new media. Drawing upon the gallery’s state-of-the art equipment, specialized media exhibit space and staﬀ expertise, the selections will prioritize varied, emergent and innovative installation and display methodologies.

The exhibition will be on view at the Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA, July 29 – October 4, 2025. Installation dates: July 14-25, 2025.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We are particularly interested in moving image art and art using emergent technologies including, but not limited to, Installations (Interactive and non-interactive), Projections, Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality Environments, Multimedia Performance, Single Channel Video and Animation, and Experimental works.

Artists are welcome to submit up to 3 works of art for consideration. Submission materials could include photos, previous installation views, written descriptions, sketches, mock ups, web links, trailers and/or videos. Gallery has an extensive digital equipment inventory available for use including high resolution projectors, iPads, computers, monitors, screens etc.

SUBMISSION CRITERIA

Artists must currently live in New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) and be able to drop off and pick up the selected works and/or specialized equipment to the gallery if needed. Gallery is not able to pay for shipping. Selected artist will receive a $1,000 participation stipend. APPLICATION FORM

**Please note there are no fees required to submit work for consideration or to participate.

Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales: Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind
2025-02-04 12:00 - 2025-03-22 18:00 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
New multi-media exhibition explores memory, history, and grief through science fiction and cinematic time travel.

On view in Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery, February 4 – March 22, 2025.

BOSTON, MA (January 15, 2025) – Emerson Contemporary is proud to present Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales, featuring multi-channel films and a dramatic sculptural installation by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind. On view in our Media Art Gallery are As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night , an Arabic-language opera on loss, mourning and inherited trauma accompanied by a dramatic sculptural installation and a two-channel science fiction film, In Vitro. A special one-night screening of the science fiction film In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and their latest documentary film Familiar Phantoms (2023) will augment the exhibition.

In much of their practice, Sansour and Lind use fiction as an imaginary mode to speak to the present in a manner that diffracts the highly charged political discourse on the historic and ongoing crisis in the Middle East. By ‘time traveling’ to both a faraway past and fictionalised futures, this exhibition explores how cinematic storytelling can open up new spaces for empathy and understanding of a shared human experience.

This exhibition is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Programming

Film Screening + Artist Conversation

Come view In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and Familiar Phantoms (2023). Filmmakers Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind will be in conversation with Emerson Assistant Professor and Filmmaker Julia Halperin afterwards.

Film screening is co-presented with the RPM Film Festival and the Salem Film Fest.

Date: Tuesday, February 4, 7-9:30pm. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Location: Bright Family Screening Room, 559 Washington St. Boston, Ma, 02111

RSVP required for tickets: EVENTBRITE

Artist Reception + Conversation with Larissa Sansour, Søren Lind and exhibition curator Dr. Leonie Bradbury

Date: Wednesday, February 5, 5-7pm.

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Ma 02111

About the artists: Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind are an artist duo who have collaborated on various films. They live and work in London. What underscores the significance of their work in the current context is the relationship between memory, trauma and the present to envision a more peaceful future. In 2019 they represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Larissa Sansour studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, KINDL in Berlin, Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark and Dar El-Nimer in Beirut. Soren Lind is a Danish author and director and visual artist with a background in philosophy. Lind wrote books on mind, language, and understanding before turning to art, film, and fiction. Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide.

Film Screening + Artist Conversation
2025-02-04 19:00 - 21:30 | Bright Lights Theater, Paramount Center
Come watch In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2016) and Familiar Phantoms (2023) by filmmakers Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind at Emerson’s Bright Family Screening Room.

Join us after the screening for a conversation with the filmmakers, and Emerson’s Artist in Residence, Julia Halperin.

This screening is co-presented with the RPM Film Festival and the Salem Film Fest, and Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s exhibition at Emerson Contemporary is made possible by the generous funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Date: Tuesday, February 4, 7-9:30pm. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Location: Bright Family Screening Room, 559 Washington St. Boston, Ma, 02111

RSVP required for tickets: EVENTBRITE

This exhibition

Date: Wednesday, February 5, 5-7pm.

Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Ma 02111

About the artists: https://larissasansour.com/ Larissa Sansour and Soren Lind are an artist duo who have collaborated on various films. They live and work in London. What underscores the significance of their work in the current context is the relationship between memory, trauma and the present to envision a more peaceful future. In 2019 they represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Born in East Jerusalem, Larissa Sansour (PS/DK) studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, KINDL in Berlin, Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark and Dar El-Nimer in Beirut. Soren Lind (DK) is a Danish author and director and visual artist with a background in philosophy. Lind wrote books on mind, language, and understanding before turning to art, film, and fiction. Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide.

Mirror Fields: A Series of Art-Led Reflections in the Media Art Gallery
2025-02-11 12:00 - 13:00 | Massachusetts
Special Gallery Event in Conjunction with Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind exhibition: Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales on view in the Media Art Gallery.

Join Rabbi Lisa Eiduson for a contemplative experience inside the newest exhibition Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind: Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales. On view are two films and a dramatic reflecting pool that invite meditations on memory, multigenerational trauma, and sorrow. Participants will be invited to take in a reading and some words of wisdom on the themes brought forth by the artworks and then are invited to share their own experiences, listen to others’ or simply sit in silence. Light refreshments will be served

12:00-1:00 pm on Tuesday, February 11, 2025 Led by Rabbi Eiduson

12:00-1:00 pm on Tuesday, February 25, 2025 Led by Rabbi Eiduson

Currently serving as the Interim Director of Emerson College’s Center of Spiritual Life, Rabbi Eiduson is a member of the clergy team at Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, MA. There she teaches, leads services, officiates at life-cycle events, preaches, and organizes programming. She believes deeply in education and feels that learning, when applied, is the best avenue for promoting understanding among people.

Mirror Fields: A Series of Art-Led Reflections in the Media Art Gallery
2025-02-25 12:00 - 13:00 | Media Art Gallery
Special Gallery Event in conjunction with the Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind exhibition

Join Rabbi Lisa Eiduson for a contemplative experience inside the newest exhibition Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind: Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales. On view are two films and a dramatic reflecting pool that invite meditations on memory, multigenerational trauma, and sorrow. Participants will be invited to take in a reading and some words of wisdom on the themes brought forth by the artworks and then are invited to share their own experiences, listen to others’ or simply sit in silence.

12:00-1:00 pm on Tuesday, February 25, 2025 Led by Rabbi Eiduson

Currently serving as the Interim Director of Emerson College’s Center of Spiritual Life, Rabbi Eiduson is a member of the clergy team at Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, MA. There she teaches, leads services, officiates at life-cycle events, preaches, and organizes programming. She believes deeply in education and feels that learning, when applied, is the best avenue for promoting understanding among people.

Call For Works: MOVEMENT/S
2025-02-28 00:00 - 23:59 | Boston Commons, 139 Tremont St, Boston, MA, Boston, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary seeks critically engaged photographic series and lens-based works for a three-week exhibition considering ideas and issues related to “movement/s.” This topical and timely show is a part of an upper-level seminar on Curatorial Practices in the department of Visual & Media Studies.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Artists are welcome to submit 3-5 artworks for consideration. Works should be from a cohesive series, exhibition-ready, and ready to hang. We expect to select several works per artist (rather than one piece per person). Format-wise, media could include photographs captured or created using historical or contemporary processes; videos or projections; photomontage or sculptural photographs; experimental or new media; or installations that include or allude to photography. Genre-wise, works could include fine art, documentary, conceptual, or archival.

ARTIST CRITERIA AND LOGISTICS: This exhibition opportunity is for emerging artists and photographers, broadly defined. We especially encourage those from historically under-represented communities to apply. Artists must live or work in the Greater Boston area and be able to drop off and pick up the selected works to the gallery. The gallery is not able to accept shipped works or pay for shipping. The gallery cannot provide framing, but does have an extensive equipment inventory available for use including high single-channel projectors, iPads, monitors etc.

DEADLINE for submissions is Thursday, February 27th at 11:59pm*There are no fees to submit work for consideration or to participate*

LINK to application form: https://www.cognitoforms.com/MediaArtGallery/MOVEMENTS

QUESTIONS? Email EmersonCuratorialPractices@gmail.com No phone calls pleas

CALL NARRATIVE: A photograph is never fully still and nothing remains truly static. The act of photographing is inherently active, requiring the photographer to move towards or follow a subject, to observe, to respond. Photographs aid in our understanding by collecting singular moments and circulating in a world of relentless flux.Our era has rapidly oscillated between inertia and eruption — from massive lockdowns to global protest. This endless movement is crucial for progress but can be overwhelming individually. How do we process and picture this whiplash of stasis paired together with speed?

Movement/s, a student-curated exhibition at Emerson College, seeks photographic and lens-based works that engage, capture, and reflect “movement.” The call welcomes artworks that examine movement as an idea — whether anticipated or abrupt, chaotic or controlled, internal or external — as well as those that document political and social, environmental and scientific, physical and abstract movements. We also solicit series that explore the role of photography as a tool for change, organization, or revolution as well as those that question the fluidity, fractures, and futures of movement. Whether we fight, fly, or freeze, “moving through” can also be a transformative pause or confrontation and invite those interpretations as well.

We especially seek projects that challenge binaries — action/inaction, progress/rewind, agitation/anxiety, construction/destruction — to map where we have been, where we are stuck, and how we might navigate, connect, learn, and move forward. Our exhibition aims to be a reflection of and meditation on our time — from its perpetual motion, shifting tides, restless energy, to continuous evolution. We look forward to seeing how artists incorporate and interrogate Movement/s at this inflection point — as the weight of history presses against the present and the fierce urgency of now foreshadows the future.

(Un)Making AI Worlds
2025-03-17 12:00 - 2025-03-22 17:00 | Huret and Spector Gallery, 10 Boylston Pl, Boston, MA 02116, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116, United States
Presenting, “(Un)Making AI Worlds”, curated by Ioana Jucan with Tushar Mathew, and Leonie Bradbury. The exhibition invites audiences to explore artworks emerging from the Data Fluencies Theatre Project team’s critical and creative interrogations of artificial intelligence and AI systems.

Blending theatrical conventions, choreographed movement, poetry, and artistic experiments with machine learning, (Machine) Learning to Be is a participatory, devised, hybrid multimedia performance experience that engages with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and their societal impacts. The performance features an interactive choreographic interface that aims to engage AI as embodiment technologies and human and AI characters that aim to convey the multifaceted nature of AI, its dangers and possibilities for our communities. Rooted in visions of decolonial AI, (Machine) Learning to Be seeks to challenge established systems of control and envision more equitable futures alongside AI technology.

Featuring artists Ioana B. Jucan, Tushar Matthew, David Mesiha, Aidan Nelson, Jae Neal, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Yuguang Zhang, Gavan Cheema, Kite, the exhibition features the following events, activations and performances at Emerson’s Huret and Spector Gallery

March 18, 2025:4-6.30pm: Performance Activations and Artist Panel discussion moderated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, followed by Reception

March 21st, 2025:2:00 pm: Secret Hyena activation

March 22nd, 2025:4:00 pm: Secret Hyena activation

The Data Fluencies Theatre Project (2022-2025) is an artistic research project that mobilizes theatrical performance’s potential to build data fluencies grounded in and honoring embodied experience. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team to develop artworks and co-create a participatory, devised, hybrid multimedia performance. Titled (Machine) Learning to Be, the performance engages with AI and algorithmic systems as it seeks to challenge established systems of control and envision more equitable futures alongside AI technology.

Mirror Fields: A Series of Art-Led Reflections in the Media Art Gallery
2025-03-18 12:00 - 13:00 | Media Art Gallery
February 4, 2026

Special Gallery Event in conjunction with the Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind exhibition

Join Rabbi Lisa Eiduson for a contemplative experience inside the newest exhibition Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind: Entire Nations Are Built on Fairy Tales. On view are two films and a dramatic reflecting pool that invite meditations on memory, multigenerational trauma, and sorrow. Participants will be invited to take in a reading and some words of wisdom on the themes brought forth by the artworks and then are invited to share their own experiences, listen to others’ or simply sit in silence.

12:00-1:00 pm on Tuesday, March 18, 2025 Led by Rabbi Eiduson

Currently serving as the Interim Director of Emerson College’s Center of Spiritual Life, Rabbi Eiduson is a member of the clergy team at Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, MA. There she teaches, leads services, officiates at life-cycle events, preaches, and organizes programming. She believes deeply in education and feels that learning, when applied, is the best avenue for promoting understanding among people.

Oblique - a photo exhibition
2025-04-01 00:00 - 2025-04-02 23:59 | Huret & Spector Gallery
Curated & created by Jay Sain and Daniel Abreu, Oblique is a photo-meditation on the fragments of what once was.

On display at Emerson’s Huret & Spector gallery, from April 1st to April 2nd, from 12-5pm.

Emerson Contemporary Presents: MOVEMENT/S
2025-04-11 00:00 - 2025-05-03 23:59 | Boston Commons, 139 Tremont St, Boston, MA, Boston, 02111, United States
A student-curated lens-based exhibition that explores the dynamic between motion and stillness in an ever-changing world.

Emerson Contemporary presents MOVEMENT/S, a student-curated lens-based exhibition that explores the dynamic between motion and stillness in an ever-changing world. On view in the Media Art Gallery from April 12 through May 3, 2025. From a thematic regional call, the student-curators selected 14 boundary-pushing artists and several pieces per series to show a fuller picture. The exhibition showcases a broad range of media by emerging artists in the Greater Boston area and includes photography, both analog and digital, photo sculpture/installation, interactive video and projection, 3D scanning, and experimental animation.

Federal Street by Jeff Larson

MOVEMENT/S examines the dynamic between motion and stillness in an ever-changing world. The artists explore movement in its many forms—whether physical, political, emotional, or abstract—capturing moments of transition, disruption, and transformation. Some works focus on the personal, reflecting on internal shifts and psychological states, while others expand outward, documenting collective action and societal upheaval. Through photography and lens-based media, this exhibition invites both artists and audiences to reconsider how we navigate periods of flux, confront stagnation, and ultimately move forward.

The exhibition was curated by 14 Emerson undergraduate students as part of a Visual Media Arts course, “Curating Contemporary Art,” taught and led by Leslie K. Brown, PhD.

ProgrammingOpening Reception: Friday, April 11, 4-6:00pmStudent Lighting Talks: Friday, April 18, 12:00pmLocation: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA 02111Emerging student curators include: Izzy Astuto, Emma Carr, Avery Cather, Helen ChauNguyen, Vincent Chen, Kaileigh Clark, Bea Downey, Jordan Marshall, Madeleine Kendris,Yinuo Liu, Maggie Luo, Zachary Olivadese, Sara Valentine, Huajun ZhangFeatured Artists: Duygu Aytac (Boston, MA)Mia Cassidy (Boston, MA)Caleb Cole (Maynard, MA)Raquel Fornasaro (Newton Center, MA)Amy Giese (Allston, MA)Camilla Jerome (Nahant, MA)Jeff Larason (Sudbury, MA)Jiayi Ma (Boston, MA)Chris Maliga (Roslindale, MA)Joetta Maue (Somerville, MA)Marcos Quinones (Emerson/NYC, NY)Anastasia Sierra (Cambridge, MA)Vivian Tran (Roxbury Crossing, MA)Mason Vaughan (Boston, MA)

Chimera by Sara Zhara Fitzpatrick
2025-04-14 00:00 - 2025-04-17 23:59 | Huret & Spector Gallery
Sara Zhara Fitzpatrick is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work includes narrative fiction and personal documentaries. Chimera is a mixed media installation which recovers found family footage to explore personal identity narratives and complex family histories.

Chimera is a multimedia installation that explores the responsibility of archiving family history, preserving legacy, and evolving self identity narratives. It combines archival materials including recovered family photos, super 8 and VHS footage with digital media and written text, revealing multigenerational family narratives and experiences of matrescence and adolescence. Themes include self-expression, memory, family legacy, the digital age, and honoring one’s inner child.

Sara Zhara Fitzpatrick, Chimera, video still from multimedia installation, 2025

Sara is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work includes personal storytelling, documentary filmmaking, and narrative fiction. Her current project, Chimera, is a mixed media installation which recovers found family footage to explore personal identity narratives and complex family histories.

She has presented her work in the Undergraduate Research Conference in New England, and she was the recipient of the First Place Award for the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences of the New England Chapter National Student Television Awards.

Sara holds a B.S. in Communication and a Certificate in Film Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has been the instructor for Movie Making Madness at the Hopkinton Center for the Arts since 2019 where she teaches filmmaking foundations to children and adolescents. She also has served as a college instructor for Visual Media Foundations of Image and Sound Practice at Emerson College where she will be completing her MFA in Film and Media Art this Spring.

The Colors of You & Me by Elise Guzmán
2025-04-14 00:00 - 2025-04-17 23:59 | Huret & Spector Gallery
Elise is a Caribbean, queer writer and artist with her work focused around love, memory, andpeople’s connections with one another. Her writing is primarily poetry and non-fiction alsocentered around these themes as well as nature and culture, specifically within theSpanish-speaking Caribbean diaspora. Her current exhibition, The Colors of You and Me, is amultimedia installation of audio, poetry, and collage to explore memory and nostalgia through the use of color and what that evokes for ourselves.

The Colors of You & Me comprise the following sections:

Sunjoy:This work is a multimedia installation with a tent-like structure in the center and a videoprojected on the wall, along with the audio of a poem in the background. The poem, Sunjoy, is a piece centered around joy as an act of resistance to harm that we face both in our society and internal world. It is to remind us of the mundane activities in our day to day lives that keep us whole and promote care. The video plays small 5-10 second clips of moments in nature or human interactions like the wind moving through tree branches, waves crashing on the sand, or people crossing the street for the viewer to take a moment and breathe. As we grow older, our joy towards the little moments dims. We ignore the colors in our lives and rush to our next destination. However, I reject that possibility. I will continue to find the delights in the little things like I am experiencing life for the first time. So I’d like you, the viewer, to sit down and enjoy it with me.

Memoryscape:This work is a collage of images from different pieces of media and as well as my culture as aCaribbean-American from early childhood to my present young adult life. At some point, some moment of growing up, the vibrancy in our lives turns bleak, but it is not a permanent reality. The presence of nostalgia is so prevalent in Gen Z, we are constantly in search of obtaining that heartwarming feeling again. Whether that is from collecting trinkets from our childhood or rejecting modernity with our technology. This collage is a way to showcase the transitions of color that we experience from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Holding images of 2000’s cartoons, toys, cosmetic products, traditional Dominican meals, and more. It’s also a glimpse into my world as a queer woman of color and how culture influences that color. The viewer may discover that we share some similarities.

Future Lives, Past Lives, The Possibilities:This poem is a piece of memory and hope for what time can hold. Although I describe mypossible future with dark colors, it still contains so much love for my best friend who I haveknown for eight years and counting. It holds the possibility that we grow old together as Blackpeople in America and we can rest. The poem holds the idea that the dark, muted colors are notalways a problem, sometimes that is just how we see life in a moment. I’m not one to thinkahead into the future, because I can’t always visualize it and when I do, it’s explosive.

Elise will be receiving her BFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry as well as a minor in Art History in May 2025. She plans to return to her home in Brooklyn, NY where she will continue to create art and new connections with other artists.

Between the Worlds: Traces of Inner Landscapes feat. Christina Yijia Ren
2025-04-30 00:00 - 2025-05-10 23:59 | Huret & Spector Gallery
Between the Worlds: Traces of Inner Landscapes is a multi-sensory exhibition centered around a VR experience. It follows the journey of a painter who enters their own unfinished work and wanders through shifting landscapes shaped by memory, perception, and fragments of the subconscious. The exhibition brings these inner worlds to life through a layered combination of canvas paintings, installation elements, and virtual reality, inviting viewers to step inside a story suspended between imagination and reality.

Christina Yijia Ren is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, illustration, animation, graphic design, and new media. Her work explores the fusion of traditional art with emerging technologies such as AR and VR, creating immersive, interactive experiences and new forms of visual storytelling.

Curiosity, Play, Innovation: International Computer Music Conference Installations at Emerson
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe.

This year, the installation track of ICMC 2025 received 56 submissions from artists and researchers across 12 countries, showcasing the expanding boundaries of sound art and interactive media. These installations will be on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Rings…Through Rings by Tak Cheung Hai

In alignment with this year’s theme of “Curiosity, Play, Innovation,” we accepted 19 installations that transform Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery and Bright Family Screening Room into laboratories of sonic exploration. The selected works span a rich spectrum of approaches—from immersive audiovisual environments and interactive sound sculptures to spatial audio experiences and video installations—each pushing the envelope of how we experience and interact with sound in physical space.

Particularly noteworthy is the diversity of artistic practices represented, with creators employing everything from AI-driven systems and sensor-based interactions to acoustic phenomena and architectural resonances. Many works exemplify the democratization of technology that David Wessel championed, utilizing accessible tools and gallery-provided equipment to ensure that innovative artistic expression isn’t limited by resource constraints. These installations invite participants to move beyond traditional concert hall experiences and engage with sound as a sculptural, architectural, and deeply interactive medium, and feature work by Michael Trommer, Jane Tingley, Zhitao Lin, William Turner Duffin, Tak Cheung Hui, Matthew Ostrowski, Matthew Azevedo, Shomit Barua, Betsey Biggs.

Read more about the ICMC schedule of installations and screenings right here, or about the installations at the Emerson Contemporary Gallery below.

Foresta-Inclusive: (ex)tending towards by Jane Tingley

Contained by Michael Trommer

Contained presents a sonic auscultation of our Anthropocentric milieu, integratingfield recordings, 360o camera footage and 3D scans of urban corporate towers,logistical networks, industrial areas and other non-places [1] as well as urbanencampments and derelict locales that are resonant with both the heard andunheard acoustic emanations of the technotope we have become dependent uponfor our survival. In doing so, it approaches sound as a material that can beapprehended as both corporeal and abstracted: in addition to the airborne, audiblesound of the subject spaces, Contained integrates the electrical, vibrational andmnemonic emissions that permeate our everyday habitats, highlighting their rolesas unheeded yet nonetheless deeply affective components of a quotidian andcontingent soundscape.

Contained – Project Still

Michael Trommer is a Toronto-based sound and video artist; his practice has beenfocused primarily on psychogeographical and acoustemological explorations ofanthropocentric space via the use of spatial and tactile sound, field recordings,VR, immersive installation and expanded cinema.

Entrainment by Shomit Barua

Entrainment is part of a series of phenomenological experiments that explore thetheme of spatial and temporal disorientation. Inspired by the passing landscapeviewed from subways and trains, this audio-video installation employs severalmotion-based perceptual distortions: 1) the Doppler effect, 2) Moiré interferencepatterns, 3) skewed parallax (binocular disparity), and 4) the Wagon wheel effect.Entrainment refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external perceivedrhythm.

Entrainment at SMOCA – Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2024-2025)

Shomit Barua is a Japanese-born, Desi-American intermedia artist specializing inecoacoustics, responsive environments, and emergent narratives. His work is rootedin poetry and architecture, and reflects the shared tenets of contained space,economy of materials, and movement that is both physical and emotional.Combining everyday technologies with esoteric programming languages, he blursthe line between installation and performance, weaving together object, sound andimage. Digital and analog techniques are fused to investigate his core subject:corporeal presence in a physical space.

Foresta-Inclusive: (ex)tending towards by Jane Tingley

(ex)tending towards is driven by sensor data collected using the Foresta-Inclusiveinfrastructure at the rare Charitable Reserve in Blaire, ON. CA. This infrastructureincludes three networked ecosensors that are installed unobtrusively onto the trunk of atree and sense phenomenon such as: temperature, humidity, VOCs, particulate matter,wind, C02 and rain. The in-gallery installation is composed of three main components: 1)a visualization that images 24hrs of collected data, where the outer ring showscontemporary values and each subsequent smaller ring images the values from theprevious hour, 2) a point cloud of the tree being sensed, and 3) the soundscape thatsonifies the collected data.

Jane Tingley is an artist, curator, director of the SLOlab (Systems | Life | Ontologies) andAssociate Professor at York University. Her studio work combines traditional studiopractice with new media tools – and spans responsive/interactive installation,performative robotics, and telematically connected distributed sculptures/installations.

the ground beneath our feet, the air inside our lungs by Matthew Azevedo

the ground beneath our feet, the air inside our lungs explores the deep, inviolableconnections between seemingly independent individuals. Visitors are invited to sitin cocoon-like hammock chairs where they will experience an infrasonicgenerative composition presented via tactile transducers built into the chair’sframe. The composition’s development is primarily directed by the visitor’s heartand respiratory rate, which are monitored via a millimeter-wave radar sensor.While in this seemingly isolated state, the visitor’s experience is continuouslyshaped by the sensor data from nearby hammocks and activity throughout thespace monitored by a seismic accelerometer mounted to the floor.

Detail view of one of the “haptic hammock’s” two Dayton Audio TT25-8 tactile transducers.

M. Azevedo (b. 1977) is an artist, educator, and researcher based in Providence,RI whose work is focused on the outer edges of human perception, in particularthe liminal space between touch and hearing occupied by infrasound. They aremost widely known for their recorded works and international performances asRetribution Body, composing site-specific works for architectural spaces driveninto resonance by massive custom subwoofers.

Liminal by Zhitao Lin

Liminal is an AI-driven audiovisual installation by Zhitao Lin that transforms tra-ditional Chinese aesthetics into a generative, interactive experience. Inspired by the mythical Peach Blossom Spring, the piece uses real-time gesture tracking to control the sound of Guqin, Xiao, and percussion, along with dynamic digital ink landscapes rendered as 3D particle systems. Only one audience member is tracked at a time, allowing for a focused and intimate interaction. Each motion becomes a brushstroke in both sound and image, creating a deeply personal and ephemeral version of this imagined utopia.

A Generated visual output from Liminal, illustrating gesture-driven 3D particle ink landscape.Image by Zhitao Lin.

Zhitao Lin is a forward-thinking composer whose work bridges traditional Chineseaesthetics, spectral music, and cutting-edge technology. Currently a Doctor ofMusical Arts (DMA) candidate in Composition at the Peabody Institute of the JohnsHopkins University, he also holds a Master’s degree in Composition from Peabodyand a Bachelor’s degree in Music from the University of California, Berkeley. Hisresearch focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and musiccomposition, exploring new possibilities in sound art through deep technologicalintegration.

MELT: the memory of ice by Betsey Biggs

MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix) is a spatial remix of my music-film MELT: thememory of ice, an invitation to sit bedside in communion with our earth’s body melting andspilling through climate change. Created during a summer spent in Greenland with my mother and 5-year-old, the installation creates a spectacular, otherworldly, immersive river of icebergs, increasingly interrupted by flashes of memories of the north. A musical drone rich with glimmers of sound — calving ice, reindeer bells, sled dogs — surrounds a choir reciting an unfathomable list of winter’s loss — flurries, orca, snow angels. The transformation and relocation of the film’s sounds and images opens up a new, imaginative space for the audience to sit with and wander through, a kind of inner topography of the north. The ice melts on.

Still, MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix), 2024

Betsey Biggs (Writer/Director/Composer) is a composer and media artist whose workconnects the dots between sound, image, place and technology. Her work has been described by the New Yorker as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” For more than twenty-five years, she has composed music, created live multimedia performances, and created participatory art installations.

Rings…Through Rings by Tak Cheung Hui and Xiaoqiao Li

Rings. . . Through Rings transforms historical military cartography of Hong Kong into an immersive sound installation, where laser-etched vinyl discs—each encoding geographical data—are physically manipulated by participants. These custom turntable-based artifacts translate map engravings into sonic textures, generating evolving soundscapes thatreflect the landscape’s temporal shifts. Through real-time audiovisual processing, users explore the dynamic interplay between natural topographies, human intervention, and technological mediation, experiencing history through physical engagement and spatial listening.

Laser-etched vinyl disc on a turntable, showcasing processed cartographic engravings of Hong Kong’s Northern Metropolis.

HUI Tak-Cheung, a Hong Kong-born composer, creates works spanning chamber and orchestral music, electronic pieces, sound installations, and interdisciplinary projects. His multidisciplinary approach integrates immersive audio, spatial sound, and advanced music technologies to reconstruct soundscapes and tell stories across eras and cultures.

Xiaoqiao Li is an artist, academic, and researcher whose work examines the intersection of analogue imprints and digital imprints, particularly in analysing digital print matrices. Li’s practice-based approach sheds light on the complexities of printmaking in the digital era by investigating how digital imaging information is captured, retained, lost, and transmitted. Li holds a BA in Visual Arts from Macao Polytechnic University, an MA in Visual Arts: Printmaking from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and a PhD from the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, supported by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme. His PhD thesis was selected by the Leonardo Graduate Abstracts (LGA) Peer Review Committee as a top-rated LABS Abstract for advanced research in Art and Science, published by Leonardo (MIT Press Journals). Li’s work has been exhibited internationally, earning accolades such as the Clifford Chance Purchase Prize (UK) and the Chinese Young Artists’ Work Award at the Beijing International Art Biennale. Beyond his studio practice, Li actively contributes to academia through presentations at conferences and articles published in the IMPACT Printmaking Journal and Leonardo (MIT Press), fostering dialogue among artists and scholars in both traditional printmaking and digital art. As he continues to learn and grow, Li hopes that his continuous efforts will contribute to evolving discussions in the field.

Summerland by Matthew Ostrowski

Summerland explores the intersection of the technical and the mystical at thedawn of the electrical age. Morse code sounders are driven by texts from fromtwo critical figures in early long-distance communication: Samuel Morse himself,the telegraph’s inventor, and Spiritualist medium Kate Fox, who communicatedwith the dead through a ‘spiritual telegraph.’ Excerpts from Morse’s writings aretranslated into the code that bears his name, and 21st-century analysis/synthesistechniques are used in a futile attempt to resynthesize recorded transcripts ofFox’s sessions with the beyond using 19th-century means.

Summerland at the Albany Institute, 2020 (detail). Photo by Andrew Neumann.

A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski is a composer, performer, and installation artist. Using digital tools and formalist techniques to engage with quotidian materials: sonic, physical, and cultural; Ostrowski explores the liminal space between the virtual and phenomenological worlds. Engaged with tropes of interruption and flux, his works function as environments in a constant state of change, exploring the process of consciousness in its constant state of collision with the world.

Entrainment (2023 - ongoing), by Shomit Barua
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe. As a part of the installation track of ICMC 2025, presenting Shomit Barua’s Entrainment – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Multi-channel video + multi-channel audio, original footage aboard rail-based public transportation inBrooklyn, Budapest, Lisbon, Montreal, and Barcelona; 16min audio + 60min video cycle

Entrainment is part of a series of phenomenological experiments that explore the theme of spatial and temporal disorientation. Inspired by the passing landscape viewed from subways and trains, this audio-video installation employs several motion-based perceptual distortions: 1) the Doppler effect, 2) Moiré interference patterns, 3) skewed parallax (binocular disparity), and 4) the Wagon wheel effect. Entrainment refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external perceived rhythm.

This installation recreates the hypnotic and transcendental states that often emerge from the repetitious visual, auditory, and haptic polyrhythms experienced aboard a moving train. Original portrait-mode footage is “temporally collaged” and spatially arranged to reconstruct views from rail-based public transportation in Barcelona, Budapest, Lisbon, Montreal and New York.

Entrainment at SMOCA – Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2024-2025)

Entrainment, originally entitled Entrainment718, was inspired by a hundred-foot stretch of the Brooklyn F train that connects the subterranean to the above-ground. On this transitional stretch, the visual interplay of regularly-spaced pylons against haphazardly strung high-intensity work lights causes a skewing of parallax— looking out the window, depth perception becomes distorted, as though suddenly careening through a starfield. Entrainment is an exploration of that sense of disorientation, and the hypnotic and transcendental states that often emerge from the repetitious visual, auditory, and haptic polyrhythms experienced aboard a moving train. This project continues to grow, include footage from rail-based public transportation from around the world.

Audio consists of a multi-channel sound system arranged linearly. The original musical composition (16mins) consists of several textural layers that are distributed spatially, running up and down the multi-channel array in gated sequences. The effect is that of a passing train, while also evoking the rhythmic quality of being on board the train. Each channel is synced with the video panel directly behind it and when that audio channel is active, a variety of visual effects is applied to the corresponding panel.

In this way, one can visually track the sonic placement of sound in space (source-bonding [1] à la Denis Smalley’s Spectromorphology). Additionally, a haptic channel plays infrasonic polyrhythmic patterns. The auditory (score length vs spatial distribution), visual (footage vs effects programming) and haptic layers are all cycles of different lengths.

As they loop, the layers stack in new combinations. This gestalt of sensory information that drift in and out of synchronization is an example of the nested or overlapping rhythms described in Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis [2], in which the body becomes a metronome that not only observes but feels—embodies—temporal perception.

Most notably, the panoramic is actually a single-channel portrait-mode video (60mins) shot on a camera-phone, repeated 14 times and mirrored vertically. Each column is an instance of the original footage offset by 23 frames; in essence, they are pulling from the “memory” of the video, and placed side by side, they become stitched together to form what appears to be a panoramic view. The perceived elongation of the image is achieved through a repeated temporal and spatial displacement.

Media Links:– https://shomitbarua.com/entrainment718 – https://shomitbarua.com/– IG@shomijah

Artist Statement

Shomit Barua is a Japanese-born, Desi-American intermedia artist specializing inecoacoustics, responsive environments, and emergent narratives. His work is rootedin poetry and architecture, and reflects the shared tenets of contained space,economy of materials, and movement that is both physical and emotional.Combining everyday technologies with esoteric programming languages, he blursthe line between installation and performance, weaving together object, sound andimage. Digital and analog techniques are fused to investigate his core subject:corporeal presence in a physical space.

Having collaborated with sculptors, dancers, musicians, architects, and visualartists, he believes that exploration of a motif is amplified – made “robust” and“thick” – through dialogue between disciplines. He holds an MFA in Poetry fromBennington College and teaches writing at Arizona State University whilecompleting his doctoral research at ASU’s School of Arts, Media, and Engineering.

Entrainment – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix), by Betsey Biggs
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe. As a part of the installation track of ICMC 2025, presenting Betsey Bigg’s MELT: the memory of ice – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Still, MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix), 2024

Betsey made MELT after wandering around the world’s most active glacier, in Ilullisat, Greenland, with her mother and 5-year-old daughter and the film’s cinematographer, Troy Fairbanks. All synthesizers are made out of processed field recordings from this trip. The slow film stills and music are increasingly interrupted by audiovisual glitches, representing tipping points of our warming climate; the timing of these glitches was determined by a Max patch converting sea ice extent data to probability.

The vocal music was created collaboratively with the members of Moving Star vocal ensemble from an open score Betsey composed. The music was recorded by Jeff Cook at 2nd Story Sound, mixed by Michael Hammond of Big Ship Audio, and the spatial Dolby Atmos mix was created with Sean Winters. The film itself premiered at the IMAX Theatre at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

On MELT: the memory of ice, Betsey writes, “As an installation, I wanted to truly use the gallery space to do something more than just press play on a movie, to explore the imaginative possibilities of transforming and relocating the sounds and visuals, to create a new kind of space for the audience to wander through. The visual transformations, especially, allow me to understand the images in a different, more imaginary way: a kind of inner topography. So I’ve titled this installation work MELT: the memory of ice (topographic remix).“

Artist Statement

Betsey Biggs (Writer/Director/Composer) is a composer and media artist whose workconnects the dots between sound, image, place and technology. Her work has been described by the New Yorker as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” For more than twenty-five years, she has composed music, created live multimedia performances, and created participatory art installations. She earned a Ph.D. in music composition at Princeton University, and has taught music, multimedia, public art, photography, and video at Brown University, RISD, and the University of Colorado Boulder, where she currently serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices.

Troy Fairbanks (Director of Photography) has a well-rounded filmmaking career as adirector, videographer, cinematographer, and drone operator. His Denver production companies, Makēda Creative and Rise Aerials, specialize in action sports, documentaries, and drone cinematography. He has created more than 800 video projects in 31 countries, with a special focus on flying FPV drones for commercial purposes. When he’s not behind the camera, you can find Troy and his wife traveling the world in their converted school bus, enjoying the outdoors and board sports, and chasing one adventure or another.

Moving Star is a vocal ensemble creating original music infused with improvisation. They are an artistic community partner of the Carnegie Hall Education Wing. The performers of Moving Star have collaborated with Meredith Monk, Julia Wolfe, Ann Hamilton, and SufjanStevens, and have performed at Zankel Hall, Whitney Museum, La MaMa, Symphony Space,and elsewhere.

MELT: the memory of ice – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Liminal by Zhitao Lin
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe. As a part of the installation track of ICMC 2025, presenting Liminal – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Still image from the documentary video Shell Art – Mother of Pearl, published by Meet Qingdao onYouTube (2023). Used here for cultural reference.

Liminal is an AI-driven audiovisual installation by Zhitao Lin that transforms tra-ditional Chinese aesthetics into a generative, interactive experience. Inspired by the mythical Peach Blossom Spring, the piece uses real-time gesture tracking to control the sound of Guqin, Xiao, and percussion, along with dynamic digital ink landscapes rendered as 3D particle systems. Only one audience member is tracked at a time, allowing for a focused and intimate interaction. Each motion becomes a brushstroke in both sound and image, creating a deeply personal and ephemeral version of this imagined utopia.At the heart of Liminal is a custom gesture-mapping system driven by computer vision. A high-frame-rate camera captures the participant’s hand and body movements in real time. The left hand triggers and modulates sounds derived from traditional Chinese percussion and xiao (bamboo flute), while the right hand controls timbral and articulatory variations of guqin-like textures, such as harmonics and arpeggios. These movements simultaneously influence a custom 3D particle system, generating visuals reminiscent of dynamic ink wash paintings. The result is an evolving visual environment that fuses digital abstraction with references to natural landscapes and lacquered ornamentation.

A Generated visual output from Liminal, illustrating gesture-driven 3D particle ink landscape.Image by Zhitao Lin.

Sound in Liminal is shaped through a real-time gestural mapping system. Using a high-frame-rate camera, the installation tracks the participant’s hand and body movements to control and modulate sonic elements derived from guqin, xiao, and percussive textures. Each gesture dynamically alters parameters such as pitch articulation, layering, and spatialization—allowing the participant to sculpt a con- tinuously evolving soundscape through motion alone.

Designed for one-on-one interaction, the installation maintains focus and clarity by tracking a single participant at a time. This enables highly responsive audio-visual interplay and encourages an intimate, reflective mode of engagement.

Each interaction becomes a unique and ephemeral composition, situated at the intersection of body, machine, and cultural resonance. Liminal invites participants into a space where gestures function as both input and authorship, transforming embodied presence into real-time audiovisual expression. It offers a sensory environment where memory, movement, and technology coalesce—evoking a digitally mediated encounter with introspection and transformation.

Artist Statement

Zhitao Lin is a forward-thinking composer whose work bridges traditional Chinese aesthetics, spectral music, and cutting-edge technology. Currently a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) candidate in Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, he also holds a Master’s degree in Composition from Peabody and a Bachelor’s degree in Music from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and music composition, exploring new possibilities in sound art through deep technological integration.Lin’s work spans chamber music, orchestral compositions, opera, electronic music, and multimedia sound installations, earning recognition for its fusion of cultural depth and technological innovation. By blending Chinese musical traditions with spectral techniques and AI-driven creativity, he crafts a sonic world that is both avant-garde and deeply evocative. Influenced by Zen philosophy, his compositions often evoke a surreal, mystical quality, transforming abstract musical narratives into immersive experiences. His practice continues to explore new human-machine collaborations that expand the boundaries of musical expression.

Liminal – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Foresta-Inclusive: (ex)tending towards, by Jane Tingley
2025-06-11 00:00 - 2025-06-14 23:59 | Emerson Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Emerson Contemporary has joined hands with the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious gatherings of sound artists, electroacoustic composers, and music technologists from across the globe. As a part of the installation track of ICMC 2025, presenting Foresta-Inclusive: (ex)tending towards, by Jane Tingley – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

(ex)tending towards is driven by sensor data collected using the Foresta-Inclusive infrastructure at the rare Charitable Reserve in Blaire, ON. CA. This infrastructure includes three networked ecosensors that are installed unobtrusively onto the trunk of a tree and sense phenomenon such as: temperature, humidity, VOCs, particulate matter, wind, C02 and rain. The in-gallery installation is composed of three main components: 1) a visualization that images 24hrs of collected data, where the outer ring shows contemporary values and each subsequent smaller ring images the values from the previous hour, 2) a point cloud of the tree being sensed, and 3) the soundscape that sonifies the collected data. This work uses a simple gestural interaction to allow the participant to move into the 3D space of the visualization to explore the deep time of the tree’s life. The slower one moves the easier it becomes to inspect each ring of the tree’s experience.

Foresta inclusive: (ex)tending towards installed at the Ottawa School of Art Gallery Orléans. 2024.

In response to the temporal difference between tree and human individuals, this work explores ways to slow down human engagement, and to make visible the daily experience of a tree. The aim of the work is to find ways to demonstrate the absolute liveliness of the natural world as it unfolds all around us – yet more often than not beyond our limited sensory perception. The first visualization materializes data as a particle flow field that gently undulates and is affected in real time by changing data. Inspired by tree rings as evidence of yearly experience, the visualization is structured in the same manner and visualizes the last 24hrs of the tree’s life, where the outer ring shows contemporary values and each subsequent smaller ring the values from the previous hour. To interact with this visualization, there is a one-meter-tall cork cylinder that is also a scent sculpture, which releases the scent of geosmin (the scent of a forest after it rains) every time it rains in the forest.

To interact, the participant uses a simple gestural interaction to move spatially into the visualization. The slower one moves, enables the participant to inspect each ring. The interface is embedded in soil, which also contain a set of sculptural sensor pods. Next to the visualization is a point cloud visualization of the tree at the rare Charitable Reserve. The point cloud was captured by a LIDAR scan of the forest at rare using a very large drone and rendered using Touch Designer. This point cloud is also affected in real time by live data. Like the visuals, the sonic elements materialize the forest data in a generative sound experience that balances between mimicry and poetic memory of forest experience.

Fig. 2. Visualization

In its entirety this installation creates an embodied exploratory space where the deep time of a tree’s life is remembered, and the human body is slowed down in the engagement.

Artist Statement

Jane Tingley is an artist, curator, director of the SLOlab (Systems | Life | Ontologies) andAssociate Professor at York University. Her studio work combines traditional studiopractice with new media tools – and spans responsive/interactive installation,performative robotics, and telematically connected distributed sculptures/installations.Her works are interdisciplinary in nature and explore the creation of spaces andexperiences that push the boundaries between science and magic, interactivity andplayfulness.

Hrysovalanti Fereniki Maheras, also known as Hryso, is a computational art practitionerspecializing in generative audiovisual art simulations and electronic kinetic art. Shecollaborated on the sound design of this project. Currently a Ph.D. candidate inComputational Arts at York University, she also serves as a studio instructor foraudiovisual arts. Hryso’s artistic exploration involves seamlessly traversing betweenvirtual and physical technological realms, aiming to create art that investigates theemergence of a virtual analog environment within a shared, intricate physical habitat.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSFaadhi Fauzi: Three.js Web developmentKavi – Ilze Briede: 3D modelling and Touch DesignerMarius Kintel: Firmware and MQTT VCR development

(ex)tending towards – on display at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery from June 11th – 14th.

Echoes of the Heart: New England Media Art Biennial
2025-07-29 12:00 - 2025-12-13 18:00 | Media Art Gallery
Iwalani Kaluhiokalani, The Radiance Chasers, 2025. Multidisciplinary installation, painting, paper cut-outs, video mapping, sound Sound score by Slamber Slusser

Iwalani Kaluhiokalani, The Radiance Chasers, 2025. Multidisciplinary installation, painting, paper cut-outs, video mapping, sound Sound score by Slamber Slusser.

Emerson Contemporary – Emerson College’s platform for presenting contemporary visual art – proudly presents Echoes of the Heart: The New England Media Art Biennial, a multimedia juried group exhibition featuring New England visual artists Clint Baclawski, Erik DeLuca, Iwalani Kaluhiokalani, Justin Levesque, VHF Studios, and Karlie Zhao. The exhibition is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from July 29- December 13 , 2025, free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm.

This exhibition is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The National Endowment for the Arts

New media art now encompasses traditional film and digital video, as well as a wide range of technology, from AI to hand-built radio, representing an exciting and rapidly expanding genre in the contemporary art world. Yet, there are few venues for emerging and mid-career video artists to showcase their work in New England. This biennial aims to expand these opportunities for the region and celebrate artists with financial and technical support and the opportunity to expand and reiterate existing and/or new works.

Artist Reception, Thursday, September 18, 5-7pm

Tuesday, October 7, 6:30- 7:30pm, 6pm doors. In Conversation: Join artists Justin Levesque and VHF Studio as they discuss their broad ranging practices and what it means to be a practicing artist in our current climates. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

Tuesday October 21, 6:30- 7:30pm, 6pm doors In Conversation: Join multidisciplinary installation artist Iwalani Kaluhiokalani and photographer Clint Baclawski as they discuss space, time, color and motion in their work. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA

Tuesday, November 4, 6:30- 7:30pm, 6pm doors In Conversation: Join artists Erik DeLuca and Wenran Zhao as they speak with Emerson professor and sound artist Amber Vistein to discuss experimentation, sonic textures and the art of presence.

Our artist centered public programming is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts.

Clint Baclawski is creating a new photographic sculptural installation part of his ongoing scroll series to consider the photographic impulse to capture the landscape as combined with the presentation strategies of advertising. Erik DeLuca is creating an interactive technology based object exploring silence and sound entitled White Spaces Radio. Iwalani Kaluhiokalani will combine innovative projection-mapping and sound to activate a challenging architectural area in the gallery’s entryway. Justin Levesque will reimagine his multimedia wall installation Geographical Problems for the Emerson space. VHF Studios will present a new iteration of their cheerfully riotous multi-media sculptural installation, Narcissus Looks Back: and They Love You. Karlie Zhao will create a site-specific piece for the windows facing Avery Street, and display her delicate, evocative piece Thread in the Air, which infinitely generates poetic texts through audience interaction.

Juried by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Leonie Bradbury, Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, and visual artist and curator Allison Maria Rodriguez, this exhibition recognizes the importance of contemporary new media art being created across the Northeast. Of the experience jurying, Allison Maria Rodriguez said:

“It’s been such an honor to be included in this process. It can sometimes feel like New England is dominated by more traditional artistic mediums – and that may be true – but it was so thrilling to see all the incredible new media artists working in the area that submitted to this call. The jury had a real challenge – in the best way! It proved that opportunities like this to showcase artists working in art and technology are so greatly needed, not only to support individual practices, but also to expand the conversation in the broader arts ecosystem – and I’m so grateful to the folks at Emerson Contemporary for making this happen!”

2025 GBFA THESIS EXHIBITION
2025-08-12 12:00 - 2025-08-16 17:00 | Massachusetts
PUT THE SOIL OVER EVERY YEAR

August 12–August 16, 2025

Isabella Gierbolini Esteva, Hanna Sato, and Gabriela Tamar

In this dynamic exhibition of experimental works, these three artists introduce audiences to the various ways memories are constructed and how they transform recollection processes and sensibilities into an experiential ‘document’ that envisions the past in a manner that may or may not be an accurate reflection of reality or lived experience.

Gierbolini Esteva in Las Palabras Ya No Importan deploys the complex methodologies of language formation with an exploration of ‘possession’ as conjured through live performance to confront the inherent uncertainties when one is born Puerto Rican.

In Shattered Memories Shine Above the Sea, Sato highlights the importance of tangibility through a conversation that bridges the past, the present, and explores the potentialities of what remains in store for the future in facing the near-death experience.

Critiquing the ever-present image of the Shoah, Tamar presents a sonic approach to Holocaust memorialization in landscapes where acoustic documents fail to exist or have long been silenced. Utilizing theories of post-memory, Keyner Iz Dortn Nisht Geven questions the act of monumentality: what has been buried in the past and what can be uncovered in the future?

Inspired by their multicultural experiences of displacement and cultural dislocation, Gierbolini Esteva, Sato, and Tamar explore the emotive power of ancestral connections and understand that it is through their creative actions that they can expand history and actualize the past as an integral part of an ever becoming and imaginative present.
