Emerson Contemporary

Kameelah Janan Rasheed
2024-01-23 17:00 - 2024-03-23 19:00 (America/New_York) | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Emerson Contemporary proudly presents our upcoming artist-in-residence, Kameelah Janan Rasheed.

all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language oran invitation to be feral hypertext, a multimedia solo exhibition featuring the visual artist is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from January 23 – March 23, 2024. Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm.

Rasheed thinks conceptually about text, type, and printed matter and uses publishing as a platform to engage and enlarge conversations with others. Her work invites important questions about the materiality of text, such as, “What is the shape of a failed sentence?” or even to quote Fred Moten speaking to the work of Renee Gladman, “Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?” These questions are central to the artist’s practice.

Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species,states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Curious about the poetics and

possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheedexplores Black knowledge production and fugitivity. She creates sprawling,“architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints;performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to bedetermined. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.Her recent solo exhibitions include KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). In 2024, she will have a solo exhibition at REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA). Rasheed is the author of five artists’ books:in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing,2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions,2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring theStacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is an adjunct instructor at the Cooper Unionand Barnard College, a Critic at Yale School of Art, Sculpture, and an instructor at theSchool for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consultingbusiness that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions indesigning expansive and liberatory learning experiences.Rasheed is represented by NOME Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm.

Artist Reception Kameelah Janan Rasheed
2024-01-23 17:00 - 19:00
Join us to celebrate the brand new exhibition of “Kameelah Janan Rasheed: all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext,” a multimedia solo exhibition featuring visual artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed (American, born 1985) on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from January 23 – March 23, 2024.

Rasheed thinks conceptually about text, type, and printed matter and uses publishing as a platform to engage and enlarge conversations with others. Her work invites important questions about the materiality of text, such as, “What is the shape of a failed sentence?” or even to quote Fred Moten speaking to the work of Renee Gladman, “Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?” These questions are central to the artist’s practice.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Lucid Dream, still, 2024

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Curious about the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed explores Black knowledge production and fugitivity. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.

Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed: all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext.
2024-01-23 12:00 - 2024-03-23 18:00
Kameelah Janan Rasheed, keeping count, Annotated, animation still, 2021-2023

The multimedia site-specific installation combines new video drafts and existing video works from the last three years. All created using some form of a writing and video editing constraint, these works live alongside several 2D works also created using constraints to explore the agility and limitations of language. With an investment in Black experimental poetics, non-linear cosmologies, and fugivity, Rasheed asks, “What can be captured through writing? What is lost? And how can this inevitable loss be an invitation to consider other modes of communication? Rasheed incorporates abstract shapes, gestures, and markings that border visual glossolalia and asemics. She presents these work alongside diagrammatic compositions of letters (Latin and Arabic) diacritics, and fragments of annotation.

In this temporary gathering of objects and ideas, Rasheed engages in intervals of self-study to explore her relationship to the widely respected poet Lucille Clifton’s legacy of spirit writing and other “wayward” methods of writing. With particular attention to Clifton’s poem “i was born with twelve fingers,” this exhibition considers the “powerful memories of ghosts” that emerge during these less traditional writing practices. Overall, the project explores writing constraints to generate more feral and intuitive writing. Rasheed writes, “Lucille Clifton’s spirit writing and self-description as a ‘two-headed woman’ piqued my interest in writing as a sacred, trickster, and fugitive ritual.”

Rasheed thinks conceptually about text, type, and printed matter and uses publishing as a platform to engage and enlarge conversations with others. Her work invites important questions about the materiality of text, such as, “What is the shape of a failed sentence?” or even to quote Fred Moten speaking to the work of Renee Gladman, “Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?” These questions are central to the artist’s practice. This exhibition is accompanied by a lecture performance and a reader created under Rasheed’s publishing project Scratch Disks Full.

Exhibition Events:

Satellite workshop, John Hopkins University – If, Then: Technology and Poetics, Friday, January 19, 2024 [zoom] 1:30- 3:30pm. Location: Zoom

Artist Reception,Tuesday, January 23, 2024, 5-7pm. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA.

Writing With Word Games, a text score workshop, Friday, February 24, 2-4pm. Registration required. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA.

Lecture/Performance with Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Tuesday, February 27, 2024 at 6-7:30pm. Registration required. Location: Walker Building, Room 202. 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA.

Book Launch, Tuesday, February 27, 8pm. Attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the Scratch Disk Full publication. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA.

Curator Talk by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Saturday, March 23, 2024, 2-3pm. Location: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA.

If, Then: Technology and Poetics,
2024-01-19 13:30 - 15:30 | On line, ZOOM
Learn from visual artist Kameelah J. Rasheed in this satellite workshop

Join us for Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s satellite workshop (conducted over zoom), in partnership with John Hopkins University. In If, Then: Technology and Poetics, Kameelah explores the relationship between writing constraints and algorithmic scores (dubbed wayward sentences).

This workshop will be conducted over zoom. You can RSVP or attend the workshop using this link.

Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

Rasheed thinks conceptually about text, type, and printed matter and uses publishing as a platform to engage and enlarge conversations with others. Her work invites important questions about the materiality of text, such as, “What is the shape of a failed sentence?” or even to quote Fred Moten speaking to the work of Renee Gladman, “Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?” These questions are central to the artist’s practice.

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Curious about the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed explores Black knowledge production and fugitivity. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.

Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm.

Workshop: Kameelah Janan Rasheed on Wayward Sentences (writing constraints and algorithmic scores)
2024-01-19 13:30 - 15:30
Workshop: Kameelah Janan Rasheed on Wayward Sentences (writing constraints and algorithmic scores)January 19, 2024 @1:30PM Eastern on Zoom (RSVP required)

Rasheed considers learning “as a process of radical slowing down/de-acceleration in the midst of the efficiency and optimization frenzy; an engagement with curiosity, serendipity, improvisation, and tangents; learning as a persistent reminder of the shifting ecologies of what it means to know something.”RSVP here

Musician Julian Saporiti approaches refugee storytelling with compassion
2023-12-15 08:00 - 2023-12-16 17:00
By Maddie Browning

Berklee alum Julian Saporiti releases music inspired by his fieldwork and research on Asian American history under the pseudonym No-No Boy – a reference to John Okada’s novel of the same name.

A selection of his songs and music videos are a part of Emerson Contemporary’s “One Day We’ll Go Home” exhibition on display through December 16.

Emerson Contemporary chatted with Saporiti on Zoom about his favorite musical artists, collaborating on artistic projects with his wife, and checking his privilege with the monks at Blue Cliff Monastery.

EC: What artists are you inspired by?

Saporiti: There’s a painting in the MFA in Boston called “Slave Ship” by [Joseph Mallord William] Turner, and when I was in school at Berklee, I would go see that painting a lot. It’s a really horrible subject matter, it’s this wrecked slave ship, so it’s all these bodies in the ocean but it’s full of [these] beautiful sunset or sunrise colors – oranges and pinks – mixed with the turbulence of the ocean. So that was always super striking, and very similar to a lot of the work that I do, which is dealing with stories of people crossing oceans under not so good circumstances. But that painting, I was always entranced by that when I lived in Boston, and I would go see that all the time.

EC: What are some of your favorite musicians?

Saporiti: When I was in Boston, as a [college student], I used to go to the symphony every week and the BSO because they had a student card, so you go every Thursday for like 25 bucks a semester. I remember I saw this piece, Hector Berlioz is the composer, and he wrote a piece called “The Damnation of Faust,” which is this overwhelming three choruses based on the Faust mythology, and that’s one of my favorite pieces of music of all time. And then I also love the rock and roll or hard rock I grew up with like Rage Against the Machine and Weezer and Nirvana and all that grunge stuff. And then my dad’s record collection, The Beatles, Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bob Dylan.

I like all that very entrenched, canonized stuff, but my favorite experiences are just hearing someone in front of me play an instrument. It doesn’t even have to be a particular piece of music. It’s just like, if there’s a clarinet player in an Italian restaurant, I’m always drifting out of whatever conversation I’m in to hear just the sound of their instrument. I’m really appreciative of live music because there’s just something so captivating and infinite in that very small experience that you can’t get with recorded music.

EC: Your music is rooted in storytelling. How do you use different sounds to tell those stories?

Saporiti: A lot of different ways. Sometimes it’s just textures of different instruments [that] might fit a lyric, you know, the difference between a plucked guitar with your fingers to a nice ethereal keyboard pad or something. I use a lot of samples, and I tell a lot of stories that are based on my historic research as an academic – these histories of Asian American folks and refugees and immigrants mostly. I sample from my field research sites, so if I go to an old refugee camp or something, I’ll knock on the barbed wire or the wood, and then I’ll turn that into a drum kit. So that’s what you hear on my recorded music to try to use the textures and real audible sounds of history inside the records themselves.

Empire Electric by No-No Boy, album cover.

EC: What has your experience been like collaborating with your wife, Emilia, who directs and does lettering for your music videos featured in “One Day We’ll Go Home”?

Saporiti: Awesome because we want to be around each other as much as possible. That’s why we got married. I have found someone who I just love sharing my life with, and my life is so artistically driven, it would kind of be impossible for me to be in a full time relationship with someone if they didn’t share in that and vice versa. Like right now you’ve caught me in the middle of her law school exam final week, so I’m basically chauffeur and making all the meals and helping her study with flashcards and making sure the sleep schedule is good. So we look at everything we do as a team. And she’s a wonderful artist in her own right – a visual artist. She helps me produce the songs that I make as well. She sings when we perform live. She also has sewn this incredible stage jacket I wear in one of the videos which has hand embroidered little stories from my Vietnamese American childhood on it.

EC: Tell me a little bit more about the songs you included in “One Day We’ll Go Home” and what stories you are telling.

Saporiti: “Boat People” is in there and that is very central to the Vietnamese American story because I think most refugees or a good deal of us can trace their families where they directly came over as boat people. These folks who had to escape South Vietnam on these rickety little fishing boats. That song is taken directly from an archival interview of this guy who was a boat person who went to Canada. The lyrics basically tell this really cinematic story of this guy, Dr. Tran, who eventually made it to Montreal but he had to escape Vietnam, got into this little fishing, boat pirates attacked them, eventually made it to Pulau Bidong – this refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia. It’s harrowing, and I think that it’s really important to tell one story at a time as a teacher and also as a songwriter because it’s really hard for students or for listeners to take in a million people. You can’t understand that number, so boiling it down to telling these personal stories detail by detail, and then setting it to music, I think that’s a very emotional way to speak to this larger humanity issue of refugees and immigrants and movements of people – things that are happening right now in the Middle East, right now in Asia and Central America. This is just one person, but if you can empathize with that one person, then maybe you can empathize more deeply with the global issue of refugees and displacement.

EC: In conducting your field work, how do you go about talking to refugees when you’re working on new music?

Saporiti: I never talk to anyone with a goal of anything. I just explore and hang out and talk to people like people, and then if it comes up that they have an interesting story, and they share that with me, I might ask questions I’d ask anyone. If we’re having a drink at a bar, I would talk to everyone the same way, you know, just be a good hang. That’s something they should lead off with [in] anthropology classes, just be a good hang, don’t needle people to relive their trauma. It’ll come out if it comes out. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and that’s all right. That’s something I had to learn when I first started interviewing people for my No-No Boy project. I was talking to a lot of people who used to live in a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming during World War II, and I would kind of right off the bat be like, “Tell me about the worst three years of your life,” which is a [expletive] up thing. Because, as someone who comes from some really harsh family history, you don’t want to define people by the worst parts of their life.

I’ve gone down and hung out in the Mexican camps across the border just to, especially as a son of a refugee, see what’s happening now and speak against it, tell people what I’ve seen, help out if I can. And it’s kind of up to [the refugees] what they want to share and just try to go in with a sense of reciprocity, giving something first before you take something away from them, which is their story.

I always bring down those Instax Polaroid cameras and just take pictures for people who have lost everything and having a picture of their kid means a lot to carry with them and then giving them the camera and a ton of film so they can take pictures of their friends. That little stuff, that can mean a lot, and then maybe you get some cool conversations and maybe that turns into art or songs, but that’s really secondary.

EC: Your song “Little Monk” on [your third album] Empire Electric is inspired by your experience at Blue Cliff [Monastery]. How does that experience influence your music going forward?

Saporiti: Pretty completely. My wife and I weren’t married at the time but we had started dating at Brown University. She had graduated with a sociology degree, and I could leave campus because I was a PhD student, and I had all my coursework done. And we just wanted to get out of there. When you’re 18 to 22, you’re never more aware. You don’t have mortgages to pay yet or kids to worry about, so that’s when the world really is spitting in your face the most, and you notice it, and you still have energy. Brown is a particularly liberal, progressive, activisty place, and it was so scary to be there at that point in time, because there were a lot of people just yelling about everything constantly and not really necessarily being informed about what they were yelling about. They were protesting everything but how rich those kids were, never protests about economic class but everything else, but with no substance behind it. I wanted calm in my life. I wanted the world to change. That’s why I went down to the Mexican border during a spring break to see these refugee camps for myself, instead of just yelling about what people were yelling about on Facebook. I wanted to actually go see for myself and see if I could actually help out.

The monks will sort you out because they just don’t buy into that because there’s greater truths for them. That’s not to say they don’t acknowledge there’s pain and suffering in the world. That’s what Buddhism is about. It’s acknowledging suffering and trying to overcome it in your life. I felt like I was just angry and I felt a poison in me from all the politics in the world, and all the suffering and [the monks] gave me tools to deal with that whether that was meditation or mindfulness stuff, just walking around. And yeah, that has sort of dictated my path. I don’t really use social media anymore. I’ll read the newspaper once a week instead of doom scroll constantly to see all the hell that’s happening because it’s not going to change in a week’s time. If I read one good article about the war over in the Middle East that’s going to be pretty thorough, and I’ll catch up on what’s happened that week.

I think what I learned is to tend to your own garden. I don’t want to yell about what’s happening at a southern border if I’m being an [expletive] to my friend that week. That’s something I can help. I can help being present and helping someone else that I know and love instead of abstractly spinning out because the world is on fire. And also checking my own privilege, right? I’m someone who has a PhD, and makes a living doing art. I have a beautiful wife, I have a roof over my head, which has not always been the case in my life and, talking about refugees, is not the case for a lot of people now. The monks really helped me check my privilege and get out of that elite campus protester culture. They let me empty out and see that life is still wonderful for some people. For some people it’s not, but for me, it is, and let me acknowledge that first and take solace and strength in that and then see how I can help the people in my community or if I do go somewhere where I can help.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Patricia Nguyễn discusses moving through memory in performance art
2023-12-12 08:00 - 17:00
Patricia Nguyễn performs “Passage” at the Media Art Gallery.

By Maddie Browning

Patricia Nguyễn is an artist, scholar, and educator with work surrounding the aftermath of the Vietnam War and memory, loss, and healing. She utilizes performance art to understand how the feeling of water and land on her body reflect the emotions and experiences of Vietnamese refugees.

Her work is a part of Emerson Contemporary’s “One Day We’ll Go Home” exhibition running through December 16.

Emerson Contemporary connected with Nguyễn via Zoom to discuss her journey developing performance art, her conversations with refugees and their families, and what she hopes people learn from her art.

EC: When did you start developing performance art?

Nguyễn: I was trained in devised theater throughout elementary school, and then in high school, I did performance poetry and spoken word. It wasn’t until I went to Vietnam in 2010, and I encountered state surveillance and censorship [that] it transformed my work in performance poetry and theater into performance art to think about the power of how the body can help tell the story and what the body remembers.

EC: What artists are you inspired by?

Nguyễn: [Okwui Okpokwasili]. She did this amazing piece called “Bronx Gothic.” A lot of the people that inspired my work are Black feminists and women of color, feminists, artists, poets, theater makers.

The person that trained me is the first woman performance artist in Vietnam, and her name is Ly Hoàng Ly, who I have this lifetime performance with called “Memory vs. Memory.” She really helped me understand what performance art is and what it can do through collaborating with her. “Memory vs. Memory” began because both of our fathers were located on opposing sides of the Vietnam War. We’re their children, their daughters, and we inherit the memories that they’ve had to go through in particular because they’re the same age on opposing sides of the war and were both incarcerated after the end of the war – her father in an old French colonial prison, my father in the jungles near the border of Vietnam and Cambodia. So, for us, delving into performance art, delving into the cultural memory of specific objects like water or soil or metal, conjures these memories that are linked to our own fathers’ histories of revolution and war and incarceration.

EC: You say in your artist statement that land and water are crucial to your process. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about that.

Nguyễn: So the word for homeland, country, and nation in Vietnamese is “Đất nước,” which respectively means land and water, but in the diaspora land drops off, so the shorthand for saying homeland or country is “nước” or just water. So a lot of my work delves into the materiality of water itself, like, how does water soak into my body? How do I understand the porousness of my own skin? And how do we tap into both the internal waters that we already have and the external waters that I play with in performance when I drown myself in water, soak my myself with drenched fabric. How does that evoke the memory both within and external to me about whatever question I’m meditating on in relationship to the aftermath of the Vietnam War?

A lot of Vietnamese were forced to migrate by boat and over water, so a lot of them are known as boat refugees. I think about the materiality of water not just as a landscape of where forced migration happens, but as this place of life and death. I’ve interviewed so many different Vietnamese refugees, and all of them have said, “I was so thirsty on that boat, and there was water all around me and I couldn’t drink any of it.” The ocean is made up of saltwater, and saltwater could help you if you have a sore throat – you can gargle it – but if the ratio of saltwater is too much, it becomes toxic. So what is this line between what is healing and what is toxic? So really thinking about water, not only as a metaphor, but literally what does it do to the body?

And then land, so my father was incarcerated on former US military bases that had landmines in them. So land was literally weaponized against the Vietnamese people, both by the US government, and also in the aftermath of war as people who were drafted in the south of Vietnam that were aligned with the US also were incarcerated on these very lands. The precarity of life and death is contingent on if the bomb will explode.

EC: Going back to you talking about how you have interviewed a lot of refugees, how do you approach people that are hurting and tell their stories?

Nguyễn: So for refugees, they have to prove what they’ve been through to even gain refugee status. So the process of conducting oral histories is hopefully more of a reparative act, where it’s not just like, “Let me extract your story to see if you qualify for this paperwork or the status for particular rights and privileges.” It’s like, “Let me actually listen and ask you your story.” The way that I conduct oral histories, it’s based off of a relationship that I’ve already had with people, so either I’ve known them for quite some time, so they can trust me with their stories, or I’m introduced to them by someone who they already trust and that person is either in the room with me or has done a lot of the prep work to help support that person. So it’s always based in rapport and consent.

It’s really just being as present as possible and doing deep listening and gauging what people are comfortable with and what people are not comfortable with. At the end of the interview, I always check in with them, making sure that they’re okay, asking them if there’s anything else they want to share. And I ask I leave them with a hopeful question like, “What do you hope for yourself or your children or future generations?” or “What do you want to leave us with and what do you want us to learn?” so that it’s not a line of questions that focus on trauma or pain. It’s more of a line of questions and invitations to share and understand these histories with one another. I try to help those that I’m interviewing feel empowered after the interview that their story is important and what they went through was significant and that they’re not alone.

EC: You received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2010 to work in Vietnam and co-founded Cây, “the first life skills and art therapy reintegration program for human trafficking survivors along the border regions of Vietnam,” according to your website. Tell me more about the program and why you created it.

Nguyễn: So originally, I was supposed to go to Vietnam or Cambodia to work with survivors of sex trafficking and human trafficking. But the Vietnamese and Cambodian government shut down the organization that I was going to work with a week before my application was due. Luckily, my friend worked in Vietnam and works with an anti-human trafficking organization and brought me on to it.

I had a lot of pushback going back to Vietnam from my own family. They were like, “We escaped from there. Why would you go back?” For me, it was really important to see the other side of war and to see those that are still impacted by its aftermath, even if not in the way that we understand how people are directly impacted, but just in terms of the new neoliberal development policies and how that impacts indigenous folks who are also known as ethnic minorities. I wanted to see how development is impacting those who live in poor and rural areas, and who are being heard and neglected by the government and to work on young women’s empowerment through the arts. So I co-founded that program with my friend who was also interested in arts education, and we were interested in exploring how arts can be this tool to support people to express themselves and make sense of the conditions that they’re living in and feel like they can build community around that because art is the first thing that was used for the war in terms of propaganda and gaining public support, but it’s also the thing that is most censored and most surveilled.

EC: At Emerson, you performed “Passage” on November 14. What story were you telling through that performance?

Nguyễn: There was this beautiful photo that I had seen of a Vietnamese woman with her conical hat, and she was surrounded by all these beautiful green fishing nets, and she just loved her, so that’s what inspired the material that I worked with. I worked with different color tulle that evoked the water itself, and the water at different depths. I played with different colors of tulle to show the different dimensions and layers of water. In thinking about the creation of “Passage,” when you walk through the gallery space, you first walk into Tiffany Chung’s piece, and her piece is really about the forced migration right after the war. And then in the middle, you have Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s installation video, “[The] Boat People” where they land on this refugee camp, so it’s from the journey of leaving to the refugee camp, and then my three channel installation is at the far end of the gallery, and it’s really challenging the notion of refugee resettlement. So it’s kind of like if you move through the gallery, that’s the story that I saw, from departure to this liminal space of the refugee camp, to this place of resettlement.

So in the middle of the gallery space, I wanted to imagine that it was all water, and the tulle evoked that sense of water. So I started the performance in the middle of Tiffany’s installation. And part of what I did was, I sunk into all this tulle that was surrounding me to be with the material, meditate with her piece, and have it be infused into my performance work. And then I carry the tulle into the main gallery space, and part of carrying the tulle is imagining, “What does it mean to literally try to carry water?” And it’s spilling over, it cannot be contained in any way. Then I dive into the tulle, and I’m wrestling in the midst of it, trying to explore my breath, trying to explore tension, trying to explore moments of feeling like I’m swimming or floating or drowning or shifting and just thinking about what the space could be. And meanwhile what’s being projected onto me from the projector above are these incremental numbers that are going up and down in different ways to symbolize the number of growing refugees that are left to die at sea or abandoned by nation states or government.

So that’s being projected on my body as I’m moving under and with and through the tulle and exploring expansion and contraction and breath and thinking about the bodies that were forced to migrate by sea and those that drowned or were thrown overboard or couldn’t make it. What does it mean to dive deep into the ocean where these bodies have landed? So then I struggle to get out of the tulle and go back in because the answer isn’t resettlement. The answer isn’t, “Let me arrive at some place, and it’ll save me. Let me get out of the water.” It was really thinking about, “Let’s return to the water,” and “What can the water teach us, and how can we build other worlds and imaginaries through the water?” And then I worked with Fiona Fiona Ngô who created a really beautiful experimental sound piece that really framed the performance and was a call in response to the piece.

EC: Your Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans bio states that growing up your parents told you stories about their experience escaping Vietnam during the war as boat refugees to Malaysia and Indonesia and resettling in the United States in the ‘80s. How do those stories inform your work?

Nguyễn: They deeply inform my work in that they are the ones that I’m theorizing with. They helped me understand the political stakes of war in how they’ve survived and how they don’t want that to happen to anyone else in any capacity. So I draw on their stories to create my performance gestures, and I draw on their stories and their legacies to think about, “What is the purpose of this work?” and really thinking about how it’s to connect with audiences to share these histories and these stories. That’s how they want their stories to be passed on.

EC: What do you hope people learn from experience in your art?

Nguyễn: I hope it offers a space for people to grieve and to mourn, especially as we’re witnessing different levels of violence all the time. I want people to understand that war and the process of nation building always results in forced migration, always results in the predetermination of who gets to live and who gets to die or who has to die for someone else to live. I want people to learn the human stakes of what it means to delve into these histories, not only just as something that’s happened in the past, but as a lens to think about the future, as a way to think about how we can build a better world by not forgetting and erasing the violences and the ugly histories and the heartbreaks of the past. How do we acknowledge them and also transform them so that we can build a better world, a better future for all of us and other generations to come?

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

PURPOSEFULLY LOST
2023-12-11 12:00 - 2023-12-15 18:00 | Huret & Spector Gallery; Tufte Building
Presenting the Fall 2023 Photography Practicum: Purposefully Lost, a varied collection of reflections and expressions by Emerson artists in the BFA program.

Featuring exhibits by the following resident artists:Aquaholic by Kyra Badger

Urban Eden by Molly Berard

Shit Show by Maya Bergman

Starring… by Charlene Cheung

Cardboard Reality by Jose Benito Guevera

Concurrent by Yangyang Huang

Second Spine by Yiyi Lu

Double Take by Xiaoke Ma

empathic fluorescence by Mia Moore

Deinstitutionalised by Julia Tweedie

Traces Echo by Yuchun (Emily) Zhou

Vietnam and Diasporic Aesthetics: Two Meditations. Dr. Howie Tam & Dr. Catherine H. Nguyen
2023-12-06 17:00 - 18:30 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
Tiffany Chung, If Water Has Memories, 2022.

The first event in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Scholar Series, this program is presented in conjunction with One Day We’ll Go Home and supported in part by the Harvard University Asia Center. Taking as a point of departure some works of Vietnamese American artistic production both in the gallery space and beyond, this two-part talk with Catherine H. Nguyen (Emerson College) and Howie Tam (Brandeis University) explores different approaches of receiving and encountering artworks and engages diasporic aesthetics that grapples with the legacy of the Vietnam War and its enduring questions about creation and memory.

This event is supported by Emerson Contemporary, WLP Scholar Series, Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, Harvard University Asia Center

Catherine H. Nguyen is an Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures at Emerson College. She is a comparative literature scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora. Her current book project examines the Vietnamese mixed-race child and the transracial adoptee from the longue durée of the Indochina Wars to their refugee aftermaths. Her publications can be found in Adoption & Culture and forthcoming in L’Esprit Créateur as well as in the edited collections Redrawing the Historical Past and Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France.

HJT Howie Tam is Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University. He earned a PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania and previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Dartmouth College and the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University. His articles have appeared in American Literature, the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. He is working on a book manuscript that studies forms of nationhood in diasporic Vietnamese literature published in the U.S. and France.

BECAUSE I COME FROM YOU
2023-12-04 08:00 - 2023-12-06 18:00
Maya Seri’s BFA thesis project BECAUSE I COME FROM YOU features photographs, video projection and sculptural installation, a project about home, identity and belonging. Seri’s perception of identity has changed through the making of this work. As she embarks in this period of transition as a 21-year-old, she realizes that she is no longer a girl. Feeling the departure from childhood, the artist can’t help but wonder, “Where is home?” She feels connected to Ohio, where the artist grew up, where she’s from. When in Boston, she feels a loss of identity and have to find herself over and over again. She asks: “Who am I? What am I? I am made of everything. I am made of the experiences I have had, the people I have met, and the places I have been.”

This project began as a journal entry to the artist’s younger self: “I just want to give you a hug. I want to see you smile and laugh. But that’s what I see in the mirror, isn’t it? I just don’t recognize it. You are me? I am you. I’m different, of course. I’m older. ‘Soiled’ by the world, as some would say. But I have you in me. I can be who I want to be because I come from you.”

About the ArtistMaya Seri’23 is a senior at Emerson College, is a passionate storyteller who uses the camera as a tool to connect with others and to understand herself and the world around her more thoroughly. Her work portrays themes of identity, girlhood, nostalgia, home, and connection.

Live Performance, Passage (2023) by Patricia Nguyễn and Fiona Ngô
2023-11-14 18:00 - 19:30 | Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02111
Still from “Collapse to Expand” by Patricia Nguyen

A work of experimental sound and movement, Passage explores how beauty and creativity emerge in the aftermath of war. The artists meditate upon the various thresholds and movements that happen for displaced peoples across the time and space of memory, everyday encounters of state violence, forced migration, and queer worldmaking.

This event is free and open to the public.

No-No Boy: Live in Concert
2023-11-04 18:00 - 19:30 | Pao Arts Center, 99 Albany Street Boston, Massachusetts, 02111, United States
This event is sold out. Register here to join the waitlist.

Experience a multimedia musical performance from artist Julian Saporiti, known as No-No Boy, as part of the tour for his latest album Empire Electric. This newest release brings Asian American history to life through a uniquely inventive approach to storytelling. This program is organized by the PAO Art Center and supported by Emerson Contemporary.

Artist Talk with filmmaker and sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyễn.
2023-11-03 16:00 - 17:00
Please join us for a talk and Q&A with filmmaker and sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyễn.

Walker 202, 120 Boylston St. Boston, MA. Doors open at 4pm. Free, but Registration Required via EventBrite.

Nguyễn lives and works Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His practice is fueled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement. Through his continuous attempts to engage with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Nguyễn investigates the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. Through collaborative endeavors with various communities throughout the world, Nguyen sets out to cultivate and empower these strategies enacted and embodied by his collaborators. Through this collaborative practice, he explores memory as a form of resistance and empowerment, emphasizing the power of storytelling as a means for healing, empathy and solidarity.

Nguyễn, based primarily in Saigon, works between various mediums but devotes much of his attention towards producing moving-image works and sculpture. Nguyễn’s intrigued with the relationship between narrative and objects leads him to make projects that combine moving image and sculpture – oftentimes many of his films begin with an object, such as destroyed memorials built by former refugees, or the skeletal remains of the last rhino in Vietnam for instance, and its story. Approaching memory as a phenomenon that is intangible and abstract, Nguyễn often thinks beyond the restrictions of time (past, present, future) which also gives way to thinking about supernaturalisms (ghosts, specters, hauntings) as political tools.

History and Archives: A Music Video Workshop with Dr. Julian Saporiti
2023-11-03 10:30 - 12:00
EVENTBRITE Registration required, limited seats (15), free.

In this workshop, musician and scholar Dr. Julian Saporiti will discuss how to use your personal story, family archive, and history in your work. He has used the medium of music videos to transform his doctoral research on Asian American history into easily consumable public art pieces. Through his project No-No Boy (Smithsonian Folkways Records), Saporiti has been able to reach broad (non-academic) audiences by using visuals and songwriting instead of academic papers.

Breaking down several videos included in the One Day We’ll Go Home exhibition, Saporiti will discuss the process of turning academic research into public art and offer insight into the societal impact public-facing history can have. Participants will be led through the artist’s production process and learn how rigorous archival research and deeply exploring one’s cultural background can produce rich ground for any creative practice.

One Day We’ll Go Home featuring Tiffany Chung, Brandon Tho Harris, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Patricia Nguyen and Julian Saporiti.
2023-11-01 12:00 - 2023-12-16 18:00 | Media Art Gallery
Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Vietnamese, b. 1976), The Boat People, 2020, Single-channel video, 4k, Super 16mm transferred to digital, color, 5.1 surround sound, 20 mins, Edition of 5 plus 2 artist’s proofs, (JCG11340), © Tuan Andrew Nguyen 2021. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York

Emerson Contemporary, Emerson College’s platform for visual art, proudly presents One Day We’ll Go Home, a group exhibition featuring recent work by five Vietnamese American artists Tiffany Chung, Brandon Tho Harris, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Patricia Nguyễn, and Julian Saporiti who each critique the established historical narratives of the wars in Vietnam, colonialism, dislocation, and their long-lasting aftermath.

On view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street, November 1 – December 16, 2023. Free and open to the public, Tuesday – Saturday from 12-6pm. Opening Reception, Friday, November 3, 5-7:30PM.

The end of the Vietnam War and the sudden U.S. military evacuations in 1975 marked the beginning of large-scale exodus of citizens of Vietnam. The U.S. government evacuated approximately 125,000 Vietnamese that year, most of whom were likely to be persecuted by the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam government. Through video, archival footage, performance, song, and innovative storytelling, these five artists examine and expand recent histories, both personal and collective, as they address multigenerational trauma and loss. The exhibition highlights the complexities surrounding the concept of homeland for Vietnamese refugees and their children and the familiar feeling of liminality that many refugees experience across the globe.

View exhibition documentation.

“It is my hope that through the stories these artists tell, we gain a deeper understanding of what happened in Vietnam and how these events continue to impact millions of people to this day,” said Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Emerson College’s Distinguished Curator-in-Residence. “Although this exhibition is focused on the Vietnamese diaspora and the impact of the historic events of 1975 and beyond, sadly this topic has renewed relevance today as many refugee crises are happening concurrently across the globe.” The exhibition is curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Distinguished Curator-in-Residence, with accompanying exhibition wall texts by Dr. Catherine H. Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures. This exhibition and related programming is supported by the Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, Emerson College School of the Arts, and the Harvard University Asia Center.

PUBLIC PROGRAMMING

WHAT: Music Video workshop with Julian Saporiti WHEN: Friday, November 3, 2023. 10:00-12:30PM WHERE: Emerson College, Ansin Building, Room 605, 180 Tremont Street, Boston, MA Free, but registration is required. RSVP here.

Artist Talk with Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Friday, November 3, 2023. doors open at 3:30PM, 4-5:00PM. Emerson College, Walker Building, Room 202, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA. Free, but registration is required. RSVP here. This program is supported in part by the Harvard University Asia Center

Opening Reception, One Day We’ll Go Home WHEN: Friday, November 3, 2023, 5-7:30PM WHERE: Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA.

Live Concert with Julian Saporiti. Experience a multimedia musical performance from No-No Boy (singer Julian Saporiti) as part of the tour for his latest album Empire Electric. This newest release brings Asian American history to life through a uniquely inventive approach to storytelling. WHEN: Saturday, November 4, 2023, 6:00-7:30PM. WHERE: Pao Arts Center, 99 Albany Street, Boston, MA, 02111.This program is organized by the PAO Art Center and supported by Emerson Contemporary.

Live Performance, Passage (2023) by Patricia Nguyễn and Fiona. A work of experimental sound and movement, Passage explores how beauty and creativity emerge in the aftermath of war. The artists meditate upon the various thresholds and movements that happen for displaced peoples across the time and space of memory, everyday encounters of state violence, forced migration, and queer worldmaking. Tuesday, November 14, 2023, 5-6:30PM, Media Art Gallery

Vietnam and Diasporic Aesthetics: Two Meditations. A conversation with Dr. Howie J. Tam & Dr. Catherine H. Nguyen. The first event in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Scholar Series, this program is presented in conjunction with One Day We’ll Go Home and supported in part by the Harvard University Asia Center. Taking as a point of departure some works of Vietnamese American artistic production both in the gallery space and beyond, this two-part talk with Catherine H. Nguyen (Emerson College) and Howie Tam (Brandeis University) explores different approaches of receiving and encountering artworks and engages diasporic aesthetics that grapples with the legacy of the Vietnam War and its enduring questions about creation and memory. Wednesday, December 6, 2023, 5-6:30PM. Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery St. Boston, MAThis program is supported by Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing, Scholar Series, Southeast Asia Programs, Harvard University Asia Center and Emerson Contemporary

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“Artists Defusing Barriers to Discovery” feat. Nicole L'Huillier and Nathan Miner
2023-10-05 18:30 - 20:00
Organized in partnership with the Long Now Boston Conversation Series, this artist talk will explore artistic research as a place of possibilities; an open-ended strategy of experimentation and failure that can lead to new modes of thinking and reframes knowledge conventions. This program presents two artists whose transdisciplinary practices dynamically intersect with technology, science, and philosophy, and creatively challenge preconceptions as they expand the role of art in society.
Tickets are $5.

Rachel Rossin: works from THE MAW OF. September 7 - October 14, 2023
2023-09-06 12:00 - 2023-10-14 18:00 | Media Art Gallery
Rachel Rossin, THE MAW OF, Single channel video installation with sound, detail (2022- ongoing). The Maw Of is co-commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. ©Rachel Rossin. Courtesy on the artist and Magenta Plains, New York.

Rachel Rossin: works from THE MAW OF, September 7 – October 14, 2023
Emerson Contemporary, Emerson College’s platform for visual art, proudly presents Rachel Rossin: works from THE MAW OF, a solo exhibition featuring recent works initially commissioned by KW Institute of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art by the New York-based painter and digital artist Rachel Rossin. On view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street, September 7 – October 15, 2023. Free and open to the public, Tuesday – Saturday from 12-6pm.
Works from The Maw Of explores the coming together of flesh, machine, cognition, and code sparked by current research into brain-computer interfaces. Rossin’s work blends painting, sculpture, new media, and more to create digital landscapes, which she uses to address aspects of disorder, embodiment, the all-presence of technology, and its effect on human psychology.
The exhibition features a site-specific immersive installation, innovative new video works and recent paintings. Conceived as mixed-reality theater, Rossin’s ongoing project addresses the expanded limits of technology and the human body. The artist offers a new poetics and visual language for the next epoch in technology, offering a critical response on what painting is for and its enduring significance in our tech-dependent society.
Floating LED ‘portals’ continue Rossin’s investigation into human autonomy and brain-machine integration research. Originally presented at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Maw Of situates the innate human desire to continually “remake” ourselves as central to the cultural inflection point represented by the advent of artificial intelligence.
Rossin’s small Scry Glass video sculptures incorporate animation central to The Maw Of, and activate the characters and texture of the paintings. The Scry Glasses evoke two modes of looking: a form of divination and fortune-telling, as well as, a form of reflection using a Claude glass, a revolutionary tool used by 18th century landscape painters. For the artist however, these “black mirrors” are not for predicting end times, but instead leave clues for the viewer, allowing us to remain tethered to the present.
The artist’s recent paintings offer a visual counterpoint to the digital world proposed by The Maw Of. These images draw from the artist’s childhood drawings of biblical figures associated with the apocalypse, representing Rossin’s conception of “the end times.” For Rossin painting represents a marking of time on the canvas, a recording of the movement of the artist’s body. They continue to emphasize the relevance of painting as a practice and are a reminder of what endures the “annihilation of analog” represented by our increasingly tech-dependent culture.

Rachel Rossin, THE MAW OF, Single channel video installation with sound, detail (2022- ongoing).
The Maw Of is co-commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
©Rachel Rossin. Courtesy on the artist and Magenta Plains, New York

Artist Reception, GBFA, Friday August 12, 5-7pm.
2023-08-18 17:00 - 19:00 | Huret and Spector Gallery
Image Caption: Joie Cousin, Our Home: Book One, multi-media video installation, 2023
Emerson College’s BFA thesis exhibition featuring graduates from the Global Paris BFA in Film Program. Featured Artists are: Joie Cousin, Miriam Yoboué, and Mars Tomasetti,
Gallery Hours 12-5pm, August 16 – 19, 2023
Artist Reception, Friday August 12, 5-7pm. Join us for refreshments and conversation.

Location: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place.

Please note: ID required for visitors without Emerson Badge

Global Paris BFA Thesis Projects
2023-08-12 12:00 - 2023-08-16 18:00 | Huret and Spector Gallery
Image caption: Mars Tomasetti, 234A, Three channel animation video, acrylic, Gamecube consoles and controllers (2001), stereo sound, 2023
Emerson College’s second BFA thesis exhibition featuring graduates from the Global Paris BFA in Film Program. Featured Artists are: Joie Cousin, Miriam Yoboué, and Mars Tomasetti,
Joie Cousin’s Our Home: Book One “Our Home” is a film essay based on childhood nostalgia using therapeutic techniques involving segments of self-expression, interviews, and confessionals. These themes entangle together in order to express a grander story displaying the power of communication in all settings. Through aspects of video art, puppets, and animation, Cousin bridges the gap between fiction and fact, in order to display a wide range of what it means to know someone (/yourself).
Miriam Yoboué’s 9- channel film installation Static Stands Still, is a comprised of different sized CRTVS and flat-screen monitors that explores the different emotions, feelings, and experiences of a young black woman reeling from the traumatic event of a rape. The installation works as a semi-linear narrative that depicts the life of a fictional black woman who goes through the memories of her past and the moments of her present to try to contextualize this event.
Mars Tomasetti’s multimedia installation 234A, features a three-channel animation video game, although you can’t actually play the game, the installation is designed to make the game and the surrounding room feel yours. Tomasetti wants to call attention to the disconnectedness and isolation many people experience at the hands of capitalism and the American ideal of “individualism,” and they redirect them towards collectivism.
Gallery Hours 12-5pm, August 16 – 19, 2023
Artist Reception, Friday August 12, 5-7pm.

Location: The Huret and Spector Gallery is located on the 6th Floor of the Tufte Building. Please enter through the doors at 10 Boylston Place.

Please note: ID required for visitors without Emerson Badge

Truth Be Told: (Re)Considering Innovation, Transformation, and Genius through the Lens of Jazz, Gender, and Justice
2023-07-29 12:00 - 13:30
Grammy Award winning artist Terri Lyne Carrington recently conceived and curated the New Standards Exhibit, celebrating the work of women composers and performers who have been either under-acknowledged or rendered invisible regarding the overall representation of the art form. This multidisciplinary exhibit imagines the sound of jazz through the lens of gender justice and is now open in Boston.
Moderated by Danny Rivera, our panelists Terri Lyne Carrington, Somi, and Patricia Zarate Perez will lead a dynamic discussion considering the themes of gender, race, innovation, and transformation featured throughout the New Standards Exhibit.
Event is free and open to the public, please RSVP here.

New Standards related events
2023-07-20 08:00 - 2023-08-02 17:00
In celebration of the one-of-a-kind installation, the New Standards Boston Takeover will include public programs, such as panel discussions, curated artist talks, and afternoon and evening concerts that will take place at multiple venues across the City of Boston, curated by Carrington and the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.
Opening Reception: Wednesday July 12, 6-7:30PM, RSVP required.
Additional events include performances by:
July 20, 7PM, Brandee Younger, Red Room at Cafe 939, 939 Boylston Street, Boston
July 26, 7PM, Landmarks Orchestra featuring Terri Lyne Carrington, Hatch Shell Boston, 47 David G. Mugar Way, Boston. Tickets: Free and open to the public. More information: landmarksorchestra.org
July 27, 7PM, Mary Halvorson and Tomas Fujiwara Duo. MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), located in the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston.
July 30, 12:30PM, Kris Davis and Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice with special guest Marquis Hill. Cambridge Jazz Festival at Danehy Park, 99 Sherman Street, Cambridge
August 2, 7PM and 9PM, New Standards Jam Session, hosted by Lakecia Benjamin. Wally’s Jazz Club, 427 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, Emerson College UnCommon Stage and Trillium Garden on the Common
July 15, 2-4pm – Enbious
July 22, 2-4pm – Devon Gates
July 29, 2-4pm Jacques Schwarz-Bart presents the Harlem Suite
August 2, 4-6pm – Zahili Gonzalez Zamora Trio
New Standards exhibit and New Standards Boston Takeover performance series is sponsored by The New Commonwealth Racial Equality and Social Justice Fund.
For more information on New Standards and its related events, please visit https://www.jazzandgenderjustice.com.

New Standards
2023-07-12 08:00 - 2023-08-05 17:00
The Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice (JGJ) has partnered with the Office of the Arts at Emerson College to bring the multidisciplinary installation, New Standards, to the Emerson Contemporary Media Art Gallery. The multimedia exhibition continues the theme set forth in the book New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers by Grammy Award-winning artist Terri Lyne Carrington, and will be free and on display to the public beginning Wednesday, July 12 to Friday, August 4, 2023, with gallery hours from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. (and by appointment), Wednesday through Saturday.
New Standards celebrates the work of women composers and performers who have been either under acknowledged or rendered invisible regarding the creation, perpetuation and overall representation of the art form. The installation will feature visual arts, film, panel discussions, music and information on classic and contemporary jazz composers, and is part of the Jazz Without Patriarchy Project (JWP), an ongoing series of initiatives, established by four-time Grammy Award-winning drummer, producer, and educator, Carrington and the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, which aims to lead a massive cultural shift toward gender equity in the field of jazz.
“The idea for the book New Standards came out of necessity when I realized there were not enough women represented in the canon of jazz standards,” said Carrington, a multi-Grammy-winning artist, NEA Jazz Master, and the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. “It expanded to be an album project and also an exhibition at the Carr Center in Detroit. I am beyond happy to be able to share this multidimensional work at home, and grateful to the Office of the Arts at Emerson College, and New Commonwealth Fund for helping to make this dream come to fruition. The hope is that anyone who experiences the exhibition will walk away transformed and excited about different sonic possibilities, imagining what the music will sound like when gender equity with its creators is accomplished.”
Curated by Carrington, New Standards will showcase works created by multidisciplinary jazz artists Cécile McClorin Salvant, Carmen Lundy, and Jazzmeia Horn – along with works by award-winning visual artists Monica Haslip, Joe Diggs, Yvette Rock, and Ramsess – ranging from print and sculpture, to collage, textiles, and multimedia. The exhibit will also feature a stunning portrait collection of 30 influential women instrumentalists by Sherry Rubel, as well as a film installation by award-winning photographer and video-installation artist Carrie Mae Weems, a film capturing the collaborative work between Carrington and visual artist Mikalene Thomas, and a documentary on the book, New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers (Berklee Press, 2022).

MFA Thesis Projects
2023-04-19 12:00 - 2023-05-14 19:00
Abigail Hendrix, Nimueh, 2023 (still, 16 mm HD video, color, stereo, 3-channel, synchronous loop).
Media Art Gallery
April 19- May 14, 2023.
Reception, April 19, 5-7pm
A two person exhibition, this year’s MFA thesis showcase features multi channel moving image works by Elise Cohen and Abigail Hendrix.
Elise Cohen, Call Home, 16 mm film, 2023

Cohen’s 16mm film Call Home is a mixed-media installation work. The project features home movies filmed on 8mm by the artist’s grandfather from the 50’s through the late 70’s during their time in Morocco and when they moved to France. More recent recordings of conversations between the artists and her grandmother are also included. The project explores themes of transmission, memories, and alienation.
Hendrix’s three channel installation Nimueh is made using digitally scanned 16mm film and a multi-layered soundscape. It explores the local folklore and mythology surrounding the death of Hallie Latham Illingworth, whose intact body was found floating in Washington state’s Lake Crescent in 1937 about four years after her death, eerily preserved (saponified) by the frigid water. Nimueh (named for the Arthurian Lady of the Lake) uses local imagery, voiceover, and text to engage with the landscape of and around Lake Crescent and with Hallie’s transformation: from human body to soap, from human being to myth.

Is This Too Much? Space, Place, Image, Sound (VM637)
2023-04-19 12:00 - 2023-05-14 19:00
Media Art Gallery, April 19- May 14, 2023.
Reception, April 19, 5-7pm
IS THIS TOO MUCH?

The works in this exhibition were created by artists from the MFA Film and Media Arts and MA Media Design programs.
This exhibition explores the complex relationships that entwine us and shape us as humans – mind-body, artificial and organic, public and private, how culture identity, nostalgia and history operate on us… wait — Is This Too Much? Featuring works by: Elise Cohen, Abigail Hendrix, Tomas Orrego, Greyson Acquaviva, Sean Blanchard, Tati Chavitage, Yuling Chen, Anny Dai, Nate Gardner, Emerson Holloway, Yue Hua, Yaqi Liu, Chunxiaoxue Lu, Paula Ochoa Tovar, Christina (Yijia) Ren, Valeria Rodriguez

Digital Art and/as Performance: A Conversation with Dr. Leonie Bradbury and Dr. EL Putnam
2023-03-24 15:00 - 17:00
Digital Art and/as Performance: A Conversation with Dr. Leonie Bradbury and Dr. EL Putnam

Cabot Science Library
Harvard University
CORRECTION: Friday, March 24, 2023
3:00 p.m.

Join contemporary art curator Leonie Bradbury and performance artist EL Putnam discuss their collaborative work on the recent exhibition PseudoRandom at Emerson Contemporary, considering the challenges and possibilities of creating and presenting digital art.

This talk is held as part of ArtTechPsyche, a symposium at the intersection of art and technology that offers a day of immersive digital experiences, art exhibitions, technology demos, and visionary speakers. Discover the ways in which technology shapes us, and conversely, how the artist continually challenges and informs technological development.

Reserve your spot. This event is free and open to the public

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

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

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

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

EVENTS

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

Media Art Gallery

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

Media Art Gallery

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

Media Art Gallery

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

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

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