Emerson Contemporary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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