Artworks
33rd Round of Art on the Marquee (Curated Round, Summer 2022)
MASARY Studios, Canopy
‘Canopy’ is a media poem derived from the idea of a collection of latent features and experiences that support and surround the city landscape. In this case, we look at the total count of trees in the Boston area and how they may drive poetic expressions when they are arranged together.
This particle-based animation includes 173,875 particles which is the same count of trees in Boston based on PARCELS Tree Canopy Metrics from 2014-2019. When emitted together they form a unison form, reminiscent of a murmur of birds, school of fish, or a full canopy crown embedded in a monolithic display above the public. The animation is paired with a simple poem written for the artwork:
dappled light peaks through,
the canopy of green
a dance,
in unison
with each leaf,
the sunlight turns to shade
DATA set URL:
https://data.boston.gov/dataset/parcels-tree-canopy-metrics2
MASARY is a transdisciplinary studio creating contemporary media artworks through installation and performance. MASARY is based in Fort Point, Boston and was founded in 2015.
Studio HHH, Girl on Fire
This digital artwork celebrates the untethered moments of life – a depiction of spontaneous expression, captured by chance, of a young girl dancing on an empty beach at dawn. This artwork relies on the use of bold, saturated coloration and high-contrast imagery – the content subtly evolving through color shifts. We exist between the competing forces of shadow and light. “Girl on Fire” represents this overlapping space, the productive tension between these dualities of life. As the dancer moves effortlessly between the big clear sky and the broad black sands, we see the harmony of life ignited, fueled by the fire inside.
In order to be able to solve the problems of our world, we need to be able to think outside the box, we need to be able to tap into boundless creativity. “Girl on Fire” shows us what it looks like to be bold and free – her raw energy reminds us to step into a head-space where endless creativity becomes possible.
Studio HHH is a multidisciplinary design studio, led by Vanessa Till Hooper and Emily Castro, specializing in large-scale interactive art installations and immersive environments. Our team of designers, artists, and creative technologists are committed to developing meaningful experiences within the built environment. Our body of work traverses the overlapping disciplines of art, architecture, and design. We create installations that emerge out of an in-depth discovery process. Each project is an opportunity to explore the deeper context and develop a meaningful response that has the capacity to engage and inspire. We believe in the power of agency, voice, and choice. We are eager to discover the many ways good design can actively empower individuals and communities. By shifting the perceived value of art from object to experience, the measure of success is determined not by the outside world, but by the individual user’s personal experience
Digital Soup, Now or How I Wish It Was
Representing life’s contradictions and change as the only constant, this piece, “Now or How I Wish It Was” both amplifies everyday beauty while at the same time serving as a biting critique of the world’s problems. In the spirit of speculative worldbuilding, the videos represent escapism from what is here and towards a movement personalizing the here so the world fits. This visual dialogue between Digital Soup members, Maria Servellon and Marcel Wulf, serves as a thinking board of life, surveillance, solitude, erasure of borders, humor, utopia, the absurd, resilience, and most importantly, collective human experiences.
Digital Soup is a collective of Boston based artists that hold space for each other and underrepresented artists — in support of QTBIPOC + AAPI artists — creating inclusive spaces that enable the sharing of public performative works, multimedia art, video, sound, music, and art projects. Members value inclusiveness, equity, and fairness in support of happenings that encourage togetherness and feed community. Digital soup is facilitated by founding member and Artistic Producing Director Lani Asuncion currently working alongside members Maria Servellón, A_Marcel, Melissa Teng, and Allison Tanenhaus.
Opertura, Playgrounds
Playgrounds is a celebration of simple shapes and their invitation to open play. Some friends interact with two shapes while more shapes wait below for their chance in the spotlight
Opertura is the collaborative unit of self-taught artists, Aya Yamasaki (she/her) and Jason Brown (he/they). They create hand-drawn animations and related media that reference phenomena of the natural world to tell straightforward but layered stories using playful characters. Their work has screened domestically and abroad.
Zebbler Studios, Push and Pull
Push and Pull, a new video from Zebbler Studios specifically created for the Art on the Marquee project, gently explores some of the most successful video mapping techniques of shadow passes and transformations, with the LED Marquee tower reimagined as a monolith of breathing and moving blocks, complete with ever changing rotating colorful lights.
Zebbler Studios is a Boston-based multimedia design team, specializing in custom video-mapped installations, video editing and animation, interactivity, software design, fabrication and lighting. In the past few years, besides fabricating multiple video mapped stages and sculptures at festivals in various parts of the world, Zebbler Studios has created public art projects in the greater Boston area as well, including an animated 20′ LED sculpture in Somerville called Iluminaciones, video mapping show at the Boston Public Library, and provided video loops for 20+ projector installation in downtown Boston called City Bloom, as well as a video at Somerville’s own LED installation Faces in Assembly Square.
32nd Round of Art on the Marquee (Winter 2022)
Alina Zazmeeva, Liquidity
Liquidity invites the viewer to think about the nature of virtual objects. With computer generated images, the world is seen as the combination of points, vectors and surfaces. In virtual space, the very “thingness” of familiar objects dissolves, as every attribute of a simulated object is discrete from others, and can be removed, tweaked, replaced and remixed. What appears like a hard and heavy rock, is weightless and empty, while supple and fluid objects are instead rigid and firm. Liquidity utilizes the intentional shifts in the texture mapping and unlikely physics simulation to illustrate the beauty and volatility of digital space and its components. Uncanny motion, tearing and oscillating digital matter captures the fluidity and the recombinant possibility of digital space.
Alina Nazmeeva a is a designer and researcher based in Boston. She is a
graduate of Master of Science in Urbanism, MIT (2019); and a fellow of the New Normal program at Strelka Institute of Media Architecture and Design (2017). She is a lead researcher at MIT Future Urban Collectives Lab, where she designs physical and digital spaces for emerging collectives, and a researcher at MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab, prototyping urban-scale digital twins.
Alina’s independent work focuses on VR/AR experiences, computer graphics and digital urban space. Using 3D software and gaming engines, she creates images and environments that investigate the relationship between cities and videogames, digital images and spaces, CGI and politics. Her most recent work was commissioned by the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Her writing has been published in PLAT, Media-N, CARTHA Magazine, Perspectives, VOICES(Towards other Institutions), and Strelka Magazine (forthcoming)
Hogan Seidel, Copy/Paste/Prune/Propagate
Copy/Paste/Prune/Propagate (2022) is an experimental animation comprised of found 35mm slide film of flowers collages together with a motion picture film splicer. This piece explores the beauty that is found in the waste of the world of memory and photographs.
Hogan Seidel is a Boston-based media artist who works in the traditions of experimental film, new media, found footage, photochemical abstraction, direct animation, and collage. Their work investigates personal narratives relating to evolving queer myths and theories. They hope to uncover the relationship between technology, materiality, and queer identity.
Bridget DeFranco, In circulation
In circulation reimagines plant-life photographed in the Boston area as mutations existing in digital space. Each 3D model draws on the photographs for both their textures and their shapes with the goal of recreating the physical world for a digital habitat. The movement and rotation of each separate piece knits them into a dynamic, kaleidoscope like arrangement, mimicking the balance between chaos and harmony in nature and allowing the motion to ultimately determine the form.
Bridget DeFranco is a media artist working to allow for a slower mode of consuming digital content. Her work explores the role of the screen as a mediator and questions what happens when we try to engage with something through the screen as if it’s real. She aims to create work that feels at home within a digital habitat while also challenging habits around screen viewing. Bridget is a first year graduate student at RISD working toward an MFA in Digital + Media. In 2019, she graduated from NYU School of Engineering with a BS in Integrated Digital Media and minors in Computer Science and Art History.
Jess Holz, Plankton Painting
These images are created with video of pond water from Halls Pond in Brookline, MA, taken through a light microscope. The video is algorithmically summed, like a long exposure, revealing the trails and paths of myriads of microscopic creatures (plankton) swimming on the slide. Holz considers these images like automatic drawings or paintings, the plankton create the marks and composition, all happening within a millimeter or less. Chronophotography allows us to see these creatures ‘footprints’, instead of a giant footprint in the dirt, there is a small squiggle. Some dart across the frame in less than a second, others carve slower, helical paths. They are always seeking, striving, looking for food and mates. Plankton form the basis of the food chain but are so tiny they’re often overlooked. By visualizing them on a giant marquee and celebrating their vitality she hopes to raise awareness of the impact humans are having on these unseen beings.
Jess Holz (b. 1985) creates artworks which give the viewer a peek into invisible worlds, as well as a chance to reflect on the influence of scientific visual culture on our collective imagination. She has recently received a MFA in Art+Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; previously she has worked in several labs and imaging facilities, gaining
valuable technical experience with a number of microscopic imaging techniques. She currently works as an electron microscopy research fellow at a Boston University lab which investigates the neural circuitry underlying thought and emotion. A true artist/scientist at heart, she has been using the scanning electron microscope for artistic purposes for the past 16 years. Her award winning micrographs have been exhibited nationally and as far away as South Africa, and have garnered the support of the Frederick Layton Fellowship and UW-Milwaukee Chancellors
Award. The discrepancy between what can be perceived by eye and what is imaged with the microscope has fostered her fascination with perceptual systems along with the optical properties of materials. Jess actively exploits this in photography and installation.
Deb Step, Ocotillo
In Ocotillo Deb Step uses collage and glitch techniques to bloom a desert simulating a natural
response desert flora has to rain. It’s a sporadic reprieve to the day, week, or season.
Deb Step is an interdisciplinary artist who explores storytelling in physical and digital formats. Their work centers around the landscapes and still lifes that surround them as well as the iconography and characters frequented by those themes. Deb Step is co-founder of Property Materials based in Boston.
Ben K. Foley, Hope & Fear
A luminescent iceberg looms in the night, rising and sweeping to view below and black sky. The iceberg is, in fact, a real object: a glass sculpture illuminated through projection mapping and is a metaphor for fear, insecurity, doubt, and the daunting sense felt through hard times and pain. Opposing the rising structure of cold glowing blues is another ascending monolith. Faint at first, but building into another shape of equal mass and intensity is a pulsing mountain of warm, bright tones realized in clear crystal, rising above the horizon. This form creates balance and represents hope, the strength found from inside out in all of us when we set out to overcome struggle
Ben K. Foley makes immersive visual experiences using light that invite viewers to challenge their curiosity and perception of our inner and outer spaces. Foley’s work highlights the intricate macro and microcosms of our universe, brings viewers to question their’ own experiences and processes often taken for granted but essential in our lives every day. He uses simple yet cleverly recycled materials plus rudimentary tricks of psychics to create complex 3D illusions that reference everything from aspects of Zen, numerology, and mythology, to universal patterns found in math and nature, as well as the science behind optics, illusion, and human vision. Foley manifests experiences that foster inclusive human connection in a time of ever-increasing polarity and personal isolation. Foley’s artwork invites us to explore certain intellectual and spiritual intrigues shared among all human beings; these experiences encourage play, and wonder, and the realization that deep within our perceptions of the space and time we share in a truly magical existence. Ben K. Foley’s creations take many forms including kinetic and interactive sculptures, sensory experiments, and installations in a myriad of scales, media, and materials, as well as drawings and 2d works mostly in graphite and charcoal. Foley focuses on hand-making every aspect of his work and tries to avoid the use of computers for almost all projects in favor of using analog means and “IRL” effects of visual trickery. Foley’s work is featured in solo and juried shows, and in is found in private and permanent museum collections in the US and Europe.
Sara Pagiaro, Hope
Hope is a multimedia installation inspired by Emily Dickinson’s 19th century lyric poem, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers:”
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
This piece is dedicated to female artists. The visuals for this piece are interlaced with nature and a sense of oneness with the natural world. The birds represent hope, freedom, and possibilities to experience the world beyond the physical senses. And towards the path to spiritual transcendence: the bright light is the soul, the waterfall is purification and continuity (Pantharhey, Eraclitus) and the sky’s the infinite world.
Sara Pagiaro is a Boston-based Italian filmmaker with over a decade of experience producing, directing and editing performances for multi talented international artists. Sara’s documentary work highlights social justice issues and female representation. Her short documentary, “Meet the Artist: Melissa Glick” was featured on PBS Vermont (2020). Sara’s public artworks use visual poetry to convey feelings of hope and inspiration. In narrative film, her sci-fi comedy short film has been selected at the Boston Short Film Festival (2018), and won the Audience Award at the New England Film Festival (2016). Currently, she is a teaching artist working with Cambridge students on producing multimedia artwork to showcase at local spaces.
Madeleine Altmann, Penobscot Narrows Bridge, ME
Going up into the observation tower at Fort Knox I got a perfect and very sculptural view of the Penobscot Narrows Bridge. With the AOTM venue pedestrians and drivers below can appreciate a view of the bridge from above. The shape of the structure is very well suited to the aspect ratio of the marquee. Below are still of the Penobscot River and the Penobscot Native American Reservation. I photoshopped all the roads and utility poles away to simulate what it must have looked like before western civilization. A contrast to the new bridge ironically named after this ancient tribe.
Madeleine Altmann has been active in visual arts for most of her life. Starting off in photography she moved on to television, interactive telecommunications and video art. Along the way she has exhibited her work around the world and accumulated a variety of kudos including awards from the American Film Institute and Sony Pictures. Born and raised in Brazil and England, she moved to the USA to attend Hampshire College for undergraduate studies in film and video. She went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from The San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Professional Studies Degree from New York University, where she received the “Interactive Media Pioneer Award.” Altmann now resides with her family in the Boston area of the USA. She continues to travel the world and pursue her interest in art.
Corey Corcoran, Foxtrot
In this animation inspired by a scene from Herman Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf, a man learns
how to dance.
Corey Corcoran is an artist, illustrator, and animator based in Boston. Trained as a painter, his recent work combines traditional and digital drawing techniques. Illustration clients include The New Yorker, Rococo Punch and iHeartMedia, Medium, Spiralbound, Boston Center for the Arts, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Since 2012, he has been exhibiting moving image work through the Art on the Marquee program.
Jeffu Warmouth, XXXOOO
XXXOOO is a set of animations based on a series of drawings composed with a 1960’s Smith Corona manual typewriter, using a grid of X’s and O’s in red and black. The compositions play the imperfection and personality of the 50 year old machine against the minimalism of the grid and limited set of glyphs. For me, playing in the restricted, inky monospaced grid evokes the shriek of dada nonsense poetry, the absurdity of fluxus postcard instructions, the abstraction of conceptual art drawings, the rhythm of early electronic music, and the aesthetic of 8-bit pixel art.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based conceptual artist whose work asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media artwork has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Boston Cyberarts Gallery; Boston Sculptors Gallery; Emerson College; Fitchburg Art Museum; the deCordova Museum; Boston Center for the Arts; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Kaunas Photo Festival, Lithuania; Experimenta Media Arts, Australia; and the 404 Festival of Art & Technology, Argentina & Colombia
31st Round of Art on the Marquee (Curated Round, Summer 2020)
Cierra Michele Peters + Autumn Ahn, Maximum Hydration
Maximum Hydration is a video installation that attempts to untangle a litany of longstanding sociopolitical histories and the life of the traumas they leave in their wake. Through a first person perspective, the video situates you in a seemingly pleasurable view of the shore and the sky, to position the viewer in the complex physiological responses which occur in the body when we engage memories. The text on screen annotates the video above, as a hopeful reminder of healing and our interconnectedness.
Cierra Michele Peters employs a practice that includes video, text, sound and durational performance. She works as an artist, DJ, and organizer with projects that attempt to examine visual, spatial and sensory representations of blackness. She is the co-founder of Print Ain’t Dead, an artist-run bookstore and publishing platform. She supports the revolution at CreateWell, an artist-run grant program for people of color, and the Ujima Project, a democratically-run investment fund.
Autumn Ahn‘s work is a response to the immediacy of our times. Through performance, drawing, video and sculpture, her artistic process centers questions of how we embody our stories, our societies, our spaces, and how their decay is coded by abstractions of new language. She exhibits regularly, runs a workshop entitled, Documentation as Poetic-Witness, developed while in residency at Harvard University’s Department of Philosophy, and is currently working in Western MA researching plant life and the metaphysical imagination.
Lani Asuncion + Anne Harris, Monument Mountain
Monument Mountain is a collaboration between artists Lani Asuncion and Anne Harris, both working in video, coming from backgrounds in performance and painting. This project was created by performances Harris did with paintings made on site at Mount Greylock in Williamstown, Massachusetts juxtaposed with Asuncion’s responsive body movements composed onto Harris’s canvas form. For six years Harris has worked with these mountains, she feels a part of them and senses their shifts and seasonal changes. In response Asuncion moves, slowly, trying to remember Harris’s motions through their own body. The moving, transposed figure becomes like that of a beheaded statue that has no identity and does not take ownership but instead opens a visual dialogue of ambiguity, one form responding and supporting the other. The action of camouflage and compositing is counter to the conquer and pillage nature of colonialism associated with American historical monuments. This intervention upon the land is temporary and is a way to decolonize this place. Not an act of dominance or power, but a search for peaceful reciprocity between us and the mountain. Reclaiming the word monument, we begin to erase permanence and get one step closer to dismantling the hate, racism and genocide attached to monuments still standing across the United States today.
We want to acknowledge that Mount Greylock lies on the Native lands of the Mohican tribe, and the Massachusetts Convention Center marquee display is located on the Massachusett and Mashpee Wampanoag tribes
Lani Asuncion is a multimedia artist working in video, performance, and experimental sound. Asuncion has showcased her video work and performed at ILLUMINUS Boston 2017, and will perform live and remotely in July 2020 in the Concerts in the Courtyard at the Boston Public Library. Her Human Garden Series was shown at the Boston Children’s Museum Art Gallery where she hosted a series of workshops. In 2016 she was a recipient of the Dame Joan Sutherland Fund grant from the American Australian Association, and Assets for Artists grant from MassMoCA. This year 2020, she joins the awardees of the Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation and Transformative Public Art grant awarded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts + Culture with the City of Boston.
Anne Harris is a painter working in performance and video art from Worcester, Massachusetts. Anne earned her BA in Visual Arts from Assumption College in 2012. In 2019, Anne attended Columbia University’s Advanced Summer Painting Intensive. Last year Anne had her first solo exhibition at the Sprinkler Factory Gallery in Worcester, MA. She is currently in her first year as an MFA Candidate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, MA.
Melissa Teng and Sopheak Sam, if we want it
with linh-phương vũ, Lucky Li / 李乐言, Luisina Pozzo Ardizzi, Melice Lopes, Sybille Gorneille
In popular U.S. media, “survival” often means winning at the expense of others, whether that be other humans, non-humans, collectives, or worlds. This drive to conquer and colonize echoes Western philosophers during the Enlightenment who framed Nature as something for Man to tame and master. Desires to administer our planet at scale have resulted in pollution, mass extinction and migration, and climate change, diminishing our very likelihood of survival.
In this work titled “if we want it,” we share Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s framing of survival as collaboration. Tsing writes: “… staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination” (2016). In this spirit, the piece collages together examples of symbiosis: a polyculture farm, coral reef ecosystem, impala and red-billed oxpecker, surfer and ocean. Formally, we are inspired by Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s “WAR IS OVER (if you want it)” billboard campaign (1969), in which they aimed to commodify and sell peace, co-opting the language of politicians, companies, and celebrities. At the top of our piece, a running marquee advertises “Survival is collaboration.” in the 6 most common languages of Boston Public Schools: English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, Cantonese, and Vietnamese. Each translator works their own meaning into this phrase (“Everyone is treated like family.” / “You can’t do it alone.” / “Life engages in cooperation with the earth.”), sometimes consulting parents or friends. Through this process, translations become an exercise in drawing worlds together. In contrast, we write “if we want it” only in English, the top global business language ranked by the International Monetary Fund in 2018, to question who is included and excluded in the “we” who can influence major decisions affecting our survival.
Melissa Teng (she/her, b. 1992, Chengdu, China) is a designer, artist, and researcher interested in memory and imagination within carceral and computational systems. She creates processes, tools, and events using new media to explore social issues collectively.
Sopheak Sam (they/them & he/him, b. 1989, Khao-I-Dang, Thailand) is a Cambodian-American interdisciplinary artist who interrogates the topics of collective memory and trauma, specifically within the Khmer diaspora, often through a framework of queer revisionism.
Sarah Brophy and Katherine Chin, Portals
Physical windows are portals through which we experience the world around us: the changing sky, the delivery workers, and even checking in on our neighbors from afar. The current shelter in place orders have renewed an appreciation for windows we perhaps took for granted, allowing us a rare glimpse into the world outside our immediate homes. Simultaneously, physical isolation has increased our digital content consumption by shifting our physical interactions to the limits of a digital screen. Video calls, previously reserved for long-distance friends and family, are now the expectation for most conversations, allowing coworkers, classmates, doctors, and others intimate views into our homes. The choice to reveal, conceal, or manipulate one’s background in a video call has created new ways to filter our experiences and perception of reality. Through the compilation of personal video footage of the outside world filtering through our windows, juxtaposed by generic Zoom video backgrounds, our piece explores the manipulation of reality and the limits of technology as we stare out of our windows and into our screens.
Sarah Brophy is a multimedia visual artist and graphic designer. Through abstract collage and the layering of found patterns, digital prints, and hand drawn expressions, her work examines language, symbols, and the various ways in which “objective” information is shared. Lately, her work is inspired by the 21st century experience of inhabiting physical and virtual worlds, which she explores through site-specific experiences that reconstitute space through digital intervention. To see more of her work visit sarahbrophy-studio.com and @sarahbrophystudio
Katherine Chin is an emerging installation artist and licensed architect. She enjoys working on site-specific installations that respond to the built environment. Through her work, she explores topics such as sea level rise, energy efficiency, and most recently a collective definition of hope. She has created large-scale projection mapping animations for ILLUMINUS Boston and Emerson College, and also collaborated on a floating art installation in the Fort Point Channel Art Basin. Sarah and Katherine’s shared interest in technology in the built environment fueled a curious exploration and a collaborative process.
Xia Rondeau and Emma Dunlop, kindred
Beneath the soil of the forest lies a network of microorganisms, fungi, and roots which support each other through storms, droughts, and every season. A mutually beneficial relationship is created between this network of fungi and plants–saplings in shaded areas miraculously grow until they can reach sunlight, aided by stronger neighbors (Macfarlane). In this piece we will use fungi as an analogical lense to examine connectedness in our community. Our large panels (1&2) will focus on mirrored hands holding a cluster of hand drawn mushrooms blooming out from the palm, accented in the blues reflected in the underground fungal network featured in panels 4&7 as still images (see below copyright). The hands will reach out against a background in continuous motion, featuring a mixture of found time lapse footage of fauna and original footage taken throughout parks and forests in the surrounding Boston-Metro area. The juxtaposition of animation and footage to traditional hand drawn media reflects the interconnectedness of such opposing life forms as plant life, which is often seen as objects that give, and fungi, often seen as decomposing objects that take.
Macfarlane, Robert. “The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web.” The New Yorker, 7 Aug. 2016,
www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-secrets-of-the-wood-wide-web.
Panel 1&2: Mirrored image of hands holding mushroom cluster (mixed media)
Panel 3: Continuation of background (found & original footage in continuous motion)
Panel 4-7: Photo 102397607 © Palex66 – Dreamstime.com
Panel 8: Light blue, to emulate the colors found in the drawn mushrooms
Xia Rondeau is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from China via Cambridge. Her work explores the intersection of gender/sexuality, adoption, and social change, using fine and media arts as tools for self-expression. Much of Xia’s work are large installations that immerse viewers in her lived experiences as a queer, masculine, woman of color. Xia has recently turned her attention towards 3D art and animation to further this exploration, guided by her fascination with art and technology.
Emma Dunlop is an educator and artist who specializes in drawing and theater. Having grown up in the midwest before taking root in the northeast, she spends much of her time working with and supporting youth from under-resourced communities. She believes art can be a powerful tool for advocacy and empowerment. Using a variety of media, her work explores themes of identity, biography, and children’s literature. She is currently expanding a series of large scale portraits, influenced by and as advocacy for her queer family across the United States
30th Round of Art on the Marquee (Spring 2020)
Steve Bennett + Luis Socorro, Neon Dreamscapes
Neon Dreamscapes celebrates the intense and magical world of colorful lights in urban environments. The animations are based on close-up photographs of small segments of illuminated signage, primarily neon, taken through the windows of local businesses. New geometrical forms and bursts of color punctuate the wall, creating a dynamic fireworks-like display that fades into the darkness. When the video ends, viewers can continue the experience as they walk about Boston at night, keying into the marvelous light shows hidden in plain sight.
Steve Bennett‘s photographic work spans the world as seen and the world reimagined. His traditional images include found still life compositions, candid street scenes, and expansive landscapes. Steve’s explorations into worlds reimagined are typically based on composites of photographs of natural and human-made elements. His work has been featured in solo and juried group exhibitions.
Luis Socorro started his career in product photography and photojournalism before focusing on multimedia art. A full-time motion graphic designer, Luis transforms scripts into animations that inform the general public about topics ranging from finance to health care. He’s also created numerous trailers for books in a variety of genres. Many of his works involve detailed 2D and 3D rendering as well as coordination with voiceovers and soundtracks.
Emely Burgos, Up We Go
Up We Go is a colorful and sweet piece following a sunset hot-air balloon ride – where we learn that a certain rider isn’t as brave as his present company. The piece was meant to be a charming and lighthearted animation in such heavy times, and hopefully reflect a feeling or memory many of us can relate to – whether you were the brave one or not!
Emely Burgos is a senior illustration major at Lesley University with a minor in animation. Her work is mostly character and narrative driven, having created work for White Snake Productions and MassDigi through her internships. She participated in last spring’s student call for art and submitted a piece titled “Star Child.” When not creating art, she can be found taking photographs and playing video games.
Kimberly Cosgrove, Take Flight
“Take Flight” is a playful motion graphic about how people move through life at different paces. Each tiny figure holds onto a dandelion seed, patiently waiting for their turn to find success—to finally take flight. As people, we tend to compare our lives to others, focusing on the imaginary deadlines and expectations that are thrust upon us. In reality, it’s all an illusion. Eventually, everyone’s time will come and we all have different ways of getting there.
Kimberly Cosgrove is a senior, honors student at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She comes from a fine arts background, but is now pursuing a career in graphic design. She loves learning new skills and experimenting with different forms of technology.
Ezra Cove, Hot Air
Hot Air borrows properties found in relief sculpture, depicting a bronze sumo pushing into a hot air balloon. As the balloon is depressed and displaced, the depths of surrounding elements synchronously transition from low to incised relief, and back again.
Ezra Cove works in video game development as a 3D Artist, having created art assets including characters, environments, and props for games such as Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, Lord of the Rings Online, and Infinite Crisis. Cove’s non-commercial work draws from art and design history along with contemporary sources to create a hybrid of traditional and digital media. He adds “sculptural” elements through the use of 3D graphics to create video loops which effectively serve as 2.5D kinetic art. He is currently Professor of Game Art at Becker College. Cove has a B.A. in Studio Art from Bard College and an M.F.A. in Electronic Visualization from Mississippi State University.
Ben K. Foley and Allison Tanenhaus, Orbteka
“Orbteka” adapts a collaborative video installation the duo created for “GlitchKraft” at Emerson Contemporary in fall 2019…and supersizes it!
Allison’s animated 2D glitch art forms the foundation. Once placed into Ben’s custom setup, the 2D art looks convincingly like a glittering 3D orb.
The recorded installation showcases a sort of supernova—massive pattern-shifting tectonic plates on a huge pulsating star—that bends viewers’ visual perception and dazzles the occupying airspace, creating new planetary bodies.
This cohesive melding of sky and screen—and of visual art practices, both virtual and physical—results in a hyper-saturated, multi-plane extravaganza that plays with distortion, motion, and otherworldly cosmic dimension.
Using light, Ben K. Foley makes immersive visual experiences that invite viewers to challenge their curiosity and perception of our inner and outer spaces. Foley’s work highlights the intricate macro and microcosms of our universe, and brings viewers to question their own experiences and processes often taken for granted, but essential in our lives every day. He uses simple yet cleverly recycled materials plus rudimentary tricks of physics to create complex 3D illusions that reference everything from aspects of Zen, numerology, and mythology, to universal patterns found in math and nature, as well as the science behind optics, illusion, and human vision.
Allison Tanenhaus is a Boston-based digital glitch artist who specializes in abstract geometrics, vibrant color fields, optical perspectives, playful patterns, mind-bending motion, and unexpected dimensional qualities. Her source material consists of daily photographs, previous glitch works, and vintage artifacts that she digitally alters via smartphone. Created with equal parts deliberation and experimentation, the results are rainbow-hued, architectural, fantastical compositions that take on a psychedelic life of their own.
Avery LaRochelle, Claw Machine
Claw Machine is a pause in our busy digital lives. It provides a colorful and serene moment just to watch for a few seconds. The animation was inspired by retro claw machines and the need to make something cute. Our world can be pretty harsh sometimes, so having something pretty and nice to look at can really help.
Avery LaRochelle is a designer from Tyngsboro, MA who attends UMass Lowell as a Senior and will be receiving her BFA with a concentration in graphic design in the spring. She loves User Experience and tries to create a good and pleasant experience with most of her work. Including Claw Machine, she likes to play with the idea of how people experience design in the world.
Andre Malan, Choose Go
Choose Go illustrates the paradox of progress captured in Paul Virilio’s often misquoted phrase “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck”. In this video installation, multiple self-organizing systems compete for space on the marque. As one order gives way to waves of new orders turbulence in the transitional moments introduce unexpected compromises and newly negotiated equilibriums.
This work is part of an on-going effort to develop a visual literacy of emergent systems. Learning to navigate, intuit and understand complex systems are becoming an essential skill for folks interested in cities, ecologies and man’s relationship with all living and non-living beings.
Andre Malan is an interdisciplinary artist, architect and urban designer based in Boston, Massachusetts. His research and design work at MIT explored the future of rapidly growing cities in Africa over the next century. His work has been shown at Design Biennials in Lisbon, Portugal (2016) and Valparaiso, Chile (2017). Andre is an Oppenhiemer Memorial Trust Fellow. Andre aims to tackle problems with vast spatial and temporal dimensions while remaining grounded in human experience.
Saurabh Mhatre, Transdimensional
Transdimensional creates a dialogue between the analogue 2-dimensional screen to the digital 3-dimensional space it offers. This space is treated as a playground to visualize the interplay between the different interactions of particles and their trails under the influence of natural forces.
Saurabh Mhatre is a Research Associate in the Material Processes and Systems Group (MaP+S) and the Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He did his Masters in Design: Technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Architecture from BSSA, NMIMS University in Mumbai. He has worked on projects dealing with the 3d printing of ceramic and concrete, deployable mechanisms, smart materials and folding robots. He has a passion for photography, motion graphics and travel.
Opertura, Under a Grove
Under a Grove is a fertile ground where energy is birthed and released into the world. The space attracts a variety of individuals out to understand and take part in the high level of nutrients present, unaware of their own contributions.
Opertura is the collaborative unit of self-taught artists, Aya Yamasaki and Jason Brown. Through hand-drawn animations, comics, installations and other media they look at the workings of the natural world and describe it using playful characters and straightforward stories inspired by personal experience and folk storytelling traditions.
Opertura began in 2004 in the town of Okutama, Japan, on a camping trip with friends. Aya and Jason’s collaborative endeavors started with creating stories based off exquisite corpse illustrations and evolved into making clumsy hand-drawn animations. They live with a big cat, Suna.
Sara Pagiaro, Infinity
Infinity is an installation inspired by Willam Blake’ s poetry, “Auguries of Innocence”. It illuminates a visceral and multi-layered human experience through themes that intimately connects nature and spirituality.
The piece features the first three sentences of Auguries of Innocence accompanied by visual representations of the metaphors in each line:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour
Sara Pagiaro is a Boston-based Italian filmmaker with over 10 years of experience producing, directing and editing performances by award-winning artists including Justin Timberlake, Annie Lennox, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Chaka Khan, Amanda Palmer, Todrick Hall, Rosas Pasos, Toninho Horta, A.R. Rahman at the Berklee College of Music.
She is also the owner and founder of Circle Motion Production LLC. She works with artists and documentary filmmakers to spotlight their unique processes and thematic elements. Some of her clients include Berklee College of Music, Illogiclab and key companies in the electric power industry such as Schneider Electric, ABB, and Raytheon.
Her short movie “The Dream” won the audience award at the Online New England Film Festival. In 2018, her short documentary “Meet the Artist: Melissa Glick” was selected at the Boston Short Film Festival. She is currently working on a new documentary featuring an Armenian-Lebanese vocalist and activist who empowers others globally with her performances.
2nd Round of Art on the Marquee: Video Wall (Fall 2019)
Madeleine Altmann, KADEWE
Taken over several months, this is a multi-layered compilation of people entering a department store as it opens every morning. Their movement across time and space become pictorial patterns with multiple images. The repetitive human shapes hypnotically draws in the viewer while their facelessness feels removed and alienating. Almost like a memory or a vision, the subjects are familiar without having a clear Identity.
I tried to strip as many identifying logos from the shoes as possible. Humans adopt labels which define them and those around them. When labels are stripped of meaning then figures no longer belong to a certain race, gender, class or cultural identity. But there is one thing that is a common thread. We are all consumers.
Madeleine Altmann has been active in visual arts for most of her life. Starting off in photography she moved on to film, television, interactive telecommunications and video art. Along the way she has exhibited work around the world and accumulated a variety of kudos including awards from the American Film Institute and Sony Pictures.
Born and raised in Brazil and England, she moved to the USA to attend Hampshire College for undergraduate studies in film and video. She went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from The San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Professional Studies Degree from New York University, where she received the “Interactive Media Pioneer Award.” She currently divide my time between Boston, USA and Berlin, Germany.
Steve Bennett + Luis Socorro, Journey to the Center of the Web
Journey to the Center of the Web invites viewers to explore a micro world defined by raindrops shown at extreme magnification. The scenes depicted span a mere two inches of physical space and are just a fraction of an inch deep. The view of the drops is initially defined both by a natural order—the water spheres are suspended on the filaments of a spider’s web—and by the human-made geometric order—concentric circles that demarcate the “atomic” structure of the space.
The journey begins as the drops orbit the “nucleus,” the central sphere that reflects the photographer and the larger human context of the exploration. As the speed of the movement increases, the magnification increases as well and the viewer is transported deep into a microscopic universe. Structured action gives way to random movements that lead to a hidden world rich with plant life, the center of the web.
Has the viewer travelled through the micro space and back to the world at large to gaze at the star-filled heavens above? Or is the sky contained within the micro world? That is for each viewer to decide.
Steve Bennett‘s photographic work spans the world as seen and the world reimagined. His traditional images include found still life compositions, candid street scenes, and expansive landscapes. Steve’s explorations into worlds reimagined are typically based on composites of photographs of natural and human-made elements. His work has been featured in solo and juried group exhibitions.
Luis Socorro started his career in product photography and photojournalism before focusing on multimedia art. A full-time motion graphic designer, Luis transforms scripts into animations that inform the general public about topics ranging from finance to health care. He’s also created numerous trailers for books in a variety of genres. Many of his works involve detailed 2D and 3D rendering as well as coordination with voiceovers and soundtracks.
Devon Bryant, Baubles
For Baubles, I have created a 3-d animation that transforms the sign into a recessed area which gives space for brightly colored particles to playfully materialize.
Devon Bryant is a multi-media artist specializing in projection mapping based in Charlestown, MA. He has been involved in numerous large scale public video projects in Boston including Illuminus Festival, Boston Cyberarts’ Art on the Marquee program, and First Night’s mapping of the Boston Public Library. He is also well known for his projection work for national touring acts Space Jesus, EOTO, Shpongle, and ZEE, and for festivals such as Envision, Infrasound, and DefCon. Devon is a co-curator and contributor to Glitch Gallery and is represented by Zebbler Studios.
Ben Foley, Binary Shivers
This piece explores the profound power, fears, ambitions, and mysterious beauty found using a simple child’s toy to teach a machine the tactile nature of fingertips. While entirely innocent, the apparent danger and looming apprehensions are palpable as we begin to outsource our human senses and faculties to new technologies and objects with no natural senses of their own.
Is sensual touch something that is no longer unique to living creatures? Are we giving away our own organic future to the next wave of evolution?
As new worlds open up to us every day through the realizations of modern
technology, Binary Shivers reminds us that we must observe and respect the natural forces of progression working with us and against us in every moment— in slow-motion and at the speed of light.
Using light, Ben K. Foley makes immersive visual experiences that invite viewers to challenge their curiosity and perception of our inner and outer spaces.
Foley’s work highlights the intricate macro and microcosms of our universe, brings viewers to question their’ own experiences and processes often taken for granted but essential in our lives every day. He uses simple yet cleverly recycled materials plus rudimentary tricks of psychics to create complex 3D illusions that reference everything from aspects of Zen, numerology, and mythology, to universal patterns found in math and nature, as well as the science behind optics, illusion, and human vision. Foley manifests experiences that foster inclusive human connection in a time of ever-increasing polarity and personal isolation. Foley’s artwork invites us to explore certain intellectual and spiritual intrigues shared among all human beings; these experiences encourage play, and wonder, and the realization that deep within our perceptions of the space and time we share in a truly magical existence.
Ben K. Foley’s creations take many forms including kinetic and interactive sculptures, sensory experiments, and installations in a myriad of scales, media, and materials, as well as drawings and 2d works mostly in graphite and charcoal. Foley focuses on hand-making every aspect of his work and tries to avoid the use of computers for almost all projects in favor of using analog means and “IRL” effects of visual trickery.
Foley’s work is featured in solo and juried shows, and is found in private and permanent museum collections in the US and Europe.
Adam Hinterlang, Iteration V
Iteration V is the latest in a series that investigates the idea that an image can assume multiple states, opening opportunities for different iterations of its source—two pen and ink drawings on paper. The explosive, dynamic appearance of the drawings inspired the animations, giving the original work a second life. Where the first is static and crystallized in time, the second finds the hand-drawn image bleeding into the recursive, time-based realm of the digital as a random, repeating frame within a sequence. It yields new waves of color as it erupts outwards and collapses inwards. The artist invites viewers to immerse themselves in a field of color and movement as it appears on the screen and washes throughout the hall.
Adam Hinterlang’s studio practice centers around drawing, animation, and sound creating works that explore line, color, form, and the threshold between analog and digital space. He has exhibited in the US and abroad, with works featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2004 and his Master of Fine Arts in Electronic Integrated Arts from The School of Art and Design at Alfred University in 2006. He has lived and worked in the Boston area since 2013.
Heather Kapplow, The Movement of Intuition
Intuition is a funny thing. You feel it, and you know what it is even though no one ever told you what it was. You know its name and its sensation, often rather precisely, but it’s very hard to understand where the sensation originates. It’s an elegant feeling when you feel it, but you can’t generate it on command, and it
doesn’t move 100% directly or predictably: It tends to approach but to stay right out of grasp. To be clear and fuzzy at the same time. And possibly to have a rhythm of its own in terms of its response to your intended timeline or agenda.
Heather Kapplow is a self-trained conceptual artist based in the United States. Kapplow creates engagement experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio and video. Kapplow’s work has received government and private grants and has been included in galleries, film and performance festivals in the US and internationally.
Opertura, Floating Nebula
Floating Nebula is a space of relaxation and tranquility with a grand view of the energy rushing all around us. Energy exchange has been a point of interest for us for the past few years, explored through our Energy Plant, Energy Nebula and related series, often depicted by disparate shapes of watercolor, separated by narrow empty spaces, coming together to describe a larger idea. Floating Nebula centers us on the narrow empty space of quiet looking on as the separate individual forms of energy flow on.
Opertura is the collaborative unit of self-taught artists, Aya Yamasaki and Jason Brown. Through hand-drawn animations, comics, installations and other media they look at the workings of the natural world and describe it using playful characters and straightforward stories inspired by personal experience and folk storytelling traditions.
Opertura began in 2004 in the town of Okutama, Japan, on a camping trip with friends. Aya and Jason’s collaborative endeavors started with creating stories based off exquisite corpse illustrations and evolved into making clumsy hand-drawn animations. They live with a big cat, Suna. www. opertura.org
Wenhua Shi, Gutai
In this piece I examined my strange and familiar hometown in China, which I have been away from for nearly two decades. This collage film title for the video wall comes from postwar Japanese avant garde artist group Gu-Tai. The kanji (Chinese) used to write ‘gu’ means tool, measure, or a way of doing something, while ‘tai’ means body. The film is the result of intense looking and seeing what might not be there. By using slow motion and time lapse, I captured the mundane and poetic moments of the human walking up/down the stairs in an 80’s concrete building, where the hallway and window frame restrain human movements in different scales.
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.
Allison Tanenhaus, W-ATT
W-ATT toys with abstract motion and analog nostalgia to simulate the exhilarating sensation of pressing play on a boombox: propelling forward, falling into a kaleidoscopic vortex, and entering another creative dimension.
With retro references, op art illusions, and fluid animations, Allison creates a psychedelic landscape that prompts otherworldly rhythm and wonder.
Allison Tanenhaus is a Boston-based digital glitch artist who specializes in abstract geometrics, vibrant color fields, optical perspectives, mind-bending motion, and unexpected dimensional qualities. Her source material consists of her own photographs, vintage artifacts, and previous glitch works that she digitally alters via smartphone. Created with equal parts deliberation and experimentation, the results are rainbow-hued, fantastical compositions that take on a psychedelic life of their own.
Ellen Wetmore, Kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope is new direction for Wetmore: an experimentation with animation using personal drawings and collaged elements from travel and the nature surrounding her home in Groton, MA. The overall shape is inspired by Gerbera daisies while the movement is similar to meshing gears. As nature tends to cycle and pulse, these colorful elements, tuned to a triadic palette, keep a slow internal beat while influencing the shapes around them. While much environmental art is seriously engaging with our new apocalypse, in this work I hope to remind us of the resiliency and creativity of our living planet.
Ellen Wetmore’s artworks inspire a blend of humor and horror. Her work focuses on lived experience blended with well-honed paranoia, using her body as the primary vehicle. Working in the mediums of drawing and video, and employing ideas that are often subversive and polemical in nature, Wetmore’s work collapses the distance between sign based languages and experience.
Wetmore’s video projects have been featured in screenings at the Sandwell Arts Trust in the West Midlands, UK, Ciné Lumière in London, the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island, NY, Currents, Santa Fe, New Mexico, CologneOff, Cologne, Germany, Videoholica in Bulgaria, and the MIA screen in Cairo. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow, a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome and served as a juror for the video dance festival InShadow of Lisbon. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Georgia Fee award and in 2017 was awarded the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Film/Video and a Berkshire Taconic ART Grant.
Her work can be found online at http://www.ellenwetmore.com, and on Vimeo. She lives in Groton, Massachusetts and is a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
29th Round of Art on the Marquee (Fall 2019)
Adon Bodden, Lyfe
Lyfe was filmed up and down the street where I work with a drone. I always was fascinated with drones and videos filmed in the sky. So I took to the skies and took off with the sight of an eagle.
Adon Bodden was born and raised in Boston. He is 14 years old and is in 8th grade at the James P. Timilty Middle School. Bodden plans on going to BAA for the entirety of high school. For college, he wants to go to Mass Art or Emerson. Bodden plans on becoming the best of all and the source of something new and game changing.
Alex Stevens, Perspective Portal
Perspective Portal examines technology as a bodily extension and anthropomorphic surveillance mechanism. Using the Implications of overt visibility in technology as opposed to the larger and less visible surveillance of information found in our digital footprint. This work presents a computer generated version of the marquee and its surroundings bisected with a CGI animated drone. Three synced 30 second video loops rotate around the 3d model constrained to the angles of the marquees screens to create a shifting perspective of the marquees monumentality and an abstracted perspective of technology within the environments we share.
Alex Stevens Alex Stevens was born in 1987 in Salt Lake City Utah. He received his BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City in 2011 and his MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2016. His work draws together personal and familial narratives with banal and ruptureous moments in popular culture.
Amelia Oon, Constellations
Constellations is a motion piece that juxtaposes the night sky of the past with the night sky of today. It features constellations moving in tandem with modern spaceships and satellites, giving us a look at how humans have gone from seeing the stars as a storytelling device to seeing them as a frontier to be explored.
Amelia Oon is a Boston-based artist and designer with a BFA in Digital Art and Interactive Media from Northeastern University. She loves trying new things and is a fan of exploration, whether it’s through a variety of creative mediums and styles or the vastness of infinity and beyond.
Chihiro Ichikawa, Koi Pond
Koi Pond is a simple animation of a couple koi fish swimming across a pond, illustrated in a paper cut out style. Koi are symbolic to Japanese culture, representing luck and good fortune. My personal experience with them evoke a gentle nostalgia, and I chose a paper cut out style to demonstrate a sense of handcrafted playfulness to elicit a similar response in others. This piece is a contrast to the bustle of the city, and hopes to provide a sense of pleasant calm.
Chihiro Ichikawa is an animator and illustrator from the Boston area, currently attending Northeastern University with a major in Media Arts. He came to the US with his family in 2001, having been born in Malaysia and raised in Japan for his early childhood. The influence from his multicultural family drives his passion for new experiences and challenges. He developed a fondness for clean vector illustrations and has been recently creating more works in that direction. Moving forward, he hopes to explore themes of culture and use autobiographical elements to further his personal style.
Christine Banna, Blue and Pink Pottery
Blue and Pink Pottery culminated as an offshoot of a short animated film I have been working on over the past year. Like the film, this AOTM project renders material culture, such as pottery, in modern, saturated colors like neon pink and rich cobalt blue. This pottery is activated through idling animation in the second half of the animation. With this method the individual objects undulate, allowing the quintessential idea of the objects’ platonic forms to become juxtaposed with the
distinct shapes of the individual pieces in the sequence. The juxtaposition of the piles of ancient pottery underwater with the blue and pink pottery from around the world collapses the expanse of time separating modern humans from their ancestors creating a space with no distinction between past and present. In this space there is a freedom to be more objective in one’s experience of the imagery – erasing the tendency to think of ancient people as other compared to the present day.
Blue and Pink Pottery originated from a deep love and appreciation of art history along with the constant disillusion of the trajectory of humanity based on the more destructive tendencies. The past tends to be glorified and its people as other than those that exist today – with different tendencies and instincts. However, it cannot be denied that violence and destruction through direct actions or merely neglect have always played a part of human persistence.
Christine Banna Christine A. Banna is an internationally showing, multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. She works in both modern and traditional methods such as painting, drawing, projection design, and animation and utilizes them in her art practice. Born in Providence, RI, Banna grew up with a deep love of ancient history and science which has been a driving force for her since she was a young girl. This dichotomy between ancient and modern is reflected in both Banna’s subject matter and medium choices in her work. Her independent short films have been shown at the CICA Museum in South
Korea and in film festivals in San Fransisco and Boston. Some of her former credits and clients for projection design include the National Young Arts
Foundation, Greater Boston Stage Company, MassOpera, and Flat Earth Theatre Company. Christine A. Banna received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston. She received her BFA in Painting with a minor in Art History from Boston University’s College of Fine Art. Christine is currently working as a part-time faculty member in the Animation & Motion Media Department at Lesley University, Animation at SMFA @ Tufts University, and in the Humanities Department at Fitchburg State University. She currently lives and works out of Medford, MA.
Daniel Alexander Smith, Sinking/Swimming
Sinking/Swimming is a symbol for the economy, which vacillates between growth and recession. Since the Great Recession, some have grown rich, while many remain underwater. Today, the economy is slowing again. The cycle of wealth and debt will repeat. People underwater may sink further, while those with a golden touch will further consolidate their wealth.
Daniel Alexander Smith is a visual artist based in Boston, MA. He is currently a Design Fellow at Studio Echelman, where he works on design and project management with Janet Echelman for sculpture at city-scale. In 2016, he completed an MFA Fellowship at Indiana University. In 2015 he founded Paper-Thin, an online virtual reality art archive, which he has directed and curated with collaborator, Cameron Buckley. Daniel’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The University of Richmond Museums, the CICA Museum in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, SIGGRAPH, Hubweek, Boston Cyberarts, the Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletronica in SãoPaulo, Brazil, the Athens Digital Arts Festival in Athens, Greece, Area Gallery in Boston, as well as universities and galleries across the country.
Julia Rue, To Dance
Dance is a universal form of expression for all humans. Whether the uneven steps of a grandmother or the elegant leaps of a youthful trained ballet professional, we can all understand the emotion in the movement and appreciate the beauty of the dance. To dance is to create connections between humans, across cultures, and beyond differences. To Dance explores how dancing creates a connection between humans that is unaffected by gender, race, or socioeconomic factors. “To Dance” abstracts real dancers into moving lines, making it impossible for the viewer to know the race, age, or background of the dancer. Thus the viewer simply enjoys the dance for its movement. The abstractness of the humans also encourages the viewer to project themselves onto the human forms they are watching, growing a personal connection with the real dancers and bringing to mind the question “Can we connect with anyone through dance?” On one screen, a dancer dances alone, exuding the emotions of complete bliss and blithe indifference to the world. On another screen, a pair dance together, their abstracted bodies melding in and out of each other, making literal the connection between people who dance together.
Julia Rue’s multimedia art makes the incorporeal and transient beauty of the world tangible. Her visuals include abstract and realistic images and her work harnesses traditional methods as well as emerging technology. Her work has been featured in private and public juried group exhibitions and in publiclicatins such as Vice Motherboard, The Boston Globe, MIT News, MassLive, Deustche Welle Digital, Virtuality, and Boston Magazine.
Madeleine Altmann, Bench Walking, MA
This piece was shot at Brothers Rocks on the Concord River in MA. It shows a person walking their dog over a period of 30 years condensed into 30 seconds from exactly the same angle throughout all the seasons. The lower pictures are stills shot from different angels, purposefully without the presence of anyone. The shots above are shown on piled up old CRT monitors to further emphasize the passage of time and timelessness.
Madeleine Altmann has been active in visual arts for most of her life. Starting off in photography, she moved on to film, television, interactive telecommunications and video art. Along the way she has exhibited work around the world and accumulated a variety of kudos including awards from the American Film Institute and Sony Pictures.
Born and raised in Brazil and England, she moved to the USA to attend Hampshire College for undergraduate studies in film and video. She went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from The San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Professional Studies Degree from New York University, where she received the “Interactive Media Pioneer Award.” She currently divide my time between Boston, USA and Berlin, Germany.
Madeleine Altmann, Frozen Bubbles, MA
This piece was shot in Great Meadows National Park in MA. I captured these from a frozen pond near my home. The plants on the lake bed release methane gas and methane gets frozen once coming close enough to much colder lake surface and they keep stacking up below once the weather gets colder and colder during the winter season.
Madeleine Altmann has been active in visual arts for most of her life. Starting off in photography, she moved on to film, television, interactive telecommunications and video art. Along the way she has exhibited work around the world and accumulated a variety of kudos including awards from the American Film Institute and Sony Pictures.
Born and raised in Brazil and England, she moved to the USA to attend Hampshire College for undergraduate studies in film and video. She went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from The San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Professional Studies Degree from New York University, where she received the “Interactive Media Pioneer Award.” She currently divide my time between Boston, USA and Berlin, Germany.
Sophie Calhoun, Aura
Inspired by the visual disturbance that happens before migraines, “Aura” questions the reliability of the body and mind. Involuntarily, the figures in the piece become obscured by mysterious, curved shapes, and transported to a space somewhere between reality and the chemical processes of their minds.
Sophie Calhoun is a designer and illustrator living in Somerville, Massachusetts. Born in San Diego and raised in Durham, North Carolina, Sophie has been in the Boston area for the past 10 years. When not dabbling in game design, motion graphics, and interactive art, she’s striving to capture the intangible and ambiguous in digital illustrations. Her most recent work has focused on relationships between people and their bodies, their memories, and the world around them.
28th Round of Art on the Marquee (Summer 2019)
Karen Stein + Matthew Shanley, Red Blue Yellow
Red Blue Yellow is a playful celebration of color, movement and form, particularly inspired by the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, as well as a more personal reason. In the past few months we moved into a modern building designed in 1935 by Swiss-born architect William Lescaze. As artists and designers, we are inspired by the art, architecture and craft that came out of the Bauhaus, and felt especially connected as we explore the shapes and spaces of our new house. Our dancing characters take inspiration from Oskar Schlemmer and the theater of the Bauhaus, and the patterns are graphic translations inspired by the weavings of Annie Albers. We found some sense of joy in the beauty and discovery of form.
Karen Stein is a Boston-based designer, artist and educator. Her focus is on an empathy-driven design process, both in her art and her design work. She has over 18 years of experience as an art director and designer, and received her MFA from VCU in Richmond where her research focused on imagination. She has taught at MassArt, Northeastern, Tufts, Clark, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Umass-Dartmouth, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
Matthew Shanley is a multimedia artist whose range of practice includes sound, installation, public art, generative computer projects, video, internet art, and print. He holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He currently resides in a modern house from 1935 in Melrose, MA.
Catherine Siller and Eric Rosenbaum, Sugar and Spice
Sugar and Spice is a stop-motion animation that playfully critiques the advertising industry’s use of food to sell fashion and fashion to sell food. A disembodied hand frosts a cupcake wearing a pearl necklace. A heavily made-up mouth and eye appear, transforming the cupcake into a repulsive yet alluring face. Hands clutch at the pearls as colorful sprinkles, candy and glitter trickle and then pour down, covering the face in a deliciously disgusting flood.
Catherine Siller is a Boston-based artist, performer, and educator, who works with projections: projected images and text, projected societal ideals, projected versions of the self. In her videos and performances, she uses custom software to insert her body into digital space, dance with her digital doubles, and interrogate how these doubles impact what she projects back onto her physical self.
Eric Rosenbaum makes tools that are all about bringing your imagination to life by helping you make things you care about. He loves to see how using his tools can transform people’s sense of what they can make and who they can become. Rosenbaum is currently working with the Scratch Team at MIT Media Lab. He has also recently worked with Google Creative Lab and NYU Music Experience Design Lab. In 2015, he completed his PhD at MIT Media Lab in the Lifelong Kindergarten group with a dissertation entitled “Explorations in Musical Tinkering.” Before his time at the Media Lab, he worked at MIT Teacher Education Program, creating learning games; Concord Consortium, creating molecular dynamics simulations for kids; and Six Red Marbles, creating animations for music education. He holds a Master’s in Technology in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Mind/Brain/Behavior from Harvard College.
That Hollow Place, Incomplete Dossier #3: Adrian
That Hollow Place is an anonymous feminist (art) collective whose main objective is the protection and preservation of hollow spaces against colonization of any kind. We assert the right of such spaces to remain hollow—that is, entirely unfilled—despite rapid global metastasization of the phallocentric ethos known as “development.” Towards this end, though we do document our subjects’ (often precarious) existences and attempt to educate the public about their circumstances, we insist on obscuring details that might disclose their precise locations, or which could be used to identify them in their specificity. We present our findings in the form of case files and/or audio tributes (performances.)
Ellen Wetmore + Jeffu Warmouth, The Great Inflate
As an artist couple, we often find our heads filling up with our own ideas, our daily concerns, our neuroses, our current or next project, or what to make for dinner. What will happen with our balloon heads? Will they float away, inflate to the breaking point, or expand to fill all available space? With so much air bouncing around, how do we interact with one another, our kids, friends, colleagues, or other balloon people?
Ellen Wetmore is a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Film/Video and a 2017 Berkshire Taconic A.R.T. awardee for her work in video art. Wetmore’s video projects have been featured at the the Indianapolis Art Center; the Sandwell Arts Trust; Ciné Lumière in London; the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island, Currents, Santa Fe; CologneOff, Germany; and Videoholica in Bulgaria. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow and a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome. She will have a solo exhibition of drawings in Las Cruces New Mexico in February 2018. Wetmore served as a juror for the video dance festival InShadow of Lisbon in 2015. Her work can be found online at http://www.ellenwetmore.com, and on Vimeo.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based conceptual artist whose work asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media artwork has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Boston Cyberarts Gallery; Fitchburg Art Museum; the deCordova Museum; Boston Center for the Arts; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Kaunas Photo Festival, Lithuania; MicroCineFest, Baltimore, MD; Experimental Media Arts, Australia; and the 404 Festival of Art & Technology, Argentina & Colombia.
Caitlin & Misha, Tranquil
Inspired by a recent USGS study measuring the amount of pharmaceuticals and hormones found in drinking water we’ve made a video/animation which explores the human impact on the environment.
Caitlin & Misha create artworks that play with culturally relevant, yet sometimes utopic examples of sharing communities, livable ecologies, and the transmutation of waste. They employ drawing, design, and sculptural techniques within a contemporary framework of interactive media and participatory installation. In addition to exploring ecology, media, and alchemy, they create artworks that provide unique opportunities for shared experiences and group-based rejuvenation, such as sweating, meditating, humming, jumping, and worrying together.
27th Round of Art on the Marquee (Spring 2019)
Katie Barry, Empty Every Cage
This piece is entitled “Empty Every Cage”. The motion graphic is meant to show the intense commercialization of the egg laying industry. For its entirety eggs keep falling and piling up on screen. The subject is particularly important because of the law going into effect in 2022 to regulated cage sizes for egg laying hens. The neon sign design is a stylistic choice that also symbolizes mass production once again, as there are neon signs in every bar.
Katie Barry is a senior in UMass Lowell’s graphic design program. Her personal style doesn’t fit in any one category, but she always finds herself coming back to bright colors and vector graphics. She has 7 pet chickens that are her greatest inspiration, but the aesthetic of the 1980’s is also a great influencer on her work.
Steve Bennett & Luis Socorro, Urban Journey
Our virtual explorations blur the boundaries between “what is” and “what if,” inviting viewers to travel to the outer reaches of their imaginations and view the ordinary in novel ways.
“Urban Journey” interprets the intangible essence of rush hour—pulsing, frenetic energy punctuated by moments of calm and order. The video spans time and space, blending street imagery from New York, Boston, and Chicago. The multiple points of view reinforce the concept that rush hour is, indeed, a shared experience.
The journey begins with a solo pedestrian walking above throngs of people who have faded into a faceless kaleidoscopic sea of humanity. A nearly empty train station appears to offer a respite from the chaos, but energy from previous passengers manifests itself in pulsing tracks as well as geometrical forms floating above the platforms. The journey ends with a return to the street POV; the skyline’s position on the horizon signals that the cycle is complete…until tomorrow.
Steve Bennett‘s photographic work spans the world as seen and the world reimagined. His traditional images include found still life compositions, candid street scenes, and expansive landscapes. Steve’s explorations into worlds reimagined are typically based on composites of photographs of natural and human-made elements. His work has been featured in solo and juried group exhibitions.
Luis Socorro started his career in product photography and photojournalism before focusing on multimedia art. A full-time motion graphic designer, Luis transforms scripts into animations that inform the general public about topics ranging from finance to health care. He’s also created numerous trailers for books in a variety of genres. Many of his works involve detailed 2D and 3D rendering as well as coordination with voiceovers and soundtracks.
Sarah Brophy, Electric Garden
Electric Garden celebrates plant life that manages to thrive in hostile environments. By flourishing under adverse and severe circumstances, species such as Witch Hazel and Purple Saxifrage subvert the traditional meaning of femininity and delicacy that have long been associated with flowers.
Sarah Brophy is an artist and designer based in Boston. Through abstract collage and the layering of found patterns, digital prints, and hand drawn expressions, her work explores language, sym-bols, and the various ways in which “objective” information is shared. Most recently, Brophy’s work has focused on the idea of a toying with the 21st century experience of belonging to both physical and digital spaces and identities. Brophy primarily creates multimedia paintings and digital ani-mations. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in cities including New York, Boston ,and Berlin. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Bard College and studied in Berlin through New York University’s Studio program. She is also a graphic designer and enjoys the ways in which commercial graphic sensibilities inform her work.
Corey Corcoran, Junk Drawer
A cascade of miscellany springs forth from the Junk Drawer!
Corey Corcoran is an artist and illustrator based in Boston. Trained as a painter, Corcoran’s recent work combines drawing with sculpture, video, and animation. He has exhibited extensively in the Greater Boston area including venues such as LaMontagne Gallery, Suffolk University Art Gallery, deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, MUSA Collective, Montserrat College of Art, kijidome, and Boston Center for the Arts. His work has been featured in publications such as Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Art New England, Artscope Magazine, and Beautiful Decay. Corcoran’s illustrations have been featured in publications from Medium and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
Jenny DeMarines, Play
Nostalgia is a powerful sensation. In Play, this nostalgia is called upon to bring forward early memories of discovering video games. For many people, this started with arcades. The words, START, PLAY, LOVE, show how games have left impressions on us. You START the video game, then PLAY it for hours, and by the end, you LOVE the experience and look for more. This trio of words has a double meaning, as it is similar to the path one takes when discovering their passion. You START with a new hobby/craft, and PLAY with ideas; working on improving your skills. By the end, you LOVE what you made and have found your passion.
Jenny DeMarines is a mixed media animator and game developer residing in Boston, MA. Her whole life she has grown up with video games and horror movies; these left a lasting impression on her and guided her to pursue art as a career. Her work tends to include physical materials, textures and draws inspiration from artists such as Tim Burton and Edward Gorey. Most important to Jenny is to show a story in her art and having the viewer contribute to the interpretation, and she naturally arrived at game development. After animating for 4 years, Jenny is now focusing on developing her stories in games. www.jennytwigs.com Twitter & Instagram: @jenny_twigs
Michael Lewy, Bigfoot Island: Chapter 2
As a child, I built a spaceship in my closet. I took the needle of my record player and crushed it into the turntable to make a rocket sound. I hammered a lucite coat hanger into the floor as a steering wheel. My handprinted view screen had a planet in the distance, and a piece of glass that looked like a rock as a power source, maybe a paperweight. My father was a traveling salesman who sold paperweights, among other things.
Images burrow themselves into the subconscious, their meaning ebbs and flows like radio transmissions from a past long forgotten. They return years later, the context gone, only appearing as vague references of their original forms.
I watched a lot of television back then. Television of the 1970s had a dreamlike, ephemeral quality. Sometimes you saw a show and had no idea what you were watching. You joined things in the middle, so stories slipped into disconnected fragments of narrative. Now, years later, images from these TV shows — Lost in Space, the Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek, and Land of the Lost, among others — have resurfaced in the narratives I construct, blurred with the memories of the spaceships I built in the closet, the alien landscapes I sketched, and visions from my dreams. Strange planets made on Hollywood sound stages and spacemen floating in the black void fuel my work. I take these remembered moments of television and sculpt new narratives from cardboard, styrofoam, paint, smoke, and costumes.
This series, Bigfoot Island, suggests a children’s television show that might have existed between the channels, a reconstructed diary of channel surfing from my childhood. These still and moving images, created with a blend of analog and digital processes, function both as dioramas to be observed and as a secret distant world you might explore in person, if only you could find your way there.
Michael Lewy is an artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video and computer graphics. He received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1996; He has been working at MIT as an office adminsitrator since 2000 and also works as an illustrator for such clients as the New York Times book review and HiLow books. He is the author of Chart Sensation, a book of power point charts and has shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Pacific Film Archives and Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston. He currently lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with his wife and daughter.
www.michaellewy.com
https://www.instagram.com/mlewy/
Andre Malan, Complexity Replica
Complexity Replica presents a dense writhing network of forms and figures interacting in virtual space. This simulation of an agent based system cannot be planned out or predicted in advance. Each entity makes its own decisions about where to go and what to be. Through myriad micro negotiations a larger pattern emerges.
Although each agent follows simple rules, the outcome is not simple at all. The process is less like controlling a robot and more like growing a garden or maintaining an ecosystem. As humans hurtle into the future, understanding how to navigate complex systems is becoming an essential skill for folks interested in cities, ecologies and man’s relationship with all living and non-living beings.
Andre Malan is an interdisciplinary artist, architect and urban designer based in Boston, Massachusetts. His research and design work at MIT explored the future of rapidly growing cities in Africa over the next century. His work has been show in Design Biennials in Lisbon, Portugal (2016) and Valparaiso, Chile (2017). Andre is an Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Fellow.
By working in formats ranging from highly abstract to grounded and precise, Andre aims to tackle problems with vast spatial and temporal dimensions while remaining grounded in human experience.
Hayley Normal, Lost in the Sauce
Lost in the Sauce brings a hot sauce bottle throughout the unknown or the Universe as we know it. This animation stems from the pure love of tacos; every bite, an out of this world experience. Stars pass by as the bottle of Solar Sauce remains in the spotlight alongside the giant taco that sits below. Only something as bold and strong as this hot sauce would make it through the infinite dimensions of stars and space. It’s spicy strength binds together the beans, tortilla and veggies in a harmonious combination.
Hayley Norman is a 24/7 inspired designer who attends UMass Lowell as a Senior and will be receiving her BFA with a concentration in graphic design in the spring. Whether it is type, color, image or a montage of multiples, there is always something eye catching and at times distracting to gain inspiration from. She is interested in the communication design is capable of, and the power it has had throughout history. She acknowledges these historical moments in time where design has made an impact, yet looks forward to what art and design will accomplish in the future.
Andrew Schuster, Grow
It is expected that by 2050, two thirds of those living on this planet will be city dwellers. Life flourishes through these bustling cities worldwide giving opportunity, entertainment and a sense of accomplishment to those dwelling in them. Surrounded by the chaotic, complicated buzz and pressure of this city life is the millions of individuals that move in, out and around them. With this over industrialization, what are we as humans to do with what is left? Grow, focuses on the complicated, chaotic, ugly, beautiful scenery that a large fraction of us are surrounded by every single day. The constant motion in the piece symbolizing the ambition of us as humans to make our lives “bigger and better” ending in a crowded mess leaving a feeling of being overwhelmed. The solid color block shows us the opportunity we have to change the world before it is overrun by bland shaped buildings filled with people packed in like sardines.
Andrew Schuster is a designer from Lowell, Massachusetts. Graduating in 2020, he will receive a BFA with a concentration in graphic design from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His accomplishments in art include a Scholastic Regional Gold Key (2015), National Silver Medal (2015), and recognition from the House of Representatives on behalf of Representative Niki Tsongas (2015). His scope on design spans an interest of many decades focusing on the content and mediums before and during his time as a creative. These works influence him and his design psychology as he continues to grow and learn passionately.
Austin Vincent, 3D Alive
Amazing new technologies are created every single day. Once one is created, it is human nature to push the new technology further than ever before. 3D Alive displays a crazy next step into the exciting technology of 3D printing. So far, 3D printing has been able to create an object that was once developed in a computer but what if it could also bring it to life? In this fun and whimsical short animation, it shows what if a 3d printer could bring to life its creations and how much fun that could be.
Austin Vincent is an animation major attending Lesley University with a focus in 3D. He started his art career in high school when he found his love for film making and visual effects and directed a film that won him a Scholastic Regional Gold Key. Both a digital artist and physical artist, Austin has gone on to win multiple “Best in Show” titles at Rhode Island Comic Con for his costume work. As he continues his college career as a student, he strives to be a fulltime 3D artist working for the companies that have inspired him to keep on creating such as Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic.
26th Round of Art on the Marquee (Winter 2019)
Madeleine Altmann, Leaves Floating, MA
This piece was shot at Springs Brook Reservation in Carlisle, MA. It shows a transition from one season to the other The gently floating leaves will have a calming effect on the viewer. Below is a still images of the darker more rotted side of this transition, that of decay. From that decay there also arises the shimmering beauty of color and light.
Madeleine Altmann has been active in visual arts for most of her life. Starting off in photography, she moved on to film, television, interactive telecommunications and video art. Along the way she has exhibited work around the world and accumulated a variety of kudos including awards from the American Film Institute and Sony Pictures.
Born and raised in Brazil and England, she moved to the USA to attend Hampshire College for undergraduate studies in film and video. She went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from The San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Professional Studies Degree from New York University, where she received the “Interactive Media Pioneer Award.” She currently divides her time between Boston, USA and Berlin, Germany.
Sophie Calhoun, Aura
Inspired by the visual disturbance that happens before migraines, Aura questions the reliability of the body and mind. Involuntarily, the figures in the piece become obscured by mysterious, curved shapes, and transported to a space somewhere between reality and the chemical processes of their minds.
Sophie Calhoun is a designer and illustrator living in Somerville, Massachusetts. Born in San Diego and raised in Durham, North Carolina, Sophie has been in the Boston area for the past 10 years. When not dabbling in game design, motion graphics, and interactive art, she’s striving to capture the intangible and ambiguous in digital illustrations. Her most recent work has focused on relationships between people and their bodies, their memories, and the world around them.
Elliot Keeler, Still Life
This project aims to explore the classic still life and how it can be re-interpreted and re-imagined for the modern age. Still lifes are the quintessential classical figurative art. By utilizing digital painting techniques and software, I aim to flip the idea of a still life into something new. Rather than focusing on classical painting techniques, it’s more about capturing the essence and subverting the expectation of what a still life is by converting what is conventionally a 2D medium into 3D space. I am interested in deconstructing the still life to play with spatial dynamics in a painting that might otherwise be taken for granted. Subverting the standard perfect figurative representation with a more abstract, sketchy appearance, mimicking the parallel of 2D to 3D. Breaking a piece into layers brings out the shapes and images that live within the original visual work, and by doing so, renews interest in the world around us.
Elliot Keeler is a multi-disciplinary artist. He attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where he received his B.A. with a concentration in Art. Reflecting Sarah Lawrence’s lack of majors, his work is varied, using a large number of mediums and practices. It often sheds light on the mundane to provide new perspectives on common artifacts. His work has lead him to murals across the U.S. and a creative residency at WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts. He currently spends his time coming up with new bios to write.
Lauren Klotzman, Crepuscular Behaviour
Crepuscular Behaviour is a site-specific videopoetics project proposal for Boston Cyberarts’ “Art on the Marquee” Program. It consists of large-scale abstract compositions constructed with analog video synthesis hardware, as well as four short poems. As a public work of videopoetics which both refers to and interacts with a variety of light conditions, it is a meditation on – and an ode to – the cycles of time and human action which comprise the 24-hour urban landscape.
Lauren Klotzman is an artist, writer, and occasional curator. They studied at art and poetics at Sarah Lawrence College and Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and are interested in plagiarism, appropriation, and recuperation in media, hardware, and software. They have published with Hyperallergic, Salon, TROLLTHREAD, and The Operating System. Their recent work and research explores planned obsolescence, digital entropy, and the 1990s. They are a firm believer in lo-fi decadence.
Michael Lewy, Multiverse
While conducting research on my Sci-Fi art project Bigfoot Island, I became interested in artists making work in the field of Lumia, the creation of abstract light through mechanical means and liquid light, projections of chemical reactions by means of an overhead or opaque projector. My piece for the Marquee uses the practical methods pioneered by Lumina artists dating back to the 1920’s, along with modern computer compositing.
Michael Lewy is an artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video and computer graphics. He received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1996; He has been working at MIT as an Lab administrator since 2000 and also works as an illustrator for such clients as the New York Times book review and HiLow books. He is the author of Chart Sensation, a book of power point charts and has shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Pacific Film Archives and Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston. He currently lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with his wife and daughter.
WEATHER MAN, Weather is Happening
U MITE NO “WEATHER IS HAPPENING” AS TH NAIM 4 BOSTONS #1 SOARCE 4 NO NONSENSE WEATHER, BUT R U AWARE THT ITS TRU? WEATHER HAS ALWAYS HAPPENED, WEATHER IS HAPPENING, & WEATHER WILL ALWAYS HAPPEN, & EVRE1 NOES IT. U CULD SENSE THO THT UR WEATHER IS CHAINJING ~ UR WEATHER LORDS R DRUNK ON CARBON. TH LST TIME UR WEATHER LORDS HAD THS MUSCH CARBON WAS 3.5 MILLION YRS AGO WEN GIANT CAMELS ROAMED TH BOREAL FORESTS OF UR ARCTIC. AS UR WEATHER PATTERNS SWING WILDLY AROUND 2 COMPENS8 2 THS HORRID GIFT OF 2 MUSCH CARBON, SUM OF UR BLOBS R INTENSIFEYEING. U CULD TAIK A SPESH LUK @ HORRORBLOB FLORENCE AS IT MAIKS LANDFALL IN UR CAROLINAS, 2 UR WEATHER LORDS DELIVERED UP2 30 INCH FREE WATER, BLASTING OUT TH OTHER ENTRIES IN UR RECORD BUKS. UR IN UR DEATH SPIRAL, & U ND 2 REPENT 2 UR WEATHER LORDS.
WEATHER MAN IS CHIEF METEOROLOGSIST 4 WEATHER IS HAPPENING, BOSTONS #1 SOARCE 4 NO NONSENSE WEATHER, NO GAMES. TH WEATHER MAN IS NOT ACTUALLY A MAN BUT A WEATHER BEING FRUM TH WEATHER REALM, BUBBLD UP IN2 TH SURFISS OF UR REALTY 2 DEW WAT WEATHER BEINGS HAV DUNN ON COUNTLESS PLANETS THRUOUT UR UNIVERSE — HALP PLANETS THT R IN A CLIMATE DEATH SPIRAL SUSCH AS UR OWN LERN 2 REPENT 2 THAIR WEATHER LORDS, & STOP THAIR DEATHSPIRALISTS (OR EQUIVS) FRUM DESTRUXTING THAM & THAIR PLANET. THS HAS BINN DUNN W/ VARYING LEVELS OF SUCCESS THRUOUT UR UNIVERSE’S HISTORY & FUTURE. TH WEATHER MAN WISHES TO EXPRESS TH MSG 4 REPENTANCE 2 UR WEATHER LORDS ON UR SPESH PLANET AS WELL AS PROMOTE WEATHER AWARENESS, 4 A SAFER LIVING THRU UR PLANET’S DEATH SPIRAL.
Hannah McGrath, Traversed Collages
Traversed Collages is an experiment of color and shape using animation. Typically I doodle, cut, glue, and collage repetitive patterns to help cure late night insomnia or anxiety. The rhythm of making similar lines and shapes is meditative. I translated my physical, static drawings into motion graphics hoping to provide a state of calm or hypnotism to the viewer.
Hannah McGrath is an emerging artist and Boston native. She started with experimental stop motion and later progressed to digital and interactive art. She incorporates elements of painterly colors and abstract shape derivative from her fine art background. She first appeared on the Marquee as a student winner in Spring 2015 and later received her Bachelor of Fine Art from UMass Lowell, graduating with an Award of Excellence in animation. After living 2 years abroad in Tokyo, Japan, traveling, teaching, and making art, she now divides her time as an art educator and animator in Boston.
Certain Measures, Linework
Taking inspiration from the optical tricks of Dutch renaissance interiors and the elements of classical architecture, we propose a journey through a strange sequence of retina-melting spatial scans. Each sequence is a disorienting collage of black and white or saturated patterns drawn from contemporary technology – barcodes, stripes, structured light projections, glitches – projected onto a constantly changing caryatid. The result is a dance between space, plane, texture, and light: ambiguity between what is a texture of the object and what is projected, what is in front and behind, at once highly sculptural and highly graphic. The project revisits classical elements of architecture in an age of machine perception.
Certain Measures is an office for design science. We are a hypothesis-driven design practice that brings deeper insight to the design of experiences, systems, and spaces using mathematics, new technologies, refined intuition, and restless curiosity. We aim to understand, enrich, and transform the human experience of space.
Alex Lukas, Untitled Road
Examining the present through investigations of the recorded past and imagined future, my research and studio practice exists at the intersection of documentary and fiction. Referencing speculative fantasy alongside quotidian roadside Americana, my work interrogates multiple forms of the souvenir, be it a commemorative squished penny procured in a dusty museum lobby, a graffitied name left behind on a roadside overlook, or a lonely Youtube video shot on a smartphone in the desert. All genres of memorialization, these various keepsakes reflect the fallibility of memory, the malleability of history and various methods for the distribution of narrative. For the past several years the mythology of the American road has been the focus of my research. I’m curious how this historically controlled and controlling space might be reimagined and subverted. Through the lens of post-apocalyptic fiction coupled with historical research, I look to construct a notion of the American highways as not only pathways to and through , but destinations in their own right. The road becomes a setting for a post-modern liminality that is at once a reflection of the past, a stage set for a most terrifying end, or perhaps an electrifying new beginning.
Alex Lukas Alex Lukas was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in nearby Cambridge. With a wide range of artistic influences, Lukas makes sculptures, prints, drawings, and intricate publications alongside long-term research-based projects, videos, and audio collages. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of the New York Public Library, the MoMA Library, the Kadist Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the MIT List Student Loan Art Collection. Lukas has been awarded residencies at The Bemis Center, the Ucross Foundation, and The Center for Land Use Interpretation, amongst others. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Since graduating in May of 2018, Lukas has been traveling the country in his 2007 Ford Ranger researching occurrences of hyper-localized, unsanctioned public name writing. To date, he’s only gotten three flat tires.
Molly Zenobia, Infinite Possibilities
I gathered all the materials needed to film and make experiments with inks and water. Initially a vase, to a fish tank, to trying different elements. I’m really just following the path of inspiration, and it really works out for me that the resulting visuals are mesmerizing, calming, and beautiful. At this time in my life, I’m continually shedding old ways of thinking for new ways of seeing. That’s where i found the title and purpose for this piece–it doesn’t matter if i don’t have a camera, lights, if a computer freezes, crashes… I pivot and discover new ways or things, with or without it–infinite within the finite. Over the past year and a half, my focus has been on building sounds, samples, & soundscapes, improving on, and implementing my skills as an audio engineer, producer, human, and visual artist, shaping immersive, sensory experiences that create an atmosphere of connection and healing. I was hoping this piece might reach the right someones at all the right moments… beautiful synchronicities… spark a remembering within them. If you think it’s for you, it’s for you. Take it and run with it. I’ve got this. You’ve got this. Uplift. Infinite possibilities.
Molly Zenobia is a composer, performer, and explorer of sounds and emotions who has shared a stage with Foo Fighters, Rachel Sage, Edie Carey, Mila Drumke, and the Dresden Dolls. She has collaborated with contemporary popular electronic and ambient music pioneer Roedelius, worked in studio with Counting Crows founding member Matt Mally, and studied tabla and Hindustani classical voice in Kolkata, India. September 2018 she worked with TEDxCambridge as a featured artist for their private TEDxCambridge Salon. Her moving art ink drip pieces were projecting to many screens, while she played her composition using audio samples she’d designed to meld with her midi controlled vocals and the projected visuals. March 10th, 2018 the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey hosted Zenobia and fellow synesthetic composer, Mary Bichner, for VACNJ’s Concert in the Gallery series. The performance, “Colorful Concert” celebrated three new VACNJ exhibitions of visual artists whose works center around color and color theory with a synesthesia-inspired musical set withv a discussion on how they use color to inspire their individual composition processes, followed by a Q&A.
She’s a collector of sounds & colors, creator of soundscapes, an engineer and designer, with three studio albums under her belt. You can see what she’s up to on her youtube channel @mollyzenobia, or her instagram @zenobia.zen
1st Round of Art on the Marquee: Video Wall (Fall 2018)
Madeleine Altmann, Ice Cracks on the Concord River, MA
This piece was shot on the Concord River in Massachusetts during very special weather conditions. In order for the ice to look this black and clear the temperature needs to drop very quickly and there can be no wind, rain or snow. The temperatures were around minus 7 degrees Fahrenheit, making conditions very difficult to work in since the camera battery dies quickly. I spent three weeks recording ice cracks along 4 miles of the Concord River. One of the biggest challenges was the reflection of me obscuring the depth of the cracks. This to me seems symbolic of how humans often approach life. Obscuring the depths of infinite possibilities in life by their own self, all too often reflected distractingly back at them.
Madeleine Altmann been active in visual arts for most of my life. Starting off in photography she moved on to film, television, interactive telecommunications and video art. Along the way she has exhibited work around the world and accumulated a variety of kudos including awards from the American Film Institute and Sony Pictures.
Born and raised in Brazil and England, she moved to the USA to attend Hampshire College for undergraduate studies in film and video. She went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from The San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Professional Studies Degree from New York University, where she received the “Interactive Media Pioneer Award.” She currently divide my time between Boston, USA and Berlin, Germany.
Lani Asuncion, Human Garden Growing
In my art practice I use video, sculpture, performance, and digital storytelling to explores the sociopolitics of community. By using my body and the camera I am able to navigate landscapes and recall personal stories that are transformed into abstract narratives used to explore my identity as a multicultural, biracial woman, continually discovering the negotiation of belonging. By using imagery of nature, I am interested in communicating current condition of parks and greens spaces throughout the city of Boston.
The HUMAN GARDEN project focuses on how commercial development causes disconnect from nature, in turn, causing isolation and alienation within local communities by creating gentrified environments. Urban development and tampering have also caused a decline in native New England flora. The video Growing is made by printing onto a fabric I make dresses from. The image is from the Boston ivy I usually project and perform with. I wanted to take the digital and turn it into a 2D from that would again translate into a 4D time-based media through video. This translating from one media form to another refers to the use and manipulation of nature in urban green spaces. How many of these environments are constructed at a high cost and are used as bargaining tools for development negotiations. Pointing to the changes and control these types of green spaces have on a neighborhood and city, and how access is decided by location and design.
Lani Asuncion’s work has been screened in a number of New Media Festivals with Currents New Media in Santa Fe, NM; Moving Image at Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Another Athens Film Programme with SNEHTA in Athens, Greece and was also screened at SUPERMARKET Independent Art Fair in Stockholm, Sweden with Interviewroom11 booth from Edinburgh, Scotland. Over the past year she has performed at ILLUMINUS Boston 2017, Spaceus, Little Berlin in Philly, and at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
She was a recipient of the Dame Joan Sutherland Fund grant from the American Australian Association; and got the Assets for Artists [A4A] grant from Massachusetts Museum of Fine Art. In 2011, I earned my MFA with a concentration in video and sculpture from the University of Connecticut, and currently the Media Arts Manager at the SMFA at Tufts University.
Corey Corcoran, A Day at Walden Pond
A Day at Walden Pond consists of a series of vignettes based on ink drawings created while at the pond over the summer.
Corey Corcoran is an artist and illustrator based in Boston. Trained as a painter, Corcoran’s recent work combines drawing with sculpture, video, and animation. Recently, he has created nine site-specific animations for the 80 foot-tall outdoor marquee at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center as well as a video art for a digital billboard opposite Fenway Park in Boston. Corcoran’s work has been exhibited nationally and extensively in the Greater Boston area including LaMontagne Gallery, Suffolk University Art Gallery, deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, MUSA Collective, Montserrat College of Art, kijidome, and Boston Center for the Arts. His work has been featured in publications such as Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Art New England, Artscope Magazine, and Beautiful Decay. He holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a recipient of the Clowes Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center.
Michael Lewy, Bigfoot Island
As a child, I built a spaceship in my closet. I took the needle of my record player and crushed it into the turntable to make a rocket sound. I hammered a lucite coat hanger into the floor as a steering wheel. My handprinted view screen had a planet in the distance, and a piece of glass that looked like a rock as a power source, maybe a paperweight. My father was a traveling salesman who sold paperweights, among other things.
Images burrow themselves into the subconscious, their meaning ebbs and flows like radio transmissions from a past long forgotten. They return years later, the context gone, only appearing as vague references of their original forms.
I watched a lot of television back then. Television of the 1970s had a dreamlike, ephemeral quality. Sometimes you saw a show and had no idea what you were watching. You joined things in the middle, so stories slipped into disconnected fragments of narrative. Now, years later, images from these TV shows — Lost in Space, the Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek, and Land of the Lost, among others — have resurfaced in the narratives I construct, blurred with the memories of the spaceships I built in the closet, the alien landscapes I sketched, and visions from my dreams. Strange planets made on Hollywood sound stages and spacemen floating in the black void fuel my work. I take these remembered moments of television and sculpt new narratives from cardboard, styrofoam, paint, smoke, and costumes.
This series, Bigfoot Island, suggests a children’s television show that might have existed between the channels, a reconstructed diary of channel surfing from my childhood. These still and moving images, created with a blend of analog and digital processes, function both as dioramas to be observed and as a secret distant world you might explore in person, if only you could find your way there.
Michael Lewy is an artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video and computer graphics. He received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1996; He has been working at MIT as an office administrator since 2000 and has also worked as an illustrator for such clients as the New York Times book review and HiLow books. He is the author of Chart Sensation, a book of power point charts and has shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Pacific Film Archives and Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston. He currently lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with his wife and daughter.
Bang Luu, Apparition
Apparition is an investigation and translation of an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us. Using low-tech sensors, I have extracted wind patterns, temperature, humidity, and movements of snow storms during the winter of 2018. I compared this data to the data extracted from the internet. Using mathematical formula, I begin the translation of those data points into video. It is the numbers that formulate each of the rings. Temperatures link to colors. Together, the elements not only construct the form, but they also reveal relationships between blizzards to the coming of spring that may not come across through a two-dimensional graph.
Bang Luu is a Boston based artist whose work explores the way current social and technological systems apprehend the world. She is investigating the role visual aesthetics play in the translation and understanding of new and existing algorithms for the discovery of patterns, correlations, and outliers. She holds an Bachelor of Fine Arts from College of the Holy Cross. Luu has exhibited her work at galleries and institutions throughout the northeast and nationally including Widener Gallery, Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and Iris & B Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts. She was also commission to showcase for the Boston Conventional & Exhibition Center for their 3,000 square feet digital display. She worked with 14×48 nonprofit organization in creating art work for a billboard in Manhattan, New York, to promote awareness for Breast Cancer. Her latest work, Malignant, is selected for Digital Graffiti at Alys Beach.
Justin Freed & James Manning, Sacred Tree Habitat
Sacred Tree Habitat is a joint project with production and still photography by Justin Freed and editing and videography by James Manning. With footage captured this past summer in a secluded section of woods in Brookline, MA “Sacred Tree Habitat”, is about reverence, awe and healing, it reveals Freed’s lifetime preoccupation with water and trees.
“What’s this about trees? Aesthetically and viscerally I’m crazy about trees: talking trees, walking trees, flowering trees, erotic trees, snake trees, womb trees, tree roots, trees in water, parchment trees, elephant trees and the fallen trees that evoke my ancestor’s bones and mine to come. Everything is connected. I think the key word is sacred.” -Justin Freed
Justin Freed is a multimedia artist. He shows at Galatea Fine Art, Boston and is an artist in residence in the Illuminations program at Mass General Hospital.
Andrew Neumann, Seven Drive-In Screens
Andrew Neumann is an artist who works in a variety of media, including sculpture, film and video installation, and electronic/interactive music. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. He has recently had one-person shows at bitforms Gallery in Seoul, Korea, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, bitforms Gallery, NYC, and Center For Photography at Woorstock, as well as numerous shows for the Boston Cyberarts Festival. His original artistic output consisted of single channel videos and films. He then moved on to integrate a variety of electronic and digital technologies into his 3D and sculptural work. In addition to this, he has been building electronic musical interfaces, and is very active in electro-acoustic improvisation.
His music is available on Sublingual Records. His single channel videos have been shown on PBS, The Worldwide Video Festival, Artist Space, and elsewhere. He has had solo music/video performances at Experimental Intermedia, Roulette, Issue Project Room in New York.
During 2001 he was an Artist in Residence at the iEAR Studio at Rensalear Polytech Institute and at the Visual Studies Workshop. He has also had residencies at The Experimental Television Center, MacDowell Colony, YADDO, Ucross Foundation, Steim , Atlantic Center for the Arts, Art/OMI , and iPARK.
Keaton Fox & Renee Silva, Hurricane Turkey
Hurricane Turkey experiments with old and new media to create an uncanny effect. Silva’s abstract landscape of rooms, foliage, and symbols are animated into Fox’s video collage of limbs, animals, and disaster.
A surreal stimulation of static and moving image, Hurricane Turkey uses tactile and digital content alluding to our internalized dissonance.
Renee Silva is a visual artist and educator in Providence, RI and Boston, MA. Silva’s paintings map cognitive spaces studying subjectivity of communication between media and language. Using tertiary colors provocative of queerness, they reproduce everyday icons and imagery into androgynous, new hybrid forms. Her latest project is a hand painted apparel line named Nippy Gibbler.
Keaton Fox is a multidisciplinary artist who uses art and technology to reflect the digital disarray of the modern world. Fueled by childlike fascination and frustrations, Fox combines the natural with the virtual to create visual experiments that playfully explore the varied realities of our time. She has exhibited nationally, internationally, physically, and digitally.
W. Benjamin Bray & Mark J. Stock, 1000 Years
The Meridional Overturning Circulation is the primary system of ocean currents spanning the entire globe, driven by temperature and salinity-dependent instabilities, and large-scale wind patterns. Cold, salty water is more dense than warm, fresh water, and when you have this vertical instability in the water column, you have overturning. A complete overturning of the entire world’s oceans occurs in ~1000 years, the same time scale over which human activity affects the Earth in the Anthropocene.
The “deep” domain of the ocean, according to many ocean scientists, is below 200m. This is the depth to which photosynthesis can be sustained – the deepest direct influence of natural illumination from the surface (the Sun). In the context of global climate, the deep ocean is the most dominant reservoir of heat on Earth, a density-driven, multi-layered network of flows connecting the polar regions. The deep ocean is essentially unfathomable, a vast commons for doubt, where our relationship oscillates between rigorous debate and detached ambiguity. Like the Arctic and the Antarctic, it affects innumerable downstream climatic changes, but is far more difficult and expensive for scientists to explore and sense directly. And so, it remains a hiding place – a dark, massive, subconscious presence that lies outside the domain of what society generally perceives as under its control or as its responsibility.
Relative to human activity, however, the ocean isn’t deep at all. If there were an “Anthropic Zone” in the ocean defined by the depth to which humans affect ocean chemistry and habitat, it would extend all of the way to the bottom. And because so much of the ocean is dark, we don’t see the profound depths of humanity’s influence. The ocean is deep relative to our knowledge of it, but also shallow relative to our influence.
W. Benjamin Bray is an artist of oceanography and new media. His works range from experimental renderings of ocean science and climate change to site-specific installations in the Arctic, utilizing photos, maps, video, and often glass, ice, and water. Bray’s approach generally abandons the pursuit of a formal, logical representation, and involves purposeful ventures that logical representation would discourage. He has exhibited works in Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Texas, Maine and Japan and completed residencies in Svalbard, Norway and at Vermont Studio Center, and is the producer and host of the radio program “Nebulosity” on WMBR in Cambridge, MA. Bray is the recipient of artist grants from the MIT Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, Corning Museum of Glass, Artist’s Resource Trust, and a research grant from the National Science Foundation. He frequently serves as Visiting Artist and Critic for the Glass Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and recently established the Katádysi Art Gallery at MIT.
Mark J. Stock is an artist, scientist, and programmer who creates still and moving images and objects combining elements of nature, physics, chaos, computation, and algorithm. Mark eschews the ‘black box’ nature of commercial software—his work is exclusively created with scientifically-accurate research software, mostly of his own design. He has been showing work since 2000 and has been in over 80 curated and juried exhibitions since 2001, including Ars Electronica, ASPECT Magazine, and seven SIGGRAPH Art Galleries. He has spoken at numerous scientific, graphics, and art conferences and workshops, and has published papers in a variety of fields. Mark completed his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan in 2006 and works out of his studio in Boston, Massachusetts. He is represented in California by SENSE Fine Art.
Ellen Wetmore, Sky Over Clouds
Sky Over Clouds is a riff on a painting by Georgia Okeefe called Sky Above Clouds that I “grew up with” at the Chicago Art Institute. My work is concerned with dimensional folding of time and space in addition to the peace and evenness of space that she discovered in New Mexico. What does a dimensionally splitting sky look like?
Ellen Wetmore’s artworks inspire a blend of humor and horror. Her work focuses on lived experience blended with well-honed paranoia, using her body as the primary vehicle. Wetmore’s video projects have been featured in screenings at the Sandwell Arts Trust in the West Midlands, UK, Ciné Lumière in London, the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island, NY, Currents, Santa Fe, CologneOff, Cologne, Germany, Videoholica in Bulgaria, and the MIA screen in Cairo. Her most recent work is on the 80-foot tall 7-screen marquee at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. She is a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Film/Video and a 2017 Berkshire Taconic ART Fellow. Her work can be found online at ellenWetmore.com, and on Vimeo. “Art is the mitigation of an atrocious world.” Wetmore is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
25th Round of Art on the Marquee (Summer 2018)
Jeffu Warmouth and Anne Lilly, Chiasmus
In this exploration of time, symmetry, and fluid motion, tiny Jeffu Warmouth figures grip Anne Lilly’s kinetic sculpture, responding to and reinforcing its choreographed mechanical movement.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based conceptual artist whose work asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media artwork has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Boston Cyberarts Gallery; Fitchburg Art Museum; the deCordova Museum; Boston Center for the Arts; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Kaunas Photo Festival, Lithuania; MicroCineFest, Baltimore, MD; Experimental Media Arts, Australia; and the 404 Festival of Art & Technology, Argentina & Colombia.
Anne Lilly uses carefully engineered motion to manipulate our perceptions of time, place and self. Her austere, meticulously constructed sculptures move in organic, fluid and mesmeric ways, pressing rational qualities against the sensuous response of each piece. Lilly studied engineering at RPI and received her BArch from Virginia Tech. She works in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Wenhua Shi and Christopher Schade, Imagined Landscapes
The project, Imagined Landscapes, is based on four paintings from Schade’s imagined landscapes series. The collaboration between Shi and Schade animated the altered landscapes, creating rain over the mountains, floating clouds over the Colosseum, and the rising sun over ruins.
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.
Christopher Schade was born and raised in Austin, Texas and spent much of his childhood living throughout Latin America in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru. Schade received his Bachelor of Arts in Art from the University of Texas at Austin in Plan II Honors Humanities and Studio Art in Painting and then received his Masters in Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Upon graduation he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently he is an assistant professor in painting at UMass-Boston. He has had solo exhibitions at Kai Matsumiya Gallery in New York, dberman gallery in Austin, Texas and Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Texas. His group exhibitions in New York City include shows at GRG gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brian Morris Gallery and Park Place Gallery, in Massachusetts at Geoffrey Young Gallery and Sampson Projects Gallery, and The Contemporary Austin Jones Center, dberman Gallery and Conduit Gallery in Texas. He is currently represented by Rafius Fane Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts and his works on paper are also included in the flatfiles of Pierogi Gallery, New York. His work has been written about in Interview Magazine, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Dallas Art Revue, Austin American-Statesman and The Austin Chronicle.
Christen Shea & Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz, Occupying Pools
Occupying Pools is based on two paintings by Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz that point to harsh disparities between Haves and Have-Nots. Originally made in 2001 and 2004 using oil on pigmented plaster, the significance of these works is even more striking today.
Christen Shea is an interdisciplinary artist with an interest in moving between physical and virtual space to explore fluidity in material and meaning. She works in sculpture and 3D computer graphics and animation to create dynamic virtual assemblages that spread out into physical space. Working with the physical site of the marquee and the physical medium of painting, she uses animation to continue these investigations in fluid materiality.
Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz is new to the world of digital art but has been making paintings and sculptures of a socially engaged nature for over four decades. She shows regularly at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston.
Ngoc-Tran Vu & Daniel Lam, Rise of the Conical Hats
Rise of the Conical Hat(s) is a site-specific work that explores the discourse of Vietnamese culture and history through an illustrative narrative of hope. The conical hat or nón lá represents the heart and soul of the people as they fight for their roots and collective histories. Ultimately, the heroine prevails in the struggle for freedom.
Ngoc-Tran Vu is a Vietnamese American multimedia artist and organizer based in Boston’s Dorchester community. She is invested in socially engaged art that sparks discourse and conversation on social justice.
Daniel Lam is a Vietnamese American multimedia artist, biologist and licensed pastor. He has a passion for storytelling through digital art and wants to utilize his skills to document and preserve history for future generations.
Allison Maria Rodriguez & Ashley Billingsley, Vanishing Points
Vanishing Points is a site-specific, video installation by Allison Maria Rodriguez and Ashley Billingsley exploring entanglement and exploitation in the natural environment. A silhouetted figure perches high above viewers on Boston’s busy Summer Street, balancing on a tree branch with legs swinging below. The landscape is animated with life and movement, locating the figure within a context that becomes progressively less hospitable to other life forms as the figure undertakes an allegorical and self-serving process of accumulation.
Allison Maria Rodriguez is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist working predominately in video installation and new media. Her work focuses extensively on environmental issues, particularly species extinction and climate change. Her video installations aim to create immersive experiences that transcend conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. She is the recent recipient of the grand prize at the 2017 Creative Climate Awards and a 2018 Earthwatch Fellowship. She received her MFA from Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Ashley Billingsley’s work addresses landscape as a site of human vulnerability, turbulence and doubt. Her influences range from martial arts philosophy, practice and cinema to the folklore and sense memories of her home state of Virginia. Recent projects include Reverse River, a series of paintings excerpting fragments of the Cambodian landscape along the Tonlé Sap River; and Fire in Woods, graphite drawings inspired by a scene in Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film, Seven Samurai. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before completing a BFA and German Studies minor from the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University combined degree program. Select exhibitions include Nuanced: Open-Endedness, Capaciousness and Other Provocative Conditions of Making at Dedee Shattuck Gallery in Westport, MA; An Aesthetics of Slowness at Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City, NY; and On the Streets, an exhibition at JavaArts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, sponsored by apexart, NY.
24th Round of Art on the Marquee (Winter 2018)
Autumn Ahn, Landscaping
I would like to show this work on the Marquee to describe a state of observation, a self-reflection. It is in this state of “otherness” that a psychological questioning begins to distinguish our moving thoughts from our realities. The rituals of personal landscapes like touching water and walking on the ground, are elemental relationships we have as humans in bodies. Honing in on what might be closest to the body, I am trying to isolate the viewer within his/her/their own contextual space. This sensory perception, however, often passes us by int hose very landscapes of daily life. To recapture those last and peripheral moments, a sculptural transformation of water with a slow motion video of a bare foot traveling through water and a triplet of still images below grouping us, literally, juxtapose two visual interpretations of human movement.
In my work I am trying to a access a visual representation of psychological weights through explorations of mechanics, inertia, language, habits and interfaces. Through performance work, drawing, video, installations, and other methods, I try to work with material specificity according to site and its implied corporeal relationships.
Autumn Ahn (b. 1986, Philadelphia, USA) is a current Fellow at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. Her multimedia works and performances use installation, sound, video and works-on-paper.
Her conceptual work has been presented at Cine Tonalá for Fería ARTBO (Bogota Art Fair); Centre National d’Art Contemporain-Grenoble; Istanbul Embassy, WRONG Biennale; Contemporary Istanbul; Maison du Portugal, Cité Universitaire, Paris; Art Basel, Miami for the AIDS Action Committee; Montserrat College of Art & Design, with Castledrone for HUBweek in Boston’s City Hall Plaza and with The Chimney in Brooklyn, NY. She currently resides in the US.
Devon Bryant, All That Is Solid II
All that is Solid is a meditation on the shifting apsect of architectual styles through out Boston’s history. To make this peice I photographed multiple buildings around the city and combined them into a morphing surface. I then embeded that into a 3-d rendered blueprint type design to show the relation between the surface designs and basic geometric concepts. This piece was first created for the Emerson’s Little building and has been reimagined for the Marquee.
Harvey Goldman and Jing Wang, Ouroboros
Glints of light, passing of shadows, the choreography of perpetual existence sets the stage for this Delphian ballet. The impenetrable flow of life’s rhythms, their Sisyphean inceptions and cessations are punctuated with eternity’s ephemeral modulations. The transmigration has begun, the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning.
Harvey Goldman has created critically acclaimed work in the fields of ceramics, digital imaging, animation and music. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. Goldman’s work is included in numerous private and public collections around the world.
Jing Wang, a composer and virtuoso erhu artist, was born in China. Her compositions have been selected and presented throughout the world. She was the winner of 2006 Pauline Oliveros Priz and has been awarded the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Vilcek Foundation Fellowship, and the Omi International Musicians Residency Fellowship.
Heather Kapplow, This is Just a Test (Self Portrait)
This is Just a Test (Self Portrait) is a conceptual, abstract, autobiographical piece created specifically for Boston Cyberarts and the marquee. People close to me me know that I don’t really like to share too much about myself publicly or to use my personal experiences explicitly in my work, so I thought it would be funny if I made a self portrait that was 75+ feet tall with my native city as its backdrop.
The way in which this is a self-portrait has a little bit to do with my history as an artist—I moved towards making conceptual and engagement-based work from the experimental film/video world, and while studying anthropology.
Two layers of what you are viewing here are related to that experience: The formal focus on video test bars relates to my previous preoccupation with formal elements of film—like the frameline and branding bursts—that we don’t usually pay much attention to, but which can have great influence. The fleshy color palette here references structural racism encoded in cinematographic color tests (which the field of anthropology perpetuated by incorporating into its fieldwork practices.)
The proportions of the flesh tones in This is Just a Test (Self Portrait), as well as the colors moderating between them and the traditional video test bar palette, were generated by a consumer genetic test. So this is also a report on the results of that test—a data-graphic portrait of my personal genetic history.
Heather Kapplow (www.heatherkapplow.com) is a self-trained conceptual artist based in the United States. She creates engagement experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio and video. Her work has received government and private grants and has been included in galleries, film and performance festivals in the US and internationally.
Dennis Miller, Realignment
Realignment is a site-specific work created for the Art on the Marquee project. A large, vertical array of colored stripes gently unfolds and recombines to create an abstract animation on the top screen, while transformed versions of the array appear across the bottom screens.
Dennis Miller is on the Music Faculty of Northeastern University in Boston His works, which illustrate principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual realm (‘visual music”), are found at www.dennishmiller.com
London Parker-McWhorter, Carnival
Carnival is made from slow-motion video footage captured at Boston’s biggest annual parade, the Boston Caribbean Carnival in Roxbury, MA. Dancers and floats adorned with ornate plumage and costumes are the work of thousands of hours of artisans and craftspeople who bring this vibrant West Indian tradition to New England. “Carnival” takes a kaleidoscopic lens to these festivities, as brilliant chromatic geometry blooms and undulates with momentary flashes of abstracted human forms. This piece was created with help from production assistant Prophet Parker-McWhorter.
London Parker-McWhorter is filmmaker and digital artist based in Boston. His visual work is informed by tradition as a third generation photographer. London has previously contributed photography and camera work to numerous documentaries including “Herskovits At The Heart of Blackness” and “Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek,” and to installations with Touchable Stories and others. Visit bit.ly/londonpm to find out more.
Misha Rabinovich, Cat Beach
Although we see cats everywhere these days, most people don’t think about how they became so widespread. It all started when people began taking cats aboard ships, probably since ancient Egypt. A ship’s cat kept the rodents at bay, which preserved the integrity of the ropes and the food supply. Cats provided companionship to the sailors far from home. As people sailed everywhere, so did the cats. The largest port in the United States today is in the Los Angeles neighborhood of San Pedro. There on a secluded wild beach a colony of feral cats live in a sunny paradise. No longer expected to do anything for people, the cats are free to simply exist. They emerge from the rocks at sunset to listen to the waves while dolphins frolic in the water. However under the surface of this bucolic scene lies the world’s largest deposit of the chemical DDT. Discharged into the Palos Verdes Shelf during the 1950s and 60s, the pesticide wreaked havoc in the marine and avian ecology. The area became a Superfund site in 1996, and the DDT concentrations have slowly declined over time. Despite the danger in the water, the cats continue to exist. And so it turns out that the cats are still doing something for us. They are living symbols of a post-work society transcending a damaged environment and offering hope for our future.
Misha Rabinovich is an artist, developer, and educator investigating the idea of waste as a cultural construct. He was recently growing plants using only the dynamic light and sound of projected Internet video to create a web-enabled alchemical installation that transmutes cultural waste into fertilizer. His work has been exhibited in the United States at such venues as the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival in NYC and Machine Project in LA, and internationally at such venues as the Prague Biennale and Sign,CIAT in Berlin. He received a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MFA from Syracuse University. Misha Rabinovich was born in Moscow, Russia and worked between New York and Los Angeles before settling in Boston, Massachusetts where he serves as Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at UMass Lowell.
Ngoc-Tran Vu, Year of the Earth Dog
Year of the Earth Dog is a site-specific work that explores the five zodiac elements (metal, water, wood, fire, earth) and offerings of 2018 to usher in the Lunar New Year from the predecessor Fire Rooster. The dog symbolizes honesty, loyalty and integrity while the element of earth enriches its character and adds stability — all critical traits much needed in our society and world today.
Ngoc-Tran Vu is a Vietnamese American multimedia artist whose socially engaged practice draws from her experience as a community organizer and cultural worker. She is based in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood and her work can be found at www.ngoctranvu.com
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Ellen Wetmore, From Massachusetts to the Dominican Republic
I was wondering if I could reach through the earth and get someplace else on the other side. Perhaps with very long arms I could dig through the snow and find sunshine. My excellent sister, who shot some of the images, introduced me to the beautiful city of Santo Domingo this year.
Ellen Wetmore is a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Film/Video and a 2017 Berkshire Taconic A.R.T. awardee for her work in video art. Wetmore’s video projects have been featured at the the Indianapolis Art Center; the Sandwell Arts Trust; Ciné Lumière in London; the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island, Currents, Santa Fe; CologneOff, Germany; and Videoholica in Bulgaria. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow and a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome. She will have a solo exhibition of drawings in Las Cruces New Mexico in February 2018. Wetmore served as a juror for the video dance festival InShadow of Lisbon in 2015. Her work can be found online at http://www.ellenwetmore.com, and on Vimeo.
“Art is the mitigation of an atrocious world.” Born in Madison Wisconsin in 1972, and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, Wetmore lives in Groton, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
23rd Round of Art on the Marquee (Fall 2017)
Mitchel Ahern and Greg Kowalski, Boston Letterpress
Boston Letterpress highlights the history and current vitality of letterpress printing in Boston. The Fort Point area of Boston, where the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) now stands, was once the heart of a thriving letterpress industry. The Golding Pearl Model 3 printing press featured in the video was built in 1870 in Fort Hill, Boston (now the corner of Oliver St. and High St.), printing with metal type from American Type Founders (ATF) who had offices on Congress St. Today, letterpress printing is alive and well with several thriving local shops.
Mitchel Ahern is a letterpress printer and performance artist living in Lynn, MA. His most recent work was Dhalgren Sunrise which he adapted and directed, performed by the Fort Point Theatre Channel at Chelsea Theatre Works. He also performs on instruments he has invented such as the harrow, solo and in ensembles. Mitchel teaches letterpress classes at the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, prints out of his own shop, mitchelka Show Card Press, and refurbishes and helps maintain Golding presses.
Digital media artist Greg Kowalski’s work lies at the intersection of theater and performance art. His work features the projection of live, video imagery using systems of his own design, which allow him to create interactive visuals out of movement, objects and light. Greg works on his own projects, interprets theatrical works, and projects for numerous sound artists using his “painting with light” system. He is currently working on a performance titled R48, to be performed at the Sprinkler Factory in Worcester MA.
Mitchel Ahern and Greg Kowalski are both members of Fort Point Theatre Channel (FPTC) which is dedicated to creating and sustaining new configurations of the performing arts. They are now in their 10th year of bringing together ensembles of artists from the worlds of theater, music, visual arts, and everything in between, as a forum for collaborative expression while enriching communities. FPTC assisted in this production, and will be hosting an educational event supporting Boston Letterpress.
The Museum of Printing, in Haverhill, is dedicated to preserving the rich history of the graphic arts, printing and typesetting technology, and printing craftsmanship. In addition to many special collections and small exhibits, the Museum contains hundreds of antique printing, typesetting, and bindery machines, as well as a library of books and printing-related documents. Museum staff assisted in this production and will be presenting at an educational event supporting Boston Letterpress with a presentation by Frank Romano, author and RIT Professor Emeritus.
Keaton Fox, Rosetta Stone X
Rosetta Stone X is a modernized, digitized, 21st Century rosetta stone that explores the visual history of human communication.
Keaton Fox is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses art and technology to reflect the digital disarray of the modern world.
Fueled by child-like fascination and frustrations, fox combines the natural with the virtual to create visual experiments that playfully explore the varied realities of our time. She received her BFA in art video from Syracuse University, has exhibited nationally, internationally, physically & digitally, and currently lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Justin Freed, Child’s Play
These spontaneous drawings created on my iPad erupt from a mirthful and meditative place within me. They are made in a joyful, searching spirit by a child who teaches me how to live. He takes my delight in abstraction, animation, humor and fantasy and somehow draws it out of me. It has become a daily practice of discovery.
This piece could not have been created without the skill of James Manning. He deserves more than equal credit.
Justin Freed is a multimedia artist. He shows at Galatea Fine Art, Boston and is an artist in residence in the Illuminations program at Mass General Hospital.
Emily Hofelich, Bridges
Bridges is a collaboration between the artist and youth from the West End House Boys & Girls Club Digital Arts program. The animation uses images of light graffiti created by the youth. The images are self-expressions consisting of words, movements, and symbols that represent something or someone of great importance. The title is inspired by the process of bridging our differences through sharing our stories and expressing them visually.
Emily Hofelich is affiliated faculty in the Visual & Media Arts department at Emerson College and the director of the Digital Arts program at the West End House Boys and Girls Club. She is a documentary filmmaker and new media artist exploring concepts related to memory and community.
Dennis Miller, The Web
The Web (2017) is a site-specific work created for the Art on the Marquee project. The imagery, which appears in inverse and slightly modified form on the top and bottom screens, references an outwardly expanding web-like structure that ultimately fills the entire screens. The idea is an artist’s interpretation of the results of information overload.
Dennis H. Miller is on the Music faculty of Northeastern University. His mixed-media works, which illustrate principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual realm, have been performed at venues throughout the word and are available at www.dennishmiller.com.
Nervous System, Stalactite/Stalagmite
Stalactite/Stalagmite explores the growth and melting of ice forms through simulation and animation. This piece is based on dendritic solidification, the growth of branching structures in supercooled fluids. Intricate forms emerge during crystal growth due to the interplay of phase change and temperature as liquid becomes solid.
Nervous System is a generative design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. Designers Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg explore how simulations of natural processes can be used in design and coupled with digital fabrication to create one-of-a-kind, customized products.
Jessica and Jesse both attended MIT, where she studied biology and architecture and he studied math and computer science. Their work is a part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper–Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Christen Shea, Three Fountains
Three Fountains is a series of three animated sculptural fountains created using procedural simulation in 3D computer graphics software. Translating blueprints of the marquee into a virtual 3D model, simulations are constructed to interact and collide with the marquee as a three-dimensional object. Cloth, hair and fluid simulations evoke the idea of the fountain as a mediator through which these dynamic events occur.
Christen Shea is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the transcendance of objects between physical and virtual space through video, sculpture, and installation. Christen focuses on mobility and fluidity in representation through the translation of objects into time-based forms and uses digital media to transcend physical locations and boundaries, creating immaterial experiences that are simultaneously anchored in a connection to the physical.
Wenhua Shi, Sense(s) of Time
Sense(s) of Time depicts the lyrical and poetic passage of time and focuses on defining subjective and perceptual time with close attention to stillness, decay, disappearance, and ruins, by using time lapse to manipulate and preserve actual time.
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Wenhua Shi is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at UMass Boston.
Ellen Wetmore, Out for a Walk in Florence
Out for a walk in Florence is a bit of a reflection on the huge Bill Viola retrospective this summer in Florence at the Strozzi Palace, where the architecture was shot. As he spends time with simple gestures reflected in the local historical paintings, like The Deluge, I am imagining a world of many small surreal moments built into the Italian architecture with unexpected bends on the passing landscape of tourists. People who know my work, know that I am fascinated by the hundreds of tiny drawings, beasts, plants, landscape, and portraits, on the surface of Renaissance buildings called “grotesques”.
Ellen Wetmore is a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Film/Video. Wetmore’s video projects have been featured at the the Indianapolis Art Center; the Sandwell Arts Trust; Ciné Lumière in London; the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island, Currents, Santa Fe; CologneOff, Germany; and Videoholica in Bulgaria. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow and a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome. She will have a solo exhibition of drawings in Las Cruces New Mexico in February 2018. Wetmore served as a juror for the video dance festival InShadow of Lisbon in 2015. In 2016 she was a finalist for the Georgia Fee award and she was a resident at Signal Culture in Owego, New York in 2016. In 2014 Wetmore was the subject of an exhibition at the Sarah Doyle Gallery of Brown University and in 2015 she had a solo show at Living Arts of Tulsa.
Her work can be found online at http://www.ellenwetmore.com, and on Vimeo.
“Art is the mitigation of an atrocious world.” Born in Madison Wisconsin in 1972, and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, Wetmore lives in Groton, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Sarah Zaidan, Game Worlds
I designed Game Worlds for the Marquee to showcase how games bring people together on a global level. With a press of a button, the Marquee transforms into pixelated environments that evoke a variety of cities and towns around the world. These five locations are inspired by places I have lived, where despite culture and language barriers, my passion for playing and making games helped me to find and build communities. In the face of cultural disparity, the power of play remains a uniting force.
Sarah Zaidan is a game designer, artist, and researcher whose work explores how video games and comic books can engage in a dialogue with identity, gender, and citizenship. She is an assistant professor at Emerson College, where she teaches video game design and history, and is a faculty fellow at the Engagement Lab. Dr. Zaidan has published in The Journal of Fandom Studies (Intellect, 2015), Gamevironments (2016), Select Start Press (2017), and the anthologies Beyond the Sea: New Perspectives on Bioshock (forthcoming) and Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domain (forthcoming). She is a co-creator of the feminist superhero comic My So-Called Secret Identity, and is currently developing a video game about the cultural importance of female superheroes through history.
22nd Round of Art on the Marquee (summer 2017)
Matt Shanley and Laura Davidsons, Our Neighborhood Circa 1900
Fort Point artists Matthew Shanley and Laura Davidson collaborated to create a video focusing on how their neighborhood looked over a hundred years ago. Combining historic photographs* from the Boston Wharf Company with images drawn by Davidson and animated by Shanley, the film offers a glimpse of the busy waterway and streetscapes that served Fort Point’s industries in the last century.
In a neighborhood currently experiencing unprecedented change and growth, this view into the past gives a glimmer of history to the buildings that surround us still.
*The photographs are from a collection of glass-plate negatives that were found in a Boston Wharf building and given to the Boston Public Library in 1995. The photographer is unknown.
Laura Davidson is an artist who makes books, drawings, paper mosaics and prints. She incorporates many types of materials in her work, including wood, paper, gold leaf, and objects found in her eclectic collections. Her interest in mosaic and other classical methods frequently show up in her work. Maps, vintage ephemera and her love of books are recurring elements in her visual vocabulary.
Laura grew up in Michigan, attended Michigan State University, and received a B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute. Since that time she has been living and working in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood, a downtown warehouse district that is home to a vibrant arts community, with her partner and daughter. She has received several grants for her work, and her books can be found in private collections and libraries throughout the United States and around the world.
Matthew Shanley is a multimedia artist whose range of practice includes sound, installation, public art, generative computer projects, video, internet art, and print. He holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He currently resides in Boston, MA.
Jon Forsyth and Julia Blake, Natural Holdings
Natural Holdings seeks to remind us to have hope and appreciate beauty, just as nature begs us to be present. Just like poppies and forests, good things in our lives can be gone in a blink. We may not even notice them or fully appreciate them until they are gone. Nature also reminds us that there is light and dark in the world — there are opposing forces. The wise recognize the difference and work for the good. The careful and thoughtful do not take for granted our earth or our allies.
Award-winning artist Julia Blake has an impressive ability to work across many styles from abstract to figure. She tends to use vivid colors, high contrast and bold strokes to create aesthetic and meaningful works. She was a peer and client nominated finalist for 40 Women to Watch Over Forty. She trained privately and at the MFA in Boston. Always pushing herself, she is now enrolled in the Drawing and Painting program at RISD. Her art is in private collections in 20+ states from Hawaii to Massachusetts. She is the cofounder of The Artist Common, a place for artists of all levels to come together in an historic New England church. She lives in the Boston area with her husband their six children. www.juliablakeart.com
Jon Forsyth is a multimedia artist specializing in video, sculpture, photography and graphic arts. He teaches music video production at the Berklee College of Music, on their Boston and Valencia, Spain campuses, as well as information systems for UMass Lowell Online. He led a humanitarian documentary filmmaking workshop in Belize, and he has studied filmmaking at MassArt and marble sculpting in Tuscany, Italy.
Sarah Bliss and Cynthia McLaughlin, Orbit
In Orbit, the Marquee becomes a portal to a fantastical, bobbling, sinuous world where texture, color and sense experience take center stage. Boundaries between human and natural world break down as a wondrous spinal pathway is traced in a psychedelic field of sea-like flora, obscuring and revealing a landscape of arcing serpentine spheres that play with space, color and time.
Sarah Bliss is a filmmaker, educator and curator whose hand-processed films and expanded works are rooted in deep encounter with the sensate, desiring body and its relationship to memory, place and time. Her work is often three-dimensional, immersive, and site-specific. It is screened and exhibited internationally at museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan; the Montreal Underground Film Festival, and Bideodromo, Spain. She has been recognized with fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Scotland’s Alchemy Film Festival and will be a LEF Foundation Fellow at the 2017 Flaherty Film Seminar. Current projects include a feature personal doc exploring the politics of desire in the context of aging, illness and death; and the production of film tints and toners made from mushrooms, lichen, bark and nuts. She received a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and is a member of Boston’s AgX film collective.
Cynthia McLaughlin is a multi-media artist and choreographer. Originally based in Washington DC, Cynthia McLaughlin performed, collaborated and served as rehearsal director with Boris Willis Moves for 12 years, performing her own and Willis’ work at such venues as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Dance Place. Currently, McLaughlin is based in Western Massachusetts where she has continually received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to create public installation and performance work. “Oh Say Can You See”, a multi-media installation examining women and patriotism, will open at Historic Northampton in July. A 2017 Whiting Award recipient, McLaughlin will travel to Singapore to attend the M1 Contact Contemporary Dance Festival. She is currently Interim Coordinator of Dance at Keene State College
Jan Roberts Breslin and Daniel Breslin, true:hope
Jan Roberts-Breslin is a media artist whose video art has been screened and won awards at U.S. and international film and video festivals, aired on PBS and exhibited at museums, including the ICA Boston and DeCordova Museum. She is the author of Making Media: Foundations of Sound and Image Production, published by Focal Press, soon in its fourth edition. She is a Professor of Visual and Media Arts and Dean of Graduate and Professional Studies at Emerson College.
Daniel Breslin is an artist whose work has been show in group shows across the country. Religious and social themes, which have been the focus of much of the work over the past few years, has transitions to a more political focus of late. Most used are the traditional painting mediums of encaustic and oil, with the inclusion of found objects and wood constructions.
Ben Houge and Jutta Friedrichs, Shanghai Traces
The multifaceted practice of Jutta Friedrichs engages with people, public space, and the built environment. As a curator, she works with architects, designers, sculptors and other artists in a range of media to encourage dialog between new artworks and the broader context of the existing physical environment. In her writings and multichannel audio-visual installations, she explores cultural and phenomenological interrelations between body and the built environment, as in her recent investigation The Inconspicuous Life of Walls and her video piece Dream, Echoes, Debris. As an arts producer, she has brought about a series of multi-sensory dining events designed to investigate the interdependencies of the food supply chain.
Friedrichs earned her BA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, with additional studies at UDK in Berlin, before obtaining her Master’s Degree in Art, Design and the Public Domain with Krzysztof Wodiczko at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
She is currently a mentor at the Harvard Innovation Lab where she advises students in the Cultural Entrepreneurship track and has served as an art and design critic at Harvard and MIT. From 2005 to 2010, she lived in Shanghai, China, where she founded Mü Furniture as an outlet for her award-winning designs.
She is the cofounder of Changing Environments, a company developing smart urban furniture, whose first product, Soofa, has been well received in publications such as The Washington Post, Mashable and Fastcompany.
21st Round of Art on the Marquee (spring 2017)
Sean Bowes, Fragile Monolith
The Marquee has a monumental presence as it stands at attention by the side of the road. Due to its digital nature it has ephemeral qualities as well, changing content and appearance with every moment that passes. Fragile Monolith translates these qualities into a simulated physical interpretation. Using techniques used in projection mapping, The Marquee appears to be re-formed out of a collection of fragmented pieces which build themselves up to fill the shape of the marquee, reconfigure themselves, and crumble away.
Sean Bowes is an animator, designer, artist, and live visualist based in Boston, MA.
Since graduating from Keene State with a BFA Graphic Design & Studio Art in 2013 he has worked as a Graphic Designer at Gupta Media, the digital media masterminds behind the music industry, while freelancing as a 3D animator for Boston-based projection mapping pioneers Zebbler Studios.
Devon Bryant, Digital Landscape
For this piece I wanted to honor the very insides of the computers and machines that allow us to make this work in the first place. The marquee starts as a building facade in a busy city. Chatoc lights flicker and cars zoom past. As the camaera zooms out it reveals the building to be part of a larger whole, and the city itself to be a working circiut board.
Devon Bryant is a multi media artist based in Charlestown, MA. He is best known for large scale projection mapped buildings, stages and sculptures. Devon is a project manager for Zebbler Studios, projection coordinator for Illuminus Festival, and co-curator of Glitch Gallery.
Gregory Maxim Burdett, Never Too Late
Never Too Late uses uses a timelapse I had taken of the sun setting beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The purpose of this piece is two-fold. “Never Too Late” asks the viewer to reexamine the beauty of the natural world in a metropolitan context and provides the audience with a temporary escape from the drab gray landscapes of urban reality. Secondly the title is a reminder that the earth’s natural cycle ensures the sun will always rise again and as members of the natural world, it’s never too late to achieve our goals.
Gregory Maxim Burdett is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Boston, MA. His artwork has been exhibited at galleries across North America including New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles, Space 1026 in Philadelphia, 1300 Gallery in Cincinnati, Leo Kestings Gallery in New York, Mills Gallery in Boston and NEST Gallerie in Montreal. His mural work has been commissioned by companies and organizations such as The United Way of New York City, Washington Project for the Arts and the Boston YMCA. His work has also been featured in publications including Tokion, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and Coso Girl to name a few. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art’s Studio for Interrelated Media and is currently a MFA candidate in Emerson College’s Visual Media Arts program. He currently works as the Director of Artists For Humanity’s Studio for Video and Motion where he works with Boston area teens on video and animation projects.
Dennis Miller, Popper
Popper is a site-specific piece composed for the Art on the Marquee project. It is a colorful and playful display of bouncing rectangles that traverse an endless field of elements.
Dennis H. Miller is on the faculty of Northeastern University in Boston. His mixed-media artworks illustrate principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual realm.
Mitsuko Nakagawa, A Life of a Seed
The brushstroke is an important element of my work, and it represents the starting point of my media art creation. Japanese calligraphy, which I learned in my childhood, influenced the root of my art because it’s not only an artistic technique, but it also connects to the mind. Currently I push myself to work with multiple bright colors, and not just black. I believe multiple bright colors introduce the path of changing one’s attitude, as I do in A life of a seed. This work is inspired by the cycle of life. I use the “flower” as a metaphor: a life starts from a seed, the flower blooms and the petals of it fall and swirl. But only after it swirls, a new life begins. Through my work I would like to make people look at their lives positively and differently. People are sometimes disappointed when something ends, however, I believe that the end is the beginning, and all matters will continue.
Mitsuko Nakagawa is a multimedia creator and an award-winning textile artist from Tokyo, Japan. Her textile work, made out of natural fibers by using a hand-felted technique, was shown at the Toyota headquarters building in Tokyo and received an award in the Material section at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, and on the cover of Interior Design Magazine. After running her textile studio in Tokyo for over 15 years, she changed her medium from textile art to media art to explore a new way of representing Japanese art. She received an MFA in Textile Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology; she is a second year student in the MFA program in Media Arts at Emerson College. Currently, she has created a series of installations by using projection mapping or AR (augmented reality).
Allison Maria Rodriguez, One Girl’s Fantasy
One Girl’s Fantasy was designed specifically for the marquee as a celebration of the power of creativity and the imagination in overcoming traumatic experiences. Over the course of the past year, I have been conducting interviews with different female-identified artists about childhood fantasies that assisted them in overcoming trauma or extreme circumstances. One Girl’s Fantasy is the first piece in a larger body of work that will explore these fantasies, highlighting their uniqueness, their commonalities, and their inherent power. Ultimately, One Girl’s Fantasy speaks to a strategy and methodology of survival activated through the power of creativity.
Allison Maria Rodriguez is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist working predominately in new media, film/video and installation. Her work explores the limits of representation and the space in between meaning. She is consistently searching for methods and approaches that destabilize perceived ways of knowing and understanding the world. Rodriguez received her MFA from Tufts University & The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In Fall 2016 she was an Artist-in-Residence at The Studios at Mass MoCA, located at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Clara Wainwright & Emily Hofelich, Hot Ocean
Hot Ocean is about the effects of global warming on a sea aquarium and its inhabitants, which escape and rise towards the sun. Hot Ocean is created by fabric artist, Clara Wainwright, and animator, Emily Hofelich, who are optimistic that the ocean and its inhabitants will eventually return to health.
Emily Hofelich is a filmmaker and new media artist. She graduated from the Emerson College MFA Media Art Program in 2015. Her work focuses on the fusion of craft art forms with new media. A mutual interest in quilting sparked the collaboration with artist, Clara Wainwright. Currently, she is the Director of Performing Arts at the West end House Boys & Girls Club.
Clara Wainwright is a textile artist who has worked with more than 50 community groups, schools, churches and mosques to create collaborative quilts. The deCordova Museum and the Cape Ann Museum have held retrospectives of her work. She is also the Founding Director of The Great Boston Kite Festival, First Night and The Faith Quilts Project.
Jeff Warmouth, Cube Experiment #2
Cube Experiment #2 is an exploration of form, weight, timing, and the laws of physics. Cubes fall into the Marquee as if poured into a container. They bounce and react, in simulated 3D physics, until gravity is reversed and they begin to rise up & “fall” out of the Marquee.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based conceptual artist whose work asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media artwork has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Fitchburg Art Museum, the deCordova Museum; Boston Center for the Arts; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Kaunas Photo Festival, Lithuania; MicroCineFest, Baltimore, MD; Boston Cyberarts Gallery; Experimenta Media Arts, Australia; and the404 Festival of Art & Technology, Argentina & Colombia.
20th Round of Art on the Marquee (winter 2017)
Christine Banna, One Step Forward Two Steps Back
When I was first conceiving this animation I was considering two diametrically opposed aspects of humanity, our scientific progress and how we can simultaneously regress on a societal level. I decided to focus on the technological achievements of humanity using imagery of a space shuttle launch. I have chosen this specific metaphor for scientific progress because I believe it is symbolic of our species’ greatest strengths. We are the only mammal to migrate and thrive on every unique environment on planet Earth. I feel that it is absolutely remarkable that we then looked up and chose to travel to an environment completely inhospitable to us – space. I added a clip of Belka and Strelka, two Soviet space dogs who were launched into low Earth orbit for a day and were the first Earth-born creatures to go into space and return safely, thus paving the way for increasingly complicated manned missions.
I planned this animation to have the aesthetic of a moving ink drawing to purposely give a sense of tradition and physicality in juxtaposition to the mechanical engineering required for launching such complicated machinery into space. Additionally, I felt the appearance of a traditional medium on such a modern site as the marquee would further highlight our technological progress while staying cognizant of our humanity.
Christine A. Banna is an interdisciplinary artist who pulls from both modern and traditional methods such as painting, drawing, video, sound and animation and utilizes them in her practice. Christine received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She received her BFA in Painting with a minor in Art History from Boston University’s College of Fine Art.
Christine is a passionate educator and is currently teaching in the animation department at Lesley University’s College of Art and Design.
Devon Bryant, Pixel Cascade
A rhythmic flow of tumbling cubes cascades downward, colors phase and shift in a constant
play of compliments. The solidness of the giant marquee becomes broken into cubes, yet stays solid. I want this piece to elicit a very distinct feeling in the viewer, something akin to awe one feels when looking from the top of a mountain.
Devon Bryant is a multi media artist based in Charlestown, MA. He is best known for large scale projection mapped buildings, stages and sculptures.Devon is a project manager for Zebbler Studios, projection coordinator for Illuminus Festival, and co-curator of Glitch Gallery.
Corey Corcoran, Squeegee
In Squeegee, animated window washers scale the marquee, polishing the glass as the clouds drift by.
Corey Corcoran is an artist and illustrator based in Boston. Trained as a painter, Corcoran’s recent work combines drawing with sculpture, video, and animation. Corcoran’s work has been exhibited nationally and extensively in the Greater Boston area including LaMontagne Gallery, Suffolk University Art Gallery, deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Montserrat College of Art, kijidome, and Boston Center for the Arts. His work has been featured in publications such as Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Art New England, Artscope Magazine, and Beautiful Decay. He holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a recipient of the Clowes Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. http://coreycorcoran.com
Caitlin Foley & Misha Rabinovich, Total Jump
Would a world-wide total jump perpetuate a disaster or unite humanity against all odds? Total Jump is an ongoing utopian thought experiment, mobile app, and arcade style game. The game trains people for a coordinated worldwide jump where every single able-bodied human lands at exactly the same time. The extreme difficulty of accomplishing a worldwide Total Jump combined with the ease and fun of training for it invites the audience to bridge the gap between a postmodern pluralistic world and the necessity of global coordinated solutions to immense problems facing the human race.
This custom animation for Art On The Marquee visualizes a hypothetical Total Jump intended to provide a poetic interpretation of the Anthropocene and question where our cultural power is leading us. Total Jump Live, the mobile app (iTunes & Google Play), invites players to participate in global jumps with others from around the world and brings the project into the realm of the real. totaljumplive.com
Caitlin Foley and Misha Rabinovich work collaboratively as artists and curators to create works which engage ideas and practices that involve sharing communities, livable ecologies, and the transmutation of waste. Among other things they create interactive games, installations, and happenings where audience participation is a key component of the work and its message. Their DS Institute Sweat Battery actively creates/engages a sharing community through the collection of sweat from participants using their mobile sauna, presents an alternative ecology for energy production, and transforms sweat “waste” into power to charge cell phones and symbolize collective energy. Their work has been exhibited in the US, Canada, and Europe at such venues as EFA Project Space (NYC), Flux Factory (NYC), the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival (NYC), Boston Cyberarts (Boston), Marymount California University (LA), the Torrance Art Museum in (LA), the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), SIGGRAPH (LA), Artspace (New Haven, CT), High Desert Test Sites HQ (Joshua Tree), Prague Biennale (Czech Republic), KCHUNG Radio (LA) and the Arts Center of the Capital Region (Troy, NY). Misha is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Caitlin is part-time faculty in the Art and Design Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Lina Maria Giraldo, Something for the Ladies
Abigail Adams, John Adams’ wife, wrote many letters to her husband and they are considered the best eye witness of the American Revolution. She is one the first to write about her concerns on human rights as well as opportunities for women’s education. She was also known for her strong views against slavery. This is why I animated one of her most important letters to President Adams, dated March 31st 1776 to honor her. She asks not to forget about the nations’ women when fighting for American Independence. More than 100 years later women were still fighting for their rights. it was not until 1920 that women had the right to vote.
I animated the poem with her own writing on the bottom screen and on the top I recreated her silhouette using the shape of her Statue in Boston with a video of women’s suffrage march.
“I long to hear that you have declared an independency—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or representation.”
Abigail Adams text is recreated from the Original Letter dated 1776 from the Massachussetts Historical Society. The video is taken from the Internet Archive Educational Film Collection MTI Teleprograms 1936, The Pennsylvania Public Libraries.
Lina Maria Giraldo is Colombia-born, Boston-based Artist. She creates screen based, computer generated work using video, photography, physical computing and data. Her work incorporates contemporary languages such as video games, advertising, repetition and massiveness. Crucial for the development of her pieces is the community’s role and the information it generates. This is why over 15 years her work has been focused on creating messages where she depicts the fragility of our environment, community equality and immigration concerns, exploring the questions of being Latino in the US. Lina truly believes in the power of contemporary art trough digital storytelling in public spaces.
Lina Maria Giraldo’s artistic career has revolved around generating educational work that has been exhibited in many Universities, Museums and public spaces such as Fitchburg Museum, The JFK Library, Fenway 30 seconds Cinema, The Art on the Marquee at Boston Exhibition Convention Center just to name a few. Notable achievements include being part of the team that created the award winning educational website JFK50.org, NEFA Creative City Grant, Artist in Residency for the City of Boston “AIR residency 2.0”, recipient of a Hispanic Scholarship Foundation Grant, and St Botolph Emerging Artist Award. Lina was cited by the city of Boston for her work generating awareness on the dangers of heroin use.
Lina Maria Giraldo holds a Master of Professional Studies on Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University where she was the recipient of both the Paulette Godard and the Tisch School Scholarships. She was awarded the Tsongas Scholarship at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she majored in Studio of interrelated Media (SIM) with Departmental Honors and Academic Distinction.
Jon Goldman, Village Portrait Project
This Project is an ongoing large-scale artwork to document my village using digital painting of the individuals who together make up the community. The focus is on the villagers as a group, not a singular person. The final work will be an environment that houses 781 metal prints of the villagers.
I set out in 2012 on an ambitious project to digitally paint portraits of the people of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, my home. I have painted 200 towards my goal of completing 781 faces. This animation of some of the faces from a scalloper to a tugboat captain can be seen also as a metaphorical portrait of the concept of “community” as a place always in transition.
Jon Goldman is an award-winning media artist based in Woods Hole, who explores ecology, technology, spectacle, community and archive as integral parts of his practice.
He has shown extensively around the U.S. Japan and Korea since receiving his Masters at M.I.T.’s famed Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His work ranges from large-scale architecturally installed kinetic inflatable sculptures, to short films and animations such as Emmy-nominated Swim. He is currently illustrating a graphic novel written by Jim Uhls, screenwriter of Fight Club.
Goldman’s work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design, and other permanent private collections.
Robert Maloney, Vortex
Vortex is an experimentation using high and low fidelity techniques to create a whirlwind of pattern, color and texture. Timelapse footage of rapidly passing clouds in the sky are layered together with footage of a pen drawing radiating spirals on a piece of paper placed on top of a spinning turntable. The clips are layered together digitally to create a cyclonic montage reminiscent of early surrealistic film techniques.
Robert Maloney is a Boston mixed media artist and instructor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Robert received his Masters of Fine Arts from Massart through their interdisciplinary Summer Low Residency MFA program. Robert’s 2D and 3D constructions incorporate elements of the urban landscape, typography, topography and architecture. Many of his pieces straddle the line between a structure being torn down and a structure being erected.
Daniel Murphy, The Intersection
The Intersection is an ode to the art of the theatre marquee. In searching for inspiration, I found a broad range of styles from bold, bright colors, to classical arrangements of lightbulb sequencing. I incorporated a bit of everything in the final rendering. The marquee, in this case, is advertising for the theatre that is the intersection where it stands on Summer Street. The films shown are simply things that happen at that intersection.
Dan Murphy is artist and designer local to the Boston Area, He studied Painting and Finance at Boston College (’11). He also studied graphic design at Massart (’16). He is currently working as a Visual Designer in the User Experience Department at Fidelity Investments. He continues to paint, draw, and write on the side – now that is living on the edge!
John Quirk, Chef
What happens when all of your culinary knowledge is a farce and you’re just tryin’ to get by? What brings us solace in times of uncertainty? Maybe the fish knows.
John F. Quirk is a filmmaker and a teacher. His work explores the uncertain, the world of media and the subconscious. Quirk has lead numerous collaborative projects, such as the GOLEM JAMS, and values teamwork and sharing; the very pillars of our society.
Susan Yao Li, Many Headed Beast
Many Headed Beast is a work derived from the parlour game “exquisite corpse”, the concept of the mythical chimera, and the aggregate form of the marquee. The intention is light-hearted visual play and an appreciation for four spectacular beasts from the suburban backyard to the savanna wild.
Susan Yao Li is in the class of 2018 at Harvard College, concentrating in Visual and Environmental Studies. She has a short but colorful background in studio art and animation, and has recently become interested in exploring spatial projections and exhibition design. She would like to express thanks to Boston Cyberarts and the MCCA for their dedication and kindness in maintaining this project.
19th Round of Art on the Marquee (fall 2016)
Sarah Brophy, My Three Sided Moon
My Three Sided Moon examines the imprecise and simultaneously powerful use of symbols and classic tropes to communicate a story. This piece invites the viewer to react based on their first associations with common symbols such as a triangle and the moon, and classic narrative themes such as the expansion of technology and lusting after the unknown in outer space.
Sarah Brophy is an artist and designer based in Boston. Through abstract collage and the layering of found objects and patterns, her work explores language, symbols, and the various ways in which “objective” information is shared. Brophy primarily creates multimedia paintings and digital animations. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in spaces including the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center and the Bard College Exhibition Center in New York, and Savvy Contemporary in Berlin. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Bard College. sarahbrophystudio.com
Corey Corcoran, Under the Weather
In Under the Weather, shadowy figures trek with ponchos and umbrellas as ominous clouds boil skyward. The video combines several analog effects including shadow puppets and a “cloud tank” in which dyes and condensed milk are suspended in fresh and saltwater to create weather effects.
Corey Corcoran is an artist and illustrator based in Boston. Trained as a painter, Corcoran’s recent work combines drawing with sculpture, video, and animation. Corcoran’s work has been exhibited nationally and extensively in the Greater Boston area including LaMontagne Gallery, Suffolk University Art Gallery, deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Montserrat College of Art, kijidome, and Boston Center for the Arts. His work has been featured in publications such as Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Art New England, Artscope Magazine, and Beautiful Decay. He holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a recipient of the Clowes Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. http://coreycorcoran.com
Jon Forsyth, Aquarium Dreams
The underwater aquarium tunnels at the Oceanografic in Valencia, Spain are the source of the underlying video featured in Aquarium Dreams. In the video, a school of fish is multiplied and transformed into an aquatic meditation of flow and color.
Jon Forsyth is a multimedia artist specializing in video, sculpture, photography and graphic arts. He teaches music video production at the Berklee College of Music, on their Boston and Valencia, Spain campuses, as well as information systems for UMass Lowell Online. He led a humanitarian documentary filmmaking workshop in Belize, and he has studied filmmaking at MassArt and marble sculpting in Tuscany, Italy.
Justin Freed, The Waters of Life: A Refuge
My video for the marquee is derived from a 2015 multimedia exhibition at Galatea Fine Art in Boston called The Waters of Life: A Refuge. I shot videos of several bodies of moving water throughout Massachusetts, displayed them on tv screens and projected others on a sculptural installation.
My intention was to create a rapturous experience for the viewer, the feeling I had when I captured these events. I believe that water is our sacred vessel. The flow of water connects us to our essence. It is a dream come true to display my work on a three-dimensional light sculpture that illuminates the ecstasy of flowing water.
Justin Freed has been involved with the visual arts for his entire adult life, beginning as a teenager, roaming Boston’s streets with his Rolleicord in search of meaningful images. Freed was influenced by people such as Eugene Atget and Walker Evans, and was also drawn to abstract art as well as landscape photography.
Entering the movie exhibition world in 1963, Freed produced a long running series of midnight showings of the American Underground Cinema featuring the work of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Conner, Maya Deren, the Kuchar Brothers, Ed Emshwiller and many others. He was a co-creator and programmer for the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge in1969, and took over the Coolidge Corner Cinema in 1972 molding it into one of the leading art cinemas in America.
During that time, Freed created “Movie Madness”, his first multi-media presentation, for a Third Stream Festival at Jordan Hall. Additionally, he photographed for the Boston Globe, Sight & Sound and other publications. He also produced photography for numerous lps and cds for jazz musicians like Ran Blake.
In 2006, Freed began video work which included his documentary, “Jen Bradley: Views of a Passionate Painter”, which played at the Provincetown Film Festival in 2011. His short film “Endless Radiance” played at the San Francisco Earth Day Film Festival in 2016. He has exhibited in Boston, Massachusetts, Sarasota, Florida and Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Presently, Freed exhibits his multi media works at Galatea Fine Art in Boston. He is currently Artist in Residence for “Illuminations”, at the Mass General Cancer Center.
Bang Luu, Metastasis
Breast cancer is well known and well documented with a social movement advocating research and treatment. Nonetheless, public comprehension of breast cancer is limited, and the actions that can be taken to prevent, detect, and treat cancer are still not well understood by the general public. The prevalent use of the pink ribbon and other products illustrate happy and uncontroversial symbols that have helped to shelter people from the biological terror that is breast cancer. Metastasis’ aim is to go beyond mere symbolism in exposing the disease at its rawest form. I hope to engage and educate viewers with illustrated biological imagery of cancer and emphasize the importance of regular checkups and preventive measures. I hope to assist those who are battling cancer to be aware of support and to feel less alone by exploring grief and, ultimately, healing wounds developed from this tragedy.
Bang Luu is a Boston based artist who seeks to link technology with various traditional mediums, tackling internal thoughts in response to the uncontrollable impact of the external world. Her work creates a transient artificial space that one can escape into, thereby breaking away from the normative world. Luu has exhibited her work at galleries and institutions throughout the northeast and nationally including Widener Gallery, Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and Iris & B Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts.
Daniel Alexander Smith, Unfixed Architecture
Conventional architecture promotes social and economic hierarchies. It distinguishes public from private, welcomes us inside or bars entry, expresses our wealth or poverty, directs where we look, walk, sit, and stand. Because the surface of the Boston Marquee is entirely wrapped in screens, its architecture becomes unfixed. It is shiftless, more optical than physical, and through collaboration with artists, its architecture becomes participatory rather than impassive. These factors allow for the deconstruction of conventional architectural hierarchies, creating new possibilities for spatial experience.
For this work, I constructed a virtual architecture that is fluid, animated, and structurally impossible, and mapped it onto the exterior of the Marquee. This architecture is adapted from the virtual structures of Paper-Thin.org, a curatorial project I co-direct, which collaborates with artists from around the world on the production of original virtual reality artworks. Visitors to the physical BCEC Marquee will see an impossible virtual structure transplanted into the landscape. Viewed out of context, the Marquee will challenge viewers’ perceptions of its shape, defying its concrete form. After the sun sets, the effect will be exaggerated so that the entire structure becomes a virtual aberration in the physical landscape. The resulting virtual structure disrupts the spatial hierarchies of its physical surroundings, compelling a reconsideration of how we experience the world around us.
Daniel Alexander Smith is a visual artist based in Cambridge, MA. In 2016, he completed an MFA Fellowship at Indiana University. In 2015 he founded Paper-Thin, an online, virtual reality art archive, which he directs and curates with collaborator, Cameron Buckley.
Daniel’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana, the CICA Museum in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, the Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletronica in São Paulo, Brazil; the Athens Digital Arts Festival in Athens, Greece; the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, Besharat Gallery in Atlanta,Ga; The Carnegie Arts Center in Cincinnati, Oh; and the Center for Fine Art Photography in Ft. Collins, Co. His research has been funded by Ideas for Creative Exploration, The University of Georgia, and Indiana University.
Recent works include Four and No Waves, an installation exploring abstraction as a consequence of technological realism; Sea Change, a video addressing the how computers re-frame our relationship with nature; and Poly_Count, a collection of mechanical drawings, exposing representational systems as technology-driven abstractions.
Jeff Warmouth, Stacks
Stacks is an exploration of the multiplicity of identity, the fragility of technology, the awkwardness of performance and the effect of imperfection on geometry. Video monitors featuring moving heads of the artist are stacked onto one another, reorganized, and removed, in a minimalist gesture that may be graceful, awkward, or both.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based conceptual artist whose work asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media artwork has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Fitchburg Art Museum, the deCordova Museum; Boston Center for the Arts; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Kaunas Photo Festival, Lithuania; MicroCineFest, Baltimore, MD; Boston Cyberarts Gallery; Experimenta Media Arts, Australia; and the404 Festival of Art & Technology, Argentina & Colombia.
Ellen Wetmore, Cannonball
Cannonball captures the joy of summer swimming for kids. I was interested in the distortion offered by the wide angle video and viewing the swimmer from beneath the water, like a fish might.
Ellen Wetmore’s artworks inspire a blend of humor and horror. Her work focuses on lived experience blended with well-honed paranoia, using her body as the primary vehicle. Working in the mediums of drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, and employing ideas that are often subversive and polemical in nature, Wetmore’s work collapses the distance
Wetmore’s video projects have been featured in screenings at the Sandwell Arts Trust in the West Midlands, UK, Ciné Lumière in London, the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island, NY, Currents, Santa Fe, New Mexico, CologneOff, Cologne, Germany, Videoholica in Bulgaria, and the MIA screen in Cairo. Her most recent work is on the 80-foot tall 7-screen marquee at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow and a finalist for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston solo show award. In 2014 she was the subject of an exhibition at the Sarah Doyle Gallery of Brown University and in 2015 she had a solo show at Living Arts of Tulsa. She was a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome and served as a juror for the video dance festival InShadow of Lisbon. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Georgia Fee award and she was a resident at Signal Culture in Owego, New York. Her work can be found online at http://www.ellenwetmore.com, and on Vimeo. “Art is the mitigation of an atrocious world.” She lives in Groton, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Portfolio archived here: www.ellenwetmore.com, Videos archived here: vimeo.com/ellenwetmore
Ellen Wetmore and Adriene Hughes, Greenland Ittoqqortoormiit
Ittoqqortoormiit is a collaboration between Adriene Hughes and Ellen Wetmore for the Art on the Marquee. The image captures the scale and serenity of a recently calved Iceberg in Eastern Greenland, north of the Arctic Circle. The closest Inuit village within this fjord system is called Ittoqqortoormiit.
Adriene Hughes is a multi media artist whose current body of artistic work is based within the Arctic. She is interested in conceptual approaches concerning the current crisis of global warming through the use of photography, video and multi-media installation.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Center for Fine Arts Photography in Ft. Collins, Co; PhotoPhore New Media Festival, Hong Kong; and at the Tasmania Int’ Media Arts Festival. She holds an M.F.A. from Tufts University and School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is currently an Educator and Managing Producer Director at The Media Teaching Labs, University of California, San Diego. More of her work can be seen at http://www.adrienehughes.com
Ellen Wetmore’s artworks inspire a blend of humor and horror. Her work focuses on lived experience blended with well-honed paranoia, using her body as the primary vehicle. Working in the mediums of drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, and employing ideas that are often subversive and polemical in nature, Wetmore’s work collapses the distance
Wetmore’s video projects have been featured in screenings at the Sandwell Arts Trust in the West Midlands, UK, Ciné Lumière in London, the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island, NY, Currents, Santa Fe, New Mexico, CologneOff, Cologne, Germany, Videoholica in Bulgaria, and the MIA screen in Cairo. Her most recent work is on the 80-foot tall 7-screen marquee at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow and a finalist for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston solo show award. In 2014 she was the subject of an exhibition at the Sarah Doyle Gallery of Brown University and in 2015 she had a solo show at Living Arts of Tulsa. She was a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome and served as a juror for the video dance festival InShadow of Lisbon. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Georgia Fee award and she was a resident at Signal Culture in Owego, New York. Her work can be found online at http://www.ellenwetmore.com, and on Vimeo. “Art is the mitigation of an atrocious world.” She lives in Groton, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Portfolio archived here, Videos archived here
18th Round of Art on the Marquee (summer 2016)
CATHERINE SILLER AND MAGS HARRIES, SUBMERGE
Harries and Siller’s artist statement for their collaborative work Submerge is a quote: “The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.” ~Annie Dillard
Catherine Siller is an artist and performer whose interdisciplinary work investigates the relationship between digitally mediated language, the body, and identity. She currently lives and works in Boston, MA. Siller holds an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University. www.catherinesiller.com
Mags Harries’ public art projects have received national recognition and have won many awards. Her early projects Asaroton and Glove Cycle have become icons of the Boston area. Mags frequently designs her work with landscape materials and responds to environmental issues. She has an increasing interest in water and city scale elements of infrastructure, pathways and connections. www.harriesheder.com
NATHALIE MIEBACH AND ALLISON MARIA RODRIGUEZ, UNKNOWN REFUGE
Unknown Refuge metaphorically explores the crisis of mass human migration. Both historically and within the current cultural climate, this crisis is often ignored, forcing those already fleeing persecution to plunge themselves blindly into the unknown. Will they have a safe place to sleep tomorrow? The piece operates with heavy symbolism. The small houses represent the individual human lives that are often enveloped by political discourse into a faceless, nameless mass…the towers of houses that rise up, piling upon one another, reference what is cast aside and thereby grows more dire…and the bubbles function to suggest a glimmer of hope, the motivating force that would drive individuals to risk everything, including their lives, for the possibility of refuge.
Nathalie Miebach is a Boston-based artist who explores the intersection of art and science by translating scientific data related to meteorology, ecology and oceanography into woven sculptures and musical scores and installations. Website – http://nathaliemiebach.com/
Allison Maria Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in new media, installation, video, film, performance, sound, photography and sculpture. Her work explores the limits of representation in order to destabilize perceived ways of knowing and understanding the world. Website – http://allisonmariarodriguez.com/
DEB TODD WHEELER AND LINA MARIA GIRALDO, WARTIME NUTRITION
Our society is changing constantly. More and more challenges arise, leaving humanity fragile and unprepared for the shifting requirements of survival. Our ecological structure is crumbling, our consumption unstoppable and the media more oppressive, manipulative and overwhelming than ever before. Our daily lives become covered with layers of advertising, “news,” celebrity lifestyle reports, and a growing sense of uncertainty. Layer after layer of fake grows thicker every day, making reality a jumbled, constructed set of fictions.
Deb Todd Wheeler is a media artist who produces installations, photographs, and sculptural objects that explore the aesthetic impact of human productivity in the natural world. From power generating interactive installations to cataloging prints of plastic as a possible new species of marine life, to working with live Western Harvester ants where, as Ann Wilson Lloyd wrote in Art in America, “ants are perfect collaborators for Deb Todd Wheeler, as their industry is a micro-complement to her own intensive, finely wrought crafting, and her ongoing interest in science and nature.” Recent exhibitions include the ICA at MeCA, Miller Block Gallery, The New Britain Museum of American Art, as well as the Megapolis Audio Art and Documentary Festival. She teaches in the 3D Department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. www.debtoddwheeler.com
Lina Maria Giraldo is a Boston-based media artist born in Colombia who holds a Master of Professional Studies on Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She was awarded the Tsongas Scholarship at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she majored in Studio of Interrelated Media (SIM) with Departmental Honors and Academic Distinction. Her work has been displayed in galleries, museums, and public spaces throughout Massachusetts, New York and Colombia. She has produced content for the Art on the Marquee LED screen at the Massachusetts Convention Center and Fenway Cinema. www.linamariagiraldo.com
EMILY EVELETH & AMY BAXTER MACDONALD, TRANSPORTED
Transported, a work by painter Emily Eveleth and interdisciplinary artist Amy Baxter MacDonald, comprises time lapse photography, oil painting, collage, video footage and digital manipulation. Using as its source one of Eveleth’s paintings, a 78” x 50 “ oil on mylar, it aims to show simultaneously the unanticipated seconds before the moment of the original painting and then its subsequent dissolution, tracing the enigmatic ways we get unexpectedly caught up in and depart from the worlds that hold us.
Emily Eveleth received her BA at Smith and studied painting at MassArt. Her work is included in many private and public collections and has been written about in Bomb Magazine, Art in America, the New Yorker and the New York Times. She is represented by Danese/Corey in New York and in Boston by the Miller Yezerski Gallery.
Amy Baxter MacDonald received her MFA in Painting from MassArt after 10 years as a professional animator, storyboarder, character designer, background artist, and art director. She teaches at Montserrat College of Art and Mount Ida College. Her home and studio are in Fort Point.
AMBREEN BUTT AND CINDY SHERMAN BISHOP, WE NEED A HERO
Ambreen Butt’s miniature series I Need A Hero re-invents Nayika, a South Asian female archetype as a hero for women. In the series, Nayika is championed for her bravery and refusal to be shamed. Rising victorious after an egregious punishment-by-rape, Nayika transcends the confines of the male gaze to become a hero for women. She emerges as a shapeshifting hero in control of her own identity. While she still carries a heavy burden on her back, she seems calm and settled with her choices. In We Need A Hero, a collaboration that digitally meshes Ambreen Butt’s series with powerful but subtle imagery by Cindy Sherman Bishop, Nayika is animated as a moving and fluid heroine. The background layering of fluid and rocking sea mobilizes her body into a different dimension of power struggle, which is external as well as internal.
Ambreen Butt is a Pakistani/American artist best known for her drawings, paintings, prints, and collages. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, she received her BFA in traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting from the National College of Arts in Lahore. In 1993 she moved to Boston and attended Massachusetts College of Art and Design earning her MFA in painting in 1997. Since then, her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Butt’s work is rooted in her bi-cultural identity and retains the intricate, decorative patterning that characterizes Indian and Persian miniature painting. She has updated the medium’s painstaking technique with new materials, such as PET film, thread and collage. www.ambreenbutt.com
Cindy Sherman Bishop is a visual artist, filmmaker, and digital creative. Originally a software developer and a painter, her work ranges from creating new tools for artistic expression to realizing immersive, interactive environments. She received her MFA in Dynamic Media at Massachusetts College of Art in 2013, and is continuing to explore the intersection of art, video and technology at MIT with a fellowship at the Open Doc Lab @MITOpenDocLab. There, she has further developed the StoryBot family archive, which is now patent-pending, and has authored the Haven project, which facilitates 3D storytelling/prototyping in the browser. www.cindyshermanbishop.com
17th Round of Art on the Marquee (spring 2016)
Sean Bowes, Specimen Analysis
A sequel to my previous entry First Contact, this piece continues the story of an extraterrestrial encounter on earth. In this installment, the alien species has taken a human sample aboard their ship for study. We see the figure suspended within the chamber of the alien analytical device as it’s mechanical parts crank, pulse, spark, and steam up while processing the specimen’s data.
Sean is Graphic Designer and Animator. Since graduating Keene State College with a BFA in Graphic Design and Studio Art in 2013, Sean has spent the past 2.5 years living and working in Boston. By day he is a Senior Graphic Designer with Back Bay digital marketing agency Gupta Media, and by night he animates for Zebbler Studios projection mapped concert visuals and VJs at electronic music events around the city.
Devon Bryant, Rube Goldberg Machine
This video piece is a pure experiment. Using only the physics in the program, how long can I make a chain reaction? The results are a beautiful and pointless sequence that I believe would make even Rube Goldberg smile.
Devon Bryant is a multi media artist based in Boston, MA. He is best know for large scale projection mapped projects and works nationally. Devon is a project manager for Zebbler Studios and projection coordinatior for Illuminus Festival.
Frank Floyd, Filmstrip
Film Strip is about the evolution of cinema, from the era of it’s inception through today. The Marquee itself is turned into a virtual filmstrip, and the viewer sees the action unfold cel by cel, with the film’s apparatus is revealed on the lower portion. The characteristics of film and its projection (celluloid, light flicker, etc) are interestingly contrasted upon the Marquee screens themselves.
Frank Floyd is a visual artist, filmmaker, and videographer born and based in Boston. Having earned a BFA with distinction from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Floyd worked as an Avid Editor in advertising companies in Boston and New York City, including for Sundance Channel from 2000-2005. Frank continues to work artistically and professionally, producing videos for clients such as Twitter, and Primark, and exhibiting nationally and internationally, most recently in Havana, Cuba and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Frank Horton and Ruoyu Guo, Lonesome Cowboy
“A grape is changed by living with other grapes.” – Old Western Proverb
Frank Horton is a media artist and filmmaker. Born in Arlington, Virginia, Frank grew up in the metropolitan area of Washington D.C. He attended college at Vanderbilt University, where he majored in psychology while also working in a neuroscience lab researching mental links between mental illness and creativity. In 2011, he and a business partner were awarded the Boston University School of Communication’s Harold G. Buchbinder Grant for innovation in media. In 2013, he and two classmates were awarded a Riley Development Grant for their work on a short documentary project. In 2015, he graduated with a MFA degree in the Media Art from Emerson College.
Ruoyu Guo is a filmmaker who focuses on directing, cinematography, graphic design and editing. His works range from short narrative film, and documentary to commercial shorts and animation. He also has extensive experience serving on the production team of a live broadcasts TV show. As a media artist Guo earned his Bachelor of Art in Television & Cinema from Hong Kong Baptist University. While working for an advertising company for a year in China, the media production experience sparked his desire to pursue a master’s degree in filmmaking overseas. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in Media Art at Emerson College in 2015.
Dennis Miller, Strip Tease
Strip Tease is a site-specific work created for the Marquee in 2016. It uses a video of a film strip processed in several different ways to create a band of highly colorful images moving across the screens at contrasting rates of speed.
Dennis H. Miller is a composer and animator on the faculty of Northeastern University. His works often reflect principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual realm.
Tamika Reid, As One Door Closes…
“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.” – Alexander Graham Bell
Tamika Reid is a visual artist currently living and working in Boston, MA. Her current works deconstruct the archetypes of women of color, and recreate them as people who are rarely acknowledge or imagined. Her whimsical and graphic work has been featured in a group exhibition at Warehouse Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
Catherine Siller, Make Me
When I close the computer and walk away, what traces of the digital world do I carry with me? Make Me deals with the proliferation of projections that we encounter and create in digital space: projected images and text, and along with these literal projections, projected societal ideals and projected versions of ourselves. The work invites viewers to consider how the images that we take in affect how we see ourselves and our world.
Catherine Siller is an artist and performer whose work investigates the relationship between digital culture, the body, and identity. She has exhibited and performed her work throughout the United States and abroad and has been published in the experimental literary magazine, Infinity’s Kitchen (Issue 7, online). Siller holds an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University. For the 2013 spring semester she was the Mellon Fellow for Digital Media/Performance at Marlboro College in Marlboro, VT. She currently lives and works in Somerville, MA, and is the recipient of a 2016 Somerville Arts Council Fellowship in Interrelated Media. For more information: http://catherinesiller.com/
Sarah Trahan, Pulling Threads
As an artist who works with textiles and found objects, I often find myself focused on creating small-scale details; a row of tiny stitches or a corner that needs to be folded in just the right way. This project presented an interesting challenge in that it offered an opportunity to subject a part of my artistic process to a drastic scale shift, converting what are normally hair-thin threads and small bits of fabric into large-scale projections. The resulting videos are variations on a scene in which my hand uses tweezers to repetitively remove strands of thread from a piece of fabric; similar to the rhythm of stitching, which also pulls thread. The work was shot through the lens of a magnifying glass to further enlarge details and highlight the movements of the small pieces of fabric as they are being deconstructed, bit by bit. I am interested in the possible interactions that may happen between the micro-sized subject and the macro-sized platform; in taking an action that is impossible to see fully with the naked eye and enlarging it on a larger-than-life set of screens.
I am an artist and educator who grew up in the Midwest reading, doodling in notebooks and daydreaming. In 2006 I received a BFA from the College For Creative Studies and followed soon after with an MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008. Following graduate school, I spent many years as a faculty member of the Photography Department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI. While teaching in Metro Detroit, my creative endeavors also included helping found the city’s first community Hackerspace, OmniCorpDetroit; a collectively-run studio / maker / creative space in the city’s vibrant Eastern Market neighborhood. As of 2015 I practice and reside in Somerville, MA and am a faculty member of the Graphic Design Department at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA. My work has been featured in galleries across the United States, including Portland, OR, Detroit, MI and New York, NY. I am published in a variety of online/print publications internationally; most recently you can find me in Alchemy: The Art and Craft of Illustration, a collection of mixed media illustration published by Gingko Press, 2016.
16th Round of Art on the Marquee (winter 2015)
Sarah Bliss, Guy Fawkes Night
Guy Fawkes Night offers a meditation on the role of ritual in contemporary culture, its propensity for adaptation and co-optation, and the experience of spectacle that increasingly takes the place of meaningful communal expression.
Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Bonfire Night and Firework Night, is an annual commemoration of Gunpowder Treason Day observed on November 5, primarily in Great Britain. It dates to 1605, when it was established to commemorate the foiling of an attempt to restore Catholic rule through assassination of the Protestant King James I via the explosion of stocks of gunpowder hidden in London’s House of Lords. The gunpowder was guarded by Catholic Guy Fawkes, who was captured, tortured and hanged.
When created, Guy Fawkes Night fortuitously met another deep social need: it offered a ritual replacement for the Celtic festival of Samhain that marks the passage from harvest to the beginning of winter. Pagan Samhain had been cleaned up and appropriated by the Christian church, which transformed it into All Hallow’s Eve and All Saints Day. Guy Fawkes Night offered a return to Samhain’s lusty ritual embrace of fire to destroy and renew. Originally rife with class-based confrontations and raucous anti-Catholic violence, including the burning of effigies of the Pope, over the centuries Guy Fawkes Night has become sanitized and is increasingly conflated with contemporary commercialized celebrations of Halloween.
Footage for Guy Fawkes Night was shot on Guy Fawkes Night 2014 on the Denholm town common in the Scottish Borders of Scotland. Denholm’s celebration boasted both an enormous bonfire and fireworks.
Sarah Bliss is a filmmaker and artist with a background in religious studies. Her projects utilize the methods of experimental ethnography to investigate desire, time, memory, place, and the body, while engaging both personal and social history. Her work is often three-dimensional, immersive, and site-specific, and has been screened, exhibited and published internationally. Bliss has been recognized by a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Sculpture/ Installation/New Media; a fellowship from Scotland’s Alchemy Film Festival; and by the Brazilian Azorean Prize of Plastic Arts. Recent screenings include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan; the Seattle Art Fair; and Artspace Projects in Sydney, Australia. Bliss received her M.T.S from Harvard Divinity School, and teaches video production at Greenfield Community College.
http://sarahblissart.com/
Sean Bowes, First Contact
Sean is Graphic Designer and Animator. Since graduating Keene State College with a BFA in Graphic Design and Studio Art in 2013, Sean has spent the past 2.5 years living and working in Boston. By day he is a Senior Graphic Designer with Back Bay digital marketing agency Gupta Media, and by night he animates for Zebbler Studios projection mapped concert visuals and VJs at electronic music events around the city.
Scientists recently announced that they have been observing anomalous light fluctuations from a distant star KIC 8462852. One of the more compelling, albeit farfetched, theories is that intelligent extraterrestrial beings have built gigantic structures around the star, possibly to harvest solar energy. This opens a huge pandora’s box of possibility.
First Contact investigates this dichotomy of possibility, taking advantage of the two sides of the marquee to demonstrate two parallel realities. In one realm of possibility, the aliens are benevolent in their first contact, hoping to share information and technology to perpetuate all life that exists in the universe. The other scenario is far less desirable for us humans. The alien race is prepared to harvest ours solar system for its resources and we are no match for their high tech invasion.
http://seanbowes.com/
Jan Roberts-Breslin, What Burns What Doesn’t
Jan Roberts-Breslin is a media artist whose experimental video work has won awards at international and domestic festivals, been broadcast on PBS and exhibited at major contemporary art museums. She is the author of Making Media: Foundations of Sound and Image Production (Focal Press, 2003, 2008, 2012) and is a professor in Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston, where she currently serves as Interim Dean of Graduate and Professional Studies. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Film and Video Production from Temple University.
Fire comforts, cleanses, sustains until it doesn’t.
http://www.janrobertsbreslin.com/
Corey Corcoran, Drive Thru
In Drive-Thru, live-action video is combined with painted cardboard and cut foam to create a make-believe car wash.
Corey Corcoran is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited throughout the country and extensively in the Greater Boston area including group shows at LaMontagne Gallery, Suffolk University Art Gallery, deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Montserrat College of Art, and Boston Center for the Arts.
His work has been featured in publications such as the Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Artscope and Beautiful Decay. Corcoran received a BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and he is a 2011 recipient of a Clowes Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center.
www.coreycorcoran.com
Evelyn Eastmond, I Want To Clean My Tub Out Of Joy
Evelyn Eastmond is a multimedia artist and researcher in the Communications Design Group at the Viewpoints Research Institute and an adjunct professor in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work explores the lasting effects of trauma on the psyche and the body. She is constantly seeking ways to ease tension, be it between analog and digital materials, between the mind and the body, and between intentions and reality.
“I want to clean my tub out of joy” is a short video performance of the encoding of bodily tension into clay. Partly intuitive and partly directed, it is an interplay between body and material, showing residue, mark-making and the emergence of a shape as a result of the gestures. The remaining clay object is a record of the experience.
http://www.evelyneastmond.com/
Gina Kamentsky, Kinetic Clock Tower
Gina Kamentsky creates kinetic sculptures, which exist in the somewhat chaotic and messy real world and animated films for the screen where gravity is a bit less of a concern.
In her animated films, Gina seeks out the sweet spot where representation and surface push and pull each other like a two-headed lama. She pursues this by drawing and painting images directly on film stock, a technique, known as Direct Animation.
Her one of a kind automata and kinetic sculpture work incorporates found objects, metal and electro-mechanical components.
Gina exhibits regularly throughout the US. She has been included in exhibitions at the DeCordova Museum, The Boston Children’s Museum and at the ICA Boston. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including The Fuller Craft Museum. Her animation is in the collection of the IOTA Center in Los Angeles and is seen in festivals in the US and worldwide.
Roscoe Lamontagne, Modern Cowboy
Roscoe Lamontagne is a professional artist in Boston, Massachusetts. He has been a professional painter since he was 16 years old, and he has a BFA in computer animation. The artist is self employed and focuses on combining traditional art techniques with emerging technologies to give his clients forward thinking solutions. Some of his recent projects include an art Installation at MIT’s Ashdown House, and industrial design services for Harvard’s Dunster House. Roscoe is always trying to find new ways to solve creative problems.
My work intends to show a narrative with no definitive answers. It is an open invitation for people to connect with me aesthetically and theoretically. I derive satisfaction from knowing people can interpret my work in multiple ways based off their experiences. Whether it be splashing ink on a piece of paper, or spending 200 hours on a direct concept, I feel it is most important that the art mirrors all of our individual realities.
Fish McGill, Boston Harbor Robots
A submarine tour of all the robots that have been dumped into the bottom of the Boston Harbor over the years. This under the sea panorama moves the viewer through the harbor floor for ½ a league.
Fish McGill is a Bostonian designer devoted to drawing to tell stories about the world around us. He merges broad skills with deep experience in collaborative team-oriented design work that informs and delights the target audience. Fish holds an MFA in Design and a BFA with honors from MassArt. See more of his work at fishmcgill.com.
Allison Maria Rodriguez, A Poem For Lonesome George
Allison Maria Rodriguez is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary multi-media artist and filmmaker. She received her MFA from Tufts University/SMFA and holds a BA in Language, Literature and Culture from Antioch College in OH, obtained also through study at Oxford University in England and Kyoto Seika University in Japan. Her work has been exhibited throughout the country and extensively in the New England area, in both traditional and non-traditional art spaces. Her award-winning film “In Between” premiered in New York City at the NewFilmakers Spring Festival 2010, and went on to screen in various venues across the country. Rodriguez has taught courses in media production in a variety of contexts and is the Community Media Training Coordinator at Cambridge Community Television. She has curated/co-curated several local group exhibitions and screenings, predominantly via work in artist collectives such as the Boston LGBTQIA Artist Alliance and the former Axiom Group.
A Poem for Lonesome George is a multi-media video installation designed specifically for the Marquee that exists as a poetic memorial to Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island tortoise subspecies, who passed away in captivity at a research station in the Galapagos on June 24th, 2012. For over forty years George lived as the last of his kind on earth and he became an icon for conservation efforts across the globe. With his passing there is the finality of extinction. The memorial centers upon the symbolism of the Japanese cherry blossom, beautiful and fleeting, as a representation of the ephemeral. In this context the blossoms function as a reminder of the transience of existence, the fragility of the earth’s balance, and the failure of our responsibility to nature.
Rebecca Wasilewski and Ben Pender-Cudlip, Good / Better: Why / Why Not?
Good/Better : Why/Why Not? is a visual exploration of a minor epiphany that has caused major effects in my life. Curious and cautious by nature, I have been well served by always asking why, but that eventually lead to over-validating all my decisions. I was getting bogged down by justifying daily minutia, choices in my art practice, and major life decisions. A few years ago, I made a hasty, ridiculous drawing to use as a postcard. Anticipating a confused reaction, I added, “Sometimes it’s better to ask why not?” and dropped it in the mail. This revelation became a breakthrough in and outside the studio. By inverting the Why?, our patterns are disrupted and analyzed, and new actions are provoked. Why not? gives greater flexibility in responding, deciding, and creating. Also, listing reasons why something should not be often reveals clearer and fewer choices, leading to quicker and more instinctive resolutions.
In Good/Better, this playful but profound dialogue unfolds. The lively, metaphoric video demands attention. Why? fades in slowly and is prolonged; it is the mental rut we unconsciously trace again and again. That line of thinking is cut, there is a dark pause, and finally Why Not? replaces Why?, attacking our query from the opposite direction.
To develop this custom marquee piece, I teamed up with Ben Pender-Cudlip. The imagery in Good/Better is previously unseen footage from our ongoing film series Chromatic Aberrations. The HD video was shot live and uses no animation or digital manipulation except for speed adjustments. I hope viewers remain mentally engaged with Good/Better’s broad implications well beyond its short duration. At the very least, the piece substantiates itself in a most literal way: A passerby may wonder, “Why? Why is there such a strange video playing on these enormous public screens?” The simplest counter is, “Well, why not?”
Rebecca Wasilewski is a multidisciplinary artist working mainly in painting, drawing, printmaking, and video. Consistent themes running throughout her diverse work include shifting micro- and macroscopic perspectives; universal interconnectedness; being wholly present each moment; and the balance of action, intuition and thought. She holds a BFA from Boston University, exhibits mainly in the Boston area and New England, and has work in private collections across the country and abroad. Outside her studio, Rebecca has worked as a teaching artist, letterpress printer, installation artist, and graphic designer for music groups. View one of her large installations locally (33 Agganis Way, Boston) and more of her portfolio at www.rebeccawailewski.com
Ben Pender-Cudlip is an artist, documentary filmmaker, and director in Boston, Massachusetts. His work has appeared on public television and in film festivals internationally. Experienced in all aspects of non-fiction production, he specializes in directing and shooting cinéma vérité and observational documentary. Ben graduated from Bard College at Simon’s Rock. www.unrenderedfilms.com
Rebecca and Ben’s collaborations have been shown in various galleries, appeared in the magazine Make8elieve, and a select few can be viewed at vimeo.com/beckwas
15th Round of Art on the Marquee (fall 2015)
Madeleine Altmann, Crystal Lake
Madeleine Altmann has been active in visual arts for most of her life. Starting off in photography she moved on to television, interactive telecommunications and video art. Along the way she has exhibited her work around the world and accumulated a variety of kudos including awards from the American Film Institute and Sony Pictures.
Born and raised in Brazil and England, she moved to the USA to attend Hampshire College for undergraduate studies in film and video. She went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from The San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Professional Studies Degree from New York University, where she received the “Interactive Media Pioneer Award.”
Altmann now resides with her family in the Boston area of the USA. She continues to travel the world and pursue her interest in art.
Devon Bryant, Lucent Crystal
Lucent Crystal is a meditation on color and light. Using 3-d software the marquee is transformed into an explosion of reflected and refracted light shimmering through translucent crystalline fragments. This piece is intended to give the logical mind a pause from specific content and allow it to rest in the pure beauty of color and form.
Devon Bryant received his Bachelor’s in Studio for Interrelated Media from the Massachusetts College of Art and design in 2003. Specializing in projection mapped sculptures, stage sets, and animation content, Bryant has been the project Manager for Zebbler Studios since 2011. Bryant has taken part in professional national touring VJ with EOTO since 2013 using projection mapped stage sculptures and has been a contributor and curator for Glitch Gallery since 2013.
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Corey Corcoran, Fish Food
In Fish Food, live-action video is combined with sculpted, hand-drawn, and digital elements to create a tank full of hungry critters.
Corey Corcoran is a mixed-media artist and illustrator. His work has been exhibited throughout the country and extensively in the Greater Boston area including group shows at LaMontagne Gallery, Suffolk University Art Gallery, deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, and Montserrat College of Art.
His work has been featured in publications such as the Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, and Beautiful Decay.
Corey Corcoran is a mixed-media artist and illustrator. His work has been exhibited throughout the country and extensively in the Greater Boston area including group shows at LaMontagne Gallery, Suffolk University Art Gallery, deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Montserrat College of Art, and Boston Center for the Arts. His work has been featured in publications such as The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, and Beautiful Decay. Corcoran received a BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and he is a 2011 recipient of a Clowes Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center.
Kristine Ericson, Drew Seyl, Ashley Takacs, Marquee Mark: a sign about signs
Boston is a city of parts, with neighborhood landmarks articulating local differences. The marquee at the convention center is Boston’s latest beacon, acting as a gateway to the city for visitors and locals. Marquee Mark uses the marquee to pay homage to all of Boston’s signs, exploring how through lights, graphics, and movement they activate the city’s most beloved spaces.
Kristine Ericson, Drew Seyl, and Ashley Takacs met at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where they learned about Max Bill, became designers, and had adventures. They each received their Masters in Architecture in 2015.
Michael Lewy, Office Chair
Office Chair reveals to us the trials and tribulations of a lonely office chair.
Michael Lewy is an artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video and computer graphics. He received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1996; He has been working at MIT as an office adminsitrator since 2000 and also works as an illustrator for such clients as the New York Times book review and HiLow books. He is the author of Chart Sensation, a book of power point charts and has shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Pacific Film Archives and Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston. He currently lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with his wife and daughter.
Robert Maloney, Cityscapes
Cityscapes is an animated video piece composed from a recent series of monoprints inspired by the urban landscape. The ever evolving city is a constant source of inspiration that I find myself returning to with this piece. Our visual landscape is in a constant state of flux, sometimes the buildings and weathered structures crumble over long periods of time while new towers and bridges are seemingly erected overnight. This urban transformation is like a continuous life cycle constantly being reborn over and over again around us.
Robert Maloney is a Boston mixed media artist and instructor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Robert received his Masters of Fine Arts from Massart through their interdisciplinary Summer Low Residency MFA program. Robert’s 2D and 3D constructions incorporate elements of the urban landscape, typography, topography and architecture. Many of his pieces straddle the line between a structure being torn down and a structure being erected. Robert was recently included in the Fenway 30 Second Cinema and the 2015 Illuminus Festival.
Matthew Shanley, The Game of Late Night Working Life
With The Game of Late Night Working Life I am embracing the cliché. Conway’s Game of Life is a classic example of a cellular automaton where in each cycle a cell “lives” or “dies” based on the state of the cells surrounding it. I’ve taken this idea and made it play out in the windows of a skyscraper (the nearby Atlantic Wharf building, whose form is a bit like that of this marquee screens). By applying the wellknown Game of Live to an office building I want to invite musings on the social drives involved in our work lives. Plus, it’s amusing to watch these windows blinking on and off.
Matthew Shanley is a multimedia artist whose range of practice includes sound, installation, public art, generative computer projects, video, internet art, and print. He holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art, and a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He currently resides in Boston, MA.
Aldo Tambellini, The Circle in the Square
The Circle in the Square, is a performance which uses a swimmer, a black floating inflatable in a pool and the projection of two of my 1960 hand-painted films, part of the Black Film Series and about 60 lumagrams. I projected the films unto the pool of water at night. The flickering of the films, the shimmering of the lights with contrasts between black and light and the smooth gliding of the swimmer created a hypnotic event. The swimmer was documented from several angles at the side of the pool. One of the video angles was simultaneously projected on a large screen at the end of the pool. The audience sat around the pool. Further away from the pool, as a continuation of the projection environment, were a seven foot black inflatable balloon and a smaller 3 foot inflatable unto which my lumagrams were projected. The projection bled into the environment creating orbs and auras all around. This gave the area a very space-like atmosphere and the black balloons, in the black of night, created a sense of the mystery of the Cosmos.
Aldo Tambellini was born in Syracuse, New York in 1930. In 1959, Aldo moved to New York City’s Lower East Side. He founded the underground, “counter-culture” group, “Group Center,” which organized alternative ways and non-traditional presentation of the artists’ work to the public. He pioneered in the video art movement in the late 60’s. In 1965, he began painting directly on film beginning his “Black Film Series” of which, “Black TV,” (made using both film and video) was the winner of the International Grand Prix, Oberhausen Film Festival, 1969.
Simultaneously, Aldo began a series of “Electromedia Performances” which organically brought together, projected paintings, film, video, poetry, light, dance, sound and live musicians. He founded the Gate Theatre, the only daily public theatre showing avant-garde independent filmmakers and in 1967, he co-founded with Otto Piene, the Black Gate, a second theatre which presented live multi-media (Electromedia) performances and installations.
From 1976 to 1984, Aldo was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he conducted workshops and organized with “communicationsphere” a series of international interactive Media Communication Projects. Since ’84, he has concentrated on poetry and performing his poetry with music and video projection.
In 2005 Aldo produced a digital film, “Listen” which incorporates his anti-war and political poetry, animation/video and film clips. This film won First Place in the “Short Experimental Film by an Independent Filmmaker” category at the New England Film Festival in October 2005 and at the Syracuse International Film Festival in 2006. In 2007 Aldo was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award” from Syracuse University at the 2007 Syracuse International Film Festival. The same year he received the Keys to the City of Cambridge from Mayor Ken Reeves in recognition of his contribution to the cultural environment of Cambridge.
In 2010 Aldo was awarded a Gold medal from the Italian Government, Lucchesi Nel Mondo Organization, in recognition of his lifetime achievement in the Arts.
Ellen Wetmore, Entreaty
Entreaty explores the liminal space of belonging – that edge of light, of admittance.
Ellen Wetmore’s artworks inspire a blend of humor and horror. Her work focuses on lived experience blended with well-honed paranoia, using her body as the primary vehicle. Wetmore’s video projects have been featured in screenings at the Sandwell Arts Trust in the West Midlands, UK, Ciné Lumière in London, the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island, NY, Currents, Santa Fe, New Mexico, CologneOff, Cologne, Germany, Videoholica in Bulgaria, and the MIA screen in Cairo. Her most recent work is on the 80-foot tall 7-screen marquee at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. She is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow and a finalist for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston solo show award. In 2014 she was the subject of an exhibition at the Sarah Doyle Gallery of Brown University and in 2015 she will have a solo show at Living Arts of Tulsa. She is a summer 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome. Her work can be found online at www.ellenwetmore.iwarp.com, and on Vimeo. She lives in Groton, Massachusetts and is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Zebbler (Peter Berdovsky), Pushing Through
Backlit entities are pushing through the screen, ghostly human shapes trapped on the other side of the divide.
Are the beings simply set aflutter by their desire to escape the digital enclosure?
Or perhaps there is a message in their movement – an urgent need to relate something to us, to share and to warn?
Who can tell what messages these beings may share with us, if they succeed pushing through into our world?
They may keep trying, but the screen, even though seemingly elastic, will just succeed in pushing them back, every single time.
So it will all remain a mystery forever. Just their reminder will be left in our memories. That behind the digital veil the cyber entities wait to make contact.
Zebbler is a multimedia artist. He was born in Belarus, matured in Boston, and has since uprooted himself into a semi-permanent tumbleweed with no particular location. He is one of the U.S. video mapping pioneers, having introduced a few of the first video mapped touring concert stage designs (Shpongletron stage in 2011 and EOTO Lotus stage in 2013). To help with ever more complicated projects, he founded Zebbler Studios – a company specializing in large scale video mapping and interactive LED installations. Some of their works include video mapping of the Boston Public Library for the 2014 NYE countdown, ongoing artistic contributions to an annual hacker conference in Las Vegas (DEF CON), and various sculptural video mapped music festival stage designs.
Currently, Zebbler tours with his own a/v act Zebbler Encanti Experience and teaches Music Video Production and VJ courses at Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain.
14th Round of Art on the Marquee (spring 2015)
For this round, our first-ever curated round, we paired traditional fine artists with digital artists to collaboratively create new works.
Kristina Goransson (felt artist) and Rob Gonsalves (artist, inventor, engineer), Pathways
Pathways is a computer animation by new media artist Rob Gonsalves and traditional artist Anna Kristina Goransson. Based on a pair of “awl punched paper” pieces by Anna Kristina, the animation shows a progression of falling motion revealing an organic pattern. This is followed by a rising motion revealing a second organic pattern. The series of punched holes is highlighted by orange swirls on the way down and green swirls on the way back up. Displayed against the Boston skyline, Rob’s and Kristina’s Pathways appears in all its sparkling beauty. The animation was created using openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding. The colored swirls were created using an addon called ofxFlowTools by Matthias Oostrik.
Rob Gonsalves is an artist, inventor, and engineer. Ever since his parents brought home a Tandy Color Computer in 1982, Rob has been hooked on programming. He honed his interests in the arts, music, and computers in the Boston area. After attending Northeastern and UMass Lowell, he joined Avid Technology as their 15th employee. Since 1992, Rob has been creating and showing original video installations, employing unique interaction techniques, often showing his sense of humor. Rob has shown his interactive video installations at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery, the Suffolk University Art Gallery, and the Smithsonian Annmarie Garden.
Anna Kristina Goransson spent her childhood in Sweden. She studied fine arts and received her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. She received her MFA in Fiber Arts at University of Massachusetts. During graduate school, Kristina spent the first year exploring the different textile techniques until she found felt. Discovering the possibilities that felting had to offer, she spent the rest of her time in graduate school creating felted sculpture. Kristina has shown her work at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery, the Dedee Shattuck Gallery, and the Center for the Visual Arts in Denton Texas.
Ria Brodell (painter) and Georgie Friedman (interdisciplinary artist), Future Fossils
An octopus, seahorse and polar bear must adapt, as the ocean dries up and the landscape changes. They are future fossils.
Georgie Friedman is an interdisciplinary video and video installation artist who considers the psychological and physical relationships individuals have to various uncontrollable natural forces. She creates experiential pieces that highlight our interconnections to the elements and our relationships to natural, built and digital environments. Friedman received her MFA from SMFA, Boston/Tufts University, and her BA from UC Santa Cruz. She was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Sculpture/Installation (2013). www.georgiefriedman.com
Ria Brodell is an artist based in Boston whose current body of work addresses issues of gender, sexuality and identity. Brodell attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, received a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle (’02) and an MFA from the Museum School/Tufts University (’06). Brodell was recently awarded an Artadia Award (’14), an MCC Fellowship in Drawing (’14), an SMFA Traveling Fellowship (’13), and an Artist’s Resource trust Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation (‘12) in support of their current series, Butch Heroes. Brodell has had solo and group exhibitions throughout the U.S. including: Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles (’10); Judi Rotenberg, Boston (’09); Swarm Gallery, Oakland (’08); Aqua Art, Miami (’08); de Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA (’07) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (’05). Brodell’s work has appeared in ARTNews, The Boston Globe, Beautiful Decay, New American Paintings,
Art New England, Art Slant: San Francisco, Daily Serving, The Phoenix and Boston Magazine. www.riabrodell.com
Kristin Breiseth (print maker) and Mark Stock (artist, scientist, programmer), Untitled (blue chaos)
Untitled (blue chaos) is a short digital video work for the seven-screen marquee at the Boston Convention and Exposition Center, and the result of a collaboration between traditional artist Kristin Breiseth and new media artist Mark J. Stock. As the piece opens, several hand-drawn rakes scrape across the screens, dragging varying blue-to-white streaks behind them. Subsequent rakes begin to disintegrate at their edges as they progress, spawning many interacting curved traces. Ultimately, the forms devolve into a hyperactive chaos which obscures their origins.
The approaches to the artistic processes of the two artists are clearly on display—where Breiseth’s focus is on formal concerns and the emotional response of the viewer to the piece, free from consciously-imposed narratives, Stock’s chaotic dynamics seek to illuminate the interactions of the building blocks of nature and physics, where motion and form are united.
Mark J. Stock is an artist, scientist, and programmer who creates still and moving images combining elements of nature, physics, chaos, computation, and algorithm. He has been showing work since 2000 and has been in over 80 curated and juried exhibitions since 2001, including Ars Electronica, ASPECT Magazine, Illuminus Festival, and seven SIGGRAPH Art Galleries. He has spoken at numerous scientific, graphics, and art conferences and workshops, and has published original research in a variety of fields. Mark completed his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan in 2006 and works out of his studio in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is represented in California by SENSE Fine Art.
Kristin Breiseth was born in California and grew up in New England. She received her BA in Religion and Women’s Studies from Dartmouth College and her BFA in Printmaking from the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, is in numerous private and corporate collections, and has been featured in the juried publication New Amerian Paintings. She currently lives in Arlington, Mass. and works out of the Joy Street Studios in Somerville, Mass.
Hakim Raquib (photographer) and Dennis Miller (composer, new media artist), Adrift
Adrift is a Homage to people of the desert world wide. Also, a testament of their endurance, moving through the daily transitions of life, without anchors, through constant renewal of the landscape, throughout global turmoil, conflicts….The people of the dunes continual to survive, floating above all , the weight of being confined. This lifestyle is fleeting, as modernityhas away of changing even how sand and water flows.
Hakim Raquib was born in Gatun, Panama and has been living and working in Boston since 1970. He is a member of the African American Mater Artist-in-Residence Program at Northeastern University and has exhibited regionally at the Boston Public Library, the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Ayer Lofts Art Gallery, the Addison Gallery at Andover, Boston University, the de Cordova Museum, the Institute for Contemporary Art, Bunker Hill Community College and Roxbury Community College. Raquib’s work is in both private and public collections: Polaroid Foundation, International Center for Photography New York, Boston University Photographic Resource Center, Museum for the Center of African American Artists, and the de Cordova Museum.
Dennis H. Miller is a composer and animator living in the suburbs of Boston. He is on the faculty of Northeastern University.
Jordan Piantedosi (painter, muralist) and Kawandeep Virdee (multimedia artist, engineer, scientist), Gemini Garden
Gemini Garden is a short story about two twin seedlings that grow from the ground together. They both start out as the seeds of buried eyes, with hair for a root. After the sparkle of inspiration twinkles their heads to life, blue clouds float up and the trunks of the twins appear, studded with flowers. The Treeple bloom green leaves and various flowers, attract flies, and mushrooms and worms cover the ground. Co-adaptation and sharing sunlight, a collaborative work by Kawandeep Virdee and Jordan Piantedosi. The void of the universe is not the darkness we imagined. It is maternal and nurturing. The soil, the wind, the trees, the flowers, the bugs, and the stars, we witness the burst of a sparkling ecosystem.
Kawandeep Virdee was raised in the DC metro area of Maryland, with a twin and by parents who grew up in Kenya and the UK. DC taught him how to love a city. He’d bike around, finding exuberant people and welcoming places. Virdee was there studying patterns and abstractions via math. Then, Portland expressed the beauty of art, community, and the amazing experiences we could create collectively. There was an optimism around the internet and technology to make wondrous things. Cambridge & Somerville showed Virdee how to build, surrounding me with ambitious people. He learned how to make things in informal social ways – at hackerspaces, meetups, or wandering the Media Lab. Now he travels often for conferences, artworks, collaborations, and events.
Jordan Piantedosi – The compulsive pattern work that dapples her paintings is both prayer and prostration to the invisible worlds and their sticky membranes that we all brush up against. Jordan pays respectful homage to the five pounds of bacteria that ride around in our guts, for without them we would surely perish. Eroticism begins at the cellular level, with our gametes, the crystal chalice and the golden dagger without which we would be but an army of clones. Jordan spits into her acrylic paint so that in the future, her artwork may be used to successfully clone her, and she might live again. Like every other artist, she longs for biological immortality, but will settle for cultural relevance, attention, a stiff drink, and a pile of money.
13th Round Art on the Marquee (Winter 2015):
Nickolas Peter Chelyapov, Marcelo Coelho, Sean Michael Dorian, Metabolic
Metabolic is a series of visual studies on the unraveling of chemical reactions through space and time. This is an ongoing collaboration between artists Marcelo Coelho, Nickolas Peter Chelyapov, and Sean Michael Dorian.
The work is inspired by the works of filmmakers Norman McLaren, Len Lye, and the Whitney brothers, as well as elements of abstract expressionist works, such as Matisse’s fluid figures and Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.
Using a custom designed tabletop and macro camera rig, we create real-time visuals effects using a variety of responsive materials, such as water, ferrofluid, ink, iron fillings, and soap. In a form of puppetry, materials are animated by hand within the confines of a petri dish, where they move, react, shatter into pieces and coalesce, generating an infinite variety of forms and behaviors.
This continuous motion and flow of abstract patterns leads the viewer into a rich associative state, where shapes adopt fleeting recognizable features that perpetually fade in and out of significance.
The actions recalls the movements and narratives of athletics – from the macro: running, jumping, pushing, pulling; to the micro: cellular processes of synthesis, division, metabolism.
Controlling the visuals by hand lends the motion a personified quality of gesture and narrative.
Marcelo Coelho- Spanning a wide range of media, processes, and scales, Marcelo Coelho’s work explores the boundaries between matter and information, shedding light on how our senses shape and limit our experiences.
Marcelo Coelho’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including Ars Electronica, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Design Miami/, The Creators Project, Riflemaker Gallery, Johnson Trading Gallery, MIT Museum, Waddesdon Manor, among others. His work can also be found in private collections including the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, The Rothschild Collection and the Tech Museum of Innovation. His work has also won several awards, including Prix Ars Electronica [Next Idea] and Honorary Mention for Interactive Art, the W Hotels Designer of the Future Award, and Honorable Mention from ID Magazine Design Review.
Originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil, Marcelo Coelho received a Bachelor in Computation Arts with highest honors from Concordia University, and a Master and Doctorate in Media Arts and Sciences from the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab.
Marcelo Coelho currently spends his time between the USA and Brazil, working on social wearables, an audiovisual engine for real-time material animation, and the 2016 Paralympics Ceremonies in Rio de Janeiro. http://www.cmarcelo.com/
Nickolas Peter Chelyapov- Nickolas Peter Chelyapov is an interactive art director with 10 years of experience in entertainment advertising, information architecture, and mobile applications. He has taught several workshops at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Some of his clients include Google, Reuters, Harvard, Sony, Electronic Arts, Paramount, Universal, and Focus Features.
In an effort to expand his creative vision off the screen, he began a curatorial project called Curious Sound Objects in the summer of 2014.
The events showcase interactive multi-sensory art objects that play with perception, and evoke wonder, joy, sensuality, narrative, and the fantastical. The third in the series will take place May 9, 2015. http://nickolaspeter.com/
Sean Olszewski- Sean Olszewski is a Boston-based artist who explores art through the mediums of software, music, and literature. His primary focus, regardless of medium or project, is on intentionality. He believes art to be an exercise in intentionality, and believes that the best art comes from the processes of individuals who spend the most time planning and being logical with their work. When he isn’t writing music or programming software, he can be found getting artistic inspiration from challenging and awkward yoga poses.
Corey Corcoran, Climbing
In Climbing, the marquee becomes a colorful indoor rock climbing wall on which a parade of figures ascend.
Corey Corcoran is a mixed-media artist and illustrator. His work has been exhibited throughout the country and extensively in the Greater Boston area including group shows at LaMontagne Gallery, Suffolk University Art Gallery, deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, and Montserrat College of Art. His work has been featured in publications such as The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, and Beautiful Decay. Corcoran received a BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and he is a 2011 recipient of a Clowes Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. See his work at coreycorcoran.com.
Frank Floyd, Tennis Anyone?
On the upper screens a tennis player is serving a ball, in slow motion. Above him (perhaps his thought, or focus?) is the recently formulated equation for the perfect tennis serve. On the lower screens a squash player is volleying; the ball seems to bounce off the marquee itself, turning it into a squash court.
Frank Floyd is a visual artist, filmmaker, and videographer born and based in Boston. Having earned a BFA with distinction from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Floyd worked as an Avid Editor in advertising companies in Boston and New York City, including for Sundance Channel from 2000-2005. Recently Floyd completed his “The Clocks” series, 12 time-pieces for 2012, which included an installation at MassArt’s Godine Family Gallery, a collaborative online work with Janet Kawada at Kingston Gallery, and a 3-hour video looping video installation (a collaboration with Kevin Sweet, jointly part of Sweet’s “Intervals” series). Frank continues to work artistically and professionally, producing videos for clients like Santander Bank, Twitter, and The Florida Keys Tourism Council.
Lina Maria Giraldo, Heartbeat
In this work I document people doing exercise with a sensor, which reads their heartbeat. I then use the bottom screens to visualize their heart rate by using the blooming of flowers. Athletes are displayed in the top screen with a blue sky and green grass background. With this piece I would like to explore the relation of exercise and life. Our body is a temple and our surroundings are an extension. I would like to create a visual statement that we are only one with nature and the sanctity of life is the same for a blade of grass, a flower or a person.
Visualizations are the trend of our modern culture. Most visualizations are usually flat line/ flashy graphics that are very cold and unicolor. While researching this piece, I found many visual interpretations of our heartbeat from the purely medical line graph to abstract 3D color. None however looked into the nature of a beating heart in the pure essence of maintaining life. This is why I decided to use the flower as a representation of life.
Lina Maria Giraldo is a Boston based Media Artist born in Colombia who holds a Master of Professional Studies on Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University where she was the recipient of both the Paulette Godard and the Tisch School Scholarships. She was awarded the Tsongas Scholarship at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she majored in Studio of interrelated Media (SIM) with Departmental Honors and Academic Distinction. Her work has been displayed in galleries, museums and shows as well as public spaces throughout Massachusetts, New York and Colombia. She has been highlighted in different news sources notably The Boston Globe, ABC news and WGBH. Lina was selected to be part of the John F. Kennedy Legacy Gallery in the category of the Arts and has received grants from the Hispanic Scholarship Foundation and the St Botolph Foundation. Recently she produced and was videographer for the interviews of several personalities among them Stephen King, Harry Belafonte, Madeleine Albright and Nancy Pelosi. She has produced content for the Art on the Marquee LED screen at the Massachusetts Convention Center and Fenway Cinema
www.linamariagiraldo.com
Amy Baxter MacDonald, Dive
“Dive” is a hand-drawn animation created in Adobe Flash. Our confident divers prance to the end of their springboards, jump, and swan dive into the lower panels on the opposite sides. I am taken with the poise and balance divers have, and with the way water transforms our skin tones and buoys us up after we land.
Amy Baxter MacDonald is an artist and adjunct instructor currently teaching animation at Montserrat College of Art and the New England Institute of Art. She was born in Haverhill, MA and raised in upstate New York, where her father coached swimming at Hamilton College. She continues to paint, draw, and create animated films from her studio in Boston’s Fort Point Artist Community.
Fish McGill, Basketball-achusetts
Dr. James Naismith invented the game of basketball in Springfield Massachusetts in 1891. Basketball has grown into a game played on every continent with surging popularity in the 21st century played by the world’s greatest athletes. Basketball-achusetts is an cartoon-y homage to legendary Bostonian basketball shooters, rebounders, shot blockers, great passers, and dunkers from the last 60 years. Everyone will get to take a shot, block a shot, grab a rebound, and hit the open guy in the corner for the win!
Fish McGill is a Bostonian drawer and designer. He has received commissions from Harmonix, MTV, The ICA, City of Boston, Nike, MassArt, MIT, Deitch Projects, Adobe, Bocoup, and more. He has been an artist in residence at Montserrat and twice at MassArt. Fish McGill has an MFA in Communication Design from the Dynamic Media Institute at MassArt and works for the design and innovation studio Continuum. See his work at fishmcgill.com.
Dennis Miller, In the Ring
In the Ring is a site-specific animation created for the Art on the Marquee program. It incorporates 3D motion tracking data in a virtual environment to simulate the movement of a group of boxers.
Dennis H. Miller is on the faculty of Northeastern University. His mixed-media artworks, which employ principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual domain, have been screened at venues throughout the world and are available for preview at www.dennismiller.neu.edu
Jeffu Warmouth, Locomotion Studies
Multiple iterations of the artist engage in athletic activities, including warmups, a boxing match, and a footrace. Based on motion studies by photographer Edweard Muybridge in the 1880s.
Jeffu Warmouth is a conceptual artist who creates work that asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media work has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Fitchburg Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Kaunas Photo Festival (Lithuania), MicroCineFest (Baltimore, MD), Art Interactive, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and the Experimenta Media Arts Tour originating in Melbourne, Australia.
12th Round Art on the Marquee (Winter 2014):
Sarah Bliss, Laundry Line
Shirts and undershorts hung on a line to dry are caught by gusts of wind. High above passersby, they billow, snap and surge. Deep, vibrant colors pop, and we’re swept up in the joyful, lyric dance. Laundry Line offers a playful respite from the chaotic stress of the urban grid and returns us to the simple pleasures offered through the body and senses: experiences we’ve become less and less accustomed to. The independent and hidden life of a work costume just like ours references the unseen body now freed of clothes — just as the clothes themselves are freed by the wind — and gives us a gentle tweak, reminding us of our daily masquerade. Laundry Line makes playful reference, as well, to the Marquee’s location in the Seaport district: these too, are sails in the wind.
Sarah Bliss is an artist and filmmaker who explores the relationships between body, place, language and memory, engaging both personal and social history. Bliss works in multiple media, including still and moving image, installation, sound, and writing. Her work has been recognized by a 2013 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Sculpture/ Installation; and by the Brazilian Azorean Prize of Plastic Arts. Recent and upcoming screenings include the Alchemy Film Festival, Scotland; TransArt Film Festival in Berlin; STIFF Seattle; Espaço Cultural ESPM in Porte Alegre, Brazil; Artspace Projects in Sydney, Australia; and the Creon Gallery in New York. Bliss is the recipient of full residency fellowship awards from the Cill Rialaig Project in Ireland, the Alchemy Film Festival in Scotland, and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches video production at Greenfield Community College. For more information: www.SarahBlissArt.com.
Corey Corcoran, The Claw
In Claw, the unique shape of the marquee is transformed to mimic the classic arcade game. Colorful toys are piled sky-high using digital and hand-drawn elements. Will the player nab the prize?
Corey Corcoran is a mixed-media artist and illustrator. His work has been exhibited throughout the country and extensively in the Greater Boston area including group shows at LaMontagne Gallery, Suffolk University Art Gallery, deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, and Montserrat College of Art. His work has been featured in publications such as The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, and Beautiful Decay. Corcoran received a BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and he is a 2011 recipient of a Clowes Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center.
Jon Forsyth, Dancing at Saint-Rémy
Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” painted at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, provides the backdrop for “Dancing at Saint-Rémy,” an ethereal dance among the stars. It features the abstracted forms of the artist and his wife waltzing together, accompanied by a chorus of smaller figures dancing in unison.
Jon Forsyth is a multimedia artist specializing in video, sculpture, photography and graphic arts. He teaches music video production at the Berklee College of Music, on their Boston and Valencia, Spain campuses, as well as information systems for UMass Lowell Online. He led a humanitarian documentary filmmaking workshop in Belize, and he has studied filmmaking at MassArt and marble sculpting in Tuscany, Italy.
Georgie Friedman, Digital Waterfall
Digitally altered video footage creates a faux waterfall or architectural fountain in the middle of the city. The imagery both follows and defies gravity, referencing the naturally occurring source and the constructed nature of the piece.
Georgie Friedman is an interdisciplinary video and video installation artist who considers the psychological and physical relationships individuals have to various uncontrollable natural forces. She creates experiential pieces that highlight our interconnections to the elements and our relationships to natural, built and digital environments. Friedman received her MFA from SMFA, Boston/Tufts University, and her BA from UC Santa Cruz. She was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Sculpture/Installation (2013) and this is her fourth public media art commissions for Art on the Marquee. Recent exhibits include: Into the Wind (solo), Foster Gallery, MA (2014), BRINK v1, Mills Gallery, MA (2013), Waves & Currents, Transylvania University, KY (2013), Moving Image Arts, The Armory Center for the Arts, CA (2012), Ripple Effect, Peabody Essex Museum, MA (2011-2012). She currently teaches in the Fine Arts and Film Studies programs at Boston College and in the Film/Video and Sculpture departments at MassArt. www.georgiefriedman.com
Bang Luu, Shoals
By reinterpreting the natural world through the lens of technology, I expose the allure of water and encourage viewers to contemplate their role in the changing physical landscape, thereby promoting environmental awareness. In order to capture nature’s complexity, I paint individual, pixilated, colored forms and layer them atop one another. These splotches, seen at a distance, are perceived as a united color system. They retain a painted border ring that segregates one color from another. Mimicking the water’s movements, simple, quivering images are simulated from microscopic observation then blown up and translated for the big screen. This video investigates the abundant complexities in nature and strives to make the unconscious and intangible known, experienced, and seen.
Bang Luu received her Bachelor of Arts from the College of the Holy Cross, MA, in Studio Arts, with a minor in Art History. Luu’s work links technology with various traditional mediums, tackling internal thoughts in response to the uncontrollable impact of the external world. Her work creates a transient artificial space that one can escape into, breaking away from the normative world. In 2014, she was featured in the group exhibition, “Alter Ego,” Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, Worcester, MA. Prior to this, her woodcuts were selected for the Arts Worcester College show in Worcester, MA. She is a Fifth-Year Fellow and works as teaching assistant for various courses in the Department of Fine Arts at Trinity College.
Fish McGill, Dance Grid
The Dance Grid is a tessellating disco floor of animated robots and doodads getting down in their own colored, glowing quadrants.
Fish McGill is a Bostonian drawer and designer. He has received commissions from Harmonix, MTV, The ICA, City of Boston, Nike, MassArt, MIT, Deitch Projects, Adobe, Bocoup, and more. He has been an artist in residence at Montserrat and twice at MassArt. Fish McGill has an MFA in Communication Design from the Dynamic Media Institute at MassArt. See his work at fishmcgill.com.
Dennis Miller, Spiro
Spiral is a site-specific piece composed for the Art on the Marquee project. The work transforms the screen array into a giant spirograph with morphing shapes and colors.
Dennis Miller is on the faculty of Northeastern University in Boston. His work illustrate principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual realm.
Jeff Warmouth, Pulleys
This 45 second video composition features multiple iterations of the artist as weights and bobs in a pulley system. Gears and wheels turn, which in turn move the various Jeffu up, down, or sideways. As always, this is a visual metaphor that uses the artist as a stand-in, everyman character to comment on the human condition and life in contemporary society.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based contemporary artist, and professor of Communications Media at Fitchburg State University, where he runs the Interactive Media & Game Design programs. Warmouth is a conceptual artist who creates work that asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media work has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Fitchburg Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Kaunas Photo Festival (Lithuania), MicroCineFest (Baltimore, MD), Art Interactive, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and the Experimenta Media Arts Tour originating in Melbourne, Australia.
Ellen Wetmore, Frescoes
This set of videos is inspired by the frescoes on the ceilings of the Uffizi museum in Florence, Italy. The videos mimic those tromp l’oeil scene effects, artificial surfaces, and collections of flora and fauna. As evident in my other works, elisions of space, time and fantastic dysmorphia are important themes. The largest vertical oval ocean scene was shot in Haifa, Israel. The other ocean scenes were shot on Plum Island, and the landscape is from Groton. All flowers, toads, and bugs were volunteers from my garden in Groton and safely returned.
11th Round Art on the Marquee (Fall 2014):
Corey Corcoran, Gutterball
In Gutterball, the unique shape of the marquee is transformed to mimic the lanes of a blowing alley. Each screen captures a different element of the classic pastime: pins being reset, bowling balls being returned, a case full of trophies, and players trying to make that perfect shot. Gutterball was created using digitally altered ink drawings.
With an extensive background in painting and drawing, much of Corcoran’s recent work aims to adapt imagery for animation, installation, or printed formats. His work has been exhibited throughout the country and the Greater Boston area including such venues as deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, La Montagne Gallery, FPAC Gallery, kijidome, and Frame 301 at Montserrat College of Art. Corcoran holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a Clowes Fellow (Vermont Studio Center). He lives and works in Boston. coreycorcoran.com
Dennis Miller, EQ
EQ is a site-specific video work that transforms the sounds of the city into pulsing patterns of light.
Dennis Miller is on the faculty of Northeastern University where he teaches courses in music and new media. His audiovisual works, which explore the application of principles drawn from music composition into the visual realm, have been screened at conferences and festivals around the world.
Frank Floyd, Brush Strokes
The artist is seen “inside” the marquee, painting onto its surface. The painting forms quickly through time-lapse; we soon see familiar iconic Boston scenes come alive. Picturesque landscapes are created from the Public Garden, to the Hancock Tower, to the North End and beyond. *This piece is dedicated to and inspired by the work of friend and Boston portrait painter Nick Ward.
Frank Floyd is a visual artist, filmmaker, and videographer born and based in Boston. Having earned a BFA with distinction from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Floyd worked as an Avid Editor in advertising companies in Boston and New York City, as well as for Sundance Channel from 2000-2005. Recently Floyd completed his “The Clocks” series, 12 time-pieces for 2012, which included an installation at MassArt’s Godine Family Gallery, a collaborative online work with Janet Kawada at Kingston Gallery, and a 3-hour video collaboration with Kevin Sweet, jointly part of Sweet’s “Intervals” series. Frank continues to work artistically and professionally, producing videos for such clients as Santander Bank, Twitter, and local non-profit The Fenway Alliance.
Jon Forsyth, Night Driving
Although headlights, streetlights and other aspects of night driving are designed for driver safety, they can appear beautiful, disorienting, or both, depending on your state of mind.
The images in “Night Driving” depict that duality, with movements and shapes that come from actual footage recorded at night from a moving vehicle. Those images have been manipulated and distorted to isolate and emphasize their patterns, colors and movements.
Jon Forsyth is a multimedia artist specializing in video, sculpture, photography and graphic arts. He teaches music video production at the Berklee College of Music, on their Boston and Valencia, Spain campuses, as well as information systems for UMass Lowell Online. He led a humanitarian documentary filmmaking workshop in Belize, and he has studied filmmaking at MassArt and marble sculpting in Tuscany, Italy.
Lana Z Caplan, Amuse: Future Teller
A fortune telling grandmother is asked for her predictions. As a premonition enters her head, a world of mystical colors and visions opens up, taking us floating into space to view earth from afar, as it heats up and…
This piece was inspired by my grandmother’s wisdom and childhood summers spent in boardwalk beach arcades. This 1930’s machine reminded me of the naysayers of climate change, who liken climate scientists and their predictions to fortune tellers. Regardless of the source, scientist or psychic, the predictions for the future on earth are similar, and grandmother was always right.
Lana Z Caplan is a film/video maker, photographer, new media and video installation artist. She has exhibited and screened her work in galleries, festivals, museums, basements and backyards all over the world. Caplan has a BA from Boston University and MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has been a member of the faculty of several colleges including Massachusetts College of Art of Design and University of California San Diego. To see more of her work, visit her website and Tumblr project: lanazcaplan.com, lanazcaplan.tumblr.com
Madeleine Altmann, Walking on Ice, Concord River, MA
I love to walk, as do so many people, and much of my current work aestheticizes this simple act. Walking is about movement as well as the sights that go by. I like traveling at a pace slow enough for my thoughts to breathe so that walking becomes a means of traversing the landscape of my mind. Since I always use my body for this action, I am able to experience the continuity of self amid the flux of the world that changes and therefore further understand their relationship to each other.
In all my recent work I am always dressed in red. It symbolizes ‘ the scarlet lettered’ woman from Hawthorn and alludes to biblical symbols of life and power. Additionally it’s visually striking (Nancy Reagan used it as her signature color during her years at the White House). This footage of a figure in red walking on ice from different angles was shot with a Hero GoPro camera on the frozen Concord River this past January 2014.
Madeleine Altmann has been active in visual arts for most of her life. Starting off in photography she moved on to television, interactive telecommunications and video art. Along the way she has exhibited her work around the world and accumulated a variety of kudos including awards from the American Film Institute and Sony Pictures.
Born and raised in Brazil and England, she moved to the USA to attend Hampshire College for undergraduate studies in film and video. She went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from The San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Professional Studies Degree from New York University, where she received the “Interactive Media Pioneer Award.”
Altmann now resides with her family in the Boston area of the USA. She continues to travel the world and pursue her interest in art.
Robert Maloney, Detrition
This deteriorated portrait is from a recent body of work based on the fragmented and fluid process of memory. I have become interested in the way that our memories and experiences accumulate and decline over time and how this retention of data affects each one of us in very different ways. As we accrue fresh units of knowledge, the memories of the distant past and the various points in-between are superimposed on top of one another and continuously deteriorate at different rates, some features rise while others recede. I have come to realize that everything that we have a connection to; from our physical surroundings to our human relationships, evolve and expand over time. Through the inevitable process of temporal erosion, the impact of our experiences reach their peak and eventually deteriorate. In the end, only a trace of these elements may remain as if they are the footprints or skeletons of their previous existences.
Robert Maloney is a Boston mixed media artist and instructor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Robert received his Masters of Fine Arts from Massart through their interdisciplinary Summer Low Residency MFA program. Robert’s 2D and 3D constructions incorporate elements of the urban landscape, typography, topography and architecture. Many of his pieces straddle the line between a structure being torn down and a structure being erected. He likes to think of his work as a 21st century archeological dig where decades of imagery and information accumulates and deteriorates at various stages of recognition. Robert combines layers of paint, found and created textures, screenprinted patterns, digital elements and three dimensional structures to create works that evoke the feeling of crumbling walls, discarded billboards and old warehouses.
10th Round Art on the Marquee (Summer 2014):
Corey Corcoran, Breeze
“Breeze” is a simple animation of kites flying at the beach. The horizontal screens at the bottom of the marquee shows people holding onto kite strings with ocean in the background. The vertical screens depict a great variety of kites gently floating in the breeze.
With an extensive background in painting and drawing, much of Corcoran’s recent work aims to adapt imagery for animation, installation, or printed formats. His work has been exhibited throughout the country and the Greater Boston area including such venues as deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, La Montagne Gallery, FPAC Gallery, fivesevendelle project space, and Frame 301 at Montserrat College of Art. Corcoran holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a recent Clowes Fellow (Vermont Studio Center). He lives and works in Boston. coreycorcoran.com
Frank Floyd, Need Not Apply
On the top portion of the marquee we see the view of a picturesque Boston city street, with pedestrians walking from each side. Below we see a similar street, with people walking toward and away from camera. Slowly we notice that a few of the people, a small minority, are walking in reverse. Those in reverse are slowly becoming “black and white”, while the others remain in color. The reverse-walkers become more numerous as the video progresses, becoming the majority by the video’s end.
Frank Floyd is a Boston-born and based visual artist, filmmaker, and videographer. Having earned a BFA with distinction from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Floyd worked as an Avid Editor in advertising companies in Boston and New York City, as well as for Sundance Channel from 2000-2005. Recently Floyd completed his “The Clocks” series, 12 time-pieces for 2012, which included an installation at MassArt’s Godine Family Gallery, a collaborative online work with Janet Kawada at Kingston Gallery, and a 3-hour video collaboration with Kevin Sweet, jointly part of his Intervals series. Frank continues to work artistically and professionally, both in the Film/Video Department at MassArt, as well as producing videos for such clients as Santander Bank, Twitter, and local non-profit The Fenway Alliance.
Lina Maria Giraldo, Extinction
We are currently facing the prospect of a sixth Mass Extinction due to the accelerated rate at which species disappear caused by human activity. Deforestation, hunting, pollution and general destruction of habitats are the main causes of this accelerated loss of species. In terms of number of species lost, the 20th century alone exceeded the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. “Extinction” is a video of wildlife modified by texturizing it over scrolling text of lost species, referencing these lost species. Through using the open source Processing language, I have programmed text to scroll and recreate the video that is underlying by each character taking the color of the pixels underneath it. The top panels features birds flying or posing, while the bottom panels have marine life. The text is a list of species lost during the last two centuries. The final effect is a mix between text and video that augments the natural movement of the wildlife and brings the observer to discover the hidden text and video.
We sometimes take life for granted in our planet and live our daily lives without taking a moment to reflect on these species being lost every day. By forcing the observer to look beyond the obvious on the screen, I invite them to look into the reality of these disappearing species.
Lina Maria Giraldo is a Boston based Media Artist who holds a Master of Professional Studies on Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University where she was the recipient of both the Paulette Godard and the Tisch School Scholarships. She was awarded the Tsongas Scholarship at Mass College of Art, where she majored in Studio of interrelated Media (SIM) with Departmental Honors and Academic Distinction. Her work has been displayed in galleries and shows as well as public spaces throughout Boston, New York and Colombia. She has been highlighted in different news sources notably The Boston Globe, ABC news and WBGH. Lina was selected to be part of the John F. Kennedy Legacy Gallery in the category of the Arts and has received grants from the Hispanic Scholarship Foundation and the St Botolph Foundation. Recently she produced and was videographer for the interviews of several personalities among them Stephen King, Harry Belafonte, Madeleine Albright and Nancy Pelosi.
www.linamariagiraldo.com
Anna Lindemann, Playtime
Playtime is an animation created for the Marquee at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. On the marquee’s 16MM video sticks, Miró-inspired shapes self-assemble into a little girl playing with an orange ball and a little boy fishing. A lily pond shimmers on the lower screens beneath them. After throwing her ball back and forth, the girl eventually drops her orange ball in the pond. But all is not lost. The ball floats to the other side of the marquee where the boy catches the ball with his fishing rod. The boy throws the ball up into the air. Up, up, up goes the ball, over the marquee, until the girl catches it again. Playtime makes use of a painterly animated style to portray a familiar moment when one person helps out another.
As both an artist and educator, Anna Lindemann is devoted to integrating art and science. Her work combines animation, music, video, and performance to explore the emerging field of Evo Devo (Evolutionary Developmental Biology). She received an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BS in Biology from Yale University.
Dennis Miller, On the Grid
Dennis Miller is on the faculty of Northeastern University in Boston. His work illustrate principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual realm.
Dennis Miller, Planets
Dennis Miller is on the faculty of Northeastern University in Boston. His work illustrate principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual realm.
Andrew Neumann, “Track/Pan/Dip/Rise””
Building on visual elements from previous sculptural works, Andrew Neumann transports physical objects and to the large LED elements of the marquee.. Fans, motors, and other mechanical parts creep up and down and across the marquee, creating a disorienting illusionary effect. Essentially, we are viewing “Technology on the Big Screen”.
Andrew Neumann is a Boston-based artist who works in a variety of media, including sculpture, film and video installation, and electronic/interactive music. In 2004 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has recently had solo shows at bitforms Gallery in Seoul, Korea, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, bitforms Gallery, NYC, solo shows for the Boston Cyberarts Festival. His music is available on Sublingual Records. His videos have been featured on PBS, The Worldwide Video Festival, Artist Space, and elsewhere. He has had solo music/video performances at Experimental Intermedia and Roulette, Issue Project Room.
During 2001 he was an Artist in Residence at the iEAR Studio at Rensalear Polytech Institute and at the Visual Studies Workshop. He has also had residencies at The MacDowell Colony (2000), YADDO (1999, ’03), Ucross Foundation (1998), Steim (1999) , Atlantic Center for the Arts (2001), Art/OMI (2000), and the Experimental Television Center (1982, ’87). In 2003 he was a Finalist in Sculpture/Installation from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He was a New England Film/Video Finalist in video in 1988 and a received a Fellowship in video in 1985.
Jeff Warmouth, Twister
The Marquee has become a three-dimensional tornado, with dramatic clouds and debris in constant motion. While the artist appears on screen, blown by the winds, grasping onto the (invisible) edges of the Marquee screens, some are forced to let go, and be blown around through the composition. Will all the Jeffus be blown out of the top of the Marquee? Will one resist by finding a lee side of a barrier? Will they enter the eye of the storm? Watch to find out.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based contemporary artist, and professor of Communications Media at Fitchburg State University, where he runs the Interactive Media & Game Design programs. Warmouth is a conceptual artist who creates work that asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media work has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Fitchburg Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Kaunas Photo Festival (Lithuania), MicroCineFest (Baltimore, MD), Art Interactive, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and the Experimenta Media Arts Tour originating in Melbourne, Australia.
Ellen Wetmore, Portrait of Dora
“Portrait of Dora” is a video based on a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar.
Ellen Wetmore received her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, and her B.F.A. from the University of Michigan. Since her emergence in 2004 with her first Boston Sculptors show, she has blended the influences of Surrealist and Feminist art with her own unique iconography. Her work explores the corporality of the female body and its surreal transformations through sculpture, video, photography, and large digital wall drawings. For her, art functions in an aesthetic and revelatory capacity: “Art is a way of mitigating the atrociousness of everyday life.”
Wetmore is a member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery LLC, where she will have her fourth solo show in November 2011. Ms. Wetmore has also exhibited at the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City, the Fitchburg Art Museum, Contemporary Sculpture at Chesterwood, the Art Complex Museum, and the Trustman Gallery at Simmons College. In 2007, Wetmore’s Land o’ Lactation was featured in the exhibition Trainscape at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. This year she was featured in seven national shows. Ms. Wetmore is an assistant professor of art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; her work can be found online at www.ellenwetmore.iwarp.com and at www.bostonsculptors.com. She lives and works in Groton, Massachusetts.
9th Round Art on the Marquee (Spring 2014):
James Manning, Dirty Pixels
“Dirty Pixels” was created using footage captured from a defective vintage Atari 2600 Video Computer System (first released in 1977) and a game program cartridge “Outlaw” (1978) a Wild West shoot-out game. As one attempts to power on the system with a game cartridge in place, a series of video patterns, noise and game sprites are randomly generated by the system, by manipulating the various control switches on the Atari console some small variations in these patterns can be made. Cycling the power switch will crate new distortions. Due to the defect in the game console, at no point is the game program made playable as intended. Different game cartridges will yield different sets of patterns but for this piece only the “Outlaw” cartridge was used.
Dirty Pixels pays homage to the era of 8-bit video game history where ones imagination and storytelling had to take primitive shapes and a limited pallet of patterns and colors to create a rich immersive world, a game sprite with a square for a head and sticks for limbs could be a star athlete, a hero on a quest or a gunslinger about to shoot in out in a dusty western street. This simplicity and primitive nature made the games more open to be defined by ones personal experiences. In contrast todays games tend to rely on detailed high definition recreations of the intended reality and where few details are open to interpretation by the gamer.
All of these images were shot in HD video, directly off a CRT monitor which adds another layer of technological distortion and artifacts due to 35 years worth of differences in technology between the frame sizes, scan and refresh rates between the CRT, HD camera and video marquee display board.
Jeffu Warmouth, Human Testbrix
Riffing off of the well known game, Tetris, Warmouth uses his own body in lieu of the colorful, trademark blocks of the 1984 game.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based contemporary artist, and professor of Communications Media at Fitchburg State University, where he runs the Interactive Media & Game Design programs. Warmouth is a conceptual artist who creates work that asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media work has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Fitchburg Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Kaunas Photo Festival (Lithuania), MicroCineFest (Baltimore, MD), Art Interactive, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and the Experimenta Media Arts Tour originating in Melbourne, Australia.
Reginald Arlen DeCambre, Permanence on the Sand
My piece “Permanence on the Sand” is about structure and time. I was inspired by Egyptian architecture and how well it has stood over time. Also how intricate the architecture is. I wanted to exercise my skills on creating a game environment using Zbrush, UDK, and 3Ds Max, but also create a piece of art. This intentionally wasn’t made to be played as a game level, but to show form, structure, lighting, and compositions as a whole by acquiring beauty from any angle that you look at it.
As for me, I am a recent graduate of the New England Institute of Art with a Bachelors of Science in Media Arts & Animation: Game Design. I am a 3D Interactive Designer at Blu Homes, Inc. As a 5th generation artist, being creative and expressing yourself through art has been a staple in my family. I love what I do and enjoy waking up everyday doing it. I love to learn new things and see different ways of collaborating and creating art. To me work is a hobby, but being a designer and creating my own projects is the real treat.
Ryan Dight, Reconsider
Reconsider: Exploring the weight of decision making in a digital environment. What does it mean to create a digital space? How does something captured from our own world translate into digital information? What limit is there to this? In this work I use pixel information derived from a digital video of the Grand Canyon in conjunction with 3D models to create an entirely new space for the footage to exist in. This space is ultimately subject to destruction at the push of a button — a space with the illusion of stability on the edge of losing control. Who is ultimately in control? Was there ever a choice?
Ryan Dight is a video artist currently based out of Boston, MA with diverse experience in traditional film/video production, post-production, analog video technology, and computer technology. He makes use of his experience to create a broad range of artistic work consisting of a combination of VFX, and Documentary style “one man band” shooting. He’s had experience working for multiple private organizations and has been a part of a number of diverse film productions. Currently open to any and all career paths related to his skill set, contact him for any/all commission inquiries.
Eben McCue, Super Life
My animation is a 8-bit style, video game inspired romp through an entire lifetime! Playground hi-jinx, high school romance and even a respectable career all happen during this satirical take on what we have defined as a successful life.
My name is Eben McCue and I’m an aspiring animator/videographer living in the Boston area. I collect VHS movies, play drums and enjoy romantic walks to the convenience store.
Jeff Bartell & Fish McGill, Trashteroids
In the near future our commute in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere is going to be a real pain due to extreme satellite traffic and space trash orbiting the planet. Your astro-mission is to get home safely from your shift working in the precious metal moon mines in time for dinner on the pizza planet section of earth by navigating safely through the tedious gridlock of space trash and corporate sponsored satellites clogging the once precious atmosphere.
Lina Maria Giraldo, UP
In 1985 Nintendo released “Balloon Fight” and it quickly rose to be an arcade classic. The pixelated backgrounds and characters along with the advances physics still bring a sense of nostalgia to many. Inspired by the 8-bit flying characters on balloons, flat clouds and simplified backgrounds, I wish to bring the arcade feeling to an everyday scene in Boston.
The bottom panels feature two classic shots of the Boston skyline, reduced to basic shapes built with repetitive cubes. The Boston sky has been brought back in time to the mid 80’s by using a single tone light blue and repetitive arcade clouds. All through the sky, our characters fly on their balloons while living their daily lives. Drinking a coffee, talking on the phone or walking to work, they all float through the sky supported by their balloons. We live our daily lives without sometimes stopping to think about our dreams. We have all wanted at some point to be able to lift up in the sky and float freely over the city skyline. As the characters hold on to their balloons and float weightlessly over the city, their dreams become a part of their daily life. Opposed to the idea of fighting against each other from the original arcade game I wish to enhance the spirit of coexistence, peace and harmony.
Lina Maria Giraldo is a Boston based Media Artist who holds a Master of Professional Studies on Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University where she was the recipient of both the Paulette Godard and the Tisch School Scholarships. She was awarded the Tsongas Scholarship at Mass College of Art, where she majored in Studio of interrelated Media (SIM) with Departmental Honors and Academic Distinction. Her work has been displayed in galleries and shows as well as public spaces throughout Boston, New York and Colombia. She has been highlighted in different news sources notably The Boston Globe, ABC news and WBGH. Lina was selected to be part of the John F. Kennedy Legacy Gallery in the category of the Arts and has received grants from the Hispanic Scholarship Foundation and the St Botolph Foundation. Recently she produced and was videographer for the interviews of several personalities among them Stephen King, Harry Belafonte, Madeleine Albright and Nancy Pelosi.
www.linamariagiraldo.com
8th Round Art on the Marquee (Winter 2014):
Frank Floyd, Amusement
On the upper section of the marquee we see an exhilarating roller-coaster ride, perhaps in slightly slower motion to maintain the thrill while keeping the movement smooth. On the lower, we see the rotating video from another theme park attraction. Both videos are from the view of the rider, so the background is moving while the foreground is fairly still. Together in this large format, the moving video creates a new kind of kinetic sculpture.
Frank Floyd is a Boston-born and based visual artist, filmmaker, and videographer. Having earned a BFA with distinction from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Floyd worked as an Avid Editor in advertising companies in Boston and New York City, as well as for Sundance Channel from 2000-2005. Recently Floyd completed his “The Clocks” series, 12 time-pieces for 2012, which included an installation at MassArt’s Godine Family Gallery, a collaborative online work with Janet Kawada at Kingston Gallery, and a 3-hour video collaboration with Kevin Sweet, jointly part of his Intervals series. Frank continues to work artistically and professionally, both in the Film/Video Department at MassArt, as well as producing videos for such clients as Santander Bank, Twitter, and local non-profit The Fenway Alliance.
Michael Lewy, Attack of the Monster
Growing up, Lewy was fascinated by the movies of Ray Harryhausen and making DIY super 8 stop motion movies. His project recreates this for the large marquee sign using stop motion techniques mixed with some modern video effects.
Michael Lewy is an artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video and computer graphics. He received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1996; He has been working at MIT as an administrative assistant since 2000 and also works as an illustrator for such clients as the New York Times book review and HiLow books. He is the author of Chart Sensation, a book of power point charts and has shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Pacific Film Archives and Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston. He currently lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with his wife and daughter.
Sam Smiley, Clam Wrap
In the summer of 2013, Smiley worked on a shellfishing grant in Provincetown Harbor. Using an underwater camera, Smiley documented day-to-day work which included collecting clams, raking clams, and seeding clams. Smiley worked with Lory Stewart and John Santos of Cape Native Secrets.
Georgie Friedman, Contained Lightning
In this piece, it look as if lightening-like electrostatic discharges are trapped within and being generated from the marquee’s boarders. The electricity streams come from the top, bottom and edges of the marquee, sprouting branches and tracing along the sides of the marquee, as if trying to find a way out.
The video footage is of real electrical streams and sparks, filmed from tesla coils and a Van de Graaff-generator, that are slowed down then digitally layered to have multiple electrical streams crossing over each other.
Jeffu Warmouth, Crawl
In this piece, multiple iterations of the artist crawl along a set of narrow slats. From a series of performance-based video compositions projected onto walls that explore the body’s relationship to marginal aspects of architecture.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based contemporary artist, and professor of Communications Media at Fitchburg State University, where he runs the Interactive Media & Game Design programs. Warmouth is a conceptual artist who creates work that asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media work has exhibited and screened internationally, including the DeCordova Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Kaunas Photo Festival (Lithuania), MicroCineFest (Baltimore, MD), Art Interactive, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and the Experimenta Media Arts Tour originating in Melbourne, Australia.
Dennis Miller, Multithreaded
Multithreaded is a site-specific abstract animation created for the Art on the Marquee project. The work simulates the process of painting an abstract image on the screens. The lower screen has a higher density of “brush strokes” than the upper screen.
Dennis Miller is a professor of Music at Northeastern University.
Dennis Miller, Re-formation
Re-formation is a site-specific abstract animation created for the AotM project. The work consists of a colorful animation that has been particleized into 2 million particles that race upward from the lower high-res screen to reform as a solid animated object on the upper screen.
Dennis Miller is a professor of Music at Northeastern University.
Ellen Wetmore, The Pleasure of Vertigo
Mary Webster was hanged for witchcraft in Hadley, MA, in 1685 and survived it, swaying all night from her rope outside, and then living another 11 years in spite of her enemies. I imagine her levitating through the night to stay alive. I have made an image of a woman on the margin between floating, hanging, and falling. Titled The Pleasure of Vertigo, this set of videos examines the twin physical experiences of rising and falling. I see these two types of swinging – the destruction of the body by hanging and the pleasure of the body in swinging – as analogs: the body being engaged in the grace of weightlessness.
How can an image convey a state of grace? Can time be truly elastic, enough to stop an event in midstream, save a person from falling? Is the perpetuation of an image linked to human immortality?
The video you are seeing is shot with a 700frames per second Fastec video camera and is the result of two months of planning, a 12 person video shoot, and $5000 invested in equipment and talent. This would be its premiere screening. The performer is Ginger Howell of Simply Circus in Newton. In addition to performing this rarely done circus act, she has also run a marathon in Antarctica: a terrific athlete. This work has been supported by a grant from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
7th Round Art on the Marquee (Fall 2013):
Dennis Miller, Annals of Science
This video consists of 100 randomly selected public-domain images of scientists, scientific instrumentation and scientific processes. The artist created a custom algorithm that placed the individual images onto a “video wall” and faded different images in and out as the video progresses.
Dennis Miller is a professor of Music at Northeastern University.
Mark Stock, Flag
Flag is a digital video piece composed of a waving, undulating structural mesh of grey segments on each screen. The work begins with the sheets of mesh slowly and softly waving, similar to small waves on a pond. As time progesses, the waves become violent, and the piece resembles a flag being whipped in the breeze. Soon the storm is over, and the piece returns to its original motion, though subtly changed.
Mark Stock is a practicing scientist and new media artist who writes and repurposes high-performance scientific computing tools to create novel generative visual art.
Dennis Miller, Going Viral
Going Viral is an artistic interpretation of the processes undertaken when a virus attacks the body. The video is in black and white, which are the normal colors used in medical illustration to depict viruses.
Dennis Miller is a professor of Music at Northeastern University.
Sarah Rushford, Radiosconde
Radiosonde uses found footage captured by weather balloons launched by amateurs, artists, scientists, and enthusiasts. The cultural phenomenon of launching cameras, experiments, and loved items into shallow outer space as both folk art and science, is explored.
Found video footage in Sarah Rushford’s Radiosonde is used by permission from NanoTV, Naperville Illinois North High School, Karolina Sobecka, David Stillman, and Page Stephenson.
Sarah Rushford is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and designer. She lives and works in Boston, MA. She earned her BFA from Hartford Art School in 1998 and an MA in Media Studies from The New School in 2001. As a multimedia artist currently working in writing, video, and collage, she has recently completed art and writing residencies at TAKT Kunstprojektraum in Berlin and Art Farm Nebraska. Sarah has exhibited in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin.
Hugh O’Donnell with Tina Eden, Akhil Bhatt, & Howard Kaplin, Sea of Life
How DNA from Diatoms and Bioluminescence from Jellyfish is reshaping new inventions to save people’s lives.
The Heart of Miami. Is a 768 x 13,660 pixels, video wall installation. The overall multiple screen size is approximately 35 feet wide and is installed in a single edge to edge horizontal networked array of ten screens in the Research & & Development Building One, at the University of Miami’s life Sciences Park. The intention of the film is to celebrate life science and to compliment the wide range of innovative work being undertaken by engineers, doctors, and research scientists at the facility. The content of the film includes references to scientific visualizations, but this is not the main focus of the work, the film is rather a free form artwork in eight sequences intended as a personal celebration of selected areas of research.
The Art on the Marquee installation takes edited footage from the above video (The Heart of Miami) to focus on two examples of Biomimetics. The detailed screen will focus on The Aequoria Victoria Jellyfish. This jellyfish is capable of producing flashes of blue light by a quick release of calcium (Ca2+) which interacts with the photo protein aequorin. The blue light produced is in turn transduced to green by the now famous green fluorescent protein (GFP). Both aequorin and GFP are important tools used in biological research. (Wiki) The larger screen will focus on Diatoms and the fact that DNA from these single celled organisms is being used to create algorithms for the manufacture of nano silica structures for filtering bacteria from water.
Georgie Friedman, Snow Study
Filmed at night, illuminated snow moves based on the intensity, wind direction and speed of various winter storms. The snow changes quickly between subtle and sharp movements, magical moments, abstract patterns and unexpected visual references.
Though this piece may look like sonographs, computer generated imagery or an animation, it is pure documentation of the atmospheric conditions and the internal physics of the storms.
Georgie Friedman (b. North Carolina, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects include large-scale video installations, single and multi-channel videos and several photographic series. She has lived, worked and exhibited throughout the United States. Her speaking engagements and exhibitions include museums, universities, galleries, film screenings and public art installations. She earned her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in conjunction with Tufts University and her BA from UC, Santa Cruz. Professionally, she has taught at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston College, and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among other institutions. In recent years, she was named a “Rising star” by The Boston Globe and “One of the most exciting new-media artists in the region,” by The Boston Phoenix.
Ellen Wetmore & Patrick Drane, Bat Lab Test
Patrick Drane at University of Massachusetts Lowell does tests on dynamic baseball bat performance and durability using high-speed air cannons. They have beautiful, slow motion footage of bats splintering and MLB balls exing as they kiss the bat at 120 mph. Ellen Wetmore collageed some of this dramatic footage into a marquee work about the force and speed experienced in this great American game.
Sophia Sobers, Viral Tectonics
The two larger screens show the fascination of cell change over time and it’s effects on the rest of the environment. The lower screens are created the lower video by coding a reaction of cells over time, based largely in the science of emergent behavior, as found and described in biology (one famous example being the way birds fly in large groups and create “swarms”).
6th Round Art on the Marquee (Summer 2013):
Cindy Sherman Bishop, Bodies Of Water
Bodies of Water re-contextualizes the average American’s interaction with water, typically constrained to faucets and pipes. On the Marquee, the participant may experience the beauty of everyday water.
Cindy Sherman Bishop is a visual artist, filmmaker, and developer of interactivity. Originally a painter and a software developer, her work ranges from creating new tools for artistic expression to immersive, interactive environments with full-body interaction. Currently studying Dynamic Media at Massachusetts College of Art, her MFA thesis includes a facial-tracking iPhone app, a geo-locative interactive website and an immersive interactive experience with the elemental substance, water.
Devon Bryant, Renewal
Renewal starts with the screens showing a fairly empty landscape. As the animation progresses, structures are erected and the building is created. The building springs to life as waves of people use and move through the building over time. Eventually the speed of the people slows and the building becomes abandoned, aging and crumbling. Finally ivy and plants overtake the crumbling building and it collapses entirely, leaving a fairly empty landscape in its place.
Jeff Derose and Christophe Brunski, Drifting
Jeff Derose is multi-media artist working primarily with video or photographic images that often reference the nature of polarity.
Drifting is a collaboration with Christophe Brunski.
Christophe Brunski is a writer and photographer based in Northampton, MA. His writing spans three languages and multiple formats; beginning with his first major publication of a collection of French poetry in 1999, he has published 4 volumes in French, Swedish, and English, and published many diverse pieces in international journals. His career as a freelance translator forms the basis for his current novel in progress.
Frank Floyd, Textual Window
Text splashes onto the marquee, a string of characters, seeming computer code instructions. The viewer sees the text grow and evolve, until an image appears out of the swirl of letters. On top, the visual becomes a woman is exiting a doorway, straight into our world. On the lower portion a man comfortably reads a newspaper, the headline of which is also made of characters. As the woman looks at her surroundings, perplexed, she picks up a handheld controller and points it outward, toward the viewer. As she hits the switch, the display is turned off-she disappears in an instant. The man below, seemingly aware, looks up, astonished.
Textual Window is dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges and Marshall Mcluhan.
Frank Floyd is a Boston-born visual artist, filmmaker, and videographer. Having earned a BFA with distinction from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Floyd worked as an Avid Editor in advertising companies in Boston and New York City, as well as for Sundance Channel from 2000-2005. Recently Floyd completed his “The Clocks” series, 12 time-pieces for 2012, which included an installation at MassArt’s Godine Family Gallery, a collaborative online work with Janet Kawada at Kingston Gallery, and a 3-hour video collaboration with Kevin Sweet, jointly part of his Intervals series. Frank continues to work artistically and professionally, both in the Film/Video Department at MassArt, as well as producing videos for such clients as Santander Bank, Twitter, and local non-profit The Fenway Alliance. www.FrankFloydFilms.com
Martha McCollough, Soup Dragon
Soup Dragon consists of the animated dragons, twining themselves around the marquee, flowing across all the screens.
Dennis Miller, Marquee
Marquee is a site-specific video created for the BCEC Marquee. The work incorporates separate elements designed for the top and bottom screens and uses a classic “marquee” as its theme.
Dennis Miller is a professor of Music at Northeastern University.
5th Round Art on the Marquee (Spring 2013):
Chris Florio, LARP
LARP is a short meditation on the interaction between the virtual world of video games and the natural world. It is also a chance to put my cat Banksy on a 2000 foot video wall.
Chris Florio is an interactive composer, performer and teacher. He is also the owner/director of Passion Records and the author of the Actionscript 3.0 Classroom in a Book as well as articles for many publications. Chris has taught gaming, audio and interactive media at a number of area colleges. He has composed original pieces for the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Metrowest Symphony, the Berklee Contemporary Orchestra and others.
Fish McGill, Space Plants
Space Plants features a weird combination of robots drifting through an outer space seen through a garden of potted leafy plants. The group of robots glide through space, the stars, aurora borealis, planets, and darkness. These outer space landscape scenes drift along within a series of rounded oak leaves, evocative of the iconic flora shapes in the collage paintings of Henri Matisse. See more of Fish’s work at http://fishmcgill.com.
Fish McGill resides in Boston as an artist & designer devoted to drawing. Fish has received commissions for drawing and design projects by The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), the Boston Graphic Artist Guild, NYLON Magazine, the Berwick Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MassArt, Nike, MTV, Deitch Projects, Harmonix Music Systems, IdN, Adobe, and more.
Mists of Mortal Legends Team
For our contribution to the Art on the Marquee call for projects reflecting on video game culture, we have chosen to focus on visualizations of popular multiplayer battle games. A conflict between two alien armies and their champion warriors is presented using the perspectives commonly employed within real-time strategy, first-person shooter and 2D fighting games. The unfolding battle takes a humorous poke at common scenarios and mechanics associated with the classics that give video games as a media such widespread notoriety.
The Mists of Mortal Legends Team is Patrick Conroy, Sarah Delahanty, Giuliana Funkhouser, Darren Gagne, Allen Homan, Jacob Lee, Thomas Schlapp and Mark Thompson – a group of creative people working together in Needham for Turbine, part of Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment. Even though we are spread across the Quality Assurance, Sound/Video, Marketing and Art Departments, our collective enthusiasm for exploring video game culture through art drew us to this project. We hope you enjoyed our animated adventure as much as we had fun making it!
Russell Pensyl, Tiger Training
Tiger Training was developed from a body of work that I complete in a Mixed Reality installation. The mixed reality installation explored the relationship between real and virtual worlds where the audience was encouraged to “train” virtual animals using hand signals and voice commands. The animation that was displayed on the BCEC Marquee took advantage of the unique configuration of the Marquee. The pieces used the screens in such a way to allow the animated characters to move across both screens, and integrate the upper low resolution vertical screen along with high resolution animated graphics on the lower screens. The characters are developed for a game engine, with low poly models and high resolution textures and background, all developed in Maya. The work is the result of collaboration between Russell Pensyl, Ian Connell, a Northeastern students and Li Hua, a student from Peking University, in China.
Russell Pensyl (MFA 88, BFA 85) is an American media artist and designer. His work maintains a strategic focus on communication, narrative, and user centric design processes for interactive and communication media. Pensyl is currently full Professor and former Chair of the Department of Art+Design at Northeastern University. Pensyl’s current work includes the creation of location based entertainment several areas of technology in the application of content delivery in environmental spaces including facial recognition, positioning and localization, gesture recognition. Recently, research in the use of facial recognition technology, positioning and augmented reality annotation is resulting in commercially viable communication technologies as well as user centric, autonomously responsive systems using biometric data in interactive installations. In 2010, recent work explores the “subtle presence” autonomously responsive media in an interactive installation that presents a dynamic time lapse still-life painting that shifts subtly, caused by sensing personal characteristics of the viewer in the exhibition space. In 2011, this installation was featured in the International Sarajevo Winter Festival. In 2008, Pensyl’s mixed reality installation “The Long Bar” was a Curator Invited Installation into the SIGGRAPH Asia Synthesis – Curated Show/Art Gallery in Singapore.
Joshua Pablo Rosenstock, Sprouting Phones
Joshua Pablo Rosenstock is a multimedia artist and musician based in Somerville, MA. He examines the relationship of humans to technology, employing an ever-expanding variety of analog, digital, and craft techniques to create dynamic intermedia works that incorporate moving images, sound, sculptural installation, and interactive performance. He earned an MFA in Art & Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of Art and Interactive Media at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
“Sprouting Phones” is a time-lapse stop motion animation of cell phones exploding with plant growth. The piece is part of the artist’s “Revenge of the Lawn” series, which examines our culture’s estrangement from organic processes and pokes fun at our desire to master the natural world. These works consist of fantasy objects which are designed to encourage “nature” to reclaim “man-made” objects and permeate the boundary between Indoor and Outdoor, calling attention to the arbitrariness of these binaries.
Jeff Warmouth, 1UP
In Jeffu Warmouth’s “1UP”, five iterations of the artist move through a shifting set of game environments drawn from the golden age of arcade games. These three game worlds have different settings, obstacles, goals, and rules of physics, all of which affect the characters’ movements & controls. He is interested in how our our internalized knowledge of the movement, actions, setting, and art style of these games from 30 years ago informs our experiences today, and is drawn to the absurdity of realistic human performers attempting to carry out movements associated with a flat, abstracted 2D environment.
Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based contemporary artist, and professor of Communications Media at Fitchburg State University, where he runs the Interactive Media & Game Design programs. Warmouth is a conceptual artist who creates work that asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media work has exhibited and screened internationally, including the DeCordova Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Kaunas Photo Festival (Lithuania), MicroCineFest (Baltimore, MD), Art Interactive, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and the Experimenta Media Arts Tour originating in Melbourne, Australia.
Late Night Art on the Marquee (2012):
For the fourth round, the call was for 4 1/2 minute works that looped. The purpose was to have a series of works that could be played from 10pm to 6am. The opening was on November 12, 2012
Corey Corcoran, Zzzz
In Corey Corcoran’s Zzzz, phosphorescent dreams float above the city: winged insects, spinning coffee cups, billowing jellyfish, cinder blocks as light as a feather. A man slumbers beneath the stars, and a spider catches his visions in her nearby web. Melding hand-drawn imagery to a digital, site-specific format, Zzzz is a tranquil rumination on the nature of sleep.
With an extensive background in painting and drawing, much of Corcoran’s recent work aims to adapt imagery for animation, installation, or printed formats. His work has been exhibited throughout the country and the Greater Boston area including such venues as deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, La Montagne Gallery, FPAC Gallery, fivesevendelle project space, and Frame 301 at Montserrat College of Art. Corcoran holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a recent Clowes Fellow (Vermont Studio Center). He lives and works in Boston. coreycorcoran.com
Dan Hermes, Air in Three Colors
Air in Three Colors is an adaptation of Abstract Expressionist painting technique realized the in modern vein of moving digital imagery. Dan Hermes utilizes technology and video to allow painted images and compositions to evolve and change over time, unfolding an abstract narrative where shapes and colors are actors on a stage, developing relationships, evolving as characters, and moving the story forward. Air in Three Colors, like many of Hermes’ works, combines elements of visual form, modern dance, and classical counterpoint. Broad strokes and splashes of orange, white, and blue bend and intertwine in a warm, living, organic painting.
Dan Hermes, born 1970, is an internationally recognized artist combining visual design and technology into an emerging art form: moving painting. Moving paintings are designed for display on flat screens and projection installations. He is currently writing a book on the topic. Mr. Hermes’ exhibitions include Boutique DESIGN New York, Hospitality Design Expo in Las Vegas, Boston CyberArts Festival, Festival Der Nationen in Austria, and the Athens Video Art Festival. His work was awarded by the IIDA/Hospitality Design Magazine Product Design Competition. Mr. Hermes’ moving paintings draw on his unique cross-training in drawing, film, technology, animation, music composition, production, and performance. He has authored multimedia art reviews for Media-N, the online journal for the New Media Caucus, and the Computer Music Journal(MIT Press). He served as judge for the ICMC audiovisual art competition at the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) at the University of Huddersfield, England. He is currently the director of Art Technology New England(ATNE). His work is in several private collections including that of Anne and Michael Spalter. www.danhermesfineart.com
Denise Marika, Expurgation
To expurgate is to cleanse of something morally harmful, offensive or erroneous. Marika is interested in how we experience loss in the erasure of information and dissolution of identity. Where stories and images were once hole they are emptied of content, shredded. The sound makes tangible the discomfort of voiding and destroying the images and words with which we communicate while the images themselves fall in a rapid and unstoppable cadence of destruction.
Marika has been increasingly focused on how the individual is impacted by and responds to violence, conflict and loss. Her video performance/installations explore these relationships by creating rituals, myths and landscapes that allow us to enter the event and reshape our response. To listen to Expurgation audio click here.n www.denisemarika.com
Dennis Miller, Fill in the Blanks
This video uses a semi-automatic painting technique to fill the screen in segments. The video is in four parts, each of which uses a different method to fill the screen.
Miller, a professor of music technology at Northeastern University, has a special talent for mixed-media compositions. Working in the synthesis of electronic sound, 3D animation and painting programs, he creates stunning and engaging pieces that interweave his own original music and visual imagery. His compositions have been performed throughout the world, most recently at Design Indaba Africa (Cape Town, South Africa), the New York Digital Salon Traveling Exhibit, Abstracta International Abstract Cinema Exhibition (Cairo, Egypt), and the Cuban International Festival of Music. Miller was an associate editor of Electronic Musician magazine for 10 years and is the founder and artistic director of the Visual Music Marathon. www.dennismiller.neu.edu
Ellen Wetmore, Playing with the Moon
A nighttime view of the Boston skyline reveals a giant “hand-of-God” interruption. The hand begins to yo-yo with the moon and does so seemingly unnoticed. The hand pauses for a brief interval and returns to possess the moon, first plucking it then carrying it further up until out of view into the night sky.
Ellen Wetmore was raised in Saginaw, Michigan. She received her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, and her B.F.A. from the University of Michigan. Since her emergence in 2004 with her first Boston Sculptors show, she has blended the influences of Surrealist and Feminist art with her own unique iconography. Her work explores the corporality of the female body and its surreal transformations through sculpture, video, photography, and large digital wall drawings. For her, art functions in an aesthetic and revelatory capacity: “Art is a way of mitigating the atrociousness of everyday life.” www.ellenwetmore.iwarp.com
3rd Round Art on the Marquee (Fall 2012):
For the third round, the call was for 15 second works. The opening was on September 13, 2012.
Lina Giraldo, Dumping
“Dumping” exhibits some of the problems our watersheds face with trash and dumping, by focusing on tires being dumped in water. It is a computer-generated animation that depicts tires slowly sinking on the top panels and tires hitting the bottom and accumulating on the bottom panels. The difference in lighting and perspective in both panels will help the spectator have the feeling of being underwater and depth. The top panels will feature an animated lighting and CGI water effect, which along with a marked perspective will give the spectator the feeling of looking up from deep underwater.
Giraldo is a Boston-New York based Creative Technologist, Media Artist and Interaction Designer who loves to experiment and research in order to implement technology in everyday life. With an MPS on Interactive Communications (ITP) from the Tisch School of the Arts in New York University, Giraldo is originally from Bogota, Colombia. She moved to Boston to study at Mass College of Art. Challenged every day by language, social differences and endless consumerism, she creates installations that merge with the spectator and the space. www.linamariagiraldo.com
Alison Kotin (with DeAnna Pellecchia, Ingrid Schatz, Kristin Wagner), You Will Be Safe
You Will Be Safe is a digitally altered motion-capture video based on a performance of That Girl and the Other One by KAIROS Dance Theater. That Girl and the Other One, an ongoing work developed by DeAnna Pellecchia and Ingrid Schatz, explores the dynamics of relationships among women, using contemporary dance to shed light on girls’ complex struggles for strength and personal identity in the face of society’s expectations.
Alison is an adjunct professor of Graphic Design at MassArt and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is also a media arts instructor and Marketing + Development Coordinator at the Urbano Project, a non-profit studio and gallery space dedicated to fostering artistic partnerships between urban teens and adult artists. She exhibits works in venues around the Boston Area, most recently a 2012 solo show: Listen Close at Boston’s Bromfield Gallery. Alison holds an MFA from the Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and a BA from Brown University.
Michael Lewy, Marcus S. L’amour – Living the Dream
Marcus L’amour, City of Work’s outstanding citizen, entrepreneur and CEO of Omnipresent industries – tells us how to live the dream and become one of the 1 percent in 15 seconds. City of Work is Michael Lewy’s long-term multimedia project to create a dystopian society where work is all encompassing.
Michael Lewy is an artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video and computer graphics. He received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1996; He has been working at MIT as an administrative assistant since 2000 and also works as an illustrator for such clients as the New York Times book review and HiLow books. He is the author of Chart Sensation, a book of power point charts and has shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Pacific Film Archives and Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston. He currently lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with his wife and daughter. www.mlewy.com
Amy Baxter MacDonald, Under the Weeds
Under the Weeds is a playful tribute to the marine life that surrounds us and sustains us. Fish swim across the screen behind an endless stream of bubbles and moving seaweed on the upper screens. On the lower screens will be lobster, snails, and other ground-dwelling creatures. The creatures will smile toward the audience, wink, blow bubbles, and interact with each other as they swim from one screen into the next.
Amy Baxter MacDonald was born in Haverhill, MA, in 1965 and grew up in Clinton, NY. She received her BA from Hamilton College in 1987 and her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA in 2009. She currently teaches animation at the New England Institute of Art, freelances as a 2D animator, and paints in her studio in Fort Point. www.amybmacdonald.com
Dennis Miller, Outburst and
Reconstruction
This highly colorful abstract animation, “Outburst” opens from the center of the top screen and moves to the entire screen complex in five flowing passes. Each of the five passes is a slightly altered rendition of the same source file. “Reconstruction” resembles “Outburst” but uses a different process to fill the screens. Line segments appear at numerous points simultaneously and follow paths in multiple directions.
Miller, a professor of music technology at Northeastern University, has a special talent for mixed-media compositions. Working in the synthesis of electronic sound, 3D animation and painting programs, he creates stunning and engaging pieces that interweave his own original music and visual imagery. His compositions have been performed throughout the world, most recently at Design Indaba Africa (Cape Town, South Africa), the New York Digital Salon Traveling Exhibit, Abstracta International Abstract Cinema Exhibition (Cairo, Egypt), and the Cuban International Festival of Music. Miller was an associate editor of Electronic Musician magazine for 10 years and is the founder and artistic director of the Visual Music Marathon. www.dennismiller.neu.edu
WATCH A VIDEO PREVIEW OF RECONSTRUCTION»
WATCH A VIDEO PREVIEW OF OUTBURST»
Julie Miller, o(78)
o(78) oscillates with color and movement. Using high resolution scans of drawings on paper, Miller implements the use of Adobe After Effects time line and manipulates the scans. The video stacks move subtlety, while the lower screens and bends have more active and noticeable movement. The overall concept is one of pleasure in color and perception, optical delight. The work has no resemblance to advertising, hoping that viewers pause to look and wonder what it might be about.
Miller’s work engages the physical intensity of optical and perceptual trance-like states. Visionary experience intended to induce trance through image in order to experience altered states is at the heart of this body of work. Her drawings facilitate a hallucinatory sensibility through color and detail that brings the viewer close to the work, while her experimental animations effect perceptual states through a plethora of psychedelic imagery. Both bodies of work exhibit and engage the element of time; the drawings through a visibly labor-intensive process, and the animations in their ceaseless repetition. juliemillerdrawings.com
2nd Round Art on the Marquee (Spring 2012):
The second call for 30 second art works. The opening was on May 16, 2012.
FRANCOIS DE COSTERD AND TODD ANTONELLIS, AXIOM #3: TERRITORY
Axiom #3:Territory” presents built and un-built environments in a series of tableaux that layer intensely color-saturated satellite and aerial photography. From an impossibly high point of view, the imagery moves, spins, zooms in and out and dissolves into the next tableau. “Territory” is part of Cycles and Ideals, an ongoing collaborative project that is a visual study of Western civilization dealing with the allure and implications of the consumer economy.
Artists François-Xavier De Costerd and Todd Antonellis collaborate to merge symbols of industry and commerce with photographic representations of cycles of consumption. These symbols – salt, metal, building materials, advertising mechanisms, etc. – interrupt and interact with the imagery to present visual axioms that serve as the foundation for a theorem in development. www.cyclesandideals.com
CHRISTOPHER FIELD AND SARAH WEST, I AM WAITING
A visual representation of the rhythm and pattern of urban circulation on the subway and train lines of the Boston area, “I Am Waiting” uses multiple screens to highlight intersections of movement, incorporating footage (both abstract and representational) of moving trains with shifting perspectives, colors and textures. The intent is to create a study in contrast and affinity between horizontal and vertical movement and vertices.
Salem-based Artist Christopher Field and Architect Sarah West are collaborating on “I Am Waiting.” Field, a recent MFA graduate of Mass College of Art is a videographer, interactive installation designer and writer as well as a website, film and DVD designer. www.ckfield.com. An architect at Moskow Linn Architects, Sarah West has a Masters from Southern California Institute or Architecture. She has worked on residential design, public art installation, commercial interior renovation, and theoretical urban interventions.
GEORGIE FRIEDMAN, SEAS AND SKIES
Georgie Friedman’s “Seas and Skies,” aims to reintroduce elements of nature back into the urban city environment. Video of Boston’s blue sky and white clouds with a formation of circling birds on the tall vertical portion of the marquee is juxtaposed with video of the Pacific Ocean forming a series of large, crashing waves along the bottom horizontal screens. The created seascape shows its artificiality through a shift in scale and perspective as waves heave past their confines, clouds are cut off and giant birds emerge from nowhere and then disappear. Through this interplay of realism and artificiality, the videos unify the two coasts, blending and contrasting the digital and real environment, placing viewers in unexpected observational positions.
Friedman has an MFA (video, film and photography) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in conjunction with Tufts University, and a BA (studio art: photography) from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current projects include video installations, video and film experimental narratives, and several photographic series. www.georgiefriedman.com
LINA MARIA GIRALDO, RAIN
“Rain” is a computer-generated animation that represents how many bottles of water, coffee and soda cups we consume and waste every day. Bottles and cups start falling as if it they were rain. These cups and bottles are not only life-sized, but their behavior is extremely life-like in the way they fall and bounce, giving the spectator the feeling of literally being under a shower of bottles and cups. When the screen has completed filling up, the viewer is immersed in an overwhelming sensation of being covered in a huge mountain of bottles and cups.
Giraldo is a Boston-New York based Creative Technologist, Media Artist and Interaction Designer who loves to experiment and research in order to implement technology in everyday life. With an MPS on Interactive Communications (ITP) from the Tisch School of the Arts in New York University, Giraldo is originally from Bogota, Colombia. She moved to Boston to study at Mass College of Art. Challenged every day by language, social differences and endless consumerism, she creates installations that merge with the spectator and the space. www.linamariagiraldo.com
CHRISTOPHER GRAEFE, LINDA DEHART AND MEG BROOKER, EMERGENCE
In 2011, inspired by the technological innovation of large-scale vertical and horizontal digital media surfaces that break the standard aspect ratios of traditional video, Painter Linda DeHart painted a series of abstract watercolors specifically for public displays. Digitally scanned at high resolution and artfully sequenced these works provide an intriguing idea “canvas” for dancer Meg Brooker’s graceful gestures. Meg’s movements combined with the flow of Linda’s artwork inspired the Colors in Motion team to celebrate the grace and beauty of the human form in nature. Digital media artist and compositor Christopher Graefe weaves these art forms together in an iterative design process. “Emergence” seeks to take the viewer to a place of deep serenity accompanied by a dazzling panoply of rich colors and textures that slowly transform from one composition to another, creating an ever changing and intricate study of light and form. www.colorsinmotion.com
BEN HOUGE, MODEL LIGHTBOX
“Model Lightbox” is a digital collage of photographs of backlit fashion advertisements that Houge took shortly before moving from Shanghai to Boston a little over a year ago. Tassels and fringes, pouty lips and vapid eyes are abstracted from their brand logos and marketing taglines, providing both a simulacrum of and a reprieve from our intensely message-saturated media environment. Images are free to be, not sell. The resulting accumulation is voluptuous and playful, perhaps absurd at times, teetering on the boundary between representation and cubist abstraction, image and pure color. At times a suggestion of accusation or menace may flash from these disembodied eyes and teeth, but they just as soon melt into a variegated field of color, reflecting the compression of our urban environment, our daily anonymous interactions, the steady hum and pulse of the city.
Houge is a composer and sound artist whose attention is focused on finding connections. His areas of activity range from computer game soundtracks to sacred choral music. Much of his work employs computers to make decisions and generate sound, and he has incorporated ideas from his experience in digital media into compositions for live performance. He has been composing music and designing sound for digital games since 1996. Recently relocated to Boston from Shanghai, where he was a senior audio designer for Ubisoft, he is currently Artist in Residence at MIT Media Lab. www.benhouge.com
MICHAEL LEWY, CITY OF WORK
“City of Work” is a long-term project using computer graphics and animation to create a dystopian society about the nature of work. The Marquee project is an animation of an office worker riding an endless elevator juxtaposed against video of the same worker in a solitary office. www.cityofwork.com
www.mlewy.com
DENNIS MILLER, IV
Dennis Miller’s “IV” is an animated abstract video that employs bright, morphing colors in a geometric-based design. Thick converging lines change size and angle while the animation pans outward (up and down simultaneously) from an origin precisely at the upper tip of the bottom screen. The hard angles of the work align with the unusual curves of the screens themselves.
Miller, a professor of music technology at Northeastern University, has a special talent for mixed-media compositions. Working in the synthesis of electronic sound, 3D animation and painting programs, he creates stunning and engaging pieces that interweave his own original music and visual imagery. His compositions have been performed throughout the world, most recently at Design Indaba Africa (Cape Town, South Africa), the New York Digital Salon Traveling Exhibit, Abstracta International Abstract Cinema Exhibition (Cairo, Egypt), and the Cuban International Festival of Music. Miller was an associate editor of Electronic Musician magazine for 10 years and is the founder and artistic director of the Visual Music Marathon. www.dennismiller.neu.edu
MATTHEW SHANLEY, BUILDING BOSTON
“Building Boston” is centered on Shanley’s fascination that much of Boston is built upon man-made land. What was once water is now a thriving community thanks to human investment and labor. Playing with the different orientations of the component screens, the work contrasts video panning across the brick and rows of windows of local Fort Point buildings with video of water with layered animations plotting out the ghosts of future streets.
Shanley is a multimedia artist with a studio in Fort Point whose range of practice includes sound, installation, Internet art, generative computer projects, video, and print. He holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art, and a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He currently resides in Somerville, MA. www.littlesecretsrecords.com
JEFFU WARMOUTH , CUT
In Jeffu Warmouth’s “Cut” black crumpled balls of paper hang by strings, but inverted, so that they struggle to fly, held in the grip of a reversed gravity, tethered to the ground by threads. The action is in slow motion, to heighten the monumental size of the Marquee and this exaggerated gesture that might otherwise be insignificant. A hand reaches in holding scissors, cuts the threads one at a time. More balls “drop” i.e. jump up, held by string, and the process repeats itself, ad infinitum.
Massachusetts-based Jeffu Warmouth is a conceptual artist who creates work that asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His work incorporates photography, video, objects, and installations, and often uses humor to skewer popular culture. Jeffu has exhibited in alternative spaces and museums, and his award-winning film/video work has screened in festivals internationally. Born in San Diego, California, in 1970, he received a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1992, and an M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Tufts University in 1997. He lives and works in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where he is professor of communications media at Fitchburg State University. www.jeffu.tv
1st Round Art on the Marquee (Winter 2012):
The first call for artworks for the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority Marquee. The opening was on February 23, 2012
NELL BREYER, FALLING MEN
Nell Breyer’s “Falling Men” examines the impact of a spatial format (vertical, horizontal, wide, narrow) on our reading of movement. Two male dancers continually fall and land (on their heads). The frames cascade down the length of the tall tower and then spread out across the horizontal bands of video screen below. The video is a single loop, but when juxtaposed as multiple frames and offset in time by a few seconds, they reveal a strong sense of gravity. The sensation and impact of falling and landing will be underscored and felt in different ways through the horizontal and vertical formatting.
Breyer’s choreography and video installations have been shown in the U.S., Canada, Europe, the UK and Bangladesh. Her work focuses on the intersection of dance, new media and visual art. She was a research affiliate at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Program for Art, Culture & Technology (2002-2010); a Baryshnikov Art Center/Summer Stages Fellow (2008-2009) and Dance Theater Workshop digital ARM Fellow (2003-2004). She holds a Master of Science degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from Oxford University, an M.S. in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT, and a Doctorate of Design from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. www.nellbreyer.com.
DENNIS MILLER, MARATHON
Dennis Miller’s “Marathon” will incorporate photographs of runners he took during the 2011 Boston Marathon in conjunction with versions Miller manipulated on the computer. Both versions will be displayed simultaneously, one on each of the two main screens. Miller, a professor of music technology at Northeastern University, has a special talent for mixed-media compositions. Working in the synthesis of electronic sound, 3D animation and painting programs, he creates stunning and engaging pieces that interweave his own original music and visual imagery. His compositions have been performed throughout the world, most recently at Design Indaba Africa (Cape Town, South Africa), the New York Digital Salon Traveling Exhibit, Abstracta International Abstract Cinema Exhibition (Cairo, Egypt), and the Cuban International Festival of Music. Miller was an associate editor of Electronic Musician magazine for 10 years and is the founder and artistic director of the Visual Music Marathon www.dennismiller.neu.edu
JOHN SLEPIAN, *sigh*
John Slepian’s “*sigh*” is a 3D-animated, multiscreen interstitial video. In “*sigh*,” the marquee itself appears to come alive and sympathize with harried Bostonians and convention center visitors on the street below. In between the marquee’s standard programming, a 3D animated face (rendered in a style that is realistic and fanciful—similar to many popular 3D animated feature films) appears over a “color bar” test pattern. The face inhales deeply, pouts its lips and exhales a deep sigh—a facial gesture recognizable to anyone that’s ever had a hard day. The title is also a reference to the “Peanuts” character, Charlie Brown, whose response to life’s vagaries was often an exasperated, world-weary sigh.
Slepian graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 with an MFA in new genres. His artwork has been shown at P.S.1/MoMA and Hunter College Art Galleries in New York, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Axiom Gallery and the Boston Center for the Arts in Boston, and elsewhere in the U.S and Canada. He is currently the Five College Assistant Professor of Art and Technology at the Five College Consortium in Western Massachusetts. He teaches in the Department of Art at Smith College and in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Hampshire College. www.johnslep.net
KAWANDEEP SINGH VIRDEE, URBAN BLOOM
“Urban Bloom,” is designed to convey the microcosm of city movement amongst the deeper, cyclical expanse of space. Spatially, the piece will be divided into panels representing movement in the city with linear cellular automata patterns juxtaposed against panels conveying the environment in which this city simulation is embedded – Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie meets Villareal’s Multiverse, with particles moving through the border passageways set against fading panels of saturated deep tones of pure color. The piece was developed using custom software to generate the automata patterns and gradual color shifting.
Kawandeep Virdee is a multimedia artist and mathematician exploring community, collaboration, design, and innovation in a complex systems framework. Kawandeep received a bachelor of science degree in physics and applied mathematics from George Washington University, researching electromagnetic test engineering at NASA, nuclear physics at the Mainz Microtron Facility, and medical physics at the University of Maryland Medical Center, all while exploring collaboration in music and arts around Washington, D.C. He pursued further collaborations within the vibrant artist-musician community in Portland, Oregon, where he found his interest in the interactions between individuals and systems, and in the potential of the complex systems framework as a tool to design solutions for a beautiful world. Currently a research fellow at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Virdee is the founder of the Whirl Music Series and Soup Night Boston. www.whichlight.com
JEFFU WARMOUTH, FALL
Massachusetts-based Jeffu Warmouth is a conceptual artist who creates work that asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His work incorporates photography, video, objects, and installations, and often uses humor to skewer popular culture. Jeffu has exhibited in alternative spaces and museums, and his award-winning film/video work has screened in festivals internationally. Born in San Diego, California, in 1970, he received a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1992, and an M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Tufts University in 1997. He lives and works in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where he is professor of communications media at Fitchburg State University.
Warmouth’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including the DeCordova Museum (Lincoln, MA), Boston Center for the Arts (Boston, MA), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), The Art Complex Museum (Duxbury, MA), Tufts University (Medford, MA), Pittsburg State University (Pittsburg, KS), Photo Festival (Kaunas, Lithuania), MicroCineFest (Baltimore, MD), Brainwash Film Festival (Oakland, CA), The Last Supper Festival (Brooklyn, NY), AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media (Boston, MA), and the Experimenta Media Arts Tour (originating in Melbourne, Australia). www.jeffu.tv
ELLEN WETMORE, BLUE BOY JUMPING & PACING
Ellen Wetmore’s “Blue Boy Jumping” is derived stylistically from her video “Blue Boy Sleeping” which documents a 5 year old boy who was given instructions to “act like he was sleeping.” The result is a cartwheel of activity throughout the video space. Given the vertical orientation of the marquee, “Blue Boy Jumping” — a similar video of the child jumping — will trace his body movements across the screens, leaving patterns of his movements behind.
“Pacing” is a work in which the camera sees an actor from the top down while she paces through the video space. Everything is oriented vertically so she appears to be climbing up and down the wall in homage to Trish Brown’s “Walking Down the Wall” at the Whitney.
Wetmore’s artworks inspire a blend of humor and horror. She begins with an idea and then decides how best to manifest that idea visually. Focusing on lived experience blended with well-honed paranoia, Wetmore’s work uses depictions of her own body as its primary vehicle, stretching it visually to convey her concepts. Critic Cate McQuaid wrote: “Her works comically deflate, poke fun at and savor pregnancy and other bodily wonders and indignities. Her work is both funny and vaguely creepy.”
Raised in Saginaw, Michigan, Wetmore received her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, and her B.F.A. from the University of Michigan. Since her emergence in 2004 with her first Boston Sculptors show, she has blended the influences of Surrealist and Feminist art with her own unique iconography. Her work explores the corporality of the female body and its surreal transformations through sculpture, video, photography, and large digital wall drawings. Wetmore is an assistant professor of art at the University of Massachusetts – Lowell. She lives and works in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. www.ellenwetmore.iwarp.com
WATCH A PREVIEW OF PACING» | WATCH A PREVIEW OF BLUE BOY JUMPING»
