Crisis of Image in Conversation: Expanding Photography

Thursday / May 4 / 6pm-7pm

Please join artists Melissa Joseph, Sasha Rudensky, and Amy Elkins in conversation with author Kirsten Gill, co-hosted by MoCAA and Field Projects.

Sasha Rudensky’s photographic work explores the production and interpretation of cultural identity and history. Amy Elkin’s “Black is the Day, Black is the Night” is a photography project spanning from 2009-2016 that explores how long-term isolation and incarceration can affect an individual’s psychology, sense of self, and perception of reality. Melissa Joseph presents a laborious translation of an archive of family photographs into felt “snapshot” sculptures that distend the immediacy of photography. The exhibition catalog’s author Kirsten Mairead Gill is a scholar and theorist of moving image media at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation, “Movement Image: Black Freedom in Experimental Film and Video, 1965-85”, recovers a range of experiments in post-war cinema to argue that the sociality of moving image media was dramatically re-imagined in the light of Black liberation movements from the 1960s-1980s.

Together, they will discuss how image-making, and particularly photography, today have the potential to “rearrange the possibilities for how we might appear,” a critical intervention in a state with increasing censorship and repressive mandates created to push for a homogenous nationalistic image.

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Elliot Doughtie: Tomato

September 9 - December 17, 2023

Experimental Gallery

Elliot Doughtie’s sculptures and installations transform industrial materials into metaphors for the human body and the experience of inhabiting one.

Andrew Barco: Understory

September 9 - December 17, 2023

Truland Gallery

Layering objects and text, fact and fiction, history and the present moment, artist Andrew Barco’s Understory explores the possibilities and difficulties of understanding across culture and time.

Marissa Long: Blister Pearl

September 9 - December 17, 2023

Wyatt Resident Artists Gallery
Enshrined in a gauzy pink enclosure with a stalagmite-encrusted figure at its center, MoCA Arlington resident artist Marissa Long’s Blister Pearl is an installation that recalls both a Renaissance garden grotto and a saint’s sepulcher, sites synonymous with mystery and transformation.

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