Speaker: Clarissa Tossin, Radcliffe fellow in 2017–2018
Clarissa Tossin expands upon her fellowship project with a newly commissioned exhibition that considers the ecology of an uncertain future. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction trilogy Xenogenesis (1989), in which the Amazon becomes the site for a new civilization of alien-human hybrids, Tossin speculates upon a postapocalyptic world following ecological collapse. Pairing DIY plastic recycling techniques with the materials and practices of Amazonian aesthetic traditions, Tossin highlights the contemporary footprint left in the geological sedimentation of the earth. These new works consider indigenous knowledge in relationship to the environment, while they also resemble ruins of a world yet to come.
Clarissa Tossin is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, California. Using installation, video, performance, sculpture, and photography, she investigates material cultural production and the ways in which it simultaneously represents the hybridization of global cultures and the persistence of difference. Her work has been exhibited at, among others, the Blaffer Art Museum, in Houston; the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Museum of Latin American Art, in Long Beach; the Queens Museum, in New York; SITE Santa Fe; the Wattis Institute, in San Francisco; Wesleyan University’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.
Join the artist and curator for a conversation about the inspiration for the exhibition and the themes that appear throughout. Please register here.
Exhibition organized by Meg Rotzel, Radcliffe Arts Program manager
LOCATION:8 Garden Street, Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20190131T190000Z DTEND:20190131T190000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR