The Dancer

Robotic sculpture The Dancer (2020) explores the performativity of an object as it moves across space and ‘draws’ through movement in time. The result is an unstable and irregular vibrational dance triggered by sounds emerging from its own body as the resonant frequencies of its material composition causes the object to move. Thus The Dancer dances as a way of embodying its own noise. This object is animated by sounds that are drawn as a dance across space and time. Exploring other levels of animacy and performativity, this vibrational body exists in a continuous dialogue between gravity, resonance, and trance.

Photo: Emerson Contemporary

About the Exhibition

Spacetime (x, y, z + t)

Emerson Contemporary proudly presents Spacetime (x, y, z + t), a multi-dimensional exhibition that features experimental works by regional and international artists: Katherine Mitchell DiRico (US), Monika Grzymala (GER), Nicole L’Huillier (CL), Zsuzsanna Szegedi (HUN), and Sarah Trahan (US)

The exhibition opens Wednesday, January 22, 2020 with an artists’ reception from 5:00–7:00 p.m. and runs through March 15, 2020. It will be held at Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery, located at 25 Avery Street in Boston, which is open Wednesday through Sunday from 12–7 p.m. The exhibition and related programming are free and open to the public.

Curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury—Emerson’s Foster Chair of Art Theory and Practice and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence—the exhibition features digital projections, 3D printed objects, inkjet prints, VR drawings, video, site specific light installation and a dancing robot. In putting together this exhibition, Bradbury considered how our perceptions are challenged and consequently change when artists include a durational element into an otherwise object-based artistic practice. Additionally, Spacetime includes both subtle and dramatic sonic elements that, when combined with drastic scale shifts of the various installations, contribute to a compelling immersive exhibition experience.

The works included in Spacetime (x, y, z + t) investigate the dynamic relationships between objects, their materiality and demonstrate how an idea, object, or artistic concept can ‘travel’ across time, multiple media and physical locations. Together these five artists’ aesthetic experiments offer an exploration of the rapidly changing intersections between the physical and the digital, objecthood and performativity, and expose how the virtual and the real interact in new ways as a result of current technological advancements.

In 1905, Albert Einstein demonstrated that space and time are both relative and integrated and are essentially the same thing: a single unified entity called ‘spacetime’. Spacetime is a dynamic entity that fuses the three dimensions of space (x,y,z) and the dimension of time (t) into a single, four-dimensional continuum. In curating the exhibit, Bradbury explored the question of what happens when an artwork becomes an event that exists in the four dimensions of Einstein’s concept of ‘spacetime’ – rather than as an object in space and/or time.

Photo: George Bouret Photography