December 12, 2019–February 9, 2020
New York-based artist Becca Albee layers the personal, political, and poetic in photo-based installations that draw on archival materials and overlooked histories. List Projects 20: Becca Albee premieres a newly commissioned body of work comprised of silver gelatin prints, color photographs, video, and a takeaway print edition.
In these works, Albee engages multiple temporalities—from singular, intimate moments to the concept of time on a geologic scale. Central to the exhibition is a three-channel video of Atlantic horseshoe crabs filmed under ultraviolet light. It documents their spawning during the full and new moons in the spring of 2019, an annual choreography that is 450 million years old. Beyond the continued survival of the prehistoric arthropod, the beach is a site of cyclical activity, at once fleeting and recurring.
The contrasting time scales of the beach find a parallel in the archive, where ephemera are conserved, at least theoretically, in perpetuity. Important to Albee’s new commission is her consideration of the influence of artist Robert Blanchon (1965-1999). Albee was a student and a friend of Blanchon's and corresponded with him the year prior to his death from AIDS-related complications at the age of thirty-three. The exhibition includes new photographs and a print edition that Albee created while reflecting on his enduring impact.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Albee has organized a screening of videos by Robert Blanchon. Taking place at the List Center on January 24, 2020, the screening will be followed by a conversation between conceptual artist and the executor of The Estate of Robert Blanchon, Mary Ellen Carroll (MEC, Studios), and Becca Albee.
List Projects 20: Becca Albee is organized by Yuri Stone, independent curator with Selby Nimrod, assistant curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Terry & Rick Stone. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. Additional funding for List Projects is also provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
