Fall/Winter Exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center
October 22, 2021–February 13, 2022
The List Center is pleased to reopen with a focused survey of Leslie Thornton’s film and video work, a presentation of new sculpture by Sreshta Rit Premnath, and Andrew Norman Wilson’s first US museum solo in the List Projects space.
Leslie Thornton: Begin Again, Again
October 22, 2021—February 13, 2022
The relationship between technology, power, and violence has been an enduring concern for Leslie Thornton, and has fueled much of her work in film and video over the past five decades. Engaging these themes within a focused survey, her List Center exhibition marks the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition and largest presentation to date, with over a dozen works ranging from 1975 to the present. Thornton’s early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions as a student in the 1970s fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. The exhibition’s title, Begin Again, Again—borrowed from a line in her decades-long magnum opus Peggy and Fred in Hell (1983–2015)—alludes to human-made cycles of destruction and renewal as well the hallmarks of Thornton’s practice: an accumulation and repetition of images and language and a radically open-ended approach to observing, processing, and understanding.
Leslie Thornton: Begin Again, Again is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the List Center and Kunstverein Nürnberg are co-publishing the artist’s first monograph with Sternberg Press, scheduled for release in spring 2022.
Sreshta Rit Premnath: Grave/Grove
October 22, 2021—February 13, 2022
Sreshta Rit Premnath’s works—spanning sculpture, video, photography, and installation—expand on the strategies of Minimalism and Conceptualism to consider aspects of political agency in contemporary life. In Grave/Grove, Premnath offers a material exploration of life that exists in otherwise inhospitable spaces, and explores tensions and correspondences between growth and decay, belonging and loss, confinement and escape. In the sculptures on view, living plants—species that are usually considered to be weeds—sprout from the gaps between aluminum panels, which are cut to the scale and shape of standard cardboard boxes. Within some of these assemblages, plaster-coated foam figures slump and lie together, their “bodies” merging with the ground as they too become sites for growth. Alluding to the realities faced by individuals living a precarious or disenfranchised existence, Premnath’s work extends post-minimalism’s aesthetics to confront current sociopolitical conditions of austerity and dispossession—and, within them, robust sites of resilience and agency.
Sreshta Rit Premnath: Grave/Grove is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, in partnership with the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati, where a related exhibition organized by Amara Antilla, Senior Curator (CAC), is on view from September 17, 2021—February 6, 2022.
List Projects 23: Andrew Norman Wilson
October 22, 2021—January 9, 2022
Los Angeles-based artist Andrew Norman Wilson works primarily in moving image and installation and draws on a range of filmic conventions to examine cinematic histories alongside economies of labor and image circulation. The List Center exhibtion debuts Wilson’s new film, Impersonator (2021) alongside the recent Kodak (2019). Impersonator follows an unhoused character impersonator on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Boulevard who seeks connection through increasingly radical conspiracy theories they consume by way of a radio wired into the helmet of their storm-trooper-like costume. Kodak is centered around Rich, a semi-fictional former employee of Eastman Kodak, loosely based on the artist’s father. After being blinded in a workplace accident, Rich spends his days trying to make sense of his life and work by listening to archival tapes of Kodak founder George Eastman’s personal reminiscences. With two works that feature protagonists grappling with alienation by turning to audio in an image-saturated world, the exhibition focuses Wilson’s evolving interest in multilayered fictions and how media and cinema have the capacity to alter our sense of the real.
List Projects 23: Andrew Norman Wilson is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Related programming:
Artist Talk: Leslie Thornton
Saturday October 23, 2pm (in person)
Artist Talk: Sreshta Rit Premnath
Thursday November 4, 6pm (in person)
Curator Talk with Selby Nimrod
Friday November 5, 12pm (in person)
Fictions, Realism, and the Motion Picture Industry:
Andrew Norman Wilson and Joshua Glick in conversation
Wednesday November 17, 5:30pm EST (virtual)
Please visit our website for information about upcoming programs, visiting the galleries, and current COVID-related protocols.
