The window show: message received
Message Received curated by Jameson Johnson
Exhibition Dates: Monday, March 8, 2021 - Sunday, April 4, 2021
Furen Dai, rendering for “The Shade of Yellow”, installation, 2021. 16mm film converted to digital video, lightbox, vinyl
While the physical Boston Cyberarts Gallery interior remains closed due to COVID-19, we are organizing a series of art events and exhibitions to be seen from outside the gallery. "The Window Show" is an ever changing art exhibition in the Boston Cyberarts Gallery windows. Please visit here for special events and updates.
Boston Cyberarts is pleased to present Message Received, a group exhibition curated by Jameson Johnson. Message Received presents new and reconfigured work by three interdisciplinary artists: Furen Dai, Ryan Kuo, and Gabriel Sosa. Through digital media, short films, application design, and text, their work explores the subtle, yet powerful ways in which language can be employed for activism, information dissemination, and collective agency while simultaneously weaponized or used as a means for upholding colonial and racial violence.
Gabriel Sosa (b. Miami, FL; lives and works in Boston) utilizes the train station as a site for examining the notion of waiting as it pertains to the language of activism. Combining Spanish and English text with the aesthetics of commercial spaces in transition, Sosa manipulates the adage “La paciencia es un árbol de raíz dulce pero de frutos podridos” (Patience is a tree with bitter roots that bears sweet fruits) and invites readers to consider the paradoxical necessity and futility of patience.
Furen Dai (b. Hunan, China; lives and works in Boston and New York City) turns the camera to institutions that maintain long-held standards about race, beauty, history, and diaspora. Her gaze considers the architecture within encyclopedic museums as unquestioned bolsters for Western ideals. To accompany the film, Dai has pulled fragments from the diary of a 17th century doctor and traveller who is credited with authoring some of the earliest modern writing about racial classification. The resulting site-specific installation, The Shade of Yellow (2021) calls into question the structures that have supported racial stratification within and outside of the arts for centuries.
Ryan Kuo (b. Elkins, WV; lives and works in New York City) pulls from personal exchanges, both online and in person, to create a “procedural whiteness sequencer.” The program, OK2 (2021) reimplements OK. (2018) , a Mac application in which users click through dialog boxes and interface elements to generate a white monologue. In this version, adapted for the web and the window gallery, the viewer is unable to stop or alter the sequence and is forced to passively watch a one-sided conversation unfold—an all too common phenomenon of whiteness that is supported by the sociocultural infrastructure of language. Kuo pointedly appropriates the language from its primary users and redeploys it as a thoughtless mechanism.
Paired with the tenderness of poetic construction, the artists’ subversion of language invites viewers to pause and consider the implications of the words we produce and consume. These works proclaim that language is not innocent; semantics are so inherently tied to historical narratives and harmful hierarchies of culture that it can be difficult to untangle them from the speaker, mode, or method with which they are employed. At the same time, Message Received posits that care and attention to language—starting at an individual level—can lead to a radical reconsideration of the world around us.
All installation photos below by Iaritza Menjivar
About the curator:
Jameson Johnson is a writer, curator, and community organizer based in Boston. Since 2017, she has served as the founder and editor in chief at Boston Art Review, an online and print publication committed to facilitating discourse around contemporary art in Boston and beyond. Most recently, she has curated exhibitions at Boston Center for the Arts and Fountain Street Gallery, as well as served on juries across New England. In 2019, Johnson became the marketing and development associate at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.
about the artists:
Furen Dai is an artist based in Boston and New York. She received her BA in Russian language and literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University, and her MFA from the school of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has participated in residencies including International Studio and Curatorial Programs (ISCP), Art OMI, NARS Foundation, ELSEWHERE. She received public art commission from The Art Newspaper for Frieze Art Fair 2019 and Rose Kennedy Greenway in 2020. She is the recipient of The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Fellowship (2017) and Emergency Grant COVID-19 Fund from Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2020).
Ryan Kuo lives and works in New York City. His works are process-based and diagrammatic and often invoke a person or people arguing. This is not to state an argument about a thing, but to be caught in a state of argument. Recent projects utilize chatbots, web design, productivity tools, and videogame engines to track the passage of objects through white escape routes. His solo commission at bitforms gallery, The Pointer, addressed whiteness as “an unremitting affective failure that erases bodies, including its own, in its search for a neutral point of origin”. His recent projects include an AI conversational agent that embodies the blind “faith” that underpins both white supremacy and miserable white liberalism and casts doubt on nonbelievers, and an artist’s book about aspirational workflows, File: A User’s Manual, modeled after software guides for power users. His work has appeared at Queens Museum (NYC), TRANSFER (LA), bitforms gallery (NYC), Stroom Den Haag (The Hague), Goethe-Institut China (Beijing), Copperfield Gallery (London), Goldsmiths (London), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA), and MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA), and has been published in Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, and Rhizome. It is distributed online at left gallery (Berlin). He has been in residence at Pioneer Works (NYC) and the Queens Museum Studio Program (NYC).
Gabriel Sosa is an artist, educator, curator, and linguist. His multi-disciplinary practice incorporates drawing, video, sound, and installation to explore how the use of language subtly shapes and disrupts our everyday experiences. Most recently, his project No es fácil/It ain’t easy was a bilingual series of billboards on display in various Boston neighborhoods from July 2020 to January 2021. Additionally, his work has been shown at the O, Miami Poetry Festival; Tufts University Art Galleries; Centro Cultural Español, Miami; La Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana; A R E A, Boston; and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. He was one of the curators of the Area Code Art Fair 2020, the first art fair focused on artists with ties to New England, and has also curated exhibitions at Haley House in Roxbury and The Nave Gallery in Somerville. Gabriel has been an artist-in-residence at Lugar a dudas, Cali, Colombia; Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; and Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, California. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Urbano in Boston and a fellow at the Art and Law Program in New York. He is also a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Born and raised in Miami, he is based in Boston.
Message Received: Artist Talk with Furen Dai, Ryan Kuo and Gabriel Sosa
Tuesday, March 30th at 5:30 PM
Join exhibition curator Jameson Johnson with exhibiting artists Furen Dai, Ryan Kuo and Gabriel Sosa for a conversation around their group exhibition, Message Received. The conversation will utilize the works included within the exhibition as a framework for discussing the role of language in contemporary art and more broadly as a tool for activism, agency, appropriation, and action.
This event will be held on Zoom. A link will be provided (to those registered) 24 hours before the event start time.
We will work with all members of our community to ensure accessibility needs are met for this event. Due to limited resources, we ask individuals to please reach out at least one week in advance with any accessibility requests.