Join us in the gallery for an artist talk by our current artist in residence, Tra Bouscaren. Tra has been in residence since May 22 and departs June 29.

FREE to attend! Please RSVP below.

(We will hold a reception prior to the artist talk from 6-7pm in the hallway between the gallery and our office)

Biography:

Tra Bouscaren is a post-disciplinary artist focused on spectacle at the crossroads of waste culture and the surveillance state.

Bouscaren has exhibited at Vittorio Manalese (Berlin), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Victor I Fils Gallery (Madrid), the Malta Biennial (Birgu), Ammerman Triennial (New London), Mattress Factory Museum (Pittsburgh), Fort Mason Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Florida Prize Exhibition at Orlando Museum of Art, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia) and Lincoln Center (NYC), among other venues.

Research presentations and publications include: RE: SOURCE Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology (Venice), Dallas Contemporary, MOCA Tucson, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Stony Brook University Conference on Art and Philosophy, Studies In Control Societies Journal, Ildo Lobo Center for Culture (Praia), CAA Conferences (Chicago and LA), the Rubin Center for Visual Arts (El Paso), and the FLAT Journal (UCLA). Bouscaren builds projects with a broad array of visual artists, performers, hackers, musicians, and scholars through the Expanded Media Lab, which he founded in 2019.

Artist Statement:

Tra Bouscaren builds environments from the afterlife of advertising and infrastructure. Using salvaged billboards, e-waste, neon, and demolition metals, he assembles unstable images, sculptures, and installations. The work treats spectacle as raw material and subject: slogans become skins; words become texture, scars of circulation and sculptural production blur. Bouscaren’s work approaches spectacle as a subject, in terms of its own materials, bringing them back to haunt it like a dead mirror.

Education:

PhD Candidate, Media Study, State University of New York at Buffalo (ABD)
MFA, Interdisciplinary Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania
BA, Philosophy, Yale University, with Distinction