Opening Reception for Sustained Echoes: Unearthing Our Shared Roots

Light refreshments will be served!

How do media artists confront the rising tides of automated technologies, biased algorithms, and data mining? How can we connect with each other, when the people in power depend on our division? How do we minimize distractions brought on by corporate media spectacles so that we can feel solidarity in our struggles?

In Sustained Echoes, five multimedia artists come together to create a domestic living space in which they embody technology to unearth their shared roots in the CEPA underground gallery. Although each of the artists differs in their creative practices, their shared disillusionment with the postmodern condition is what unites them. In this interactive and multi-sensory group installation, material memories are revitalized and sustained through disempowering modern technology.

This exhibition features a deconstructed CRT TV interactive system made by James Pardue in which visitors’ sounds will be processed into data and projected onto the wall. This piece is meant to challenge and problematize the relationship of control between humans and both obsolete and emerging technology.

Dana Hunt-Locklear will create an affective experience through play that transports visitors to a child’s bedroom from the early 2000s. Video game posters are hung on the wall, and a Disney-branded CRT TV is set up, with significant Indigenous cultural symbols placed throughout, illuminating the incongruent depictions of Indigenous narratives in mainstream American media with more honest representations.

In the living room, Daphne Pugliese will visualize the harsh realities of labor exploitation and commodity fetishism through a handmade personification of various workers through history, and Jamie Hager’s interactive videos will feature a three-act structure that reflects the commodification of media consumption through mining consumer data.

An experimental video by Ashley Manigo featuring a textual representation of inner ruminations surrounding her struggles with feelings of melancholy and malaise ties our work together, echoing our shared hope for sustained community empowerment, artistically and beyond.

This group installation is made possible through the University at Buffalo’s Department of Media Study, the guidance of Professor and artist Crystal Z Campbell, and the CEPA Gallery.

For press inquiries, please contact Jamie Hager at: [email protected]

Host or Publisher University at Buffalo Department of Media Study