The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

August 19 to September 8, 2024

Eva Richardson McCrea stages encounters between actors who are performing scripted lines and improvising within set guidelines. Centered around moments of deal making and financial risk, Rope and Table Games frame the banality of high stakes transactions.

In Rope, 2022, three men eat food from takeaway containers and drink champagne in a derelict room. They chat about holidays and hobbies, have a conversation about Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, and discuss property development, among other things. The scripted parts of their conversation were developed from online reviews of Hitchcock’s Rope; the interviews and writings of Daniel Doctoroff, New York City's economic-development czar under Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class; and quotes from Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects.

In Table Games, 2021, six characters are playing poker. They played for real money which the winner received at the end of the performance. Each player was given a score of gestures, sentences and actions that they activate over the course of the game. Initially live-streamed, Richardson McCrea and her collaborator, Nina Nadig, live-edited the four camera recordings over the course of the seven hours.

Eva Richardson McCrea was born in 1990 in Ireland. She currently lives and works between Berlin, Germany and Dublin, Ireland. She is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Eva Richardson McCrea's presentation is curated by Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Associate Curator.

September 9 to September 29, 2024

Winnie Truong's practice spans dioramas, site-specific wall installations, animations, public art, and three-dimensional sculptures informed by feminism, botany, science fiction, and our ecological crisis. Her enchanting storylines combine femme anatomy with horticulture specimens of her own invention, originating a paranormal species that emphasizes interdependence.

This presentation spotlights new and recent stop motion animations projected on loop inside two galleries: The Trade, 2022 and Seed Vault, 2024. Truong animates her compositions with collaged cut paper elements individually hand colored with pencil and chalk that impersonate pressed flowers. Set to a nature soundscape, in The Trade depicts a plant-human collision as a delicate hand sprouts fleshy pink blooms under a full moon. While Seed Vault takes its inspiration from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which preserves over 1.2 million seed samples from around the world. In Truong’s fantasy, a pulpy uterus-like cavity safeguards an infinitely regenerating flora cycling through conception to maturity synched to a wistful audio track. Underscoring both works is Truong’s visualization of an alternate futurity emptied of binaries and hierarchies that reproduces hybrid life forces that are fluid and free.

Winnie Truong was born in 1988 in Toronto, Canada where she currently lives and works.

Winnie Truong's presentation is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

September 30 to October 20, 2024

Maya Jeffereis presents two experimental video works that investigate the oppressive and exploitive histories of Pacific and Caribbean Islands by addressing themes of resilience, solidarity, and rematriation.

Fields Fallen from Distant Songs, 2023, is centered on the artist’s great-grandparents’ experience as Japanese contracted laborers on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations during the early twentieth century. The film collapses time through the integration of archival footage of plantation workers, Jeffereis’ grandfather’s family videos from the 1960s, and her own documentation of the eruption of Hawaiʻi’s Kīlauea volcano in 2023. Throughout the film lines of contemporary Hawaiʻian poetry flutter across the frames, while an audio track of Japanese folk songs (holehole bushi) drifts over the visuals. The result is both a haunting reminder of a colonial past and a hopeful tribute to restoring relations with ancestral lands.

Taking a broadened perspective, Passages II, 2024, surveys the political and cultural implications of Western expansion amid Island territories such as Hawaiʻi, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Considering the islands’ shared history of US imperialism, the film emphasizes the ocean as a unifying force, joining together a collective legacy of resistance and understanding.

Maya Jeffereis was born in Los Angeles. She currently lives and works in New York, NY.

Maya Jeffereis' presentation is curated by Caitlin Monachino, Curatorial and Publications Manager.