Friday, May 28, 5pm ET
Zoom Link Sent Upon Registration

Anika Todd will discussing the history of the view from above.

Live event – May 31, 2–6pm
This event is part of the exhibition Din Din, a series of free, socially-distanced outdoor public events which use food and art to build community.

Window Screening
In addition to gallery space I will be using the window of the office during the exhibition for video projection.

Program Description
To Hold Water is an exhibition that considers the paradox of ownership. Presenting a challenge to Western traditions of private property and surveillance, the works investigate the implications of the human impulse to survey, to organize, and to control in an effort to understand that which is uncomfortably unknown.

The video work at the exhibition’s center, Self Portrait, exposes the implications of a traditional god’s-eye-view. While one camera submerges into the murky waters of the East River, a second flies on a set of balloons above Wall Street, creating a two-channel video that tracks the artist’s efforts to extend sight. The humble technology of the balloons shifts our experience of the conventional “God’s eye-view” characteristic of military and government-controlled technologies. The unsteady image of the work subverts this customarily controlled top-down perspective, creating a portrait of precarity in the effort to understand oneself and one’s world from above.

Artist Bio
Anika Todd (b.1992, Boston, MA) received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and her MFA from The University of Texas at Austin. Todd is a sculptor/media artist investigating landscape and ownership; Todd’s work functions through acts of trespass — simultaneously enacting and challenging systems that oppress, compartmentalize, and own in order to control. Todd’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at VisArts Center, Richmond, VA and Co-Lab Gallery, Austin, TX featured in the Washington Post (2018) and Glasstire (2019) respectively. She has been selected to participate in numerous residencies including Salem Art Works (2017), Haystack School of Craft and Design (2018), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019).