Still from Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Waste Scenes, 2024. Two channel video installation, 40:39 min.Still from Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Waste Scenes, 2024. Two channel video installation, 40:39 min.Disaster Views and Objections
Tuesday, February 25 | 6:30–8pm
Online via Zoom
Join BCA for a panel discussion with Maia Chao, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, and Tessa Haas, moderated by Laurel V. McLaughlin. Together, Chao, Schmidt-Arenales, and Haas will explore the processes, production, editing of the main two-channel installation Waste Scenes, specifically querying its performative and new media methods of decomposition as resistance to the extractive and all-consuming logic of late capitalism.
Participants
Maia Chao is an artist who works collaboratively in social practice, film, and performance. Chao has presented commissioned works for The Shed, MoMA Education, Mural Arts (Philadelphia), and most recently the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (DC). She is co-creator of Look at Art. Get Paid. at the RISD Museum. She has completed residencies at Pioneer Works, Queer|Art, and the Fine Arts Work Center, among others. In 2022, she was named a Pew Fellow and in 2023, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently, Chao is the Public Artist in Residence at the Times Square Alliance. Based in Philadelphia, Chao is a member of the art collective and DIY space, Vox Populi Gallery. She has taught at RISD, University of Pennsylvania, Moore College of Art and Design, and is currently full time faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and filmmaker working across participatory non-fiction film, experimental narrative film, and video installation. His projects attempt to bring awareness to unconscious processes on the individual and group level. He has presented solo exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York), Visual Arts Center (Austin), and Galveston Artist Residency (Galveston). He has presented films, installations, and performances internationally at venues including SculptureCenter and The Bronx Museum (New York), Links Hall and The Logan Center for the Arts (Chicago), The Darling Foundry (Montreal), LightBox, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Vox Populi, and The School District of Philadelphia (Philadelphia), Artspace (New Haven), The Museum of Fine Arts and FotoFest (Houston), Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien (Graz), and Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna). His film Committee of Six was awarded a Jury Prize for Best of the Festival at the 2023 Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
Tessa Bachi Haas is assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where she has organized and supported nearly ten exhibitions since 2022. She is invested in uplifting local arts ecologies and fostering a global exhibition program. Her forthcoming projects include Christian Marclay: Doors, the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize, and the first museum survey of Derrick Adams. Haas has previously held curatorial positions in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and has contributed to over thirty exhibitions in these cities. Tessa is a Ph.D Candidate in History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she earned her MA in 2019.
Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, is a writer, curator, art historian, and educator. McLaughlin is a Curator and the Director of the Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries. She has shared her scholarly and curatorial work in conferences ranging from Performance Studies International, Calgary; to the Universities Art Association of Canada Conference, Montreal and Toronto; the College Art Association, New York; and the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present, Hong Kong, and she has published writing in Art Papers, ASAP/J, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Performa Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, Women & Performance, and ASAP Journal, among others. She recently co-edited the multidisciplinary reader Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production (Amherst College Press, 2024). McLaughlin’s curatorial work has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Dutch Consulate of New York, and she is currently undertaking a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship for a forthcoming exhibition How do you throw a brick through a window….