Curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin

Opening Reception & Performance: Jan. 17, 2025 | 6–9pm

In the main gallery celebrate the opening of Waste Scenes: Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin. In the Project Room explore the work of BCA Studio Resident, Chelsea Silbereis: absorption. 

At 6:30 pm, experience sounding piles a performance by Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales in collaboration with Erik DeLuca and Mobius Artists Group performers Jimena Bermejo and Sara June.

Next door in the BCA Artist Studios Building from 5–8 pm, current artists in the BCA Studio Residency program will open their studio doors to the public in a building-wide Open House!

Schedule for the day:

• 5:00 pm BCA Artist Studios Building: Open House starts 
• 6:00 pm BCA Mills Gallery: Opening Reception for Waste Scenes: Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin and Chelsea Silberies: absorption. 
• 6:30 pm- 7:00 pm  BCA Mills Gallery: Performance event in collaboration with Erik DeLuca and Mobius Artists Group members Jimena Bermejo and Sara June.
• 7:30 pm  BCA Mills Gallery: Artists remarks at the BCA Mills Gallery
• 8:00 pm BCA Artist Studios Building: Open House ends 
• 9:00 pm BCA Mills Gallery:  Reception ends at the Mills Gallery

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Waste Scenes tells non-linear stories about trash, value, and desire in corporate culture and neoliberal capitalism through a new body of work by artists Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales produced during the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR). Given access to the construction and demolition waste stream generated throughout the Tri-state region, Chao and Schmidt-Arenales collected items from the trash piles in a new two-channel video installation Waste Scenes (2025), accompanied by wall drawings, a print series, a movie poster designed with Kristian Henson, and a sound-based performance event in collaboration with Erik DeLuca and Mobius Artists Group members Jimena Bermejo and Sara June for the opening.

The video installation Waste Scenes forms a call and response between trash and its counterpart—humans, often flipping the script between object-subject in vignettes with the Philadelphia Voices of Pride chorus, singer Dan Schwartz, and performers Bellisant Corcoran-Mathe and Parker Sera. The accompanying print series and wall drawings directly cite trash—real estate manuals, neurological textbooks, and puzzles featuring the “American West,” excavating corporate exploitation and empiric expansion. Collectively, Schmidt-Arenales and Chao probe processes of material decomposition—collection, breakdown, and synthesization—as methods of artistic research to dismantle twentieth-century neoliberal systems in tragicomic embodied experimentations.

 

*The exhibition Waste Scenes is organized by Laurel V. McLaughlin in dialogue with the artists at the Boston Center for the Arts. The film Waste Scenes (2024) was funded by the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR), the Velocity Fund, Illuminate the Arts, the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.