Curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin

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

Join us for an evening celebrating the opening of two new exhibitions at the Mills Gallery! In the main gallery, experience Waste Scenes by Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin. In the Project Room, explore absorption, the latest work by BCA Studio Resident, chelsea silbereis.

From 5–8pm, the BCA Artist Studios Building will host a building-wide Open House, where current residents in the BCA Studio Residency program will open their studio doors to the public. Come meet the artists, see their work in progress, and get an inside look at the creative process!

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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.