PLEASE LET ME IN is a multimedia installation of video, photo, and object work that crystallizes as an interactive experience, urging gallery-goers to excavate and co-create the exhibition’s narrative. A living bedroom installed deep in the gallery is an open invitation to explore an unknown stranger’s most intimate space—an opportunity to discover details hidden within the work and to reckon with what those discoveries might reveal. Beyond the bedroom emanates the detritus of fantasy and nightmares—large scale projections of warped home interiors immerse you in the realm of the Other; found object creations imbue the space with a sense of haunted history; fairy houses made of scavenged bits of earth and trash evidence an idyllic fairytale in a state of apocalypse.

PLEASE LET ME IN is a piece of object-spatial theatre, an environmental performance in which gallery-goers become a character in the sticky world of existential mystery constructed by Cannon and Rubio, gathering the threads between self and divine, intimate and unknowable, bedroom and black hole.

M’Kenzy Cannon: PLEASE LET ME IN is the fourth exhibition in the 1:1 Curatorial Initiative series presented in the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts. Each exhibition in this series presents a collaborative project between one curator and one artist, and either introduces a new artist or highlights a new aspect of a more experienced artist.

Public Reception & Curatorial Walkthrough

Friday, August 12 | 6–9pm

During the public reception for PLEASE LET ME IN, visitors will also be able to visit Project Room No. 1: Karmimadeebora McMillan, the first of the new Mills Gallery Project Room Exhibition Series. And as an additional treat, the BCA Artist Studio Building will be open from 5:30–8pm. If you get to our campus an hour early or feel like stepping outside during the reception, you’re welcome to explore the four floors next door and visit some BCA studio residents and their studios. Please RSVP.

Hello My Name Is… M’Kenzy Cannon & Maya Rubio

Virtual Artist Talk

CANCELLED.  Thursday, August 18 | 6-7 PM

M’Kenzy Cannon and Maya Rubio join us for the next episode of our virtual artist talk series “Hello My Name Is….” Learn about the origins and futures of PLEASE LET ME IN as the duo converses with Julia Szejnblum, Associate Director of Exhibitions at BCA. You’ll also be able to ask questions and participate in an active discussion with the curator and artist.

Desire Path: A Sonic Walk

DESIRE PATH is a sonic walk by Kelly Chen to prompt a reimagining of mobility through interactions with vibrations.

Available August 22 – September 10

DESIRE PATH is a geolocated audio tour is in conversation with themes of public/private, self/other, inside/outside, image/text, and other transgressed dichotomies presented in M’Kenzy Cannon: PLEASE LET ME IN at the Boston Center for the Arts. It explores the body’s relationship with city infrastructure with choreography and gesture. The sound walk combines elements of spoken “scores” and guided listening for the streets around Boston Center for the Arts in the South End, up Tremont Street, including interactions with Berkeley Community Garden and Peter’s Park.

DESIRE PATH considers how silence, noise, and mobility function as social conditions by taking part in the sounds and motions produced by organic and industrial processes of South Boston. To plier over fences, saunter across curbs, and relever from pillars to the sounds of construction, cars, fountains, stop lights, and passersby, participants interpret the public dimensions of the space. What does the infrastructure allow you to do? How does it allow you to assemble? How doesn’t it?

DESIRE PATH is created on Echos, available for mobile download on the App Store, Google Play, or the web. The walk will also be transcribed and mapped as a downloadable Google Maps coordinate set for accessibility. The walk can be performed in groups, or by oneself.

Virtual Workshop – Romancing the Virtual Domestic

An object-oriented poetry exercise with writer and soft theorist Annie Louise Martin

Tuesday, August 30 | 7 PM

This virtual poetry workshop will explore the changes between screens, objects, and bodies. Participants are encouraged to join the workshop from the comfort of their own homes, preferably from their bedrooms, from which they will be asked to choose an object that has accompanied them for longer than three years. Objects become participants, capable of invoking questions that can guide our understanding of space, aesthetics, and the agency of non-human matter. 

Annie Louise Martin is a writer and soft theorist based in New York City. She holds a BA in English from Amherst College, where she was a two-time panelist for the LitFest Poetry Workshop and the recipient of the Laura Ayres Snyder Poetry Prize, the Ralph Humphries Poetry Prize, and the Collin Armstrong Poetry Prize.

Participatory Performance with M’Kenzy Cannon & Maya Rubio

Saturday, September 10 | 4-5 PM

Join artist M’Kenzy Cannon and curator Maya Rubio for a participatory performance workshop marking the final days of PLEASE LET ME IN. The pair will lead guests through a movement-based interrogation of body and space relations. Together, we will return to the slow and magnified. Please wear comfortable clothes and an open heart.