Contemporary X is an annual open call for artists to present a new body of work that advances the discourse of image-based practices in unique ways. Each finalist receives a $5000 honorarium and the opportunity to exhibit their work in TILT’s main gallery. This year the jury selected visual artists Liliana Farber and Allie Tsubota. The exhibition will run from April 13 – June 24, 2023 in the Main Gallery.
Liliana Farber’s artwork examines knowledge production within global-scale infrastructures. Her still and moving images, sculptures, and interactive works explore the histories and design ramifications of common digital systems. She uses timestamps, geolocation points, satellite imagery, old maps, and literature as raw materials for her minimalist pieces. Abstract and entangled, the end results are failed data visualizations that contrast a sense of being lost or disconnected in a hyper-mapped and connected world.
Allie Tsubota is a photographer exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Through contemporary and archival practice, she pursues questions of history, subjectivity, spectatorship and language, and their discontinuities across transnational space and time. As a fourth-generation Japanese/American, she has been most focused on episodes of empire and assimilation within the Asian/Pacific diaspora, and is notably indebted to the work of Black feminist scholars attending to the afterlives of transatlantic racial slavery.
Leah Ra’chel Gipson is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. Her work facilitates hyperlocal, community projects that engage Black culture and imagines critical “call and response” environments. Leah’s work explores race and gender through family history, popular media, and archives using image, sound, textile, and installation, rooted in mixed traditions of Black feminism and the Black church. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art Therapy Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Samantha Hill is a transdisciplinary artist and the Curator of Civic Engagement at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books & Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. Samantha creates multi-media installations and performances within historic buildings, landmarks and public locations. Her practice focuses on archives, oral stories collecting, social projects and art facilitations. She has produced archive-based exhibits, educational projects, and presentations for various academic and cultural institutions.
