Artist Lecture Series Winter 2024: Clarissa Tossin

The Brazil-born artist has built a collaborative research-focused practice from her base in Los Angeles that addresses connective tissue that links place, history, and aesthetics. Employing moving images, installation, and sculpture, she explores their alternative narratives in both built and natural environments of extractive economies. Whether reinserting figurative traditions and ritual practices of Mayan motifs in early twentieth-century Los Angeles architecture, as in her 2017 video Ch’u Mayaa, or more broadly examining a grotesque, postlapsarian world, the artist employs the future perfect language of speculative science to propose ways of seeing our devastated present.” Tossin’s work has been exhibited widely, including in the exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2018), and in the Twelfth Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea (2018).As a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University (2017-18), Tossin worked towards the installation Encontro das Águas (Meeting of Waters) (2018), which became the subject of a solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX. The project unfolded into a new exhibition, Future Fossil (2019), commissioned by the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. Tossin holds an MFA from the California Institute of Arts.