Clarissa Tossin: Future Fossil

Clarissa Tossin RI ’18 expands on her fellowship project with a newly commissioned exhibition that considers the ecology of an uncertain future. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction trilogy Xenogenesis (1989), in which the Amazon becomes the site for a new civilization of alien-human hybrids, Tossin speculates on a postapocalyptic world following ecological collapse. Pairing DIY plastic recycling techniques with the materials and practices of Amazonian aesthetic traditions, she highlights the contemporary footprint left in the geological sedimentation of the earth. These new works consider indigenous knowledge in relationship to the environment while also resembling ruins of a world yet to come.

Clarissa Tossin is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Using installation, video, performance, sculpture, and photography, she investigates material cultural production and the ways in which it simultaneously represents the hybridization of global cultures and the persistence of difference. Her work has been exhibited at the Blaffer Art Museum, in Houston; the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; the Museum of Latin American Art, in Long Beach, California; the Queens Museum, in New York; SITE Santa Fe; the Wattis Institute, in San Francisco; Wesleyan University’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, among others. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.

Curated by Meg Rotzel, arts program manager

Exhibition design by Joe Zane, gallery coordinator

Curatorial assistant, Rachel Vogel, doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art + Architecture, Harvard University