“The contributions of Aimée Papazian and Marianna Dixon Williams are very different, yet linked by a shared concern for damaged landscapes… The Massachusetts-based Williams created audio recordings of the Arctic Circle and pressed the ambient sounds onto discs that decay over time, representing the disappearance of glacial terrain in a warming world.” (Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post, May 22, 2024).

Since 2020, our world has been transformed by a global pandemic, advocacy for social reform, and political division. How have these extraordinary times inspired artists? Works by the artists featured in New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024 explore these ideas from perspectives that shift across geographies, cultural viewpoints, and time.

Installation at the Atlanta Contemporary (three channel video, eight channel audio, micro-controllers, wood, sand, boats, canvas panels, steel) The exhibition examines how our societal conditions have impacted artists’ visions for the future or inspired them to create alternative realities.

In my multimedia installation electronic objects, video and a deconstructed racing shell are activated to frame modes of survival, navigation and growth. Growth and loss, erasure and visibility are not just keys to navigating a physical landscape, but have been important to my own queer identity and community.

I arranged contact microphone recordings taken in the Arctic Circle into a two minute score. Based on research into phonautograms, I used Processing and Python to convert my audio file into a vector based drawing that could be read by a laser cutter. From these series of handmade paper discs (that can be played with sewing needles and a megaphone) I was able to develop a PVC disc that would play the indexed recording. As the discs are played the audio slowly erodes over time, pointing to an environment which is continuously changing.

When you visit the gallery and press play on the player, you contribute to the slow erosion of the sonic archive. After a disc has finally ‘melted,’ another one is taken from the stack and placed on the player. There are approximately 480 of the original 500 discs remaining.

James A. Michener Art Museum, The Delaware Contemporary, The Noyes Museum at Stockton College, Penn Praxis, ECC Venice, The Wrong Biennial, The Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, The Electronic Gallery at Salisbury University, The Mary S. Byrd Gallery at Augusta University, Smith College Galleries, Katzman Contemporary

In 2013 - a time before drones and in a place where helium doesn’t float - I zip-tied a GoPro to a meterological kite and flew it off of our ship in the Arctic Ocean. The camera flew for just over 2 minutes before the mainstay of the kite broke, causing the entire rig to fall to its death. This sculpture contains a welded steel basin, salvaged video and rocks.

Letters is a media installation that reframes the letters and drawings I sent and received over a ten year period as a life sized journal within a box truck. As I navigated my own relationship to home, chosen family, and my own LGBTQ+ identity, these letters became small symbols of the relationships that grounded me.

Metal balls on the floor ‘home’ to magnets within the floor after they are pushed around the box. A Kinect’s infrared sensor scans in visitors and connects to a Processing sketch which re-draws their depth from the lens as a bitmap image on the back wall. Data from this translation is never stored. By focusing on in the moment action the projection allows us to see ourselves as active in the conversation of the work.

I’ve followed environmental change by focusing on water - an element with a constant identity but which changes shape based on its container. Within this mixed media installation, water acts as a central metaphor for our relationship to self and the journeys that we take to find ourselves.

Pink Slips Analog was a shared studio space in downtown Augusta, Georgia. Artists working in the space hosted monthly events which promoted collaboration, community and non-commercial opportunities for artists and non-artists of all ages.

// Events suspended due to Covid-19

Both the world’s most northerly Cold War frontier and one of two Russian claims in the Arctic, the small coal mining community of Pyramiden supported several thousand people at its height before suffering economic hardship in the 1980s. This video documents the site as it was preserved by the arctic elements years after it was abandoned, just before its restoration and re-use.

This installation consists of a wall scale video generated from layered environmental data and painterly effects created in the Processing programming environment.

Hike Theory re-imagines a collective view of global ecology by transforming the museum into a real-time, color based weather system. Our relationship to climate and to our actions are re-framed through live data visualization, soundscapes and networking within the space of the museum.

Big Wave is a proposed tour of the city of Suqian, China. The installation utilizes sustainable, light construction to transform preexisting bus terminals into interactive animation galleries which reveal the history of each site in terms of a water narrative when they are activated.

// animation + programming Marianna Williams, site plan Moya Sun

Paintings created by milling GIS map data onto physical forms.

I rebuilt toys into radio receivers to intercept the electronic sounds in my city to reframe my understanding of home.

Collaboration by Sonya Rademeyer (performance), Dina Christiaan (performance), and Nkosenathi Koela (sound) in South Africa’s Northern Cape. Performances signal acts of restoration that work to dismantle colonial violence and which advocate for healing in the land. Videography and editing by Marianna Dixon Williams.

The Sound & Soil project acknowledges and respects the Khoe-San of the Northern Cape and the deep spiritual attachments to their ancestors and relationships they have to the country of South Africa and its peoples.

Visualization and play help us understand the relationship between mind and body. Viewers pedal a bike generator to activate a series of stop motion animations which are meant to ease the fear of crashing during an actual bike ride or race.