Alice Wang: Liminal Landscapes

This program presents three works that span over a decade of Wang’s practice: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (2012), Oracle (2017), and Pyramids and Parabolas III (2024). Rooted in structuralist, essayistic, and documentary traditions, Wang conceives the act of filming as a mode of inquiry into the intersection between physical and psychological landscapes. Her site-specific filmmaking often focuses on remote and uncanny terrains—volcanic fields, Arctic glaciers, and self-contained ecosystems—inviting viewers to reflect on the alien within the familiar. Through structural and poetic narration, her films produce a sense of dislocation evoking the solitude and wonder of navigating the unknown.

Parallel to Wang’s film practice, the artist also makes sculptures and photographs that center the body as a sentient agent situated within a non-geocentric and quantum universe. Using metamorphic substances such as fossils, meteorites, electrons, plants, and heat, she engages the mediums of sculpture and photography as critical frameworks to examine metaphysical questions about the nature of reality. Employing a post-minimalist process for object-making, Wang’s sculptural works combine geometric abstraction with material, form, scale, color, and texture, striking a balance between mathematical thinking and sensual physicality. To short-circuit cognitive operations and reclaim the intelligence of the body, she takes a structuralist approach to photography and film by calling attention to the perceptual qualities of images.

Following the screening, Wang will be in conversation with artist Matthew Day Jackson and e-flux Film Curator Lukas Brasiskis to discuss how medium-specificity operates in her work as both a conceptual schema and in the exploration of materials and forms.