BOSTON, MASS.- Suara Welitoff’s appropriations of the past are a strategy for summoning an awareness of time as we are living it now. The exhibition surveys 12 videos spanning 2013 to 2018 (including the premiere of three works) and chronicles Welitoff’s practice of reworking footage from historic films, television, and the internet. Welitoff investigates how disrupting traditional structures of filmic time and narrative can alter our expectations of moving images. Repetition is key to our experience of Welitoff’s image and language fragments. Through her use of continuous loop and slowed motion, she achieves a temporality in which duration is the dominant experience rather than time moving forward, effectively resulting in an endless present. In contrast to technical methods of control and standards of digital perfection, Welitoff embraces the formal potential of accidents and inaccuracies, including pixilation and audio-visual glitches, viewing them as chances to improvise. At a time when the acts of selecting, modifying, and re-circulating are increasingly central to creation and communication, Welitoff’s works invite us to consider how our sensory relations to the mediated world are forever under revision.

Suara Welitoff (b. 1951 Jersey City, NJ) lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1998, her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings throughout the U.S. and Europe. One-person exhibitions include Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston; Anthony Greaney, Somerville; 186 Carpenter, Providence; Document, Chicago; James Harris Gallery, Seattle; Le Rete Projects, Milan; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has participated in group exhibitions with Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt; Regina Rex at Bunker259, Brooklyn; Marburger Kunstverein, Marburg; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester; Strozzina CCC, Florence; Performa 05 at Participant Inc, New York; NGBK, Berlin; Threadwaxing Space, New York; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Welitoff’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; List Visual Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Deutsche Bank, New York; Fidelity Investments, Boston; Barr Foundation, Boston; and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, in addition to numerous private collections. Welitoff is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Rappaport Prize (2012), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2009), and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Maud Morgan Prize (2002).

Suara Welitoff: Right Now This Moment is accompanied by a brochure with an essay by guest curator, Susan L. Stoops, Independent Curator of Contemporary Art. Previously, Stoops held the positions of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Worcester Art Museum (1999-2014) and Curator at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University (1984-1999).