Martha Poggioli explores the channels through which sounds and images move, across distance, through physical matter, and over time. For her newly-commissioned installation at the Fine Arts Center, Poggioli invites visitors into a multi-sensory environment that begins with a vinyl drawing of a spiral sound wave. From there, the experience unfolds through a cast glass sculpture — colored pinkish red as if to suggest the body’s internal cavities — which cuts through the wall in the gallery. Inside, visitors will encounter milky silicone sheets on which video projections are reflected and refracted, a mind map of associative terms on glass, and a brass conch-shaped sculpture that emits sound.
A wide-ranging set of references inform Poggioli’s works, each of which relate to transmission: robotic surgeries that make use of digital screens to mediate an image of a patient’s internal body in invasive surgeries, a 17th-century treatise on music theory that illustrates sound amplification, and the naturally resonant limestone cave known as the Ear of Dionysius in Sicily (allegedly used by a tyrant ruler to eavesdrop on his political prisoners). Poggioli takes these references and reconfigures them into a poetic constellation through sculpture, sound, and image. In the artist’s hands, form and material are engaged as both barrier and conduit, highlighting how the transmission of sound and image mediate our experience. As a result, the installation offers a proposition: technologies that extend human perception contain a dual nature, they reveal but they can also surveil, they enable but also control. This tension, in turn, leads to a question: what are the ethics of access? Rather than offering easy answers, Transmissions creates an environment of heightened awareness so that we can consider how we see, hear, and sense the world around us.
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About Contemporary Film, Video, and Sound
From August 2024 to September 2025, the Lane West Gallery will be dedicated to a rotating selection of contemporary film, video, and sound works. Each of the featured artists grapples with the body’s relationship to technology.
Contemporary Film, Video, and Sound is curated by Katja Rivera, Curator of Contemporary Art. Support is generously provided by the Catharine and Bart Holaday Endowment for Interactive Art.
Top image: Martha Poggioli, still from Split screen Altar for our Echoes, 2025.