Long Transmission

Long Transmission features large-scale installation, sculpture, photography, video, printmaking, poetry, drawing, and audio art from 8 artists based around the U.S.

Messages linger as residue—in spaces, objects, lineage, and subconscious memories—shaping how we understand our past and navigate our present. Abandoned sites, often the byproducts of late-stage capitalism, serve as silent warnings for future generations. Ancestral tools and symbols encode instructions for survival, waiting to be unlocked through a relationship to one's contemporary body. Like a game of telephone, each generation relays the protective traditions learned by distant kin. In the digital age, messaging apps like WhatsApp extend transmissions across borders, carrying sacred counsel from family and echoing the wisdom once passed through touch, voice, and ritual. This exhibition examines the ways messages persist, whether grafted over landscapes, carried down generations, embedded in materials or whispered through technology.

Gary Sczerbaniewicz’s installations and sculptures turn abandoned architectural spaces into messages—remnants of past events layered with religious symbolism, Cold War silence, and esoteric mythologies—revealing an uneasy cohabitation of “official” history and conspiracy. May Elian works between sculpture, painting, and poetry, giving form to stories of trauma, languages of love, and antiwar messages. Her work channels messages that often go unheard, and the psychological landscapes of PTSD, through the use of vessels, text-infused images, and icons that traverse borders.

Through drawing and sculptural intervention, Liam Ze’ev O’Connor's work explores and shifts narratives around the intricate tapestry of Jewish identity in America. Their featured installation transmutes a traditional melody, giving way to silence and letting ambient sounds become part of the viewer's experience. Pilar Lagos’ printmaking process uses fragmented imagery and impermanent materials to express the impossibility of fully conveying a message. Her work reflects the ever-changing nature of memory, identity, and life with chronic illness.

Andy Van Dinh uses carbon paper and clothing patterns as a direct link to the ideas of translation, transition, evidence of absences, and his experiences with the Vietnamese Diaspora. Jose D. Trejo-Maya's poetry engages the spectral remnants of the Nahuatlacah oral tradition, tracing the disappearance of language as a rupture in time and intergenerational memory. 

Betty Yu weaves together multimedia storytelling and community-based practices to unearth buried family histories, recognizing that acts of resistance can start with your own ancestral roots. Meanwhile, she examines the protective silences and generational amnesia often shaped by trauma.  In collaboration with Daylight Books, we are pleased to feature Yu’s work, from her recently published photo book, Family Amnesia. Malda Smadi’s large-scale installation considers the use of traditional Syrian embroidery in tandem with modern technologies that both carry familial wisdom across geographies and time, illuminating the cyclical act of re-rooting as a message of endurance recorded in the body. The work incorporates laborious methods that speak to a fidelity to memory, and spaces of respite and caretaking.