(∼) Echo ( ) | phase two |

Through moving-image works, optical lenses, and a four-channel sound composition, artist Rebeca Bollinger and musician Patricio Coronado meditate on how distance and proximity inform meaning and perception, creating intimacy across distance through the transmission of image and sound.

Bollinger's video Before Word is projected onto the gallery floor, casting a shimmering pool of light and shadow that reflects across the surrounding walls. The work is composed of footage of the Pacific Ocean recorded inside San Francisco's Giant Camera Obscura—a room-scale optical device that projects a live, inverted image of its surroundings using mirrors and lenses. For Bollinger, the camera obscura's ability to "produce a different perspective of everything" lies at the center of her inquiries in (∼) Echo ( ).

While the video is a moving imprint of a distant time and place, in the gallery the image becomes distorted and abstracted—resembling not only flowing water, but also seeping molten earth, or mysterious celestial signals. The projection creates a new space that can be inhabited, to be experienced from within or observed from a distance. Nearby, a circular fresnel lens catches and bends light: magnifying and distorting views. These visual manipulations by the lens are in dialogue with the Camera Obscura’s transformative view, revealing how material, position, light, and distance shape what we see and can offer new perspectives on the familiar.

In dialogue with Bollinger's visual meditations on time, distance, and perception, Coronado's multichannel composition La Luz de los Naufragios is composed from field recordings, or sound imprints, gathered through his research into interspecies communication, the preservation of cultures, water, and land, and what he calls multi listening: the idea that distance and position shape how sound is perceived. Distributed across four speakers, discrete compositions emerge from each corner of the gallery, weaving together the sounds of whales and dolphins, instruments made from animal skins, humans singing to animals, and musicians improvising to create an evolving auditory experience shaped by distance and proximity.

Together, these works form a constellation of transmissions in which distant signals become intimate, and sound, light, and place continually shimmer, circulate, and return.

Organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Curator. Image Credit: MOCA Tucson, 2025. Photography by Julius Schlosburg