Phase Two ( )

Rebeca Bollinger in collaboration with Patricio Coronado

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, and create intimacy from afar through the transmission of image and sound.

A video by Bollinger is projected onto the gallery floor, casting a shimmering pool of light and shadow that reflects onto surrounding walls. Titled Before Word, the video is composed of footage of the Pacific Ocean recorded inside San Francisco’s Giant Camera Obscura—a room-scaled optical device that projects a live, inverted moving image of the surrounding environment using mirrors and lenses. For Bollinger, this device’s capacity to “produce a different perspective of everything” is 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 created from field recordings—or sound imprints—collected from his research into interspecies communication, the preservation of cultures, water, and land, and what the artist calls multi listening: the idea that distance and position inform how we perceive sound. Distributed across four speakers, discrete compositions play in each corner of the gallery emitting sounds of whales and dolphins, instruments made of animal skins, humans singing to animals, and musicians improvising, creating an evolving auditory experience shaped by distance and proximity.

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