(∼)Echo(  )  | phase two | presents moving-image works, optical lenses, glass, light, shadow, and a four-channel sound composition.

Rebeca 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, within the gallery the image becomes distorted and abstracted, resembling flowing water, seeping molten earth, or mysterious celestial signals. The projection creates a space that can be inhabited, experienced from within or observed from a distance. A suspended Fresnel lens and mirror catch and bend light, magnifying, doubling, and shifting the projected image.

Across the gallery, in counterpoint to the projection, the looping video Where the moon touches the sea is presented on an 8-inch monitor, viewed through suspended glass forms and folded black acrylic that refract and double the image.

Patricio Coronado's multichannel composition La Luz de los Naufragios draws 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 weave together the sounds of whales and dolphins, instruments made from animal skins, humans singing to animals, and musicians improvising.

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

(~)Echo( ) unfolds in two distinct phases, each developed through a different collaboration: opening with composer Gus Tomizuka (∼) and concluding with artist and musician Patricio Coronado ( ). Together, these collaborations extend Bollinger's work with iteration, translation, transmission, and sound.

Organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Curator. Image credit: MOCA Tucson, 2025, photography by Julius Schlosburg.