Thin Places: Thresholds of Transmission

Art, Science and Technology Collide at Emerson Contemporary’s Upcoming Exhibition

Announcement Thursday, August 27th, 2026, 3:30 p.m.

BOSTON, MA –

Emerson Contemporary, Emerson College’s platform for presenting contemporary visual art, today announced its upcoming exhibition, Thin Places: Thresholds of Transmission, which brings together works by Beatrice Glow, Megan and Murray McMillan, and Sabrina Ratté that explore the unstable boundaries between objecthood and atmosphere, embodiment and mediation, material presence, and digital experience. The exhibition is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from September 15 – December 12, 2026

Across sculpture, moving image, and installation, the exhibition considers how contemporary artistic practices are shaped by ecological, technological, cosmic, and sensory transmission that exceeds fixed or stable material states. The artists included in the exhibition approach matter not as a static substance, but as a dynamic process: something continuously shifting across thresholds of visibility, perception, and relation.

Beatrice Glow’s materially grounded installations trace the movement of cultural, ecological, and historical forces across global systems of exchange, connecting sensory experience with environmental transformation. Megan and Murray McMillan’s sculptural and video practice translates cosmic and environmental phenomena into embodied spatial encounters, activating relationships between gravity, light, perception, and physical forms. Sabrina Ratté’s speculative digital environments imagine hybrid ecologies in which technological systems and organic forms merge into continuously evolving atmospheric worlds.

Beatrice Glow, Textures of Time, single channel video, 2025. Video stills.

Astrophysical systems, environmental histories, speculative fictions and digital simulations become intertwined fields through which viewers encounter forms that are at once tactile and immaterial, intimate and planetary. Across the exhibition, distinctions between the virtual and the physical, the speculative and the real, are in doubt.

The exhibition asks how contemporary art might help us sense the complex and often invisible forces that shape contemporary life. In this context, “thin places” become sites where distinctions between matter and atmosphere, body and environment, material and immaterial briefly dissolve, allowing viewers to encounter the world as a shifting field of relations, transmission, perception, and transformation.

Megan and Murray McMillan, This Collapsed and Expanding Breath, Five-Channel Video Installation, 2025. The Jamestown Art Center.

Sabrina Ratté, CYBERDELIA, Interactive installation, 22 videos with soundtracks Oracle deck, 2024. Installation view. Soundtrack by Roger Tellier-Craig. Interactivity Guillaume Arseneault. Realized with the support of Sporobole

About Emerson Contemporary

Emerson Contemporary is the College’s platform for showcasing contemporary visual art. It is focused on presenting living artists, their ideas, experiments and creative practices in the areas of media art, performance art and emergent technologies, while critically examining these works in their social context.