Featured Artists: Tra Bouscaren, John Pomara, Liz Trosper
In collaboration with Dallas Contemporary and UTD Lecture Series ‘The New Painter’
Reception: Friday, March 7, 2025 at 7pm till midnight Exhibition: March 7 to 28, 2025 Open Doors on Tuesdays from 10:00 am - 3:00 pm
Appointment based viewings of the gallery available. Make appointments via email at newmediacontemporary@gmail.com
***Donation based finger foods and refreshments will be available at reception.***
Tra Bouscaren
Bio
Fingers and Zippers (2025)
Tra Bouscaren is an Assistant Professor and Director of the eXMeLab (Expanded Media Lab) in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. He earned a BA in Philosophy from Yale University, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and is ABD towards a PhD in Media Study at SUNY Buffalo. Bouscaren’s work has been featured at the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), Vittorio Manalese (Berlin), the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Victor I Fils Gallery (Madrid), the National Museum of Art (Addis Ababa), San Diego Art Institute (now ICA San Diego), Hallwalls (Buffalo), Fort Mason Center for the Arts (San Francisco), the Florida Prize Exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia), and Lincoln Center (NYC), among many other venues.
Bouscaren has been offered research presentations at RE: SOURCE International Conference on Media Art, Science and Technology (Venice), the Stony Brook University Conference on Art and Philosophy, Studies In Control Societies Journal, the Museum für Naturkünde (Berlin Museum of Natural History), Dallas Contemporary, MOCA Tucson, the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, and the FLAT Journal out of the UCLA. In 2025, Bouscaren is focused on collaborative projects with a broad array of visual artists, scientists, and scholars through the eXMeLab network he founded in 2019.
Artist Statement
Tra Bousaren is a neo-cave painter. Assembling e-waste, neon, billboards, and salvage from demolition sites, his installations critique American spectacle at the intersection of waste culture and the surveillance state. From the ceiling down, he constructs storms of trash into which he weaves surveillance equipment. Live surveillance video feeds are algorithmically combined with test patterns and re-deployed through a multichannel array, submerging the installation in projection. By illuminating the installation with the calibrated image of the spectator, the work recalibrates the viewer in relation to the salvaged substrate upon which it is projected.
John Pomara incorporates various technological platforms into his work to reflect our unconscious immersion in the digital world. His abstract paintings depict blurs, glitches, and printing imperfections, contradicting our vision of modern technology as cold, rational, and without error. Entropy and mechanical failure are prevalent themes within his work. In his endeavors to visually represent these errors he utilizes printers, copy machines and the Internet. John Pomara (b. 1952) received an MFA and a BFA from East Texas State University. Pomara also attended the Empire State Studio Arts Program in NYC. He Lives in Dallas, Texas.
Facial Disruption 2, 2019
UV ink on canvas
96 × 70 in | 243.8 × 177.8 cm
Facial Disruption 1, 2019
UV ink on canvas
96 × 70 in | 243.8 × 177.8 cm
Liz Trosper
Bio
Liz Trosper is an artist and new media painter working with ideas of reproduction, transformation and play. Trosper’s work considers the desire for touch that is both fueled and denied by technology along with systems of waste. Trosper is founder of The New Painter, promoting creative research in new media painting, and creator of MOTHER’S ROOM, an ongoing virtual exhibition of new media works exploring the womb as a virtual spatial metaphor. Trosper works in the space of shareable imagery via the web, her materially-oriented work is represented by Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas, TX. Trosper’s work has been the subject of a one-person exhibition at The Wilcox Space, an initiative of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, a site for the exhibition, documentation, and study of the work of artists who explore painting as medium and idea. Internationally, Trosper has participated in residencies and exhibitions such as Centre Pompadour Center for Neofeminist Studies residency in rural France, the CICA Museum in South Korea and the Artron network in China. Trosper has also been included in surveys of abstraction at the San Antonio Museum of Art and The Museum of South Texas. Trosper teaches and is Area Head for Design and Creative Practice at The University of Texas at Dallas focusing on new media painting practices and is a faculty member of LabSynthE creative laboratory.
Artist Statement
My creative research is steeped in materiality and driven by the question: How are we in material discourse with digital and mechanical mark-making? Using a practice of blending paint, tangible materials with imaging technology, my artwork is driven by inquiry into what constitutes innovation and tradition in contemporary painting.
Influenced by the culture surrounding blended approaches to painting since Rauschenberg and Warhol, my work is informed by material science, color theory (both pigment and light), screen culture and conceptual art. I make artworks that begin with a love of materials and their tactile, voluminous properties. I create both still and time-based paintings using tube structures, discarded materials and objects along with digital media. Such works are informed by painter animators like Oskar Fischinger.
My work explores the vibrant interplay between physical materials and digital media. I try to bring the joy of physicality and embodied sense of materials to screen culture using all that painting and imaging has to offer. I use wet media painting materials, digital painting software, digital photography, physical computing and printing processes along with salvaged trash to create work. Reproduction and salvage is important in my work as both a concept and as a technical means. Even clones, though technically a reproduction, have a unique existence. Troubling binaries of new vs ancient by layering strata of print with paint alongside other materials from trash flows drives my research. For example, I use earth pigmentation, among the most ancient colors used by humans in painting and the history of image making, along with scanners, optics, advanced printing techniques, PDFs and internet art objects using light theory via screens and projection.
Mère Sauvage (2021)
On the Main Screen
WORKS ON VIEW
Mère Sauvage (2021)
Mère Sauvage or Mother Savage is an abstract motion painting exploring the tale of a caregiver, how mothers are entwined with the political state and how things can go horribly wrong as violence begets violence. This is a response to her tale of labor, loss and revenge. It omits her aristocratic narrators in favor of empathy for her suffering and rage.
The work is about the subversive use of a space -- specifically under martial law and forced quartering of soldiers -- to seek vengeance. In this animated painting, I created abstract, painted responses to the translated and censored short story by Guy de Maupassant of the same. I created this work while in residence at the Centre Pompadour Center for NeoFeminist studies in rural France during the Summer of 2021.
SQEEZRAY
SQEEZRAY
AR project "sqeezray” includes a digital painting as an image target for a custom-coded AR application. Originally coded in unity and C#, the custom AR application for iOS 12 is now defunct and this reimplementation of the project is driven by Artivive. sqeezray invites viewers to engage interactively with the artwork, blurring the lines between virtual and physical realities. Most AR experiences focus on the spectacular. This artwork invites a gentle, , quietclose looking at the layers of the painting.
Pick up the viewing frame device.
Artivive should already be open. Press the scan icon the bottom left of the screen.
A camera-like viewer will open. Point it at the canvas to see another layer of the painting.
ENERGY LINES
These drawings are made from ephemeral vector lines, drawn blind with a stylus and executed in pencil by an x/y open bed plotter. These paper works are part of an ongoing series of meditative digital drawings that I execute in collaboration with a drawing robot either in watercolor or graphite. After a few iterations with my mark-making tool, after each of which I resize the file (what’s interesting about vectors). I continue resizing and plotting until the drawing sufficiently catches my energy.
The first of these serial drawings originated out of grief – after my father died. Then, they became much more focused on managing volatile energy after I was diagnosed as bipolar. Facilitating a balance between creation and destruction is part of this journey. These drawings encapsulate both processes with the creation of the physical drawing and the digital destruction of the vector programming that drove its creation.
The New Painter
The New Painter (TNP) is a project supporting research in digitally-informed practices in painting. TNP promotes fluidity between digital and material practices through creative research, visiting scholars, and workshops. With support from a UT Dallas HEARTS grant, The New Painter champions ongoing discourse in the field of new media painting. Drawing on the history of painting as an ever-evolving discourse, along with the history of images themselves, TNP advances conceptual, technical, and material fluency in new media painting.
