Installation shot

About Tra Bouscaren

Tra Bouscaren is a transdisciplinary installation artist. Currently, he serves as an Assistant Professor of Critical Art Practices, and Co-Director of the Expanded Cinema Lab at Florida State University.

His work engages American spectacle at the crossroads of waste culture and the surveillance state. Site-responsively, his installation process begins with salvaging local materials that resonate with toxic American culture. Aggregating these waste materials into suspended networks of assemblage, Bouscaren weaves surveillance equipment through the materials such that it looks out at people as they approach the work. Those live video feeds are combined algorithmically and re-deployed through a multichannel array, submerging the installation in projection. By illuminating the work through the distorted images of the spectator, the spectators are implicated back into what they judge.

Bouscaren's work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues including the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde, Victor I Fils Gallery (Madrid), the National Museum of Art (Addis Ababa), Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (Seoul), Palácio da Cultura Ildo Lobo (Praia), The Wrong Biennial, The Wiregrass Biennial, Greenleaf Gallery (Los Angeles), Fort Mason Center for Art and Culture (San Francisco), San Diego Art Institute, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Hallwalls (Buffalo), Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia), Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh), and Lincoln Center (New York).