Project Space Residency

Allie Tsubota (she/her) is an artist exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Her work joins photography, video, photographic and cinematic archives, and text to examine the role of visual spectatorship across racialized space and collapsed historical time. Tsubota has received recognitions from Aperture, Google’s Creator Lab, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and PhMuseum, among others, and has been an artist-in-residence with Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and ARCUS Project. Her works have been exhibited across the United States and in Japan. Tsubota holds an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and presently teaches photography at Parsons School of Design and The College of New Jersey.

I am an artist exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Through a research-based and historical approach, I tend to media archives, literature, and other forms of collective memory to examine the role of visual spectatorship across racialized space and collapsed historical time. These investigations re-materialize as photographs, moving images, text and expanded media installations.

My recent projects have addressed topics ranging from 19th-century Asian/American immigration, to postwar nuclear memory, to interracial desire, all of which maintain thematic anchors in the politics of visual media and spectatorship. I am compelled by strategies of narrative fabulation, archival (dis)assemblage, and mistranslation, and by codes of language, testimony, witnessing, and catastrophe. Above all, I am invested in art and language as socially and politically dismantling apparatuses, and as practices that bear witness and perform repair.

VSW Project Space Residencies are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature, Monroe County, and Joy of Giving Something. Photography-based artists participating in the program receive support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.