Liminal Luminance
EXHIBITION | ALUMNI
August 17 – October 4, 2026
An exhibition celebrating new media practices that blur the boundaries between physical sculpture and digital reality.
Liminal Luminance
EXHIBITION | ALUMNI
August 17 – October 4, 2026
An exhibition celebrating new media practices that blur the boundaries between physical sculpture and digital reality.
About the Exhibition
Liminal Luminance
Exhibition by Edrex Fontanilla & Robert Goldschmidt
August 17 – October 4, 2026
Atrium Gallery (Level 1), Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
Public Hours: Thursdays | 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Liminal Luminance presents a series of perceptual experiments on the physical and the virtual. Edrex Fontanilla and Robert Goldschmidt engage with this boundary, producing works that fuse algorithmic image generation with treated sculptural surface. When projection and architecture interact, the material object adopts properties of digital space: mutable, unstable, animated by light.
The resulting art objects occupy no stable ontological state. They are neither purely sculptural nor purely virtual, but suspended somewhere between the two. Drawing on research in cognitive science and perceptual psychology, the work locates this condition in the viewer rather than in the object. Active perception now runs at odds with the brain's own implicit assumptions, and the viewer becomes a participant in this instability.
*According to University guidance, our buildings are open only to active Brown University ID holders outside of designated public hours (or during specified hours). Visitors without a Brown ID may visit during listed public gallery hours.
“ A new media practice that interrogates materiality. Burled maple grain that morphs. Animated glyphs that reenact the proto-semantic. A shoreline, held in the hand, that no longer exists. ”
About the Artists
Edrex Fontanilla
Edrex Fontanilla (Brown '00, '02 M.A., '12 M.F.A.) is a new media artist whose practice fuses sculptural and computational methods to examine perception, materiality, and temporality. For twenty-five years he has built objects that sit between sculpture and projection, between writing and pattern, and between place and liminal space, and has asked the viewer to interrogate their perception of reality.
In 2006 Fontanilla introduced the term mutable sculpture. A mutable sculpture layers projected image and physical surface so that the object takes on the properties of a virtual correlate, and at any moment what the viewer sees could be naturally occurring emanations, or digital fabrications. He first used the term as invited plenary speaker at the Digital Humanities Computing Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, set it out in the proceedings of the Ammerman Center's Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology in 2008, and once again in 2014.
His work has been shown internationally. S[tr]eam, made with Robert Goldschmidt, was selected by jury for Slow Art at SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles and remains catalogued in the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show Archives. Overlooked 2.0 was installed as a featured work at TechFest at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2014, with an accompanying invited lecture. Evanescence, a solo exhibition, was mounted at the Nepal Art Council National Art Gallery in Kathmandu, Nepal in 2019. Since 2022, virtual reality work made with Sarah Nelson Wright has toured continuously through five New York museums and institutional galleries.
His work is held in the permanent collections of Arrow Electronics and of Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates.