Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales:
Waste Scenes
20 December, 2024 - 9 February, 2025
Curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD
Waste Scenes tells non-linear stories about trash, value, and desire in corporate culture and neoliberal capitalism through a new body of work by artists Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales produced during the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR). Given access to the construction and demolition waste stream generated throughout the Tri-state region, Chao and Schmidt-Arenales collected objects, footage, and audio files from the trash piles in a new two-channel video installation Waste Scenes (2025), accompanied by wall drawings, a print series, and a movie poster designed with Kristian Henson.
The video installation Waste Scenes forms a call and response between trash and its counterpart—humans, often flipping the script between object-subject in vignettes with the Philadelphia Voices of Pride chorus, singer Dan Schwartz, and performers Bellisant Corcoran-Mathe and Parker Sera. The accompanying print series and wall drawings directly cite trash—real estate manuals, neurological textbooks, and puzzles featuring the “American West,”—simultaneously excavating entangled corporate exploitation. Collectively, Schmidt-Arenales and Chao probe processes of material decomposition—collection, breakdown, and synthesization—as methods of artistic research to dismantle twentieth-century neoliberal systems in tragicomic embodied experimentations.
The exhibition is organized by Laurel V. McLaughlin in dialogue with the artists at the Boston Center for the Arts. The film Waste Scenes (2024) was funded by the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR), the Velocity Fund, Illuminate the Arts, the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
Maia Chao is an artist who works collaboratively in social practice, film, and performance. Chao has presented commissioned works for The Shed, MoMA Education, Mural Arts (Philadelphia), and most recently the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (DC). She is co-creator of Look at Art. Get Paid. at the RISD Museum. She has completed residencies at Pioneer Works, Queer|Art, and the Fine Arts Work Center, among others. In 2022, she was named a Pew Fellow and in 2023, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently, Chao is the Public Artist in Residence at the Times Square Alliance. Based in Philadelphia, Chao is a member of the art collective and DIY space, Vox Populi Gallery. She has taught at RISD, University of Pennsylvania, Moore College of Art and Design, and is currently full time faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and filmmaker. His projects attempt to bring awareness to unconscious processes on the individual and group level. He has presented films, installations, and performances internationally at venues including SculptureCenter and Abrons Arts Center, (New York), Links Hall (Chicago), The Darling Foundry (Montreal), LightBox and The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Artspace (New Haven), The Museum of Fine Arts and FotoFest (Houston), Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien (Graz), and Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna). His recent film Committee of Six is an official selection of the 2022-23 Architecture and Design Film Festival and was awarded a jury prize for best film at the 2023 Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, is a writer, curator, art historian, and educator. McLaughlin is a Curator and the Director of the Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries, Boston, MA. She has shared her scholarly and curatorial work in conferences ranging from Performance Studies International, Calgary; to the Universities Art Association of Canada Conference, Montreal and Toronto; the College Art Association, New York; and the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present, Hong Kong, and has published writing in Art Papers, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Performa Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, Women & Performance, and ASAP Journal, among other edited volumes and exhibition catalogs. Recently, she co-edited the multidisciplinary reader Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production (Amherst College Press, 2024). McLaughlin’s curatorial work has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Dutch Consulate of New York, and she is currently undertaking a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship for a forthcoming exhibition How do you throw a brick through a window….
Oregon Contemporary is supported by The Ford Family Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Oregon Contemporary also receives support from the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other businesses and individuals provide additional support.