The word “screen” is one of those with deliciously juicy intersections of meaning. It’s a device on which to watch video, read text or do work; it’s also a filter, a barrier that blocks out imperfections and lets the good stuff through. Two shows currently on view — Chris Sollars’ “The Neighbors” at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and Sebastian Alvarez’s “The Completion Office” in the McCarthy Art Gallery at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester — consider how we use screens and other tech to understand the current moment in ways that also play with multiple meanings. Sollars investigates the natural world surrounding his rural home; Alvarez contemplates the era we’re entering, what will persist and what will get screened out.
Chris Sollars: ‘The Neighbors’
On view through November 8 at 0102 Gallery, Black Family Visual Arts Center, Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. Closing reception Saturday, November 7, 4-7 p.m.
Perhaps one of the most striking things about the rural landscape, for a former city dweller, is its loudness. In May, the frog chorus sounds like some kind of deafening experimental synth project. In January, the air is quiet enough to hear the beat of a passing crow’s wing.
With “The Neighbors,” Sollars has created an unusual yet familiar experience of landscape, in part through his ample use of sound. The trill of spring peepers emanates from a rusted steel oil drum the artist found in a creek near his home, tipped over as though discarded on the gallery floor. Field recordings of birdsong play through a speaker made from a forked maple branch.
Perhaps strangest of all, a wall-mounted device resembles an analog clock. In place of numbers, a smattering of insects is pinned to its face: ticks pulled from humans and dogs. Nearby, a speaker amplifies the clock’s ticking, overlaid with the slightly sickening sound of the evil creatures’ chomping.
Sollars devotes each side of the gallery to a different season. Photos tacked directly to the walls portray flora and fauna, such as a mouse snuggled in the snow, shelves of bright orange mushrooms, a painted turtle. Two crumpled sculptures made from discarded porch screening are mounted high on the walls, as though the barrier between inside and outside has evaporated into clouds.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a four-channel video installation, with a 65-inch TV screen leaning against each of the walls, propped up off the floor by Styrofoam packaging. The effect is to make the space seem like a living room we’ve just moved into — perhaps a reference to Sollars’ 2024 relocation to the Green Mountain State from San Francisco, where he resided for 20 years. The monitors present seasonal footage from wildlife cameras Sollars installed around his property, which borders protected forestland. In a written statement, the artist says the impulse behind making the piece was “to get to know his new home and neighbors.”
What that means — what it is to get to know somewhere and how technology mediates that knowledge — becomes the central question of the show. Visitors watch the videos while sitting on stools made from birch logs. The low vantage and placement of the monitors make it feel as though you’re crouched in a hollow or a duck blind, surveying the terrain. Animals make surprising appearances: A black bear ambles past; a groundhog pops into the frame; a wild turkey vamps, fanning his feathers for the camera. The landscape itself is never still. We see wind whipping snow off branches and rain spreading over a pond. Black-and-white night footage offers ghostly portraits of deer families, a lone coyote, a raccoon with glowing eyes. The videos also carry sound, from chirping robins to crunching fall leaves, which layer over each other and the other pieces, reinforcing a sense of the outdoors.
The accumulation of observations paints an intimate portrait of the place, made possible through the trail cams. A person observing this landscape from within it would likely miss most of what’s going on. Flat as the screens may be, mediating that observation through technology ironically allows for a broader, richer experience of the natural world.
The balance between mediation and information also comes through in “Nests,” a sculptural installation of cardboard boxes, each one supporting a found bird’s nest. Looking closely at the boxes’ shipping labels, one realizes that in place of the standard codes and addresses, they carry species names, nest sizes and weights, the bird’s range and habitat, and a QR code for access to more species specifics. The contrast between the ubiquity of shipping boxes and the birds’ unique constructions conveys both the abundance of the nests and their preciousness.
One piece in the show tries to use technology to provoke action. A site-survey marker, stuck in a bucket of earth, is engraved with the open-ended question “What’s at Stake?” Visitors are invited to answer it by speaking their thoughts into a cassette field recorder — though what will happen to the comments isn’t immediately clear. According to a student gallery sitter, very few visitors have given it a go. Using tech to observe the environment is, after all, a lot easier than using tech to take the next step toward fixing it.
Sebastian Alvarez: ‘The Completion Office’
On view through October 30 at the McCarthy Art Gallery, Saint Michael’s College, in Colchester.
Saint Michael’s College was founded by the Edmundites, a Catholic order of brothers with a social justice focus. Today, the Society of St. Edmund has, according to its website, “entered its ‘completion’ phase,” meaning it is no longer accepting new candidates and will eventually die out with the last of its members, who are still attempting to fulfill their mission without ever finishing it.
Sebastian Alvarez, a Peruvian artist who lives in Fontecchio, a village in Abruzzo, Italy, takes that idea of completion as his jumping-off point for an exhibition that swirls around the current moment. It’s a show of conceptual works that touch on technology, ecology, institutions and the idea of continuity amid radical change. A four-page curatorial pamphlet provides descriptions and bios of each piece and artist and is wholly necessary for understanding the show.
In the center of the gallery, “L’albero morto della conoscenza (The Dead Tree of Knowledge)” is the trunk of an apple tree, suspended above a series of 12 forensic markers — the numbered yellow plastic tent cards that populate crime scenes — printed with text. The piece, which Alvarez attributes to forensic botanist Giulio Ferretti, likens the tree’s structure to artificial intelligence, asking, according to the pamphlet, “what survives when the structures that carry knowledge become separated from the practices that renew it.” The forensic marker texts pointing out different aspects of this resemblance are quite poetic, making observations such as “AI can continue a sentence without sharing the vulnerability from which the need to speak arose.”
The digital and botanical recombine many times in the show, including a series of illustrations by Lidia Serra that incorporate views of a microchip, a circuit board and a Neuralink brain implant with plants and fungus that mirror how they function — parasitically, in the case of the Neuralink. Another work presents the covers of literature foundational to how people who work in Silicon Valley think, laser-etched into blocks of wood. (Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring are among them.)
A piece attributed to media archivist Elena Ward considers screens as archaeological objects. “Relic in Mineral Light” runs a video on an LCD screen encased in a glass vitrine. Part animation, part text, the video points out how interactions with screens are becoming ever more frictionless even as we fail to address the power imbalances and fundamental flaws of the capitalist structures serving up information on them. As one frame points out, “The more complete the image becomes, the easier it is to forget what is missing.”
All the works in the show, especially when taken together, prompt the viewer to consider how technology doesn’t always present a full picture. At the very end of the curatorial guide, viewers should read (Shouldn’t we always?) the small-print Terms and Conditions section. In it, the reader is told that the artists to whom the work in the show is attributed are either wholly fictional or amalgamations of existing people and their practices.
Alvarez, who claims ultimate responsibility for the works, has done this as a way of acknowledging the many voices, hands and influences on which any studio endeavor ultimately depends, dispelling the myth of the solitary artist in favor of a new way of thinking for a new era. “The distinction between what is invented and what is factual,” he writes, “is therefore not a puzzle to be solved, but part of the exhibition’s inquiry into how authorship, expertise, evidence, and authority are constructed and transferred.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Screen Time | Solo shows at Dartmouth and St. Mike’s consider screens, nature and understanding in a new era of tech”
This article appears in The Tech Issue • 2026.
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