Clarissa Tossin

CLARISSA TOSSIN (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1973) is a visual artist. She received an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009 and was a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston from 2010 to 2012. She joined Artpace San Antonio international artist-in-residency in 2013, invited by curator Hou Hanru. The residency culminated in the multimedia installation Brasília, Cars, Pools and Other Modernities, exhibited first as a solo presentation at Artpace and later as part of the Hammer Museum’s Biennial curated by Connie Butler and Michael Ned Holte, Made in L.A. 2014. 

 

In early 2015, the video installation Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach. The project was funded in part by a Videoarte Project Grant (2012) from Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Recife. 

 

A grant from the the California Community Foundation (2014) allowed for the first bilingual monograph about the artist, Unmapping the World,be released in 2015. The publication discusses a selection of projects and objects made and shown over a span of six years of back-and-forth travel between Brazil and the United States and includes essays by Michael Ned Holte, Guilherme Wisnik and Moacir dos Anjos.

 

Tossin is currently working on a commission from the city of Los Angeles for the Getty Foundation’s initiativePacific Standard Time: LA/LA(Los Angeles/Latin America) to be presented in 2017.

 

Other solo exhibitions include How does it travel?at Samuel Freeman, Los Angeles (2015); Transplanted (VW Brasilia)at Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2014); Blind Spot: Clarissa Tossinat the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston (2013); and Study for a Landscape at Sicardi Gallery, Houston (2013). 

 

Her work has been featured in group exhibitions including Unsettled Landscapesat SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2014); Bringing the World into the Worldat The Queens Museum, New York (2014); Liberdade em Movimentoat Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre (2014); Southern Panoramas – 18th International Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasilat Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo (2013); and When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes, curated by Jens Hoffman, at CCA Wattis Insti-tute, San Francisco, and Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art (2012–2013). More recently, her work could be seen at Fabra i Coats Centre D’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, as part of After Landscape: Copied Cities (2015); and at the travelling exhibitions MetaModern, first presented at the Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2015); and Time / Image, curated by Amy Powell and first presented at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston (2015).

 

Recent awards include a California Community Foundation Fellowship (2014), an Artists’ Resource Completion Grant (2013), and an Artistic Innovation Grant (2012), both from the Center for Cultural Innovation. 

 

Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Gulf Coast Journal, X-traMagazine, Correio Braziliense, and Folha de S.Paulo, among other publications.

 

Clarissa Tossin lives and works in Los Angeles.