Opening Reception + Performance:  Fri., March 13, 2026, 5–7pm
Gallery hours: Saturday and Sunday, 1pm-5pm

Hidden Labors, Sonic Tensions is an ongoing dialogic collaboration between 2026 Indexical Artist-in-Residence Abram Stern and Dorothy R. Santos in which the artists respond to one another’s work through iterative exchange. The collaboration unfolds through reciprocal exchange, with each artist offering the other a work from one of their projects as a prompt for response in another form.

In this iteration, the responses take the form of sound, installation, and performance as the artists assemble sounds and artifacts at the interface of their research and artistic practices. As part of their residency, the duo poetically process materials that include 911 dispatch, slow scan television, medical image metadata, FBI aerial surveillance, emulated breath, and a love letter to caregivers.

Abram Stern's (they/he) art and research practice seeks out ways that institutionally situated media tells on itself. Much of this work draws from collections of government media and metadata. They look closely at technical systems and make projects that operate within the gaps of intelligibility. Rather than seeing these gaps as problems to be solved through technical solutionism, Stern makes work that functions in a poetic capacity to surface rhymes and dissonances among institutions, infrastructures, formats, and techniques of sense-making. They are currently making work about cancer surveillance through the lenses of format studies and disability justice, among other projects.

Dorothy Santos (she/they) creates work informed by social interactions, language, and labor. Her creative practice is informed by her experiences growing up in an immigrant Filipino household with parents who raised her in San Francisco’s Mission District. She creates interactive, text- and sound-based works that process complex familial and cultural histories. She makes work through a variety of forms and formats, including durational (experimental) writing, game play, subversive practices, field recordings combined with recitations, and imposition of constraints.