Presented by Urban Video Project, the new commission coincides with a Boston edition of Professor Alisha B Wormsley’s “Cosmologyscape” project, focused on collective dreamwork.
The Temple of Our Survival in Syracuse, NY
“Alisha B Wormsley: The Temple of Our Survival” is a newly commissioned video work by Light Work’s Urban Video Project, projected onto the façade of the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY. Created during a residency in partnership with Sankofa Reproductive Health and Healing Center, the project explores what “survival” means through interviews with local care workers, land stewards, and cultural workers conducted inside Wormsley’s traveling film set and workshop space. The Temple itself, a monumental tent draped in quilts sewn from vibrant traditional fabrics referencing ancestral migration and refuge, has traveled to eight sites nationwide, hosting workshops using herbs grown from Wormsley’s grandmother’s garden and gathering stories of resilience. Wormsley will return to Syracuse for a special indoor screening and panel discussion on March 19.
Cosmologyscape in Boston
Currently on view at Wagner Gallery, Cosmologyscape extends Wormsley’s ongoing collaboration with Kite, inviting Boston-area residents to share their dreams through the project’s website as part of an evolving communal archive. This iteration reflects on the artists’ methods of dreaming and making through a contextual diagram developed with Omnivore, furniture co-produced with Indigenous students from the University of Manitoba, and a “dream office” that encourages visitors to rest and enter the imaginative space of the work. Supported by a research grant from the Wagner Foundation, the project includes deep engagement with Boston communities, culminating in a co-created dream retreat and a 2026 Summer Solstice public day of dreaming aimed at building a rooted, repeatable model for community-based dreamwork and technological collaboration.