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Emergent Realities is newly commissioned three-channel animation by Sharmistha Ray that collages painting, original and found footage, and cosmic imagery into a layered visual odyssey. Spanning the ecological, cosmic, and psychological, the work collapses linear time into a simultaneous, immersive experience. Each channel operates both independently and in dialogue—projecting fragments of satellites drifting, comets arcing across space, painterly textures dissolving into stellar dust, and archival visions of the cosmos. By juxtaposing representations of deep time and human perception, the animation explores the simultaneity of cause and effect—not as a chain, but as a coexistent field. Solar flares ripple through painted abstractions; ecological collapse echoes in planetary drift; memory and future blur within the folds of light and motion. The viewer is drawn into a perceptual vortex where time loops, splinters, and converges.

Complementing Ray’s animations is a newly commissioned musical score by Arooj Aftab, the Grammy-winning Pakistani-American composer, singer, and producer, celebrated for her genre-defying, deeply emotional music. Her signature voice has earned her recognition as the first Pakistani artist to win a Grammy, in the category of Best Global Music Performance and nominations for Best New Artist and global music performance. Emergent Realities invites the viewer to inhabit a temporal ecology—one in which every moment is simultaneously origin, consequence, and reflection, folded into the infinite continuity of space-time.

About the artist

Sharmistha Ray is the Estella Loomis McCandless Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and a visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores the complexities of cultural inheritance and queer identity through abstraction in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and electronic media. In Emergent Realities Ray will present a new body of work featuring animations and sound. Ray has presented work in major exhibitions across the U.S., India, Mexico, and Brazil, and is the co-founder of Hilma’s Ghost, a spiritualist feminist art collective focused on collaborative research, pedagogy, and community engagement.

Their work—both solo and collective—has been exhibited at institutions such as The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Galería RGR, Mexico City, Mexico; The Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil; and Secrist|Beach, Chicago, IL, and is featured in a major 2025 public art commission by the MTA at Grand Central Station, New York, NY. A recipient of the Joan Mitchell MFA Grant, Montblanc Young Artist Award, and TED Fellowship, Ray has held residencies at the Wassaic Project and Fire Island Artist Residency, among others, and has visited and taught at numerous institutions including Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago,  and New York University.

Their work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, and Hyperallergic, and they currently serve on the Editorial Board of Feminist Art Practices and Research, a journal launched by Taylor & Francis in 2025. Ray holds an MFA and MS from Pratt Institute and a BA from Williams College.

Sharmistha Ray: Emergent Realities is curated by Anastasia James and presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

Image: Sharmistha Ray, Still from Emergent Realities, 2025. Courtesy the artist.