If you follow the trail of glitter in the far back of Emerson Contemporary’s Media Art Gallery, you’ll see the entranceway to a multimedia sculptural installation, Narcissus Looks Back: and They Love You (2025), created by VHF Studio. Here, you’re greeted by multiple television screens and projections as the instrumental of “Toxic,” by Britney Spears, plays. What feels like a massive media altar is a reflection of identity through the lens of camp.
Jack Gruman and Logan Puleikis are the masterminds behind VHF Studio, a collective of multidisciplinary artists pushing the boundaries of new media. They work with “low art” categories such as television, club culture, and camp. Puleikis began his career as a studio art painter before moving on to work in film, theater, and event production, while Gruman is a theme park developer who specializes in theater lighting and production design. The two, who have backgrounds in video art and live performance, make work that explores how media shapes our realities. The duo’s installation is currently on display, through December 13, in “Echoes of the Heart: New England Media Art Biennial,” a multimedia exhibition for creative technologists. With live computer coding, avant-garde radio sounds, and interactive large-scale sculptures, this show represents a rapidly emerging genre in contemporary art. Amid ongoing shifts in digital technology, I spoke with Gruman and Puleikis, who joined our video chat from their Somerville studio, about their installation for the biennial and how artists are engaging with the idea of “new media.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Zaryah Qareeb: Narcissus Looks Back: and They Love You is such a strong title. How did this title come about?
Jack Gruman: The concept arose from previous projects. We made this short film called A Haunted Body, which was later turned into an installation. That project was rooted in bodily autonomy, specifically how gendered bodies are haunted.
Logan Puleikis: That show touched on questions around bodily autonomy for both trans and femme people, both facing significant political threats and the impacts they have on the body, feeling like the body is a place that is your own and that you can kind of rest into. The second part of the title, and They Love You, stems from seeking acceptance, identification, and thus validation, which is something that cannot sufficiently be met. It kind of just gives a sense of softness and comfort—almost like something we can send to the community and anyone who enjoys the piece.
JG: We got accepted into a show called “Queertopia,” and we kind of took all those vignettes and documentation from working on that project. We did a lot of discussing around what “queer utopia” means and the different fraught issues of utopia that kind of don’t exist inherently. The show featured work about queer subcultural spaces working to manifest that utopia, but in creating this isolated utopic space in which your sensibilities are reflected back in your environment, it has to be removed from the social sphere of everyday life. It cannot be integrated into that. It is fundamentally removed. So that feeling of desire, of isolation, of being surrounded by others yet still alone, that’s what we were working with. The title Narcissist Looks Back was actually the last thing after developing the project. We were thinking about Pink Narcissus (1971). These are gay mainstays of video and performance art because we do a very specific gay tradition of performance video, plus editing montage. After making the piece, we were like, “What do we call this?” We were thinking about the idea of seeing yourself reflected back in your environment, your sensibility reflected back, coupled with this desire to be seen by another, to be recognized as belonging in that, and the image that we came up with was the narcissist image.
ZQ: This installation was originally presented at Piano Craft Gallery. How has the work evolved or transformed in this new iteration?
JG: Fundamentally, what we were trying to impart was the feeling of discomfort in these spaces. And in each iteration, we created a new video for it. So now for the piece that’s at Emerson, the front area with the TV sculpture, that was a new video created for the new historical and political context we’re in. The feedback we received is that people are more understanding of the aesthetic sensibility and less “this is weird or this is crazy,” but it was much more kind of engaged in the concept and desire to engage in the work. Blurring the line between performer and spectator. Blurring the object and subject. We were thinking of other queer camp video artists of the tradition coming out of the ’60s, like Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and Jean Cocteau. We salvaged furniture and parts of furniture that we reassembled to create architectural fragments to kind of flesh out the visual symbolism of the Greek myth, but from all the reused materials that are around us. We combined that with water imagery, pearls, and having Logan perform on screen to symbolize this narcissist.
LP: There are some things that kind of remain the same in terms of that internal projection space, where you’re surrounded by the video footage on these little fabrics around you, but you don’t see your image within it. But as Jack touched on, as we revisited the piece we felt a bit differently because the times had changed. We tried to make this piece reflective of that. Functionally, though, this time I really got into the sound because I did the sound for it in a way that I wasn’t able to before. So I was able to remaster that and actually localize the sound to different parts of the room and get very specific with what effect that might have on the viewer. For example, I’ve inserted a baseline that’s a bit like a heartbeat that’s actually consistently playing through the whole thing, but sometimes you hear it, sometimes you don’t. It’s always behind you. There’s always something kind of lurking behind you. And how close or loud it is kind of really varies with the video, and then different elements or spirits of it move across the room with you, and since it’s surrounded, you will get a different experience if you sit on the benches in the back of the room versus actually inside where the projection is.
ZQ: Collaboration can be both generative and challenging. What was your process in creating work with nuanced topics together?
JG: I’m always learning about collaboration. What does it mean to collaborate with artists? It’s incredibly important to my practice to work collaboratively with other people. But I think the basis that makes it work is that without an institutional architecture set up, you have to all agree that you’re having fun. VHF Studio started when Logan and I began collaborating on projects for the three years ago. Our practice has become very collaborative, and we bring other artists into the installations and events we create. My neighbor, Janella, who had paintings in our previous show, made a new, big plexiglass ink painting that sits in front of these mirrors that are on the wall.
LP: The ethos of VHF Studio is to establish a platform where there’s a low barrier for anyone to participate in, for anyone who has an artistic interest and can chip in ideas. In the entrance of our piece, there’s a red wig on the coatrack that I actually wore during the video. And our piñata became a staple for the parties at the studio. I think that kind of goes into some of the principles of the show, of being able to create spaces for joy.
ZQ: Your work plays with the line between “high” and “low” art. Do you see that boundary as still relevant today, or is it starting to dissolve?
LP: I come from Orlando, Florida, which is an interesting city because a large percentage of people work jobs that require creative labor to be able to build all the extensive installations featured in the parks, as well as all the performers. But if I ask any of those people if they’re an artist, maybe some would say yes, a lot of them would say no. So I hadn’t considered being an artist until Jack and I were shooting ideas off in a more joking way that it felt like we could do it. There’s just so much creative labor that goes unrecognized and unappreciated. One of the efforts of our work is breaking down that divide.
JG: Absolutely. Still, the divide persists in the structure of the institutions in which it’s taught, right? Film and theater are a totally separate school from art. I was in art school, and in my mind, underground theater was probably the best art I’d ever seen. The pinnacle of what I thought of as art was actually theater. But since I was on an art school track, the closest I got to that theater was a video art installation with performance. What I want from my work is for people to be able to enjoy it at any level of engagement, in that they can look at it and they can say, This is cool, this is really cool looking. Or they can recognize things in it, and they want to go at it that way, or they can feel the experience and just go on an almost sensory journey of the thing. Or they can get as deep as they want into the concept. And I’m there for it all day. But to me, I am not telling people how to feel or engage with the piece. Ultimately, I can tell them everything I put into it. I put a lot—the labor of art is the joy of art for me
ZQ: “Echoes of the Heart” presents a wide spectrum of new media art. As technology rapidly evolves, how has your understanding or definition of “new media” changed?
JG: Our work is very grounded in the physical because that’s how it’s going to be experienced, and we learn new tools and technologies to serve what we’re trying to achieve. I work in the world of production. I am always working with whatever the new thing is, and some of those tools spark ideas, and others have a purpose. I think new media for us basically means the kind of expanded form of any discrete kind of art. None of these things is inherently art. A camera’s not inherently art, and AI is not inherently art either. I think it’s a very interesting digestion of this kind of filter that you put it through, whether it’s with photography, with AI, with video, with every new technology. There’s always the initial thing of how new it is, and it will allow you to do things that have never been thought of before or seen or whatever. And that never ends up true. There’s actually a much slower way in which time moves, and human narratives and ideas develop, and symbols develop. So, what really can this new piece of technology do that another one couldn’t is almost a political thing that is inherent in that technology.
LP: I’m a little bit afraid of AI. I’m thinking about the surveillance and the ongoing politics, any kind of AI software, I see it being used for art, and I respect those disciplines, and what they do with it. We haven’t stepped into the realm of using some of the newest technologic advancements such as AI. And with approaching that myself, I’m not sure how I would engage with it, but I know it’s becoming such a large part of the fabric and what is considered or within what isn’t. But yeah, I feel like, largely with the work, so much of it is in the material presence of it. So while we’re creating with video and sound and learning the newest software to do that, we’re also very interested in bringing our work to the physical. I feel like, in the process, I’ve worked out some of my more complicated feelings in real time.
