clarissa tossin


With her Future Geography series (2021–ongoing), Tossin alternates sliced strips of used Amazon boxes, their broken smiles repeating across the weave, with cut-up ribbons of inkjet prints, silvery images of space, the “final frontier.”3 In these works, the large-scale photographic print, itself a kind of fetish object, is woven through the monochromatic strips of an ordinary cardboard box, disrupting both the image’s capacity to convey information and its power to seduce. The weave pattern designed by the artist is structured to reveal parts of the photographs, glimpses of brilliant, distant stars, bright moments that punctuate the surface, creating another level of pattern-making. These works take time, as their fabrication requires a set of repetitive gestures typical of traditional crafts.

Following the geometric patterns across the surface, there’s an implied choreography of body movements, in contrast to the rigors of mechanical production, or the relentless repetitions of the algorithm. (It may be important here to remember that a woven basket is one of the few everyday objects that cannot be manufactured by a machine.) There’s an implied touch, a sensing of both the hand of the artist, slowly manipulating the cardboard and paper across the expanse of the work, and the imagined touch of the viewer, an embodied absorption of these textured surfaces. Tossin moves the spectacular photograph of the ultimate “elsewhere” into the zone of the tactile, taking it out of the instant into another temporality, one marked by contemplation and repetition.


– Leslie Dick, Clarissa Tossin: Becoming Mineral. In to take roots among the stars, Frye Art Museum, 2023.

Future Geography: Small Magellanic Cloud, 2023


used Amazon.com delivery boxes, archival inkjet print on photo paper with lamination, wood 72 x 45 x 1 ½ in.





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