
Conflux: Variation
February 14 - June 30
Location: Fine Arts Building Amphitheatre

The Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture launches its 2025 program with Conflux: Variation (2025) by Baltimore-region artist collective Collis Donadio. This public video art projection explores the intersections of industry and the environment in Baltimore, where water meets land. Between 2023 and 2024, collaborating artists Shannon Collis and Liz Donadio recorded video and audio documentation in sites where industry has reshaped local habitats, such as the Curtis Bay Water Tower and Baltimore City’s marine terminals. The artists think of this documentary research and resulting installation as a “speculative exploration of the future, using moving images to convey transformation and transition.”
From the Curtis Bay industrial area, with its water tower and terminal where coal is stockpiled for shipment, to Masonville Cove, a nearly 50-acre environmentally restored space and the site of the nation’s first Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnership, the artists visited sites repeatedly and in all seasons, seeking to explore how industry, environment, and community converge and influence one another. The resulting footage was initially presented in a multiscreen installation artwork at Baltimore’s Voxel art space in 2024.
The updated work, now titled Conflux: Variation, was adapted for the CADVC public video art projection series in the Fine Arts Building amphitheatre. This installation is designed and mapped responsively to the building, with segments of the video reflecting and animating specific features of the built environment on which the work is presented.
Conflux: Variation will be on view nightly from sundown until 2 a.m. between February 14 and June 30.
The CADVC will host a public talk featuring Shannon Collis and Liz Donadio on March 4 at 6 p.m. (details forthcoming).
Admission is free. Visitors who need specific accommodations to experience the program should contact cadvc@umbc.edu or 410-455-3188.
Image: Conflux: Variation video still, 2025, Shannon Collis & Liz Donadio (courtesy of the artists).