EMILY SPER: RADICAL PERCEPTION – Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

EMILY SPER: RADICAL PERCEPTION 

Photography That Challenges What We Think We See 

October 2– November 1, 2026 

Opening Reception: Friday, October 2, 5–9 PM 

TAG | The Art Gallery 

450C Harrison Avenue, Unit C2 

Boston, MA 02118 

BOSTON, MA — TAG | The Art Gallery presents Radical Perception, a solo exhibition of photography by Emily Sper, on view October 2–November 1, 2026. Through photographs that hover between representation and abstraction, Sper asks viewers to reconsider something seemingly simple: What are we actually seeing? 

At first glance, Sper’s photographs can appear digitally manipulated, collaged, or constructed through multiple exposures. They are none of these. Instead, Sper photographs visual complexities that already exist in the world, layers of ice and water, trees and leaves, reflections across glass, shadows, surfaces, colors, and forms that momentarily align before her camera. 

The result is photography that often behaves like painting. 

In Radical Perception, recognizable subjects begin to dissolve. A reflection becomes a field of color. Ice fractures a landscape into overlapping planes. Glass merges what lies behind it with what appears on its surface. Nature and architecture intersect until foreground and background become difficult to distinguish. 

The exhibition asks us to slow down precisely because the images resist immediate understanding. In a culture accustomed to consuming images rapidly, and increasingly accustomed to questioning whether photographs have been altered or generated, Sper returns attention to the extraordinary visual complexity of the physical world itself. 

Nothing needs to be invented. The illusion is already there. 

“I used to take photos of walls and cars that appeared to be landscapes,” Sper explains. “Now, viewers think my photos are manipulated, though they are not. I create illusions from the visual layers I find in nature and man-made materials. I’m drawn to colors, patterns, reflections, and shadows.”

Walking is an important part of Sper’s process. Whether close to home or traveling abroad, she walks for miles, observing her surroundings and waiting for unexpected visual relationships to emerge. Rather than searching for conventional subjects, she searches for moments when ordinary things become visually ambiguous. 

Her approach is rooted in a lifelong engagement with photography. Sper first learned darkroom photography while still in middle school, an experience that transformed photography into an enduring passion. She later studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where photographer Aaron Siskind reviewed her work. Since RISD, she has worked as a graphic designer and author-illustrator in New York, Tel Aviv, Portland, Maine, and the Boston area while continuing to photograph. Throughout those changes, she describes a consistent search for “color, light, balance, and movement” in the world around her. 

That sensitivity to design remains visible throughout Radical Perception. Sper’s compositions are carefully balanced yet visually unstable: what initially appears to be one thing may become something entirely different after several seconds of looking. 

Scale and material are also essential to the experience. Sper often prints the photographs large, allowing viewers to become immersed in their layered spaces. Printing selected works on Arches and other fine-art papers further disrupts expectations of photography, giving the images a tactile, painterly presence. 

The title Radical Perception speaks to this shift in attention. The radical act is not manipulating reality, but looking at it differently. 

Sper’s photographs suggest that abstraction does not necessarily require removing ourselves from the recognizable world. Sometimes abstraction is already present, in a frozen surface, a reflection, a shadow, a scratched material, or the fleeting intersection of objects that most of us would walk past without noticing. 

Through her lens, the familiar becomes uncertain, and the ordinary becomes worthy of sustained attention. 

Radical Perception invites viewers to resist the impulse to identify an image immediately. Instead, Sper asks us to remain with uncertainty, allowing perception to unfold slowly. In doing so, her photographs remind us that seeing is not passive: it is an active process of interpretation, curiosity, and discovery. 

ABOUT EMILY SPER 

Emily Sper is a photographer, graphic designer, and author-illustrator whose artistic practice has developed through decades of close observation of the visual world. After discovering photography and darkroom techniques at an early age, she went on to study at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her photographic work explores abstraction found within everyday environments, with particular attention to color, light, reflection, pattern, movement, and unexpected visual relationships. 

Working both close to home and during her travels, Sper photographs natural and human-made environments without relying on Photoshop manipulation or double exposures to create her layered compositions. Her work challenges distinctions between photography and painting while encouraging viewers to reconsider the extraordinary complexity contained within ordinary acts of seeing.

ABOUT TAG | THE ART GALLERY 

TAG | The Art Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in Boston’s SoWa Art + Design District and operated by the New England Art Center. With an artist-centered model and a growing community of more than 120 member artists, TAG works to lower barriers between artists and audiences while creating opportunities for exhibition, education, conversation, and connection. 

Through solo and group exhibitions, artist talks, workshops, satellite exhibitions, art fairs, and public programming, TAG champions living artists and encourages audiences not simply to encounter artwork, but to understand the ideas, processes, and stories behind it. 

VIEWING ROOM available on ARTSY.net 

Contact 

Claudia Fiks 

claudia@newenglandartcenter.com 

774-551-6824 

Visit NEAC website meet TAG artists members and visit TAG’s ARTSY page

EXHIBITION DETAILS 

Emily Sper: Radical Perception 

October 2–31, 2026 

Opening Reception: Friday, October 2, 5–9 PM 

TAG | The Art Gallery 

450C Harrison Avenue, Unit C2 

Boston, MA 02118 

Gallery Hours: Thursday–Sunday, 12–5 PM