8 Hours of What You Will | March 19 - April 18, 2026

'8 Hours of What You Will' is the third and final exhibition of the Wattis's 11th research season focused on the topic of LABOR.

'8 Hours of What You Will' collapses the prior iterations, '8 Hours of Work' and '8 Hours of Rest', into a single exhibition. In this culmination, incorporating works from each of the previous chapters, we explore how labor, rest, leisure–once distinctive parts of everyday life–are now entangled.

In an era defined by algorithms, doom scrolling, automation, and artificial intelligence, the promise of “free time” feels increasingly illusory. Now, leisure is not an absence of work, but another site of production and capitalization of our attention and data. '8 Hours of What You Will' asks what remains of our unstructured moments that are folded back into economies of consumption and surveillance, contributing to rapid social and ecological destruction. How can individuals and communities regain their agency? Can creative work allow us to reclaim what has been lost?

Alexandre Estrela: RedSkyFalls | May 9 - November 21, 2026

RedSkyFalls is a multi-part installation by Lisbon-based artist, Alexandre Estrela, for the Portugal Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The work on view in Venice comprises multiple video projections that are reactive to seismic activity, from tremors to earthquakes, registered by the European seismic monitoring network, and mediated by the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA). Every time seismic activity is registered in locations around the world, 24 hours a day, the tectonic movement is made visually and aurally manifest by shaking images and sounds resembling distress signals. RedSkyFalls is meant to be an “amplifier of empathy,” drawing our attention to even the smallest seismic movements happening around the world rather than simply large-scale earthquakes. Thus, the jittery movements and amplified noises remind us that the plates just below us are always in constant motion, impacting the lives of all living things on Earth.

In partnership with the project at the Venice Biennale, institutions in seismically active sites around the world will display a reproduction of one of the Réplicas — an aluminum plate containing an image of an artificial creature engraved into its surface — from RedSkyFalls. The Wattis Institute is one of these collaborators, along with MALI in Lima, Peru; REDCAT in Los Angeles; and Galeria Zé dos Bois in Lisbon, Portugal. Seismic activity recorded in Portugal and transmitted around the world affects the behaviors of the animated beings depicted on each of the aluminum plates. When a seismic event occurs, they react like other living things, and become completely still.

The Wattis Institute is located on the campus of the California College of the Arts (CCA) and is free and open to all. Join us!

Images:

Allan Sekula, Assemblage made by coal dockworkers, Vancouver from TITANIC's wake, 1998/2000. Cibachrome print. Framed dimensions: 29 1/2 x 40 1/2 x 2 1/2 in. (74.9 x 102.9 x 6.3 cm). Edition of 2. Courtesy of Allan Sekula Studio.

Tania Candiani, Camouflage, 2020-2025 (detail). Cotton tarpaulin. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Instituto de Visión, Bogotá and New York. Photo: Phillip Maisel.

Alexandre Estrela, Réplica, 2025. RedSkyFalls installation (detail). Computer animation generated from animal behavioral data, projected onto an engraved aluminum plate, sound. Plate: 19 3/4 x 14 inches (50 × 35.4 cm). Looped. © Alexandre Estrela. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Hugo Botelho Rodrigues