. Biography .
Dylan McLaughlin is an interdisciplinary artist working across sound, sculpture, video, and performance. His practice synthesizes ecological listening, signal transmission, and the material legacies of extraction, tracing how colonial processes fragment land, community, and memory, and how sound can hold what the complexity. Drawing from Diné cosmologies and familial story, the work moves between field recording, synthesized drone, and sculptural installation to make perceptible what is otherwise left in abstracted. McLaughlin has exhibited and performed at the Denver Art Museum, SITE Santa Fe, and Smack Mellon, and held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Mass MoCA, and Boxo Projects. His work appears in publications including An Indigenous Present, Speaking With Light, and the US Pavilion catalog for the 2025 Venice Biennale. He is a Community-Based Research Fellow at NYU's Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands, and a recent finalist for Monument Lab's Revolutionary Act award. He holds a BFA in New Media Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts, an MFA in Art and Ecology from the University of New Mexico, and completed a Provost Early Career Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin. McLaughlin teaches sculpture and art and technology at Ramapo College of New Jersey and serves on the MFA Studio Arts faculty at IAIA. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
. Artist Statement .
My practice synthesizes sound, sculpture, video, and performance to trace the material and sonic residues of extraction, displacement, and ecological change. The work grows from a sustained engagement with listening, not as passive reception but as a methodology for gathering what colonial processes have fragmented: land, memory, community, and continuity. Central to the practice is a concern with how signals move, degrade, and transform across mediums and time. Field recordings from mine sites become modulation sources. Environmental data becomes score. Landscape becomes a system of transmission. Drawing from Diné cosmologies and familial knowledge, I do not position Indigenous experience as subject matter so much as structural logic: a way of orienting toward place, duration, and relation that shapes every formal decision. The work is grounded in specific places and histories while remaining attentive to how those histories connect across communities facing parallel conditions of dispossession. I have developed this practice through residencies, community collaborations, and sustained research across the US and internationally. I teach at Ramapo College of New Jersey and the Institute of American Indian Arts, where pedagogy extends the same questions the studio work asks: how do we listen, what do we carry, and what forms does that knowledge take.
