Sónia Almeida is a Lisbon-born artist based in the Boston area whose work stretches the boundaries of painting and considers how images transform as they are copied, shared and reproduced in a digital age. This expanded solo presentation, spanning Wagner Gallery and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, brings together painting, sculpture, textiles, printmaking and intricately bound artist books to reflect the breadth and complexity of her practice.
On view at Wagner Gallery will be a site-specific installation, alongside an opportunity to view a significant body of her artist books in an intimate setting. The exhibition’s title, Margins of Error, points to an approach that runs throughout Almeida’s practice. Error is typically understood as something to be corrected: a deviation, a malfunction, a point where information fails. In Almeida’s work, however, the margin of error becomes generative. Systems loosen, the hand interrupts the program, repetition gives way to variation, and apparent failure opens onto unexpected possibilities.
This interplay between instruction and improvisation, precision and instability, is central to her work. Her engagement with digital processes and the Jacquard loom, both technologies structured through coding, translation and repetition, offers particularly rich ground for exploring these tensions. Almeida works deliberately within these systems, attending closely to their glitches and gaps and allowing uncertainty itself to become productive.
This proposition feels especially urgent now. At a moment defined by systems that promise optimization and control, Almeida’s work makes room for what cannot be fully anticipated. It asks us to stay with complication rather than rush toward certainty, and to recognize that difficulty and breakdown can produce new ways of seeing and making. Sónia Almeida was selected as the 2025 Artadia Fellow supported by Wagner Foundation.
