site specific installations
In 2015-16, Manon Wada altered a set of six family heirloom chairs into three sculptural installations entitled Thirsty Ghosts, Flux Migration, and Aligning Elevation.
A decade later in March of 2025, she cremated the remnants of this body of work with artists Irene Wibawa and Reiko Fujii at Muir and Ocean Beach in the San Francisco Bay Area.
A video installation of POEM IN CHAIRS was presented at Loisaida Inc in the East Village of New York City in May of 2025 for the third installment of Mixed Poetics produced by Miah Artola.
Short excerpts of the video are shared below. The original video length was 17 minutes with editing by Manon Wada.
ECHOES by artists Jessica Higgins and Manon Wada, curated by Jeffrey Perkins, was an exhibition at The Emily Harvey Foundation in SoHo of New York City in November of 2023.
The presentation included two- and three-dimensional works by each artist, and centered on a collaborative video triptych entitled Echo, Song, and Hallucination, recorded onsite by Jeffrey Perkins. In the triptych, Higgins and Wada engage with video projections in a reciprocal process that traces an intergenerational dialogue.
The exhibition culminated with a site-responsive performance by Jessica Higgins and Manon Wada, and occurred on what would have been Wada’s father’s 80th birthday and in the year Higgins’ mother turned 90. Performance with Red Thread and Singing Bowl included sound accompaniment contributed by composer Tashi Wada and was performed by artist Joshua Selman.
Photos by: Maria Acconci (2,3), Jessica Higgins (12), Jeffrey Perkins (13), Joshua Selman (1), Kelsey Sharpe (6,9,10,11), Scott Walden (4,5,7), and Manon Wada (8)
Artist collaborators Ong Siraphisut and Manon Wada created a temporary site specific installation in a grain silo with dimensions of 106’7″ x 19’8″ at Buffalo Riverworks for PLAY/GROUND 2022.
When envisioning Siloscope, Ong and Manon were thinking of the silo as a telescope/ microscope/ kaleidoscope and essentially as a portal to another universe.
Whispers in Glass (2022) by Manon Wada is a site responsive installation at Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina.
A motion sensor activates an audio recording of a whispered poem composed by the artist with found text from 16 books sourced in the Living Library.
The content of the poem responds to the room it is installed within, called the Bureau of Illumination also known as the Glass Forest.
Images of the original found text that compose the poem are engraved backwards on 3 mirrors, which is read forwards in the reflection of a perpendicular mirror.
Invisible Exit was a site responsive installation with video and audio made collaboratively by Mia Reiko Braverman and Manon Wada. It was exhibited in a stairway to an attic at Whitney Center for the Arts in Pittsfield, MA, for Rites of Passage Project 2021.
Meditating on death, the artists considered its mysterious character yet its stark boundary, its speed to strike with grief, and its residue of release.
In the process of working on this installation, Manon’s father passed away suddenly. The collection of ashes was a shredded paper trail of his documents, the wood pillars from constructed furniture in his home, and the bowls were inherited.
The audio piece in this installation is layered with singing glass vessels, Mia passing through a river, and the artists’ breaths held and then exhaled.
Temporary work inSITE was created in situ by Manon Wada through the removal of soil on a plot of land with measurements of 53′ x 13′ and 4′ into the ground. This installation responded to the natural environment and roads of the artist residency ComPeung in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
The two pathways were parallel, yet misaligned and met at the deepest section at the center with seats for two. The arrangement of the seating created a shared experience being at eye level in the earth with mirrored yet offset perspectives.
This installation was activated by audience interaction and pictured in the images are the founder and partner of the artist residency, Ong and Maureen Siraphisut.
At the time when this piece was completed in mid-November of 2016 the celebrations of Yi Peng and Loi Krathong were occurring, which use brightly burning candles. In the night photos, the inside perimeter of inSITE was lined with candles to cast the cavity in light and highlight an ephemeral moment of this impermanent piece.
