(In)Secure is a collaborative exhibition featuring Kingston Gallery member Cree Bruins alongside guest artists Martin and Erik Demaine. All three are seasoned creative professionals and co-workers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Together, their thoughtful yet playful works explore the complex interplay of identity and security in today’s digital and financial worlds. 

(In)Secure examines how modern technologies and symbols like credit cards, QR codes, and barcodes, reflect the evolving boundaries of identity, privacy, and security in our increasingly digital and financially interconnected society. While these tools offer convenience and protection, they also expose our identities, reducing us to data points caught in a delicate balance between personal autonomy and external control. 

Fingerprints and QR codes serve as unique yet easily traceable representations of our identities, highlighting a reality where individuality is increasingly digitized and commodified. These symbols capture the paradox of modern identity: deeply personal, yet accessible, monitored, and often commercialized. Financial security envelopes, with their selective transparency, further underscore this tension—protecting private information while strategically revealing curated details about how we choose to present ourselves to the world. Like the walls of gated communities, these envelopes demarcate boundaries, emphasizing the fragile equilibrium between privacy and exposure.

Together, these works illuminate the dual nature of these technologies and symbols: they function both as protectors of our security and as gateways to our vulnerabilities. In an age defined by financial uncertainty and compounded by pervasive digital surveillance, we navigate a landscape where trust feels fragile and our digital footprints are ever more scrutinized. As our identities increasingly shift into the realm of data-driven profiles, our sense of self becomes both more transparent and, paradoxically, more elusive, fading into the vast sea of information that defines us in the digital age.

Artist Bios

Cree Bruins grew up in Rochester, New York, and has a long family background with Eastman Kodak, her father was the Director of the Experimental Division for many years. While attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, she started experimenting with the materials of film photography as a medium for sculpture, drawing, and installations, leading to a 20-year body of work about the rapid movement from film to digital photography. Her current projects center around today's financial environment, identity, and security. Since graduating from SMFA in 2001, Cree has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including Danforth Art Museum, deCordova Sculpture Park, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Krakow, Sculptors Gallery, and Mills Gallery. She has been awarded a Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in drawing, Blanche E. Colman Award, St Botolph Grant-in Aid, Yousuf Karsh Prize, and an Artadia Award finalist. 

Erik and Martin Demaine are a father-son team that combine their expertise in mathematics, art, and science. Martin, who started the first private hot glass studio in Canada, has been called the father of Canadian glass and has been an Artist-in-Residence at MIT since 2005. Erik, a professor of computer science at MIT, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 as a "computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending--moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter.” Their sculptures serve as both visual representations of unsolved problems in sciences and as sources of inspiration for new artistic forms. The duo has created over 300 curved origami sculptures, with works included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian. Their scientific contributions are equally significant, with more than 100 joint publications, including several focused on the intersection of mathematics and art.