Screening w/ live performance
Artist in person
Microscope is very pleased to present a solo screening of video works along with a live video lecture performance by New York-based artist Maya Jeffereis. The event will take place in person only, and will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.
The program features three short videos by Jeffereis, which through dream-like and entrancing imagery that often merges hand-processed film with archival photographic materials and views of nature, conveys the experiences of the South and South East Asian diaspora in the US while examining Orientalism and the history of colonialism.
Jeffereis’ videos often show a profound, almost metamorphic relationship between workers and the environment they work within: salt water becomes the their tears and blood, and their buried bodies eventually transform into the harvested fruits of the land. The work “Fields Fallen from Distant Songs” underlines the significance of songs — which are unbound by limitations of time and physical boarders — in carrying the memory and knowledge of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii working in the sugar cane plantations, who were like many others “caught in the cross tides of empires.”
The exoticized women subject to the colonial gaze are visible, or even hypervisible and placed at the center of the attention, yet remaining completely unseen. Jeffereis asks whether the disappearance of their figures as achieved through digital erasure or forms of abstraction may offer a remedy. Ultimately, the artist seeks ways to liberate such depicted bodies from the imprisonment of the frame, in art, and more broadly from the imposition of a unidirectional gaze.
The artist will also be performing “The Moment Before a Dream,” a live video lecture rethinking “archival spaces of darkness as sites of emancipation, refuge, and reinvention” for exoticized and fetishized women put on display at world fairs.
Jeffereis will be available for a Q&A following the screening.
_
Maya Jeffereis is an artist and filmmaker whose work in video, performance, and installation seeks to expand upon overlooked histories and fill in archival gaps with counter narratives, personal histories, and speculative fictions. Jeffereis’ work has been presented in the United States and internationally, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum, The Noguchi Museum, and Queens Museum, among other institutions. Jeffereis has been an artist-in-residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Center (LMCC), Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She is a recipient of the A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship and Cisneros Initiative for Latin American Art. She teaches art, art history, and Asian American Studies at Parsons School of Design at The New School and Hunter College (CUNY). She earned an MFA from Hunter College and BA and BFA from the University of Washington. will take place in person only, and will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.