a murmuring, 2018, single-channel video, 14:42
When does "I" become "We"?, 2018, softcover book, published by BAM & Wendy's Subway
In 2013, the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization active in the United States since 1923, put out a call in Critical Resistance’s The Abolitionist for stories of tear-gassing and pepper-spraying in prisons and jails. Hundreds of people sent in letters revealing the rampancy of human rights abuses in incarceration centers. Freya Powell’s When does I become We, based on her video On Fire like Hell Fire, gathers some of these harrowing accounts of prisoners’ exposure to chemical weapons into a polyphony of voices relating the injustices suffered through gassing and medical negligence and the lasting physical and psychological trauma resulting from these experiences.
Available: Motto Distribution and Wendy’s Subway
The Silence of the Unseen (excerpt), 2018, 4 channel video, 19:40
From the starting point of land always being the silent witness, this video connects the horizon as a point of unknown, the use of the American South West desert as a site of US missile testing and the birth place of the atomic bomb, man’s potential for failure, and the crash of the 122nd Athena test missile.
The Silence of the Unsaid, 2017 (excerpt)
Single channel video, 16:50
In July of 1970, the U.S. military launched an Athena missile from a base in Green River, Utah to test re-entry speeds and impact. The missile lost control, went about 400 miles off course, and crashed in a desert in northern Mexico, known locally as the Zone of Silence. It was carrying two containers of Cobalt-57, a radioactive element. In March of 2016, I traveled to this desert with questions about the silence surrounding the clean up of the crashed missile, as well as the myth that has since been building on this history.
Our disappearance is already there, 2017
Installation view at Art in General, Brooklyn, NY.
Photo: Charles Benton.
What did I expect to find? 2017
silkscreen, 10 x 8" (2 units)
ellipses, 2017, steel, each 5 x 5 x .75”
the space in between, 2017, cast glass, 3.75 x 1.75 x 1.25"
omniscience and oblivion, 2015
installation view at the basile gallery of the herron school of art and design, indianapolis (2017)
listen to a sample on soundcloud
Omniscience and Oblivion (2015) explores the function of individual memories to speak to the existence of a collective or shared experience. For the project, I created an audio archive where participants were invited to anonymously share, via an online form, one memory they would like to keep forever and one they would like to let go. From these written contributions I recorded voices of different individuals reading a stranger’s memories. In the audio installation, each memory is therefore mediated: by the writer’s choice of words and grammar, by the reader, and by the presentation. By listening, the visitor can interpret the connection or disconnection between the voice and the memory being recalled.
reading frequencies: omniscience, 2016
A hearing-accessible reading performance in the Queens Museum atrium draws connections between individual and collective memory through the frequency of word repetition.
entre-deux, 2017, multi-channel sound installation, 40:55
sample on soundcloud
Entre-deux is a multi-channel sound installation of collected memories on the notion of home and displacement. I often feel that I exist somewhere in-between, neither here nor there. Elsewhere. No doubt a common feeling for people who have lived in more than one country. I wonder, how do we define ‘home’? Is it a place? Perhaps in our mother country or where we have settled in our current. Is it a feeling? Perhaps found in the warmth of family. Or, is it a memory? A smell or a sound that triggers us to reminisce on something that once was. Through a participatory process I received anonymous written musings on home, I then employed new voices to read them and will present them in an interwoven sound installation. As distinctive as each iteration is, there are a few underlying collective notions: Home is a place where… From the place that I was born… The closer we come to finding… To the comfort and familiarity of… These notions of origination, return, and security make up chapters of voices, which will be projected into the exhibition space through standing speakers. Where one voice pauses, another chimes in offering their understanding. The voices will be choreographed to move the viewer through the space, resting in moments to listen, or to return to complete the chapter.
Installation view of Active Turn at Socrates Sculpture Park for EAF15
our disappearance is already there, 2015, 3 channel video, 20:30
This silent piece shows the physical distance between New York City’s public and potter’s field, located on Hart Island in the Bronx. The seemingly abandoned island that holds over a million deceased is seen from two vantage points, as it is circumnavigated by the camera. In contemplating the separation currently enforced by the Department of Corrections around the public space of the cemetery, the project calls into question the value of life, and how lives are allowed to be grievable or not through frames of reference such as shared experience, nationality, or humanness.
From the series Our disappearance is already there, 2015, graphite on paper, 30 x 22"
holding, 2017, cast graphite, 6-3/4 x 5-1/2 x 3”
On fire like Hell Fire, 2016, single channel video, 20:51
A narrative-video of interwoven personal statements by men and women incarcerated across the U.S. regarding their exposure to chemical weapons by prison guards. I had been given access to hundreds of letters gathered in response to an ad placed by the War Resisters League in Issue 21 (2013) of The Abolitionist, a newspaper distributed in American prisons by the prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance. These incarcerated men and women have expressed a desire for their stories, of first hand experience with chemical weapons while incarcerated, to be heard. On fire like Hell Fire draws the connection of the use of chemical weapons as a form of submission, often on individuals with known mental health issues, from the individual to the collective prison experience.
from the ongoing series After Perec, 2016, ink on paper, 30 x 22”
from the ongoing series, After Perec, 2016, ink on paper, 30 x 22”
From the ongoing series After Perec, 2015, Ink on paper, 30 x 22"
Installation view of omniscience and oblivion (Barcelona) installed at Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona in 2014
Diminishing Distance, 2012, archival pigment print, 10 x 10"
i'll smile and i'm not sad, 2012, single channel video, 56:03
