An all female media arts exhibit featuring work from Rebecca Adorno, Rebekah Flake, Desiree Dawn Kapler, Brooke White, and Reiko Yamada with Carolyn Drake. This exhibition is hosted in collaboration with the Oxford Film Festival and is being held in the Powerhouse, headquarters to the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council.
Opening Reception, 3:30pm-5:30pm
Closing Reception, 6:00pm-8:00pm (as part of the Oxford Art Crawl)
Infrasonic Hug is a sound sculpture where a pair of subwoofers face each other – a symbolic hug – while absorbing low frequencies. Adorno’s hug make visible a phantom acoustic wave that the human ear can not hear, but can feel.
This piece is being shown as part the first all female media arts exhibit Silent Reflections.
Rebecca Adorno is a New York based Installation Artist and Emmy Nominated Video Editor born and raised in Puerto Rico. Her installations explore the deconstruction of linear narratives and space awareness by means of sound. Adorno has exhibited her work in Puerto Rico, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Montreal and New York, among others, and is part of the Museum of Art of Ponceʼs permanent collection.
photo credit: Vanessa K. Rees
The Call of Rocks and Mud investigates the relationship between North Americans and the Outdoors. Communing with nature is the common thread in the two versions of the natural environment presented in this multi-channel video, but the personal pleasures and ethical complications diverge along the fuzzy boundaries of geographic regionalism and cultural attitudes.
This piece is on view as part of the first all female media arts exhibit Silent Reflections.
Rebekah Flake is a Canadian-American artist using lens-based media and curation to explore migration narratives and the psycho-social effects of borders. Raised in Mississippi, she references the inescapable persistence of history in the forms of public memorials and personal reflections. Her practice also expands to Berlin, where she was awarded a DAAD fellowship, and to South Africa, when she and her colleagues at Temple University received an EPPY Award for media work in Johannesburg in 2013. She was also a 2015 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship finalist.
In below the neck, above the knees, a filmmaker shares diaristic stories from her life, contemplating the different ways in which one could feel trauma, and explores the act of violation in the context of trauma and healing. In Home, layers of destroyed photographs light up footage with flames. Collect. Save. Document. Repeat. The filmmaker walks through the rubble. Images of the before and after exist as one.
These films are being displayed as a video installation for the first all female media arts exhibit Silent Reflections.
Desiree Dawn Kapler is a southern artist and filmmaker from Mississippi. She is a childhood cancer survivor and self-proclaimed feminist artist. Her work centers primarily around health and the body, which comes from her personal perspective as a woman growing up lowerclass and with medical hardships. Desiree was awarded the Mississippi and the Arts Scholarship in the Fine Arts division in 2010 and a scholarship from the Mississippi State Committee of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in 2014. Her work has been exhibited/screened nationally and internationally.
The photographs in Light Transcended describe fleeting moments, defined by light, that occur in our daily lives and have the potential to turn the unfamiliar into the familiar. The morning light that grazes the top of my daughters’ head, or the simplicity of the sun setting and rising can describe, in an instant, when light becomes the sole subject of the photograph. It is in this brief period of time where we can be transported to an unnamed place that is simultaneously old and new all over again.
This body of work is on display as part of the first all female media arts exhibit Silent Reflections.
Brooke White is both a practicing artist and educator specializing in photography. White has exhibited her photographs and videos nationally and internationally including the Hammer Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She is a Fulbright Scholar recipient and has received numerous Mississippi Arts Council Individual artist grants. Her work has been published in Aint Bad Magazine and the Oxford American and is in the permanent collection of the Do Good Fund.
Mare Island
Slow Room is an audio visual collaboration between composer Reiko Yamada and photographer Carolyn Drake. The experiment began when the artists visited a WWII-era ammunition bunker on Mare Island, a former naval shipyard near Drake’s home in California. Entranced by the echoes that reverberated when she interacted with the concrete interior of the bunker, Yamada recorded a series of sound sequences. Drake returned in the hours before dawn and made still photos in the dark landscape outside the bunker. The resulting piece is a slowly-built conversation recalling the artists’ distinct encounters with a place where past and present, nature and technology, sound and sight, mix and repeat.
This piece will run on scheduled screenings as part of the first all female media arts exhibit Silent Reflections.
Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and imagine alternatives to them. Her work explores community and the interactions within it, as well as the barriers and connections between people, between places and between ways of perceiving.
