Aldrich Video Series: Maya Jeffereis

September 30 to October 20, 2024
Maya Jeffereis

Aldrich Video Series is a sequence of three solo presentations of video art. Each artist exemplifies a different approach to telling stories. Their distinct practices provide insights into the diverse methods at work in contemporary video art including improvisation, animation, and archival research.

Maya Jeffereis presents two experimental video works that investigate the oppressive and exploitive histories of Pacific and Caribbean Islands by addressing themes of resilience, solidarity, and rematriation. Fields Fallen from Distant Songs, 2023, is rooted in the artist’s great-grandparents’ experience as Japanese contracted laborers on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations during the early twentieth century. The film collapses time through the integration of archival footage of plantation workers, Jeffereis’ grandfather’s family videos from the 1960s,
and her own documentation of the eruption of Hawaiʻi’s Kīlauea volcano in 2023. Throughout the film lines of contemporary Hawaiʻian poetry flutter across the frames, while an audio track of Japanese folk songs (holehole bushi) drifts over the visuals. The result is both a haunting reminder of a colonial past and a hopeful tribute to restoring relations with ancestral lands.

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