On view on in the E. Craig Wall Jr. Academic Center from February 2 – March 14, 2020 are a collection of video artworks on the theme of family and memory, including Caroline Falby, Darren Douglas Floyd, Hye Young Kim, and Bradly Dever Treadaway. Learn about the art on view:
Caroline Falby is an artist based out of Brooklyn, NY. She is the recipient of the BRIC Media Arts Fellowship in 2018 and has exhibited her work at the Every Woman Biennial Film Festival, among others. She explains:
“this work is an abstract representation of my father’s death from AIDS-related complications and is a therapeutic space for me to reflect on his identity while re-defining my own. Accompanied by layered renditions of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” I’ve blended stop-motion and digital effects to construct an iconography that connects my encompassing grief with the overwhelming stress of living in the closet, the spread of the virus and my father’s transition into death.”
Darren Douglas Floyd received his B.A. in Women’s Studies from the College of Wooster in 1994 and his M.F.A. in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in 2001. He was accepted to several prestigious artist residencies including Yaddo, I-Park and the Millay Colony for the Arts. His work has been exhibited at the AC Institute, CANADA, Video Dumbo and Gallery 138 in New York City and screened in many group shows and film festivals. His creative practice redeploys subversive feminist production strategies to interrogate masculinity. CancerGram, his 2017 Instagram diary based on having stage 4 cancer, is an experimental storytelling practice that works through social media. He is currently convalescing in a desert valley. Of this artwork, he says:
“Waiting for dad to come home. We can’t open presents without him. Where could he be? Mom is upset but we kids are just bored. My dad had a talent for getting tight at exactly the wrong moment, often on holidays. After that we stopped celebrating. There were presents and maybe a last minute tree, but we never made a big deal out of Christmas again. Eventually we stopped giving gifts, which was the last tether back to the ritual of getting the family together. When that was gone, we stopped having Christmas entirely. After I moved to the city, I preferred to stay there for the holidays, with my people. The city was always better when most of its inhabitants were back wherever they came from. The emptiness made it feel more my own. After 9/11, Christmastime would bring a panic in me. A dreadful feeling that everyone else had someplace to be on the holiday. I had no place I had to be. I could go home. I could have people over. I could go to a friend’s holiday party. But there was no place I had to be on Christmas. My guess is that my dad was out having fun, drunkenly defying the idea that he should be at home on Christmas, but I don’t really know.”
Hye Young Kim is Associate Professor of Art at Winston-Salem State University and an internationally exhibiting artist. She had solo exhibitions at venues such as the Visual Art Exchange in Raleigh, NC, and CyartSpace, Seoul, South Korea.
“Intimate Distance project is a participatory performance, which two people close their eyes for 3 minutes and to keep the closest distance by not trying to touch each other. This ongoing project is to capture psychological ‘intimate moments’ from physically closest distance and to emphasize on the intimate relationship, which has a power of transformation to define who we are, by using a mirror reflection as a visual strategy. By growing up with a big Korean family and strong Asian family bonding, I have played different roles of family and struggled between independence and dependence, and between personal decision and family involvement. Intimate relationships start from family, so I started to ask questions about what intimate relationships are, how to define roles of family, and how the intimate relationships of family affect who we are. When I visited my family in Korea in summer of 2014, I asked my family including myself to close their eyes in 3 minutes and to keep the closest distance by not trying to touch each other. Intimate Distance I in South Korea emphasizes on family dynamics by playing multiple roles of family by juxtaposing of these two different roles of family at the same time.”
Bradly Dever Treadaway is a Brooklyn based artist and teacher utilizing lens-based image making, moving images, sound, sculpture, installation and performance to comment on the breakdown of intergenerational communicating and broken familial links due to natural disaster, technological evolution, mental health challenges, societal shifts and the continuance of interpersonal detachment occurring within American communities. Treadaway is a Fulbright Scholar and has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and many others. The artwork on view was generated from performative gestures featured in a fifteen-year body of short-form experimental video works related to domestic rituals, intergenerational communication and archival interventions. This non-linear montage juxtaposes and intertwines the artist’s study of vernacular archives and family histories.