Presenting:
Fallout Shelter, 2016, 12-channel video installation (presented here as a single-channel video excerpt, 7’07”)
About the Artworks
The screening title I Guess if the World is Coming to an End… is a line taken from Fallout Shelter (2016), a thought experiment about ethics, identity politics, and nation-building that envisions a post-apocalyptic survival scenario. The video stages a US Navy training exercise from an Officer Training Manual. The exercise envisions a nuclear holocaust in which ten people occupy a military-controlled fallout shelter. Each occupant is described by limited and often problematic demographic information, including age, gender, race, sexual orientation, and occupation.
The artist invited dozens of participant-performers to complete the exercise, coming to their own conclusions about who should be included in the shelter in order to “rebuild society.” They then improvised the role of one of the fallout shelter occupants in a video confessional format where they make arguments for their further inclusion. The result is a polyphonic narrative that complicates identity politics and speculates on a utopic society. Revealing moral values, biases, and ideals, the video confessional and documentary interview formats serve to conflate fact and fiction and to complicate the performance of character versus the performance of self.
The exhibition also includes a series of photographs depicting the former US Naval Station Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. Established during World War II as a strategic airbase in the Caribbean, the United States has since used vast areas of the eastern part of Vieques as a bombing range and site for military training exercises. Heavy metals and toxic chemicals like depleted uranium and Agent Orange were used during these tests, with the result that residents of the island report the highest cancer rates in the Caribbean. The naval base was closed in 2004 but questions remain over land usage and development. The site sits uncomfortably between abandoned and occupied, military and demilitarized, American and Puerto Rican, imperial territory and native land, and foreign investment and local economy.
About the Artist
Maya Kaminishi Jeffereis (b. Los Angeles; lives and works in New York, NY) is a research-based artist working primarily in video, performance, and social engagement. Her work focuses on the role of historicization and memorialization in the politics of identity and confronts experiences of historical domination and marginalization by recontextualizing, reimagining, or restaging those processes in the present. Interviews, documents, or historical events are points of departure for experimental narratives and documentaries that play with fraught truth, as she investigates the space between presence and absence, memory and erasure in personal knowledge of historical narrative.
Recent exhibitions and screenings of her work have been organized at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (forthcoming, 2018); chashama, Brooklyn (2018); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2017); SOHO20 Gallery, Brooklyn (2017); Flux Factory, Queens (2016); and the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT (2016).
She has received awards from NARS Foundation, the Dick and Lois Haskayne Artist Award for the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Vermont Studio Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Cisneros Initiative for Latin American Art, and the Luetz Riedel Fellowship. Jeffereis holds an MFA from Hunter College, New York City and a BFA and BA from the University of Washington, Seattle.
