Maya Jeffereis

Visual Description: The first video, Fields Fallen from Distant Songs made in 2023 is a single-channel that combines 4K video and 16 mm film with color and sound with a total running time of 11 minutes played on loop. The film is based loosely on the artist's great grandparents' history emigrating from Japan to work on sugarcane plantations in Hawaii. The film includes footage of the Hawaiian landscape shot by the artist, 16mm home movies shot by her grandfather, and archival films depicting life on plantations. The film has been subjected to a process called chemigrams which, through chemical reactions, creates abstract splash, drip, and splatter marks on the film to varying degrees of legibility. 

Visual Description: The second video Passages I made in 2023 is a single-channel 16mm film with color and no sound with a total running time of 5 minutes looped. The film is projected onto a screen made of sugar glass, suspended from the ceiling. Passages I features historical documents that have been abstracted and intervened upon through the chemigram process, allowing only fragments of text to show through. The sourced texts include Jeffereis' grandfather's immigration records, ship manifests, Queen Liliʻuokalani song "Aloha ʻOe", and the "Gentlemenʻs Agreement" of 1907. Flashes of color gradation and snippets of text create a lyrical rhythm that obscures the original documents.

About

Maya Jeffereis is an artist working in video, performance, and installation. Her work seeks to expand upon overlooked histories and archival gaps through counter and personal narratives, offering both critical perspectives and speculative possibilities. Jeffereis’ work has been presented in the United States and internationally, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum, The Noguchi Museum, and Queens Museum, among others. Jeffereis has been an artist-in-residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Center (LMCC), Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She is a recipient of the A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship and Cisneros Initiative for Latin American Art. She is currently a 2023 Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM fellow and an artist-in-residence at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts SHIFT Program. She teaches art, art history, and Asian American Studies at Parsons School of Design and Hunter College. She earned an MFA from Hunter College and BA and BFA from the University of Washington.