Fields Fallen from Distant Songs
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Fields Fallen from Distant Songs
2023
Two-channel video installation, 11 minutes
Installation view: The World Is Before You at EFA Project Space, July 6--August 12, 2023
In Fields Fallen from Distant Songs (2023) Jeffereis interweaves folk songs and ghostly images, poetically and enigmatically exploring the past through a present day gaze. Here, Jeffereis blends 16mm home-videos shot by her grandfather (whose parents worked at the plantations), with footage from the 1906 Thomas Edison film “Hawaiian Islands,” as well as with colonialist archival materials, and digital videos of the artist's recent research-based trip to Hawaiʻi with her mother, where she captured volcano eruptions, thus creating a fusion of past and present. The artist’s great-grandparents moved to Hawaiʻi in 1904 with the aspiration of establishing a better future, and were disillusioned by the reality of plantation life. Through Japanese folk songs and contemporary Hawaiʻian poems that speak about the challenges of this reality, Jeffereis sets a soft yet penetrating tone.