Artist in Residence – Maya Jeffereis
Maya Jeffereis is an artist working in video, performance, and public practice. Her work raises questions around the politics of identity and presents counter-narratives. Maya has shown her work nationally and internationally. Most recently, she participated in the NADA Art Fair and she will have a solo exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art. She has received awards from the Vermont Studio Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Cisneros Initiative for Latin American Art, Hunter College, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Beta-Local, and SOMA Summer. Maya holds a MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College, a BFA in Painting and Drawing, and BA in Classics from the University of Washington.
+++
July 7 – 25, 2016
Open Studio
Fri. July 15, 6-9pm
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Fallout Shelter Public Program
Fri. July 22, 7-9pm
For this public program, the artist invites viewers to participate in the Fallout Shelter exercise in small groups. Fallout Shelter is a social experiment and video installation that engages visitors in a conversation about ethics, morality, identity politics, and nation building. Each group will be asked to come to a unanimous decision about who should remain in the fallout shelter and who must be excluded, based on the identities provided in the exercise. The activity will be followed by a discussion around the collective moral values and the identity politics that contributed to the decisions.
During the residency, Maya Jeffereis will be working on her ongoing project Fallout Shelter. During her time at SOHO20, she will invite visitors to participate in a military training exercise that outlines a hypothetical apocalyptic scenario in which ten people of diverse backgrounds occupy a fallout shelter. The shelter can guarantee survival for only six people. Four must be excluded from the group in order that the remaining six may live to rebuild society. Visitors must make life-or-death decisions based on limited information about the occupants’ identities. The artist invites visitors to get on camera to discuss their decisions in a video confessional format.