SASHA WATERS FREYER
AFRAID OF EVERYTHING
exhibition dates : October 7 - 29, 2016
ada gallery is pleased to present four films by Sasha Waters Freyer, on view October 7 -- October 29. Freyer is a moving image artist trained in the photography and documentary tradition, fusing original and found footage in 16mm and digital media. Freyer's works ask the question of how to be an artist and a parent; to make and to nurture; to revolt and sustain; the certainty of death; the project of reconciling the irreconcilable. For more than a decade, her work has revolved around what happens -- psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally -- when one becomes a parent, guided around her own maternal ambivalence. Her work conveys a desperation to evoke meaning from motherhood, the battle between autonomy and subjugation, selfishness and
sacrifice. Since the becoming a parent 12 years ago, she has mined the tension between the subjective and lived experience of mothers--so often without cultural or aesthetic representation--and their fantasies, projections, fears, and mourning. The four short films selected for presentation in Afraid of Everything explore, without sentimentality, this loss of innocence that is both real and imagined, personal and collective. They synthesize Freyer's original 16mm footage (shot on a hand-cranked Bolex camera) with optically re-printed and manipulated nature and history films and the home movies of strangers.
The four films included are: Her Heart is Washed in Water and then Weighed (2006, 13:00, 16mm film loop), premiere: Tribeca Film Festival. You Can See the Sun in Late December (2010, 6:30, 16mm film -> video loop projection), U.S. premiere: Anthology Film Archives, New York. Burn Out the Day (2014, 4:00, 16mm film -> video loop projection), premiere: Havana Film Festival. A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965 (2015, 6:30, 16mm film -> digital diptych, looped), premiere: The Jihlava International Film Festival.
In 2016, Sasha Waters Freyer was the recipient of the Helen Hill Award from he Orphan Film Symposium, and in 2015 received a Media Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her past projects have screened at such renowned international festivals as Rotterdam, Telluride, Tribeca, and IMAGES, in institutions such as the Pacific Film Archives, the Museum of Moving Images in New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and are equally active in microcinemas, church basements, and county libraries. Her films and videos have been reviewed in ArtForum, The New Yorker, Variety, IndieWIRE, and Mother Jones. Freyer is a past fellow of The Macdowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and currently serves as the Chair of the Department of Photography & Film at VCU's School of the Arts.
exhibition dates: October 7th - October 29, 2016
Gallery hours are Wednesday through Friday 12 to 5pm and Saturday 12 to 4pm