Marina Yacoe has studied film, dance, and theology at institutions including the School of Visual Arts in New York City and UCLA, and is currently completing an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Maine.  This is Yacoe’s first solo exhibition.

Each handmade viewer in the gallery displays a film poem on a small screen, seen through a stereoscope viewer.  The photographs are film-stills from these works printed on aluminum dibond.  Eschewing large screens or projections, the artist deliberately conjures an intimate sensory experience for visitors.  In an age of ubiquitous, mindless scrolling on mobile phones, Yacoe uses the same unlikely format to foster mindful contemplation.

The artist’s approach to film is similarly counter-intuitive.  Acutely aware that the world is awash in TikTok videos and Instagram reels, Yacoe does not position herself as yet another content generator.  Instead, she gathers from the ocean of stock sound and film footage and other ephemera to identify moments of unexpected beauty worth preserving.  She then joins these lost elements together, creating unlikely—sometimes haunting—juxtapositions.  In her digital hands, the most quotidian source material undergoes a sort of transubstantiation, speaking to existential matters with exquisite clarity. 

There is a non-doctrinaire, yet profoundly spiritual instinct at play in Yacoe’s practice.  She notes a parallel with the Japanese practice of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, transforming that which was broken into something purposeful and distinctive.  One might also recall the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, in which the great task of humans is to gather the sparks of light which escaped from shattered vessels at the start of Creation.  Yacoe’s videos are offerings in this spirit.  They provide glimpses of unity in a period of discord.