Exhibition

Marina Yacoe: Ease in the Uncertainty features recent video work and photographs from a series that combines found footage and sound to create vibrant compilations that present new layers of meaning. Since living in Maine, Yacoe has recently focused her film-making practice on crafting short poetic film pieces she creates from what she calls ‘space junk’ or the flotsam of lost and broken visual and audio content in virtual piles of cheap data banks. Yacoe selects, refines, and attaches pieces of movement and light, sound, and faces together in these video works.

Viewed through stereoscope viewers, the collections of short abstract films provide an intimate space for one’s reflection on time and place. The photographs are printed on aluminum prints, emphasizing the still moments she captures in the films. The custom birch wood ‘viewer-booths’ house each looped film and offer an up-close experience of the work’s vibrant rhythmic and emotional subtlety. Yacoe also presents her films in handheld viewers as another motion towards more intentional viewing and an invitation to feast at her table. The films only exist where they are viewed, as Yacoe’s work is not publicly available online.

Yacoe’s film work is about horizons and boundaries. Growing up with inspired visual artist parents and yet trying to reconcile imposed labels like ‘bi-racial’ and ‘mixed’ planted this fractured lens in her creative mind. She is dedicated to juxtapositions that create wholeness in their beauty and contrast to things that are better together. She faces the in-between spaces and pulls them into a graceful collision. Her work brings to our attention what we may have missed on the edges and in the friction, like a subway ride under her native Manhattan. Yacoe’s work invites us to consider the questions in our visual sphere: the plethora of content on demand and soon discarded; image scraps for sale of people and moments; constant screen content available in public spaces…mostly unnoticed.

Marina Yacoe is a video artist based in Belfast, Maine. She studied film and photography at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and dance Ethnography at UCLA. She earned her BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Interdisciplinary Studies and completed a master’s in disaster mental health.

Her visual art practice has spanned 40 years. It has bolstered her other life works documenting young artists and making super-8 films for alternative music while living in London and West Berlin in the 1980s, creatively photo-essaying women’s education in Nepal, supplying disaster relief support within island archipelago communities as an artist and librarian; Red Cross Disaster Spiritual Care in Maine, raising three children and now shepherding sheep in the Mid-coast while continuing to create and exhibit her films. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at the Parsonage Gallery in Searsport, Maine, and a Lights Out Gallery group show in Belfast.

While teaching and supporting Haitian refugees on a remote Bahamian island, she incorporated her visual juxtaposition-processing film practice to foster resilience through her artwork as an example to others in crisis and to any eye and heart seeking to notice unlikely beauty and hope within chaos and havoc. Yacoe refers to her art practice as Resilience in the Making.

Exhibition