The Emery Community Arts Center on the University of Maine at Farmington campus will present the North American debut of “The Waves and the Mantram, part 1” at the center on Academy Street. The exhibit will feature a multi-channel film installation by Markeith Chavous, media artist, poet and UMF graduate of the class of 2011.

The exhibition will be on display from Thursday, Jan. 25  through Thursday, March 7. An opening reception will be held from 5-7 p.m. on  Thursday, Jan. 25. An artist talk will be held at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 7. All events are free and open to the public, according to a news release from the arts center.

The first in a trilogy of cinematic triptychs, the waves and the mantram has been featured internationally. Chavous created the film to thread together varied narratives, accounts, images, poems and documents of belief and spirituality; and the environments that surround, impact, and inform those beliefs. It is a slate, an elastic model of being.

This project debuted in 2023 in Scotland at the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival’s Exhibitions Programme, and was then subsequently exhibited in South Korea at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) as part of the Experimental Film & Video 2023 exhibition.

Chavous’ film was made possible in part by financial support from the Vermont Arts Council Artist Development Grant/National Endowment for the Arts, a grant from the Integrity: Arts and Culture Association, and additional support from Alchemy Film and Arts, Scotland.

Chavous’ work plies at the edges and inquires into the thin space between tensile, fleeting dichotomies and polarities — receding and becoming; narrative and documentary; painting and film/video; inner life and social identity; stillness and change; religion and spirituality; humanism and transcendence. Through multimedia installations (informed by experimental and documentary film, and the history of Western painting) and short form poetry, he attempts, time and time again, to glance against the innermost and all-too-human.

His video work and installations have been presented internationally at the Film and Moving Image Festival in Scotland, at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) Museum in South Korea, and in the US at the Lewiston-Augusta Film Festival in Maine, the New Studio A.D in New Mexico, and in Los Angeles. His poetry has been widely published in international journals and anthologies such as NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems, Modern Haiku, BONES, The Heron’s Nest, KAMIHIKOUKI, and HAIKU 2016.

He holds a degree in art from the University of Maine at Farmington, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts.

The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, and from noon-6 p.m. Saturday. It is closed Sundays and holidays.

For updates, visit wpsites.maine.edu.

For more information, contact Ann Bartges, director of UMF Emery Community Arts Center, at ann.bartges@maine.edu or 207-778-7461.

 

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