Maya Jeffereis: Fields Fallen from Distant Songs
Columbus Museum of Art
Located in Upper Level Atrium, Mary and Bob Kidder Video Space
On view April 9–August 17, 2025
Admission Information
Maya Jeffereis: Fields Fallen from Distant Songs is included with the cost of general admission.
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Exhibition Description
In this evocative video, Maya Jeffereis probes the legacy of indentured labor on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations, where her maternal great grandparents worked after immigrating from Japan in the early 1900s. Paying homage to these ancestors, Fields Fallen from Distant Songs combines home videos from Jeffereis’s grandfather with historical footage of canefield labor and the artist’s recording of the 2023 eruption of the volcano Kīlauea. Jeffereis accompanies this montage with folk music called “holehole bushi”—songs sung by Japanese canefield workers—overlaid with her own poetic musings.
For the video, Jeffereis researched historical films depicting sugarcane plantations, which often represent immigrant workers as exotic foreigners. Rather than reproduce that trope by displaying historical footage in its original state, Jeffereis treats the 16mm film with a chemigram process to produce effects reminiscent of salt water or sugar crystals, disrupting the legibility of the image.
About Maya Jeffereis
Maya Jeffereis is an artist and filmmaker working in video installation and experimental film to bring overlooked histories to light and speak to archival gaps through counter narratives, ancestral histories, and speculative fictions. Jeffereis’ work has been presented in the United States and internationally, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum, The Noguchi Museum, and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, among other institutions. Her work has screened in international film festivals including Images Festival, Third Horizon Film Festival, Cosmic Rays, and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. Jeffereis has been an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works, Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant. She teaches at Parsons School of Design at The New School and Hunter College (CUNY). She earned an MFA from Hunter College and BA and BFA from the University of Washington.
