Numinous Pools

Opening Reception: First Friday, October 7, 6-9pm

Numinous Pools is a group exhibition surfacing ritualistic practices and alternative temporalities in film and video art from around the Great Lakes. In metaphorizing the Great Lakes’ formative processes, this single-channel exhibition is inspired by how time has animated the melting of this region’s ecologies and histories into fluid wholeness. The artists featured in Numinous Pools use experimental moving image projects to reflect on their cultural backgrounds and numinous realities in contrast to dominant Western values. Numinous Pools is curated by Rachel Poonsiriwong, and includes works by Lili Chin, Jacklyn Prasad Das, and Emily Pelstring. Read the full exhibition text by Rachel Poonsiriwong here.

Works in the Exhibition

Jona Dove (2020)
by Lili Chin
Single Channel HD video, color, sound, 2020 (5:30)

Jona Dove is a single channel installation that reflects on the intersecting emotions of man and whale. Drawing inspiration from Moby Dick and Jonah and the whale, this film explores co-existence, biodiversity, and the fragile relationship between man and mammal. Incorporating sound recordings ranging from Humpback whales to the albatross, the film immerses the viewer into an emotional experience of darkness and light. Shot in La Jolla, California, this artwork, intentionally placed by the Connecticut coastline, will bring two bodies of water together, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean.

Members Only (2019)
Jacklyn Das
Digitized film loop shot on Super 8 and overlaid with hand painted 16mm (2:23)

Members Only is a dream of a memory of a ritual. Fading memory—bright colors, silky and chiffon. The anticipation of what comes next. Spinning and tangled, morning pujas, ring the bells. Will you even remember how? Thick, swirling wisps—fragrant and smoldering. Intentions set to follow. Singing but chanted, tightened petticoats, fold the pleats. Did you forget the fall?

Petal to the Metal (2021)
Emily Pelstring
Digitized 16mm film (3:00)

This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden's creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants.

About the Artists

Lili Chin is a visual artist based in New York City. Her interdisciplinary art practice incorporates natural materials, film, video, ceramics, weaving and mixed media to mine historical and personal narratives. She has exhibited at Microscope Gallery, Abrazo Interno Gallery (NY), Below Grand (NY), as well as several other art organizations in the US, Scotland, Latin America, Europe and China. She has created commissioned installations for the He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, CT. She has participated in several residencies, including the MacDowell Colony, Mass MoCA, Swatch Art Peace Hotel and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She also curates screenings and programs independently and together with IOM Projects.

Jacklyn Das is an educator, curator, and transdisciplinary artist. Currently working as an educational consultant, Jacklyn provides mentorship and advisement to high school and college students, in addition to assisting refugee populations navigate the college application process. Jacklyn graduated in 2009 with her BA from Columbia College Chicago where she studied early childhood education and 3-dimensional art. A graduate of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY she studied exhibition design, photography, film, and book arts, earning her MFA in 2019. Since 2017 she has been a member of the organizing committee for WALL\THERAPY, a public art mural festival in Rochester, NY. In this context, she has collaborated on and organized workshops, artist talks, and conferences that invite the community to engage in conversations around themes of “art & activism” and “representation.” Jacklyn has held a prolonged interest in visual interventions that reclaim public space and amplify marginalized voices. She first began photographing street art and graffiti while living and teaching in Chicago, IL and co-founded Chicago Truborn where she curated exhibitions and community engagements from 2011 until 2014. Embracing a pluralistic approach to making, Jacklyn’s work is rooted in a feminist and decolonial practice which seeks to incite critical visual discourse by raising questions around issues of identity, erasure, and appropriation. Creating immersive environments that provide the viewer with an acute embodied experience, her primarily installation-based work focuses on disrupting dominant Western and Eurocentric narratives, while identifying and acknowledging diverse sources of knowledge production; an endeavor that often involves the utilization and recontextualization of archives as a means of reclaiming identity and confronting the erasure of marginalized cultural narratives. Jacklyn’s moving image work is primarily shot on 16mm and Super 8 film stocks, working with these formats she often combines original and found footage with direct animation techniques and hand developing processes. Once digitized, these films are looped and screened within the greater context of her installations. The concepts of time and ritual and their relationships to each other, to the production of culture, and to the dissemination of knowledge, are all themes visually explored in her filmmaking practice and work. The films she makes are defined by both experimental aesthetics and theory of practice. She considers her filmmaking to be experimental in that it is an ongoing process, continually evolving, with no determined end in time or place; her films are often made and remade, but never completed. IG: @jdas

Emily Pelstring is an artist and filmmaker, and is faculty in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Emily's artistic research often brings antique media into contact with contemporary images, exploring the evolution and cultural perception of various media forms, the material contingency of the cinematic spectacle, and the intersections of science and magic. These inquiries have been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, and the results have been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, DIY spaces, and festivals. She has directed many music videos and short experimental films, specializing in animation techniques for 16mm film and analog video. In addition to her solo work, Emily is engaged in ongoing artistic collaborations with Jessica Mensch and Katherine Kline, her “sister-crones” in the performance trio The Powers, and was a core organizer of The Witch Institute, an international symposium discussing media representations of the witch. IG: @_em_bo_

About the Curator

Rachel Poonsiriwong (she/her) is a Singaporean independent curator researching visual culture at the intersection of ritual and technology. With a curatorial focus on woven art and moving images, Rachel investigates the encoding of trauma into cultural and relational fabrics. She recently curated a 17-person show about intergenerational trauma in diasporic cultures at Root Division (San Francisco, CA), titled Water is Thicker than Blood. Her art programming experience extends to organizations like the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, SOMArts, and the Asian American Women Artists Association. In the realm of product design, Rachel’s creative portfolio spans machine learning tooling to nonprofit research alleviating homelessness. Rachel graduated with All College Honors from the California College of the Arts, where she studied Interaction Design and the History of Art and Visual Culture. She currently lives in San Francisco, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples, where she serves as a Global Shaper with the World Economic Forum. IG: @curatordesigner