VCFA and For Freedoms Unveil Art Installation and Announce a Video Projection Evening on 10/13

Art Installation – 10/8

For Freedoms selected artist Luis Jacob to design the installation, because of his social activism and relationship to VCFA as faculty in the MFA in Visual Art program.

His work is titled “Land Acknowledgement” and is intended to raise several questions:

• What does the relationship between Indigenous people and non-indigenous settlers mean to us, in this place we now call Vermont?
• What are the frames of reference that we adopt to understand—and also to misunderstand—our shared presence here?
• What new frameworks can we devise in order to honor our responsibilities to each other and to this land?

Abenaki and Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs Council Member Rich Holschuh said of the work,

“I find the artistic concept behind the image compelling: two human hands framing the word ‘Abenaki.’ It is interesting that the hands appear to be those of a person of an atypical Vermont demographic group, thus throwing an unexpected angle into the initial impression. With Vermont settler dispossession and marginalization of its own Indigenous people—the Abenaki—having a distinct racial and/or ethnic bias as a foundation, it makes the viewer wonder who is framing the question/situation or who is supposed to answer or be confronted with it?”

Born in Lima, Peru, Luis Jacob is a Toronto-based artist and curator whose diverse practice addresses social interaction and the subjectivity of aesthetic experience. Realized as painting, video, installation and photography, as well as actions in the public sphere, Jacob’s work invites a collision of meaning systems that destabilize conventions of viewing and open up possibilities for engagement and the creation of knowledge.

VCFA is excited about this public art piece and the questions it encourages the Montpelier community to explore.  The installation will be on view from October 8th-mid November, 2018, on the corner of East State and West streets in the north section of the college green.

Video Projection Evening – 10/13

VCFA will also be hosting a public video projection that will be held on Saturday, October 13 at 8 pm at College Hall.  It will include works by VCFA alums Adam DelMarcelle, Sumru Tekin and Jonathan Mars, as well as Vermont based artist John Douglas.

The works are a direct response to the prompt of being asked to consider the four universal freedoms articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Join us!