Performance
by Ian Power & Clint McCallum
Film
by Jennifer Bewerse & Cassia Streb
Mail Art
by Ariel Oakley
about the art
Explore the blurry edge between body and soul with a film by Ian Power and Clint McCallum and visual art by Ariel Oakley. Together, they contemplate our culture’s obsession with eternal life—one through absurdist performance using news footage of a mummy’s resurrected voice, the other through anatomical iconography that reframes the sacred.
Ian and Clint’s film It Allowed them to Produce a Single Sound blends evening news footage with performance into a duet that’s equal parts absurdist comedy and wry critique. In a tight, minimalist composition of gestures and object performance, Ian and Clint try in vain to communicate alongside looping news samples reporting on the sound recreated by scanning and 3D printing the vocal cords of an ancient Egyptian mummy. Acting as imagined surrogates for the mummy—who had inscriptions on his tomb expressing a hope to speak again after death—they echo his wish through increasingly futile attempts at communication. By foregrounding technological spectacle and news cycle hype, the artists expose the longing beneath the gimmick: to keep a voice—any voice—echoing beyond death. What emerges is a witty parody where immortality is both a gag reel and a genuine ache.
Ariel’s painting Every Breath Ever Taken is part of a series she created after a night working in the operating room, where Ariel held a woman’s lungs intended for transplant after she died suddenly. What is death, if parts of us go on living? By titling her painting after a quote from Tyson Yunkaporta—“every breath ever taken is still in the air to breathe”—Ariel frames respiration as a shared, circulating sacrament: the soul inhaled, exhaled, and inherited. Layering references to medieval fresco and anatomical imaging, she suggests that if the sacred survives anywhere, it might be in the messy, generative matter we pass between us—lung to lung, life to life.
Together, these works ask where the self begins and ends, offering a sharp meditation on mortality, absurdity, and the porousness between life and afterlife.