Music & Film
by Akari Komura & Ilana Waniuk
Mail Art
about the art
Both works in this pairing — Notes of Care by composer Akari Komura and violinist Ilana Waniuk, and Reconfiguration 67 by visual artist Lacey McKinney — explore care as a tactile, embodied practice. Objects, gestures, and environments become sites for reflection and renewal, where healing is understood not as a solitary pursuit but as an interconnected, evolving process.
In Notes of Care, Akari and Ilana merge sound, words, and light to trace the contours of care. The film’s score, composed by Akari, interlaces violin, spoken fragments, and field recordings from her family home and garden into an intimate sonic portrait of how care is shared and felt. For the film’s visuals, Ilana performs with two overlapping overhead projectors, layering photographs, silhouettes, prisms, liquid, and glass to visualize care through light, reflection, and transparency. Her hands—visible as she tends and shapes the imagery in real time—recur alongside the spine as visual and conceptual anchors, connecting care to the physical body as structure, site of vulnerability, and conduit for growth. Through this intertwining of media, the artists invite a sensory awareness of care as something cultivated through personal connection and attentive presence.
Lacey McKinney’s Reconfiguration series depicts entangled bodies to reflect how people reshape themselves in response to circumstances, environments, and social expectations. How do we care for ourselves within the limits of systems and hierarchies? In Reconfiguration 67, Lacey uses solar dye and cyanotype on silk organza and muslin to depict an entangled figure and a skeleton—perhaps one body seen through layers of transparency or two forms sharing space. Her work shows the body as never fixed but continually shaped by memory, environment, and the invisible systems that hold it.
Together, these works meditate on care as an interdependent act — one that links bodies, systems, environments, and gestures. Through sound and image, they reveal how intimacy and resilience emerges not in isolation but through the continual practice of attention and connection.