December 5, 2025 to February 11, 2026

UMW Media Wall is pleased to present the following artworks on rotation:

Stefani Byrd, The Razor’s Edge
2015-16. HD Video, 25:24.

Pierre Yves Clouin, Fiumicino (Runways)
2025. Digital Video, 2:36.

Takahiro Suzuki, SMASH Dance Marathon
2023. Digital Video, 5:14.

Additional information on each artist and artwork will be provided in subsequent individual posts.

Until November 20, we will be accepting video art submissions for our Fall and Winter Rotation. Pieces that are selected will be on display as part of a 24-hour looping exhibition. All submissions are welcome, no fee required.

Submit your work to the Media Wall here.

Awarded the Melchers-Gray award in 2024, N.Y.S. keeps its focus entirely on a mostly-still cutting board. One pair of hands cleans, prepares, rearranges a bowl of water, a piece of bread, a rag… Johnson’s exploration of domestic objects and maintenance accents are paired with voiceover selections from The New Negro or Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, a 1925 collection of essays edited by Alain Locke. These excerpts cross-examine the Harlem Renaissance’s cultural, spiritual, artistic, and social breakthroughs—grounded in the artist’s images of domestic work and care. Is there a line between research and lineage? Between domestic and academic? 100 years after the its publication, the questions brought forth by Locke’s work, and by the Harlem Renaissance as a movement, still remain potent and necessary.

N.Y.S. Transcript:

Excerpts from The New Negro; Voices of the Harlem Renaissance

Not all art is in a field of pure art values; there is poetry of sturdy social protest, and fiction of calm, dispassionate social analysis.

But reason and realism have cured us of sentimentality.

Instead of the wail and appeal, there is challenge and indictment.

Satire is just beneath the surface of our latest prose, and tonic irony has come into our poetic wills. These are good medicines for the common mind.

For us, they are necessary antidotes against social poison. Their influence means that at least for us, the worst symptoms of social distemper are passing, and so the social promise of our recent art is as great as the artistic.

It has brought with it, first of all, that wholesome, welcome virtue of finding beauty in oneself.

The younger generation can no longer be twitted as cultural non-descripts and accused of being out of love with their own nativity.

Gradually too, under some spiritualizing reaction, the brands and wounds of social persecution are becoming the proud stigmata of spiritual immunity and moral victory.

Already enough progress has been made in this direction so that it is no longer true that the Negro mind is too engulfed in its own social dilemmas, or too depressed to attain the full horizons of self- and social-criticism.

Indeed, by the evidence and promise of the cultured few, we are at least spiritually free, and offered through art an emancipating vision to America.

But it is a presumption to speak further, for those who in the selections of their work in the succeeding sections, speak so adequately for themselves.

Until December 6th, the Mediawall will be accepting video art submissions for our Winter Rotation. Pieces that are selected will be on display as part of a 24-hour looping exhibition. All submissions are welcome, no fee required.

Submit your work to the Mediawall.

Curated by Josiah Arnold

Independent Student Submissions

Pieces received from the spring 2024 call for student submissions.

Artists:

Michael Murphy

Mackenzie Martin

Approaches to Video Art

Final projects from ARTS 454: Approaches to Video Art with Jason Robinson.

Artists:

Noah Barrett
Nellie Bittenbender
Eniya Cropper
Cassidy Ervin
Malachi Geter
Hayden Griffith
Winston Heron
Anne Jackson
Alicia Johnson
Reese Kubricki
John Mabry
Grace Martin
Stephen McClanahan
Maha Momtaz
Rachel Nolan
Stella Pallasch
Robert Roets
Nadia Cloud Shiblie
Tom Straus
Jamie Vuong
Leah Wolfson

Pierre Yves Clouin – Hole
Xingrong Qiao – 25 things that’re hard for me
Neil Ira Needleman – Postcard from Acadia
Jack Catling – Through the Window
Andrew Payne – Light under a bridge
Yossi Galanti – There are no saints in this story
David Anthony Sant – Between here and there
Sara Ko – Anomaly Reverie
Lol Sargent – Peter, Shirley and Louis
Zsolt Gyenes – Tiled Wall
Jocelyn R.C. – Branch Blend (2022)
Michael Ipsen – Nature’s Organ of Anticipation

We are looking for new submissions for video art and moving images to be displayed on-loop this March. The application will close February 28th. Please use the link below to apply.

Submit your work to the UMW Mediawall

MCCALVASP – Astrid Espenhain  (Copenhagen, Denmark)

MCCALVASP shows a fascinating universe of soft transitions and movements of organic shapes and changing colours. The abstract images are induced by the interplay of coloured light and a semi transparent indeterminable material. The interaction between colour, light and reflections create new compositions in continuous transformation.

Light, colours and the interplay between them are key elements in all my art works. In my videos, I explore the spatial qualities and the aesthetics in colour and light. 

The Uncanny – Kailum Graves (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia)

There is authenticity in low-resolution imagery. This is how Bigfoot, UFO, and Loch Ness Monster videos uploaded to YouTube gain their validity. Similarly, the most powerful still and moving images from conflict and occupied zones are often low-resolution, heavily pixelated, and blurred. In researching this project, I began to realise how fundamental the pixel is in allowing us to cross borders in real-time through the emission and instantaneous reception of visual signals (live streaming webcams, security cameras, and mobile footage from protests, war zones and dangerous journeys). I wanted to embrace this quality—which enabled me, from Mexico City, where I was undertaking a residency—to capture beachgoers at leisure using a networked surf camera above Coolum Beach, Australia. The uncanniness of the images—at times the people documented appear more mythical creature than human—belongs to a politics of fear and threat of otherness (the pixelated face of a criminal, Bigfoot, fighter jet footage of an airstrike, or CCTV footage). These things sit at the intersection of digital and physical, and the real and imagined, where the spectacle trumps direct experience of the world, and things we recognise start to blur seamlessly into places and things that aren’t real.

Kailum is critically obsessed with the Web and born-digital content. He is particularly interested in image-rich technologies and the way global media communication—a landscape controlled by a handful of multidimensional oligopolistic corporate-run networks—can be sampled, organised, and considered in new philosophical, sociological, and political terms. Nonetheless, while these issues are political and economic in nature, Kailum believes anti-capitalist art offers no real alternative to the economic and ideological discourses of multinational capitalism. In its place, he is interested in examining the politics of the image and the construction of truth. To do this, he uses the Internet, which has normalised the act of collecting and compiling information, to preserve and curate found images and raw material. The aim is to engage with the cultural space and aesthetics of the Internet—and the vast amount of digital information it contains—as a subject, material, and tool of artistic production.

Oil Dancer – Circle – Tolmie MacRae (Köln, Germany)

Oil Dancer grew out of collaboration and experimentation with a fan dancer. The original intention was to explore a particular technique, but in trying to capture this elusive performance, the hypnotic and meditative rhythm and movements of the dancer, spiralled this piece in a completely different and unexpected direction. This piece was the genesis for my current body of work. Through constant experimentation and collaboration with a dancer I was able to explore and start to define my own aesthetic as a video artist. Video allows me to catalogue time and space into a language of frames. Once captured I would play and challenge their linear hierarchy , distorting it, pulling those moments and perspectives through each other. Like the cubists trying to represent every perspective at once, video allows me to pull each of these catalogued moments through themselves to paradoxically see each frame at once, whilst also allowing things to evolve and flow over time.

Tolmie explores the multiplicity of existence predominantly through the medium of video. Over the past five years his work has explored themes of meditation, transcendence and immanence by investigating the flow of light and time on people and landscapes. He plays with opposing ideas and then fuses them together. Rather than transcendence and immanence or creation and destruction as binary opposites the artist explores the tension of these seemingly competing states of existence as combined dualities. It is not a political or spiritual investigation for the artist but rather an individual exploration of the state of existence.