Prayer for the Beehive
2024
Video Installation
Exhibited at
Academy Hall Video Club
West Suffield Academy Hall, 2024
Prayer for the Beehive is a site-specific video installation that constructs a layered system of memory and repetition - part ritual, part affirmation, part prayer.
The work was created for Academy Hall Video Club, presented by Jim Whitten and Christa Whitten at West Suffield Academy Hall on November 23, 2024.
Designed in response to the architecture of the space, the installation operates as a projection-mapped environment, layering moving images directly onto the surfaces of the hall.
The work is composed of a projection map built from fifteen interwoven video layers. Archival footage - filmed by my grandfather and mother between 1947 and 1993 - exists alongside video work I created, forming a composite image where past and present unfold simultaneously.
The layering functions as a system rather than a sequence. The work operates like a hive - built through accumulation, sustained through repetition, and dependent on the interconnection of its parts. Surrounded by these layered images, the work becomes a space of internal orientation - an attempt to direct care inward through the materials of memory.
Media
Projection-mapped video installation composed of 15 layered video channels (looped)
Much of my earlier work has focused on externalizing trauma - using art as a way to process, release, and survive the weight of lived experience. These works were acts of exposure, confronting what had been hidden.
Prayer for the Beehive shifts that focus outward.
Rather than centering only my own experience, the work considers the collective—how healing is sustained through others, through networks of care, and through shared labor. It reflects a growing awareness that survival is not individual, but relational.
Drawing on symbolism of the hive as a site of interdependence, the work considers how individual pain exists within larger systems of connection, labor, and shared resilience.
Prayer for the Beehive operates as an act of offering.
It is a gesture toward something beyond the self - toward ancestors, toward community, toward an unseen network of support that sustains life even in moments of fracture.
If previous works were acts of release, Prayer for the Beehive turns toward maintenance.
It exists as a quiet, continuous act - one that does not resolve or erase what has been experienced, but builds a structure capable of holding it.
Materials / Specs
Projection-mapped video (15 layers)
Archival footage (8mm → VHS → digital transfer)
Original video work
Site-specific installation