Reston’s Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA) will feature a large-scale video installation in its latest exhibition.
“Three Kings Weep,” an exhibit by Jamaican-born artist Ebony Patterson, will be on view from Sept. 21 through Dec. 14 at Tephra’s Reston Town Center gallery (12001 Market Street, Suite 103).
An opening reception is set for Saturday, Sept. 21 from 5-7 p.m. The event will feature a talk by Valeria Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Center’s curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which is organizing the installation.
Playing in reverse, the film shows three men, each on a separate screens, as they dress themselves with tears rolling down their cheeks, occupying a chapel-like space where viewers can contemplate their presence, according to Tephra.
Here’s more from Tephra on the exhibit:
The voice of a young boy reading the poem “If We Must Die,” by Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, frames the scene. McKay wrote his poem, published in 1919, following weeks of race riots dubbed “the Red Summer,” in which hundreds of African Americans were killed during attacks on Black communities in several cities across America. One hundred years later, Patterson reiterates McKay’s words as a soundtrack to her visually arresting work, exposing the continued vulnerability of Black bodies in our present society. “I wanted to present these bodies in a way that allowed space to demonstrate the full sense of potential of their vulnerability,” says Ebony G. Patterson about the film.
Patterson received a master’s of fine arts degree in printmaking and drawing from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor’s degree in painting from the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica. She has taught at several universities.
Her works explore class, race, gender, youth culture, and acts of violence.
