Residency Myah Jeffers
- Ras Ilix, Myah Asha Jeffers, January 2024, photograph.
Project Space Residency
January 8 – February 5, 2025
Myah Asha Jeffers is a London-based artist who works with film, photography and installation. In this talk, Myah shares about her background in photography and film. She then speaks with VSW Assistant Curator, Hernease Davis, about the work she is currently making as a part of her time as a VSW Project Space Artist in Residence.
Mya’s current project, Exclusion Zone, engages with the island of Montserrat. A 1997 volcanic eruption on Montserrat left 80% of the island uninhabitable. Myah has a familial connection to the British colony, and spent a month researching and photographing throughout the 20% of inhabitable land. While in residency, she is using her time to begin using these images to experiment with installation strategies that engage with Montserrat’s connected histories of climate disasters and colonialism.
Listen to the complete audio of Blueprinting our Futures Soundscape
Watch and listen to Jeffers’ debut short film, Bathsheba.
MYAH ASHA JEFFERS (b. 1994) is a London-based, Barbados-raised, award winning artist whose practice spans photography, performance and film. Her work focuses on witnessing and documenting the nuances of daily life within diasporic communities. Myah’s photographs have been featured in a host of publications including VOGUE, The Guardian, ELLE and The Sunday Times Magazine. She is a recipient of The Photography Foundation Awards (2024), two-time winner of the Portrait of Britain Award (2019/21), Future High Streets Artist-in-Residence at KWMC and has an upcoming Darkroom Residency at Art Hub Studios. Myah has facilitated workshops / engaged in artist panels for the likes of The Photographers’ Gallery, TATE Modern, Autograph ABP and Whitechapel Gallery. Myah’s directorial debut ‘BATHSHEBA’ world premiered at Toronto’s Inside Out Film Festival (TIFF Lightbox) and will have its UK premiere in August 2024.
“Spanning photography, theatre, and film, my practice is focused on the witnessing and documentation of the Black quotidian / Black interiority. Working solely with small & medium format analogue cameras and darkroom-based hand printing processes, the work is particularly concerned with the intersection of “naturalism” and “myth”, through illuminating the magic of rituals, quiet, and connection. I have most recently been focusing on the (in)tangibility and truth of grief and its relationship with what I call “living abstraction” – where Black folk sculpt or construct versions of themselves as a tool for survival. I aim to make work that lends itself to abstraction through the experimentation with form, monotone, texture, and structure.”
VSW Project Space Residencies are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature, Monroe County, and Joy of Giving Something. Photography-based artists participating in the program receive support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.