Massachusetts College of Art MFA exhibit

From Twilight Till Dawn is a narrative video and installation that explores the generational effects of war and the impossible desire to step into another person’s experience. Upon entering the Pozen, viewers will walk into a space transformed by a sea of parachutes above their heads. The translucent white material glows from a faint light and gently fills with the air of the room, making gravity and air, visible and palpable. A twenty minute film plays from a small screen that hangs from the parachutes revealing Shadid Lewis’ fascination with and connections to this material. She states of her own fascination: “The Airborne imagery speaks to a metaphysical isolation, as the men leave the communal space of the airplane with soldiers huddled together in close proximity, and jump into the vast openness of the skies where existence is boiled down to a seeming impossibility—an unseen force fills a delicate material defying gravity to support the weight of a human body in mid air.”
Shadid Lewis interweaves her own melodies, stop-motion animation, and historic WWII footage of paratroopers in the sky with recorded conversations between herself and Army paratroopers, including her father who trained for the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Benning, GA where the artist was born. As Elaine Scarry tells us in The Body in Pain, all the wars of the 20th century are apparent through the injured bodies of the men who fought—a granddaughter experiences WWII through the limp of her grandfather whose leg endured shrapnel wounds in the French forest or through an uncle whose hip was shot in an ambush attack in Vietnam. The effects of these war moments are visible through the pain that endures in the bodies of our Soldiers over generations, and Shadid Lewis’ work explores an invisible psychological pain of war, one that trickles down through generations, becoming an unspoken reality barely perceived within a body, a family, a community, a country. From Twilight Till Dawn creates a tension between the beauty of the skies and the horror of the ground as Shadid Lewis attempts, through a moment of grace and empathy, to bridge the gap of her experience with the experience of those caught in war.
Carolyn Shadid Lewis is a multimedia artist working with music, animation, video, and installation. She has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally. For three years, Shadid Lewis worked as a multimedia Flash Developer for the Army at Fort Leavenworth, KS where she conducted research and cultivated relationships for her current body of work. In 2004, she was selected as the Kansas Arts Commission Fellowship Recipient for Interdisciplinary art. In 2002, she received a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship for a year of study at Burren College of Art in the West of Ireland. Shadid Lewis holds a B.A. in piano and vocal performance from William Jewell College in Liberty, MO, and will soon complete her M.F.A. from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.