The telling of history is complicated.

The narratives we believe are true are often controlled by a society’s dominant group, leading to social and cultural collisions. There is no greater evidence of this than the prevailing push in contemporary culture to add other voices, recognize missing elements of history, and the movement against single stories because so many experienced the real social and political consequences of being excluded.

Artists-in-residence Jackie Milad, Barbara Schreiber, Edison Peñafiel, Janet Loren Hill, and Sichong Xie question this concept of the narrative, using their work to add and ask questions about humanity’s relationship to the past, the present, each other, and the natural world.

Edison Peñafiel’s work also explores crowd and conflict, displacement, and the human desire to claim land. His multimedia installations focus on those who are often on the underside of the world’s major conflicts: the migrant, the laborer, the surveilled. The disjointed, repetitive and often cyclitic movements in his videos mirror disturbing cycles of human history that result in human catastrophes. These unnerving views break us out of the desensitized lull that ongoing crisis creates.

Excerpt from essay by curator Jonell Logan for Conflict Point exhibition.

This exhibition was presented in partnership with Windgate Foundation.

Photo: McColl Center for Art + Innovation