Installation Art Work

Feature Work // Series Work // Commercial Work

You Remind Me Where I Come From

3d Installation / USA, 3 hours, 2012
Language: English / Debut at 407 Studios in December 201

You Remind Me of Where I Come From is the second piece that I have made at 407 Studios in Rockland, Maine. It is made with the packaging materials from wedding gifts. The sound is from a package being sent by me to me. The photos are from an experience, while making the installation. The video is a play of light and dark creating the box from being closed to opening up.

Artist Statement:
How you remind me of where I come from. As a person, a thing, a lifetime and a monetary gain… belonging to someone or something…dirt poor or being belonging-less and what that must mean. How you want all the things that I’m supposed to want… but I want the opposite. I want what keeps from breaking, what makes safe, and what takes care… the materials used, the way it’s used, and the dirtiness it makes. And how you must look at me? Wrapped in bubblewrap, taped together, in my studio… like a child with mischievous thoughts in my head, and writing on the walls. Is dirty bad? But what if I clean the dirty up? If I came from somewhere else… a prettier place. Better bred, better fed, better opportunity. Where I come from… you remind me of that.

I Miss You Like The Sun Misses The Moon

3d Installation / USA, 3 min, 2012
Language: No dialogue / Debut at 407 Studios in July 2012 / Show:Sacred and Profane, Peak's Island, Maine

I Miss You Like The Sun Misses The Moon

I Miss You Like The Sun Misses The Moon is the first piece that I have made at 407 Studios in Rockland, Maine. It was initially conceived in 2007, while I was living in South Bristol, Maine and has been influenced strongly by my travels to Sweden and back.

With this piece, I am attempting to place the viewer in the perspective of the sky, looking down on a sailboat at sea. Though it is proven that there are many suns - for the sun is just a star - and many moons in the solar system, this is the story of only one sun and one moon.

This is the true story about a Captain’s wife in South Bristol, Maine in 1882, who was devastated to hear that her husband died at sea during the first week of his two-year sail to China for trade. Hugging the coast, seemingly from no direction, the thunder rolled in and the lightning struck during the fiercest of storms. From the roof of her farmhouse, the house that roofed me, she mourned him. Until 1884, on his scheduled return, he arrived with China in his hand for her. No one had told him that he had died at sea. The long days and endless nights of missing him like the sun misses the moon had become but a dream.

Or is it about the words that I heard in my head when I found out you were dead and I would never see you again so many years ago now. How you appear to me once in a blue moon. Barely awake or almost asleep, I get a moment with you before you leave me all over again. As the lighting strikes, you are gone in a blink of an eye. For I know, in this life, we will never be together. I’m missing you like the sun is missing the moon.

Or no, is it about a simple mistake that I made? Did it serve me right? I didn’t leave in time or was it that I had left you? You… it was you. I could see you like lightning. I could feel you like thunder. I could hear you like rain. But you were already out of reach. I had waited so long to find you, only to lose you again.  I missed you like the sun misses the moon.

Or could it be about how I have no control over the thunder or the lightning or what I do or what you’ve done to me. Or whether I’ll survive this storm or if I’m too weak? Whether you’ve blown the wind out of my sails or how I may sink to the bottom of the sea? And left will be only darkness. This may not be a story with a happy ending for me. For the sun can not miss the moon, if there is no sun.

Or maybe it’s not about any of that. Maybe I found a boat, but never got it in the water and then those words got stuck in my head and everything turned upside down when I returned to Maine from Sweden until the pivotal moment when a discharge of static electricity created lighting and I realized that as much as the sun misses the moon, the sun does not need the moon. 

Artist: Sally Levi
Collaborating Artist: Andrew White
Year: 2012
Format: HD
Length: 2 ½ minutes
Country of Origin: USA

Thank you: Mom, Dad, Alice, Nicole, Pam, Forrest, Daniel S, Daniel B, David W, Brian, Amanda, Anelisa, Matt, Andy G, and Andy W.

ALLEGORY OF THE Cave

3d Installation / USA, 2012
Collaboration with Ana Courtney / Presented by The Collective at The Farnsworth Art Museum

An abstract interpretation of Plato’s Cave for the Collective at The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine.

LOOK UP MY Dress

3d Installation / USA, Two projections looping, 2013
Language: English / Debut at Keystone Art Space, Los Angeles, California, December 2013

The Study of Quiescent Love

Sweden, 7 min, 2011 / Original title: The Study of Quiescent Love
Language: Swedish and English / Debut at the River Arts Gallery in August 2011

Girl in a Glass House

3d Installation / Durational Performance living in the installation for 2 twenty-four hour periods
Language: None / Debut at Lord Gallery, Orono, Maine, August 2015

Though the background is not necessary in experiencing this piece, the following paragraph will give context to my desire to make a glass house.

I have never had a house. I grew up in small apartments. I always wanted a house. But some summers, my family would visit the coast of Maine and stay in an old white farmhouse that belonged to my mother's friend. To me, the house was beautiful. When I was an adult, my mother moved into the house permanently. My sister and I loved visiting her. We finally had a house. But then we heard what people thought of the house. It was looked down on, criticized and belittled. Not properly cared for by the owners, my mom had a love/hate relationship with the house and did everything she could to fix it. Soon my sister decided that she hated the house too and refused to visit my mom in the house. No one wanted to visit this house, except me. I would stay with my mom and get fixated on the old wallpaper, the fixtures, the worn out furniture, and the way the light fell through the windows. The floors and walls spoke to me. I found the history of the house, and visited the couple that built it, buried in the graveyard across the street. This house became my escape for many years. But what about this house, the only house I've ever had, was so repelling to others?

The old windows were replaced in 2012 with cheap vinyl replacement windows. It stopped looking or feeling the same. Before the old windows were thrown away, collected them, but didn't know where they could go. I needed to find a place for them.

The house represents my family: warped, unstable foundation, and falling apart. I couldn't see how ugly my family had become. I only could see what was good. M mom moved from that house into a house that she had re-built to a brand new condition. Once in the new house, our family's dysfunction could be seen. The cleanliness revealed the truth that I was blind to... the truth that I was repressing.

My upbringing was a rough one, with constant money problems, a temperamental dad, an irrational mother, and a sister that is a pathological liar. What does that m about me? Am I throwing the same verbal stones right now that also should be thrown at me? Am I temperamental, irrational and a pathological liar? Or maybe I am something else just as bad? This scares me more than anything. This is my greatest fear. This is what I have dealt with in this piece.

Vitamin M

3d Installation / USA, 3 minutes, 2013
Language: English / Debut at the Contemporary Artist Center in May 2013

Object

Based on a brown dress, an old farmhouse, and a brief but intense love affair.

This series is a story that only could/can be told with this brown dress and only in this house with these objects and only at this exact moment in time. Several events occurred for this study to have manifested into what it is. If my job hadn't ended that day and I hadn't moved from Portland into this old farmhouse far away from everything, if I hadn't seen that brown dress at a thrift store and if it hadn't still been there when I went back for it and if the dining room hadn't been being re-done, none of these elements would have come together and this emotion would have never been captured. But, it all happened and while it was happening, my love story seemingly was a sad tale of mis-use, of abandonment and of objectification, while in reality it was not so serious at all. It was as ridiculous as the images that represent the experience. From January 2010 into March, I studied heartbreak all too intimately. I studied heartbreak from a hundred and fifty years that lived in this house, covered the walls, sat on the shelves, and were hidden in the furniture. The story stopped being only mine and became about the once loved and now forgotten, the seen and unseen, and the hide and seek of love.

Theme: only time can tell true love from false. / Technical study: Long exposure times. Platinum and paladium processing. Work in progress.

Party

Welcome to a moment too late to undo what's been done. When a Christmas Guest helps herself to the host's boyfriend, the party continues, as does the heartbreak, in this small story of large consequence. Theme: Devastation and humiliation boils over social etiquette leaving a facade of happiness. Technical study: dslr in low light conditions on a 50mm lens. Day for night.

Room

Something I know all too well. It's disguised as rousing and beautiful. The pillows so soft. The sheets so clean. The glass windows clear without a streak. There's no more picture perfect place than this. By the sea, but I never get my feet wet. The butterflies never reach my stomach. My heart never skips a beat or even races, not even to the door. I lie quietly, mostly to myself. Based on a weekend in a concrete room by the sea.

This series is a story of... how horrible it is to be with the one you don't love and a study of why I stayed. / Theme: Can't pretend latent love true.

Play At Your Own Risk

3d Installation / USA, 2013
Language: English / Debut at the The University of Maine in March 2013

Look Up My Skirt

3d Installation / USA, 3 minute loop, 2013
Language: English / Debut at the Danforth Gallery, University of Maine, Augusta, September 2013

This short film, housed in a farcical skirt, is the fifth film in this autobiographical series capturing and preserving the visceral as an attempt to process human experience.

This piece is about the time I wore multiple pairs of underwear to an ex-lover's apartment. My thinking was that he might be able to get one off... or maybe even two.... but each pair would remind me that I wasn't going to sleep with him. This piece is about wanting something more than physical and not getting it.

Underwear

Undress

USA, 1 min, 2011 / Original title: The Study of Not Knowing
Language: No dialogue / Debut at 407 Studios in June 201

SELECT EXHIBITIONS

2015 "Home and Homelessness," Lord Gallery, Orono, Maine
2015 "In the Door, Out the Window," Lord Gallery, Orono, Maine
2015 "Mystic Bazaar," Kinship Studios, Highland Park, California
2015 "Renascence," Orondava, Downtown LA, California
2015 "Collage," Groundworks, Downtown LA, California
2014 "Light Print," Solo Show,Keystone Art Gallery, Glassell Park, California
2014 "Grad Expo," University of Maine, Orono, Maine
2014 "36th International Short Film Festival," Clemont-Ferrand, France
2014 "Intermedia," University of Maine, Orono, Maine
2013 "Gifted", Keystone Art Space, Glassell Park, California
2013 "Videotheque", Cornwall Film Festival, Cornwall, United Kingdom
2013 "Film Screening," Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, California
2013 "Unfolding Traces," University of Maine, Augusta
2013 "A Hint of Mint," Contemporary Artists Center, Troy, New York
2013 "Intermedia Show," University of Maine, Orono
2013 "Grad Expo," University of Maine, Orono
2012 “Sacred and Profane,” Peaks Island, Maine
2012 “End of the World,” The Collective, The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine
2012 “The Portland International Film Festival’s Film Series,” Portland, Maine
2012 “Interact” 407 Studios, Rockland, Maine
2011“The Boston International Film Festival,” Boston, Massachusetts
2011 “Landscapes,” River Arts Gallery, Damariscotta, Maine
2011 “First Friday Film Series,” The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine
2008 “La Femme Film Festival,” Beverly Hills, California