Marina Yacoe’s Gathering Light series

Marina Yacoe has had many creative incarnations. She has studied film, dance, and theology and lived in New York City, Los Angeles, London, and now coastal Maine, where she raises sheep and is completing an interdisciplinary PhD.

This summer, Yacoe debuted Gathering Light, a new series of video works, at the Parsonage Gallery in Maine. Each handmade viewing booth in the gallery displays a poetic film on a small screen, seen through an antique stereoscope viewer. Eschewing large screens or projections, the artist deliberately conjures an intimate sensory experience for visitors. In an age of ubiquitous, mindless scrolling on mobile phones, Yacoe uses the same unlikely format to foster mindful contemplation.

The artist’s approach to film is similarly counterintuitive. Acutely aware that the world is awash in TikTok videos and Instagram Reels, Yacoe does not position herself as yet another content generator. Instead, she gathers materials from the ocean of stock sounds and film footage available online in order to identify moments of unexpected beauty worth preserving. She then joins these lost elements together, creating unlikely—sometimes haunting—juxtapositions.

In Yacoe’s digital hands, the most quotidian source material undergoes a sort of transubstantiation, speaking to existential matters with exquisite clarity. There is a nondoctrinaire yet profoundly spiritual instinct at play in Yacoe’s practice. She notes a parallel with the Japanese practice of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, transforming that which was broken into something purposeful and distinctive. One might also recall the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, in which the great task of humans is to gather the sparks of light which escaped from shattered vessels at the start of creation. Yacoe’s videos are offerings in this spirit. They provide glimpses of unity in an era of discord.