Freya Powell: I’ll Smile and I’m Not Sad

Freya Powell explores history, mortality, and language’s relationship to memory, both personal and collective. Emerson Dorsch presents Powell’s moving video i’ll smile and i’m not sad (2012) in the Project Room. Writ in spare, white text, Texan inmates’ last testaments emerge from blackness. The video is silent. The date of the execution precedes each statement. To experience the methodical appearance and disappearance of the 475 dates and statements for the hour that follows is to consider the values of life and the way death punctuates time’s passing.