Under Drifting Suns—
Stacy Mehrfar & Jillian McDonald
June 20th—September 22nd
Opening June 20th 6-9pm
Spectral Lines announces its seventh exhibition, Under Drifting Suns, featuring photographic works by Stacy Mehrfar and video work by Jillian McDonald.
In Under Drifting Suns, the world is seen askew—bent by migration, memory, and celestial glitch. Through photography and video, Stacy Mehrfar and Jillian McDonald chart unstable terrains where home, body, and place dissolve into otherworldly light.
Stacy Mehrfar’s The Moon Belongs to Everyone is rooted in personal dislocation yet moves toward a collective, poetic expression of exile and belonging. Landscapes blur into color fields, portraits drift in indeterminate spaces, and the moon becomes a quiet anchor—distant yet shared. Her photographs prompt us to contemplate: what does it mean to find yourself in a place that no longer holds you?
Jillian McDonald’s experimental video Total Eclipse and the Heart unfolds across the four phases of a solar eclipse stuck in time. Shot across New York, Québec, Greenland, and Utah—and threaded with AI-generated sequences—the work imagines characters overcome by ecological and cosmic forces, dispersing into dust, sea, and fungal spores. Inspired by the writings of A. Laurie Palmer (The Lichen Museum) and Elvia Wilk (Death by Landscape), some scenes are filmed from the point of view of moss, lichens, and fungi. McDonald’s eclipse is both celestial event and existential rupture, channeled through nonhuman perspectives.
Together, the artists invite us to inhabit a world of drifting suns—where orientation falters, gravity loosens, and meaning migrates. In this shared space, viewers are gently pushed to linger in uncertainty, to see through the lens of estrangement, and to consider what remains luminous when everything else begins to shift.
The exhibition runs between the Summer Solstice and the Autumn Equinox.
Stacy Arezou Mehrfar explores the emotional and social facets of community. Her works look closely at the tension between belonging and alienation, and how individuals form meaning through their embodied presence in place. Mehrfar has exhibited her works at TEDxSydney, Australia; KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and the International Center of Photography, New York. A 2022 Silver List nominee, Mehrfar has received the Joseph Robert Foundation Grant, a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant, and the Australian Postgraduate Award. Her residencies include Interlude, I-Park Foundation, and the Wassaic Project. She is a 2025 LABA Lab fellow and Studio Arts resident at the Clemente Center.
Her most recent monograph, The Moon Belongs to Everyone, was published by GOST Books in 2021. Mehrfar holds an MFA in Photomedia from the University of NSW School of Art and Design, Sydney, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Certificate in Creative Practices from ICP, New York. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts and ICP. Stacy is a first-generation Iranian-American artist.
Jillian McDonald is a Canadian artist living in Brooklyn, and Professor of Digital Art at Pace University.
Recent exhibitions and screenings were held at Undercurrent and Air Circulation in Brooklyn; AxeNéo7 in Québec; aCinema in Milwaukee; Philip Steele Gallery in Denver; and The Esker Foundation in Calgary. She mounted performances for 50 to 1000 performers in natural and urban settings at The Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe, in collaboration with Lilith Performance Studio in Sweden, and at La Nuit Blanche in Toronto. A CBC “Ideas” documentary profiles her videos, which were also reviewed in The New York Times and Canadian Art. Critical discussion appears in “The Transatlantic Zombie” by Sarah Lauro and “Deconstructing Brad Pitt”, edited by Christopher Schaberg. Awards include grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts, and participation in numerous residencies such as Wave Farm in Acra, NY, The Arctic Circle Art and Science Expedition in Svalbard, The Headlands Center for the Arts in California, the Glenfiddich Canadian Art Prize in Scotland, and The Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta. Total Eclipse and the Heart work was created during residencies at Harvestworks in New York, Sporobole in Sherbrooke, La Bande Vidéo in Quebec, and Temp Files Video Co-op.