2nd Story Gallery presents "edge waves"

2nd Story is pleased to partner with Jena Seiler and Marina Peterson to present the premiere of their experimental video and sound work, edge waves, at the Kroger Field Pavilion. Following the screening, Seiler and Peterson will discuss the ideas and research informing the work and offer an opportunity for audience questions.

edge waves (single-channel video with sound; TRT 14:18 minutes) incorporates video, electromagnetic recordings, and text to explore the ghostly space around a football stadium during the pandemic. Employing a visual triptych, the film plays with that which is present in a space of absence – a tiny insect crawling across the asphalt, the sky, trees, birds roosting in the eaves of a hulking stadium, while simultaneously evoking the human comings and goings that ordinarily transpire in and frame the space. A crowded parking lot, tailgating, fandom, and team rivalries lurk at the edge of what is seen. The interplay of presence and absence is further complicated by the static buzz, clicks, and subtle rhythms of electromagnetic frequencies made audible through transduction. In a moment of temporary suspension, the built environment feels charged with traces, gaps, and echoes of human amidst more-than-human presences and flows. 

*** PLEASE NOTE this event is located at the Pavilion at Kroger Field: 1580 University Drive, Lexington, KY 40506 (Google Maps lists this location as “Bus Shelter No. 4”).

Jena Seiler is a lecturer at the Lewis Honors College at the University of Kentucky and an interdisciplinary artist. She holds a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary arts and an MFA in painting. Working across various media, Seiler’s practice revolves around taking time, allowing for intimacy, welcoming confusion, attuning to sensation, and suspending resolution. She is interested in where things meet, listening to breath, what comes before an event, and whether you can trace someone or something else’s path. Her works have been featured in galleries and theaters across the United States. Seiler and filmmaker Tijah Bumgarner’s feature documentary Picture Proof  (2022) was included in the Lindsay Theater & Cultural Center's Emerging Filmmaker Showcase and programmed on KET and WVPB networks. In 2025, Seiler’s experimental short Plastic Wake (2024) was screened in the Big Muddy Film Festival and will be exhibited at The Contemporary Dayton in 2027. Seiler and Nicole Martin’s short documentary, The Keeping Space (2024), was included in the Single Channel’s 5th Annual Video Festival and the 18th International Moving Film Festival. 

Marina Peterson is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work attends to engagements with elemental forms and forces, considering how unruly and shifting modalities of matter become a locus for epistemic uncertainties. With an emphasis on sound and urbanism broadly, she explores diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic through writing, sound, and image. She is invested in a de-objectified approach to sound, with a focus on listening broadly construed. Other threads in my work include energy and mining, labor, music and performance, law, science and technology, and late liberalism. Her most recent book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles traces environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through noise pollution legislation and the politics of airport noise in the 1960s, addressing key ways in which noise amplifies ways of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric. She has co-edited books on anthropology and art and is co-director of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography.