Chiara Giovando

The Pow’r of Life is Love: Mariah Garnett

2025, Institute of Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, June 22 – July 25

The Pow’r of Life is Love was an exhibition by artist and filmmaker Mariah Garnett featuring video works, archival elements, a newly commissioned slide projection, and regular screenings of her 55-minute film Songbook. Developed over five years, this body of work traces Garnett’s engagement with the archive of her great-great-aunt Ruth Lynda Deyo, a composer, pianist, and spiritualist who lived in Egypt from 1924 until her death in 1960.

While living in Cairo, Deyo transcribed spirit communications and composed an ambitious opera about Akhenaten and Tutankhamun titled The Diadem of Stars. The opera remained unfinished and unproduced, but Deyo’s archive is rich with the residue of imagined worlds: characters rendered in ornate costume designs, elaborate set sketches of Egyptian gardens and ethereal mountains shrouded in smoke, and hundreds of pages of spirit transmissions longing for material form.

The installation at ICA Santa Fe brought these themes into physical space through video works that emerged throughout Garnett’s process and references to Deyo’s archive. A selection of Deyo’s original spirit communication transcripts from 1924 to 1940 formed the historical foundation of the exhibition.

In Conversation with a Spirit Medium, Cairo, 2021, vinyl text along the base of the gallery walls featured excerpts from a 2021 session between Garnett and a spirit medium in Cairo. In the recording, the medium channels Deyo. The conversation moves between silence and speech, touching upon Deyo’s solitude and emotional complexity. At one point, the medium says that Deyo’s spirit is willing to merge fully with Garnett, raising questions about artistic inheritance, authorship, and boundaries.

ICA Santa Fe commissioned Color Scale, a new work consisting of 78 slides shown through a traditional slide projector. Deyo experienced synesthesia throughout her life and was studied as a child in what became known as the Langfeld Study at Harvard. Her archive includes documentation from sessions in 1893, 1905, and 1912, during which she listened to specific musical notes and described the colors she saw. Each slide displays a color with Deyo’s original title, sometimes straightforward, such as “greener blue” for G-flat, and sometimes more poetic, such as “ethereal moonlight, greens and grays” for G-sharp. These color-tone associations also appeared in a printed takeaway poster.

Automatic Writing, a hand-tufted wool rug, is based on a page of Deyo’s automatic writing, composed of texts and drawings she believed were dictated by spiritual entities. It was displayed alongside a digital copy of the original drawing and Garnett’s iPad rendering used in the rug’s production. The piece reflects Garnett’s ongoing inquiries into Deyo’s archive through acts of mediation, translation, and collaborative probing that expand and reframe the material through contemporary tools and interpretations.

The two-channel video The Pow’r of Life is Love features opera singers Breanna Sinclairé and Christopher Paul Craig performing excerpts from Deyo’s unfinished opera. Set in a stark soundstage, the performers move between Deyo’s compositions and improvisation. Garnett uses split-screen projection to heighten the dualities of presence and absence, inheritance and interpretation, creating a space where voice becomes both invocation and rupture.

The exhibition also included Songbook Outtakes, composed of unused footage from Songbook filmed during Garnett’s research trip to Egypt, and A Sudden Perversity, a short companion piece featuring a list Deyo wrote in her diaries describing ways to improve herself. The list is both poetic and painfully revealing.

Regular screenings of Songbook connected these works to Garnett’s larger collaborative project. The film weaves together Deyo’s diaries, interviews, and diaristic footage from Garnett’s 2021 research trip to Cairo. Garnett collaborated with opera singers Breanna Sinclairé and Christopher Paul Craig, experimental musicians and composers Nancy Mounir and Holland Andrews, and Jordanian playwright Raphaël Khouri to reimagine the unfinished work. Departing from the colonial frameworks of Deyo’s original project, Songbook becomes a portrait of artistic inheritance, creative obsession, the spirit world, chosen family, and sustaining all of the above at the margins.

The exhibition was accompanied by Take Me Away, an eight-page newsprint publication made on the occasion of the exhibition in collaboration with Chiara Giovando and designed by Neil Doshi. Combining archival photographs and transcripts from different iterations of the project, the publication offered a portable entry point into the research and collaborations behind The Pow’r of Life is Love.

Framed through Giovando’s curatorial essay, “The Theatre of the Mind,” the exhibition considered how sound, expression, staging, and repetition produce reality. The stage does not merely reflect the world; it constitutes it. It is within this context that the work of Deyo and Garnett finds its strange resonance, not only as artistic practice, but as acts of worldmaking through utterance, vision, and the unseen.