A new documentary from WHRO Public Media highlights a local artist’s life and work. Nastassja Swift is a multi-disciplinary artist holding a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. The documentary To My Best Friend From the Start follows the artist as she creates the exhibit “Canaan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice.”

Her exhibit is a multi-layered installation and collaborative performance that intimately displays the exchange between Swift and her brother, who is currently incarcerated within the Virginia Department of Corrections. Articulating feelings of absence, erasure, and the personal and communal impact of mass incarceration, Nastassja’s culminating body of work explores her personal experience navigating, as his sister, the past few years of Canaan’s incarceration.

Watch the documentary on WHRO TV 15 on Dec. 15.

 

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