The multimedia artist’s upcoming exhibition builds on a video installation created during his residency.

*De Profundis Clamavi ad Astra*, installation digital render

Edison “Eddy” Peñafiel's 2019 residency marked the emergence of spiritual water imagery that has since resurfaced in his practice. On the third floor of the 100W building—a room where the Oddfellows once used magic lanterns for ritual reenactments, a technical lineage of which Eddy is conscious in his own contemporary projection work—he produced Land Escape, a multi-channel piece in which 49 masked figures move across a series of landscapes evoking Texas history (grass, cotton fields, desert, and finally water) in a meditation on migration.

His upcoming exhibition, supported by a VIA Art Fund grant, will debut De Profundis Clamavi ad Astra (From the Depths, I Cried Out to the Stars), the second chapter in a three-part video cosmology that began with Mare Magnum in 2021 (12 projections creating an animated seascape navigated by 14 boats and 81 performed characters in a perpetual loop) and will close with a third, still-unmade installment, forming what he now sees as a single, unfolding cosmology.

De Profundis follows the same 81 characters as they fall into the sea, in an interior, mythic reckoning. A lone protagonist, transformed through his trials, sets up the trilogy’s final turn in which the sea becomes stars. Land Escape’s central, Sisyphean gesture of figures endlessly walking on water, brought up archetypes of migration and the depth of Eddy’s references, from Andean cosmovisions to Arthurian legends or the Bible—“these things that repeat in cosmovisions around the world,” Eddy says.