An Inquiry Into the End-Of-Life Experience, an Illustrated Lecture with Leigh Davis

• Religion & Spirituality
• Science & Health

This lecture-performance examines end-of-life experiences (ELEs) and their role as tools to help us understand human consciousness and the emotional intricacy of grief. ELEs typically occur around the time of death either before, during, or after and are often experienced by a person who has lost a loved one. These experiences can be interpreted in various ways as premonitions, deathbed visions, golden light, changes in the temperature or atmosphere, terminal lucidity, or deathbed coincidences.

Davis will present an assemblage of imagery, objects, written accounts, and archival research to explore ELEs and the liminal states they create between our inner and outer worlds.  Collected both in person and online through interactions with hospice nurses, chaplains, funeral directors, and people of all spiritual backgrounds and capacities, these remnants of lives lived and lost are profoundly meaningful to those who experience them and are often hidden from others out of fear they might be dismissed or misunderstood.

Making connections between the past and present, fact and fiction, and the objective and private worlds, Davis’ lecture invites audience participation and speculation about the boundaries between the physical world, the emotional world, and what may exist beyond.

Leigh Davis is an artist and educator working in a variety of media.  Navigating the complex line between voyeurism and empathy, her work is both deeply personal and anthropologically rich, often stemming from an all-consuming curiosity about a specific person, community, or place. The subjects of past work span all corners of the human experience, from the devoted brothers of a dying religious order, to the residents of a Brooklyn YWCA, to the inhabitants of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, DC.Davis’s photographs have been featured in various publications including the New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post.  Davis teaches courses at Parsons the New School and is currently working on a site-specific installation for the grounds at the Clermont State Historic Site located in upstate New York (fall 2016).