Life-Line
Dates: September 27th - October 30th
Life-Line
Artists: Laura Nova and Karina Aguilera Skvirsky
Location: The surrounding fence of The Clemente at 107 Suffolk Street
Dates: On view starting September 27th, 2021
Life-line is a series of 26 augmented full-bodied portraits with audible voices of multigenerational members, reflecting the diversity of the Lower East Side community that memorializes people waiting in line. These portraits, spaced 6 feet apart, are exhibited along the fence at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center Inc., a Puerto Rican/Latinx multi-arts cultural institution that demonstrates a broad-minded cultural vision and inclusive philosophy rooted in NYC’s Lower East Side/Loisaida. Audience members can pass by the line of photographs and choose to look and listen to the people represented via QR codes on their mobile phone-lines. Life-line draws from oral history and uses immersive storytelling to expand documentary photography and celebrate what’s worth knowing at this unprecedented moment. The audio portrait augments the usual photographic experience prompting an intimate interaction with a Lower East Sider.
Laura Nova is an artist, educator and activist who lives and works on New York’s Lower East Side—creating festive, absurdist spectacles that unite generations and diverse communities. The first Public Artist in Residence to be embedded in New York City’s Department for the Aging, Nova brings expertise and empathy to her projects and actions, designing each element to enhance social wellness and decrease social isolation. Working in festivals, public monuments, and the city street, Nova delivers spiels to homebound New Yorkers, organizes an older adult cheerleading squad, and designs crafting kits, guides, and costumes that help nurture emerging activists of all ages. Nova received a BFA and B.A. from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an associate professor and program coordinator of expanded media in the creative arts & technology division at Bloomfield College—a college dedicated to serving the underserved. Her long-term goal is to create a municipal Department of Future Aging and Innovation.
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist who works between New York and Ecuador. Her practice began in photography and grew into video and performance. In 2019, she received a grant from Creative Capital to produce How to build a wall and other ruins. Her work constructs an expanded history in which she pieces together expert theories to stage performances of labor that were never recorded. The multichannel video will premier in the upcoming Cuenca Biennial XV (2021), curated by Blanca de la Torre in Cuenca, Ecuador. Recent solo exhibitions include: Sacred Geometry at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico and Ponce + Robles Gallery in Madrid, Spain. Other important international exhibitions include her participation in Africamericanos at Centro de la imagen in CDMX (2019) and There is always a cup of sea for man to sail, the 29th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2010). Skvirsky is an associate professor at Lafayette College.
Life-line is presented as a part of PHOTOVILLE with support from the City Artists Corps, Read more here!