An interactive projection installation on Central American refugees, by Miah Artola & Chris Jordan
EV Gallery 621 East 11th Street New York, NY 10009 (MAP)
Stream will have its public opening on Tuesday, July 12th 2022, 6-9pm
On display every evening until July 24th, 2022
Stream is an installation at EV Gallery, New York, by artists Miah Artola and Chris Jordan. Two wall size projections merge, representing the inner and outer conditions of refugees’ experience of fleeing. Stream takes as its point of departure the journeys of three women from Honduras to Mexico, the first step in their quests for asylum.
Miah interviewed these women at a shelter in Mexico City; and through a series of animated charcoal drawings, stop motion paintings, and her films of walking through the mountains of Mexico, she tells these three stories.
Projection Two: Framing this is an assemblage of tubes and pumps, representing facts of immigrants lives physically through the movement of water.
Subtitles and headphones provided.
Three chairs are offered for visitors to sit on. Each chair is named for each one of these women and offers the person sitting in the chair the opportunity to read her story. Chris Jordan has created a machine that creates projections and acts as an intersection of resources emblematic of the water they need. It describes the simple vital fact of the necessity for water we all are made of, and that sustains us. These projections will pause every 78 seconds to stop and consider the fact that as of July 2022, 1 in every 78 people is displaced.
Stream is an exercise that detours from the politics of refugee law, suggesting the one and only guiding principle is our shared humanity. It creates opportunities for multifaceted encounters with artworks, highlighting the fundamental necessities of survival, water and compassion. The ways in which the works confront various political, economic, and environmental issues encourage, through the experiential perception of the plight of three women, new modes of addressing this ongoing crisis. The gallery space functions as a political device, proposing a diagrammatic relationship between artist, landscape, and viewer. In this model, diverse forms of engagement can be established in relation to the use of materials, space, and the exigencies of our time.