Lines of Flight:
Joiri Minaya | Miryam Charles
February 20 – May 24, 2025
Thursday – Saturday, dusk – 11pm
Everson Museum Plaza
401 Harrison Street
Related Events
Screening + Q&A
Thursday, March 20 at 6:30pm
Light Work, Watson Theater
316 Waverly Ave.
Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present the exhibition Lines of Flight featuring short films by multimedia artist Joiri Minaya and filmmaker Miryam Charles exploring the tangled trajectories of displacement, immigration, invasion, exploration and escape.
The exhibition will run from February 20 – May 24, 2025 as an architectural projection venue on the Everson Museum facade.
Additional work by Joiri Minaya will be on view at the Syracuse University Museum in the show Joiri Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Museum from January 21 to May 10, 2025.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Minaya and Charles will be present for a screening and Q&A on Thursday, March 20 at 6:30pm in Watson Theater across from Light Work’s galleries.
About the Work
Labadee
Joiri Minaya
2017 | HD video
Duration: 7:06
Labadee is a short video documenting parts of a Royal Caribbean cruise trip in Labadee, Haiti, and the dynamics that unfold in this privately-managed space, which is fenced off and leased to Royal Caribbean cruises until 2050. The subtitles in the video begin with text from the diary of Christopher Columbus when they first saw land, moving into a contemporary recount of the trip we’re seeing.
It meditates on the exploitation, self-exploitation, performance and access control created by the system of tourism in the Caribbean, and, in linking it to Columbus’ Invasion through the first sentences in the subtitles, it traces the lineage of these contemporary spaces to colonization.
Fly, Fly Sadness
Miryam Charles
2015 | 16mm film transfered to video
Duration: 5:23
A nuclear explosion mysteriously transforms the voices of all the inhabitants of an island. A journalist travels to the island to learn more and finds herself transformed.
About the Artists
Joiri Minaya is a Dominican-US multidisciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity.
Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013).
She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop, ISCP, Art Omi, Vermont Studio Center, New Wave, Silver Art Projects and Fountainhead.
She has received awards, fellowships and grants from NYSCA/NYFA, Jerome Hill, Artadia, the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Nancy Graves Foundation, amongst other organizations. Minaya’s work is in the collections of the Santo Domingo Museo de Arte Moderno, the Centro León Jiménes, the Kemper Museum, El Museo del Barrio and several private collections.
Artist’s website: joiriminaya.com
Miryam Charles is a Haitian-Canadian director, producer and cinematographer living in Montreal. She has produced several short and feature films. Her films have been presented in various festivals internationally. Her first feature film, Cette Maison (This House) was presented at the Berlinale, the AFI film festival and was included in the TIFF Top 10 of the year. Several of her short films and her feature are available to stream on the Criterion Channel. Her work explores themes related to exile and the legacies of colonization.
Distributor’s website: ladistributrice.ca/…miryam-charles
Sponsors
This exhibition is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.