During February 2025, Light Work is delighted to host new media artists LaJuné McMillian and Manuel Molina Martagon for the UVP Residential Commission to work on the latest installment of their ongoing collaborative project The Portal’s Keeper for exhibition at UVP’s architectural projection site on the Everson Museum facade in Fall 2025.

Working with local organizers, activists, and artists as performers, McMillian and Molina Martagon will record participants answering questions about their work and ask them to embody the answers not only through words, but through movement as well. The finished piece will follow the journey of local participants diving into an alternate reality through meditation and prayer. Collaboratively designed avatars will be an abstract representation of the energy we access and emit when we are able to move through the world freely.

About the Artists

Manuel Molina Martagon is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, video and socially engaged projects. Molina Martagon holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from SVA. His work has been exhibited in Mexico, Spain, China, Cuba, and at institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Art Museum of the Americas in DC. He is a Fulbright recipient and has been an artist in residence at Recess, Santa Fe Art Institute and Artists Alliance.

LaJuné McMillian is a multidisciplinary artist, and educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination and make room for different ways of being.

McMillian has had the opportunity to show and speak at Pioneer Works, National Sawdust, Leaders in Software and Art, Creative Tech Week, and Art & Code’s “Weird Reality”. They have continued their research during residencies and fellowships at the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, NYU ITP, Barbarian Group, and Barnard College.

Artist’s page: @_lovelaja

This commissioned project is supported by a Support for Artists Grant to Manuel Molina Martagon from the New York State Council on the Arts  with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.