The Skirt

March 4 - April 2, 2023
TATIANA FLORIVAL: IMAGINED CONVERSATIONS
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 4, 2023, 5 – 7pm

Tatiana Florival, The Guided Journey, video still, 2023

Brooklyn, NY (February 22, 2023) — Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents a solo show opening on Saturday, March 4, Tatiana Florival: Imagined Conversations, curated by OyG Co-director Nickola Pottinger. The exhibition will take place in OyG’s site-specific space, The Skirt, and will be on view through April 2, 2023. 

Tatiana Florival’s first New York solo exhibition, Imagined Conversations, is an audio visual installation that incorporates four video vignettes of conversations; Imagined Conversations, Defeat the Monster, The Standoff, and The Guided Journey. For this presentation, Florival intersects videos, miniatures, props, and paintings to build a textured and collaged set. She assembles her footage sometimes using clips of film media,  along with animated drawings, photography, and special effects. Florival tells stories with characters that already exist in our mental landscapes in a journey to understand, and suggest explanations for, natural yet incomprehensible phenomena.

The first video and the exhibitions namesake, Imagined Conversations, is a dialogue between a rebel alliance of fictional and nonfictional figures, the protagonists include Lin Manuel Miranda in costume as founding father Alexander Hamilton, Luke Skywalker, Sojourner Truth, “bandit queen of India” Phoolan Devi and Jean-Jacques Dessalines in a dream like sequence. United under a singular belief of exciting revolutionary change, Tatiana weaves this engagement of iconic figures through collaged sound, keeping the original voices of the characters played.

The second video, The Monster, draws inspiration from John Gardner’s 1970’s novel Grendel, which is a retelling of the poem Beowulf from the perspective of Grendel the monster and antihero of the 8th century anglo saxon epic.  A "hero" and a "monster," as they both ponder their existences and come to terms with their roles in mythology.

The Third video, The Guided Journey, is a split screen film that takes us down a magical river surrounded by a surreal landscape on a boat with shadows of two characters. One fictional character, and one real person; Boy Willie from the Piano Lesson, and Audre Lorde poem readings. The two protagonists share ancestral stories and have a conversation about the evolution of black bodies to nature. It is true that African-American attitudes toward nature were (and remain) conflicted. For most of American history, land was a bludgeon used against the bodies of black people, who were forced to work it to raise tobacco, rice and cotton while being deprived of that bounty.

The final video Florival presents us with is The Standoff, a fictional western setting with a backdrop of crafted cardboard saloon buildings where two archetypes face off in a duel of conversations. The two characters share ideologies such as the conflict of the modern person wanting to do good in the world, but also wanting to have nice things, wanting to rest but also wanting to act against injustice.

Florival addresses the emotional, personal and political content in her work by asserting the perspectives in a myriad of characters from fiction and nonfiction. Watching the videos we can see the artist’s hand in the materials that lend to her world building, and we are raptured and transported to far and near distant memories by mere conversations.

ARTIST BIO
Tatiana Florival received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. She is currently a 2023 Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York Artist in Resident, and a Video Resident at the BRIC lab in Brooklyn, NY. Previous residencies include The Studio at MassMoca in North Adams, MA and BIPOC Artist Residency at Alfred University in Alfred, NY. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions Cohen Gallery, Alfred, NY; TV Eye in New York, NY; Susan Calza Gallery in Montpelier, VT, NYC; Crit Club Group Show, and Kunstraum Gallery in New York, NY. She has been awarded the Fellowship for Black and Indigenous Artists from Studios at Mass MOCA. 

CURATOR
Nickola Pottinger is an artist and curator born in Jamaica, West Indies. Raised in Brooklyn, she received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008. Recent exhibitions include the Sargent’s Daughters, The Armory Show, New Museum Triennial, New York, Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, and the Galveston Artist Residency, Texas.  Previous solo exhibitions include Deanna Evans Projects, New York, NY, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles.  The artist continues to live and work in Brooklyn, NY and will have her first solo exhibition with Mrs. in 2024.