Installations
In collaboration with Marc D'Agusto.
Venae Cavae is an, interactive video installation created for Gallery Aferro's Activate Market Street Initiative. It is centered around themes of decay, revitalization, and the relational aesthetics that underpin such transformation. Like the veins of the same name in human body, which carry deoxygenated blood back to the heart to be revitalized, the viewer and passersby are transported into the landscape, to become signs of life, light, and vitality amidst the ambiguously apocalyptic landscape. This landscape becomes a new arena for bodily interaction, in which virtual space is intermingled with real space. Just as the passersby activate the virtual space of the installation, they simultaneously activate the physical space of Market Street itself, becoming analogous signs of life, light, and vitality amidst Aferro Gallery’s revitalization of Newark as a whole.
This multiplicity of space is folded into yet another dimension with the accompanying light and sculptural installation in the physical space behind the video. The projected, sometimes inverted shadows, traversing these disorienting spaces ultimately generate relational encounters in which creative acts coauthor a further understanding of our surroundings and ourselves. Venae Cavae marks the first of a series of collaborations between artists Marc D’Agusto and Eric Valosin, who extend similar relational revitalization efforts to their work with Gravity Arts Initiatives.