BU Art Galleries

Local artist Jaina Cipriano’s photography and installations explore duality of light and dark

This article was first published in BU Today on September 20, 2022. By Sophie Yarin | Photos by Jake Belcher

Excerpt

For local artist Jaina Cipriano, to stimulate the creative imagination you first need to create the right space.

“I always like to go into the space before I have any models in there, because I feel like there’s something the space wants to tell me,” the artist says of her homemade immersive sets. “I like to use that time to let everything else in my life fall away and see how it feels to exist in this space that I’ve made.”

Given her focus on the importance of space, it’s fitting that Cipriano was chosen as the first artist to exhibit work in the newly reopened 808 Gallery, which closed in 2018 when the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground relocated from the George Sherman Union to 808 Comm Ave and took over half of the gallery’s interior. 

Dreamscapes: Finding the Light Through Immersive Design, a collection of Cipriano’s photography and installation art, explores the duality of childhood nostalgia, its pains and its joys. In one corner sits a children’s playhouse painted in primary colors. Gallery visitors are prompted to climb it and sit on the roof. Nearby, a wall of pink lights casts a rosy hue on viewers, and across the room sits a multicolored cave covered in blue acrylic fur. A sign nearby encourages folks to climb inside.

Lissa Cramer, BU Art Galleries managing director, says it’s important that the first show in the reconfigured 808 space be both transportive and joyful. In its original incarnation, the massive gallery, a former Cadillac Oldsmobile dealership, could be intimidating to both curators and visitors. Then during the pandemic, the space was transformed into a COVID-19 testing center.

“The space, for many of our students, is not known as a place that you necessarily want to hang out,” Cramer says. “It was vital, but it wasn’t an art gallery. So I wanted an exhibition that was joyful, and Jaina fit that bill.”

Even at half its original square footage, the new gallery is an impressive swath of exhibition space, complete with soaring tracery ceilings—big enough to easily accommodate three of Cipriano’s installations, plus a four-walled display of her photographs in the center of the room.

“It’s bigger than any space I’ve ever had access to,” Cipriano acknowledges. “Each installation has enough space around it to be its own thing.”

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