Shifting Gaze - Rooted: An installation about Choice, Desire & Memory
LAIA CABRERA + ISABELLE DUVERGER with music by ERICA GLYN

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This installation is site-specific. It combines video art, sound, animation and painting, and includes historical artifacts belonging to the collection of the Apple Tree House.

The installation includes a video art piece directed by Laia Cabrera which has been created over the years about choice, memory, and desire: a multiple portrait of women, and two paintings by Isabelle Duverger representing the two feelings of being connected and uprooted, which relate to the theme of the group exhibition: “Ward Mount: A Mother of Many Daughters.”

This group exhibition, curated by Lucy Rovetto, also includes works from exceptional women artists Nicole Demaio, Jaz Graf, Katelyn Halpern, Joanna Bellamy Jordan, Pat Lay, Tina Maneca, Jennifer Roberts, and Pauline Ward Mount.

Apple Tree House - Museum of Jersey City History October 1-20, 2024
Opening: Tuesday October 1, 2024, 1-5PM
Tuesday & every other Saturday & Sunday, 1-5pm
JCAST 2024: October 4-6, 2024 - Friday-Saturday: 5-9pm & Sunday: 5-7pm

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"Shifting Gaze” Video Art, Film for cinematic presentation, 4K color, 20 min.

Shifting Gaze is a film-art-music installation about choice, desire and memory conceived and directed by Laia Cabrera (filmmaker and video artist) and created in collaboration with Erica Glyn (music, composer and singer) and Isabelle Duverger (animations). Shifting Gaze is a film about identity, about making choices, a memory in act. Drawing from the body, faces, urban patterns, nature and remains of activity, the piece explores a notion of choice, linked to desire and memory - choice being the present, memory representing the past and desire, the drive for a future. Underneath these mirrored imageries lie many stories about limits, freedom and self-perception.

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“Rooted #1" and "Rooted #2" Paintings, Acrylic and Ink on Canvas, 14 x 14 in.

This diptych is named "Rooted - Bodies of Nature". They are gold and black paintings on canvas, portraying the desire of belonging by nature, freedom and limits.
The top panel (#1) is the experience of belonging, and the desire to leave that precious origin to become something else, while the bottom panel (#2) is disconnected, reaching out, expanding, to rejoin with that other who will give them a foundation. This journey, from one canvas to the other, is also a personal one, a conflict between the comfort of the origin, the connection to the past, and the desire to break apart, leave everything and start anew, finding a place of my own. 

Shifting Gaze was commissioned by Spain Culture New York with Times Square Alliance, King Juan Carlos Center at NYU, Georgetown Business Improvement District, and sponsored by Jamestown Properties and Georgetown Park with the support of Spain Arts and Culture.

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