Miah Artola & Chris Jordan

Stream is an installation at EV Gallery, New York, by artists Miah Artola and Chris Jordan. Two large projections stand face to face representing the inner and outer conditions of refugees' experience of fleeing.

Stream takes as its point of departure the journeys of three women from Honduras to Mexico, the first step in their quests for asylum. Miah Artola interviewed these women at a shelter in Mexico City and through a series of animated charcoal drawings, stop motion paintings, and her films of walking through the mountains of Mexico, she tells these three stories. Subtitles and headphones provided.

Chris Jordan has created a machine that creates projections and acts as an intersection of resources emblematic of the water they need. It describes the simple vital fact of the necessity for water we all are made of, and that sustains us.

Stream is an exercise that detours from the politics of refugee law, suggesting the one and only guiding principle is our shared humanity. It creates opportunities for multifaceted encounters with artworks, highlighting the fundamental necessities of survival, water and compassion.

The ways in which the works confront various political, economic, and environmental issues encourage, through the experiential perception of the plight of three women, new modes of addressing this ongoing crisis.

The gallery space functions as a political device, proposing a diagrammatic relationship between artist, landscape, and viewer. In this model, diverse forms of engagement can be established in relation to the use of materials, space, and the exigencies of our time.

Miah Artola creates interactive installations and multi-platform projects that combine her drawings and paintings with new media. Poetry and the visual representation/connective potential of words are a throughline in all of her projects. Her work has been shown at numerous venues which include Queens Museum, Harvestworks, PS1/MoMA, Andrew Roth Gallery, Ramis Barquet Gallery, Pioneer Works, Experimental Intermedia, Governors Island, The Wild Project, and ARCO Madrid.

Since 2019, Miah’s focus has been on the refugee experience and the building of community structures that support them. In 2021, Miah was awarded NYFA Artist Corp grant to support this work, one result of which was the installation The Man from Eritrea her first show at EV Gallery.

In 2022, Miah was awarded a Mayor’s Office/NYFA grant for Sky, an upcoming web series on refugee women from Honduras whom she met in a shelter in Mexico City; Sky is the inspiration for this current installation.

Chris Jordan explores the medium of light, movement, and time through the use of technology. His installations have appeared at the Moma, The New Museum, The Whitney, The Museum of Natural History, The Chelsea Museum, Times Square, numerous galleries and clubs; and the incidental spaces in between.

The common elements that define Chris’ work include explorations into memory, photography, film, interactivity, time, and light. By examining the political and social implications of these mediums, his work challenges the viewer to redefine perceptions of community and self.