This week we welcome Ivana Larrosa, a visual artist, performer and educator from Spain living in New York City. Larrosa creates video installations in response to spatial environments, often merging elements of fantasy, humor, and daily life into performances and photo-based objects. Larrosa is interested in conceptual strategies that have to do with the body as an object of study and a medium to approach memory, trauma, perception and architecture.
Her work has been shown at art institutions that include Anthology Film Archives, International Center of Photography, The Exponential, and the Queens Museum, among others. Larrosa is the recipient of a City Artist Corps Grant of New York, the Ramon Aloy International Photographic Award, and the Camera Club of New York at Baxter St annual juried competition.
She is currently a dedicated NEW INC Mentor at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and works as a consultant for the Architecture & Design Film Festival of New York. In 2020 Larrosa was a panelist for the Queens Arts Fund, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and a mentor for the Youthworks performance program at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Ivana holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film and Media Studies from University of Navarra (Spain) and a Master of Fine Arts degree at Bard College-International Center of Photography where she currently teaches video installation and performance.
The Colony is a study of the body as a symbol of housing, immigration and gentrification. It entails a five-channel video installation based on her own experience as a homeless immigrant living in 12 places during 12 months in New York City, tied into 12 romantic relationships.
Through a constellation of objects and images of the 12 locations she lived in during 12 months, she expands a stream of visual narratives that we negotiate daily, from floor maps to NYC maps, smartphones and GPS, to social and new media. Larrosa explores the parallel between house/space and the body, and additional topics such as social and economic resources.
With this project she aims to give visibility to individual empowered female immigrants who came to New York in search of professional growth and career progress. This is in contrast to Spanish women in the 20th-century who came to New York to either reunite with their families/husbands or single women rejected by their families due to out-of-wedlock pregnancy.
See more of her work on her website and instagram.