IRENE ALBERTY

Born in the small but wondrous archipelago of Puerto Rico, Iréne Niké Alberty Cardona is a multimedia artist integrating video installation, archive research and labor intensive artisan practices. Combining animation, fiber techniques, found footage and intervening family archives, she explores the larger heartbreak of neocolonialism and dispossession. 

 

She has a BA in Film from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

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Artist Statement:

Fueled by a material and technical curiosity, my practice combines different fiber explorations with experimental video projection in the installation space. This multi-modal approach challenges the immateriality of video projection and the perceived stillness of fiber objects by blurring digital and physical bodies. Texturized and deformed by wrinkled felt or puffy trapunto, videos metamorphose to reveal hidden folds and creases in their unraveling pixels. Imbued by light and moving images, fibers evolve into apparitions: glitching in stitching and crossing over to the digital realm.
Playing in this in-between, my work examines the impact of colonization on Puerto Rican access to land in the island's current political climate. The heartbreak and fatigue of existing on occupied land, the fracturing of psyches, families and affective networks, and the collective grief of a nation adrift, are a few of the concepts I'm currently exploring. Through found footage sampling and intervention, animation, and historical research, I travel between modes of making, communicating, and existing to explore the "bilingual" tension between colonial self-perception and Caribbean representation.

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