Naomieh Jovin: Lover’s Hands, Devil’s Pool

Oct 27-Dec 9, 2023

Opening Reception Friday, Oct 27, 5-7:30pm*

Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery

*5–6pm Portrait session by Naomieh Jovin within the installation (First come, first served)

The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of University of the Arts is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the work of Naomieh Jovin, curated by Nicole Pollard. In a quest to understand the link between family trauma, spirituality and inheritance, Naomieh Jovin’s works incorporate found images, original photography and installations with found objects. In her photographs, Jovin incorporates family stories of intuition and premonition that speak to the ways in which both spirituality and trauma are held within our bodies and passed down generationally.

The exhibition highlights Jovin’s connection to both Haitian Vodou and Christianity, two spiritual practices that have been historically blended in Haiti due to colonization and the protective need to hide diasporic spiritual practices behind Catholicism. Vodou is defined as a sacred dance with the ancestors that manifests ancestral and divine energy within oneself by working its way through one’s flesh.

Building on themes of her past work, Jovin seeks to create new pathways for unlearning harmful stereotypes about Black people, and translating the trauma within immigrant families into power through storytelling and photographic imagery. With this practice her hope is to expand her personal narrative beyond the singular perspectives of her family’s gatekeepers of information as well as the larger xenophobic narratives surrounding Haitian people. The visual and cathartic exploration this exhibition provides for Jovin speaks to the general experiences of first-generation Americans, specifically of African and/or Caribbean descent.

This exhibition is supported by the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, University of the Arts and Magnum Foundation.

About the Artist
 

Naomieh received her BFA in Photography and Digital Arts from Moore College of Art and Design. She was selected as a Lens Culture 2021 Critic's Choice winner, and she was recently named a 2021 PEW Fellow in the Arts. Her work has been featured in The Nation, Vogue and Buzzfeed. She has photographed for The New York Times and Vogue Italia. 

Naomieh was an inaugural UArts iLAB Artist-in-Residence in 2022-23, and has been featured in Here & There: Alumni Invitational Exhibition at The Galleries at Moore in 2021, Photo Arts Center's 2020-21 artist residency program, Mural Art's inaugural Philadelphia Fellowship for Black Artists, and In Conversation: Visual Meditations on Black Masculinity exhibition at The African American Museum in Philadelphia in 2019. 

Important Dates
 

-Opening Reception: Friday, October 27th from 5–7:30 pm
 5–6pm Portrait session by Naomieh Jovin within the installation (First come, first served)

-Portrait session by Naomieh Jovin: Saturday, November 18th, 12–1:30pm  CANCELLED

-Portrait session by Naomieh Jovin: Saturday, December 9th, 1–2:30pm