Boston University Art Galleries is proud to present Dreamscapes: Finding the Light Through Immersive Design from September 6 through October 13, 2022, at BU’s 808 Gallery. Art returns to 808 after the gallery space served as a COVID-19 testing site for the BU community.

In Dreamscapes: Finding the Light Through Immersive Design, Boston-based artist and filmmaker Jaina Cipriano constructs emotive and enveloping experiences for viewers with her installations and photographs. Through illusionistic set designs – devoid of any digital manipulation – Cipriano’s work wrestles with themes of trauma, grief, and self-discovery. She curates herself and others within her immersive installations, ultimately capturing photographs of raw, intimate moments that embody her thematic reflection. Exhibited alongside her set designs, her photographs capture moments of stillness within the surrounding chaos.

The exhibition as a whole contemplates the duality of light and dark. The works further communicate how the two can exist together in discovering one’s own resiliency, here expressed through elements of play and theatricality. This duality of light and dark, as well as play and trauma, manifests conceptually through Cipriano’s attention to façade, adornment, and expression, as well as physically through her construction of the installations and her unconventional perspective. She balances aspects of dramatic boldness and moments of vulnerability in her reflection on personal evolution. The photographs, and the additional installations they reveal, demonstrate a span of Cipriano’s most recent projects, all communicating a continuous study of female identity, both connected to struggles of the past and growth toward the future.

These installations are meant to be touched, inhabited, and photographed. Please, make this your own playground: engage with the sets and curate your own photographs. Explore the worlds – the dreamscapes – that this artist creates and become a part of the narrative she envisions.