@ Work
by Zoe Beloff and Eric Muzzy
@ Work, an exhibition of the work of artist, Zoe Beloff and filmmaker, Eric Muzzy, was installed at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. The exhibition was curated by Tracey Simon, Aneta Stojnić, and Natasha Kurchanova of IPTAR’s Arts&Society committee.
Together Beloff and Muzzy have created @ Work, an exuberant documentary public art installation that includes fourteen life-size canvas banners depicting images in oil of essential workers who were so vital to the survival of the city and all of us during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Each banner is over seven feet in height, five feet across, and features brightly colored, playful, realistic, and symbolic representations of fourteen essential working people of New York City. They range from a cashier at a grocery store to a dock worker to a ferry operator to a teacher to a respiratory therapist. The portraits speak to a long tradition of the representation of workers in mural form. Warm, human, wry, alive, and yet iconic, idealized and lifted up as examples of how work, when it does not oppress, brings dignity and equality.
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Zoe Beloff’s work has been featured prodigiously in festivals and exhibitions from the Whitney in New York City to the Pompidou Center in Paris to the M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. With a bent toward social activism and public engagement, she favors working (like the great mid-twentieth-century muralists she is in conversation with) in community settings that are free and readily accessible to the public.
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Eric Muzzy is a cinematographer, photographer, and printmaker. He has toured Europe and the US doing lighting for theater and has worked as a programmer in the libraries of the American Museum of Natural History and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
- Website: theworkerswall.com
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