Jaina Cipriano is a photographer, filmmaker, actor, writer, and set designer who owns her own set design company, Finding Bright Studios, and is also the owner of the Arlington Film Festival. She has been published over 200 times in various independent and established publications such as The Boston Globe. She has exhibited mostly in the Boston metropolitan area as well as across the United States and in Europe. In Jaina's photography and films, all the props and sets are built from scratch and she doesn't use Photoshop or any digital enhancements in her photography.
For this particular article, we will be discussing a series titled The Lucky Ones, which is a carefully selected and curated archive of Jaina Cipriano’s early photography between the years of 2009-2015. The Lucky Ones, unlike the photography Jaina is known for, are documentative in nature and capture Jaina’s experiences and lifestyle in her youth. From moshpits to performative, conceptual scenes such as a young man lying down on a pile of grocery carts or a stuffed animal on a dashboard among incoming headlights on a sideroad, these works are a foreshadowing. They are a prelude to the grand theatrical displays seen in her current works, which entail elaborate hand-made sets and props with toy-like and pop-art-like features full of pasty colors and unrecognizable scale. In The Lucky Ones, the grainy of texture of the photography becomes accentuated through suboptimal weather conditions, such as a damp night, a cloudy day, or rainy mists. Some of the shots depict ominous lens flares coming from various sources such as overarching street lights, overexposed or blurry interior lights, and the silent mists of cloudy daylight, all of which express a sense of drama and anticipation.
“And there is so much more out there than what I can see and sometimes that scares me”, is a piece of writing which is part of the curated collection. These various ‘notes’ and philosophical musings reflect on the past and specifically of Jaina’s youth. The vast unknown remains terrifying to the unexperienced and the young, because they only know what they have been taught and experienced up until their point in time. Experiences build foresight, which come with age. These photographs reflect a sense of innocence and despair, the grappling of fitting in into a complex, digitized, and global world order. But for now, as depicted in these photographs, Jaina’s friends, acquaintances, and immediate environments shapes her sense of identity, her confidence, and sense of belonging. The imposing world waiting for her out there is far away and this current realm of her youth contained within the series reflects concerts, frolicing with a lover, personalizing local commercial environments, and an ominous solitude in dystopian New England suburbia, even amongst friends.
The Lucky Ones V. 4 depicts a stuffed animal on a dashboard within the pale moonlight and threatening headlights affixed to the center of the camera. The angle of the shot has the appearance as if a car accident is about to occur and the stuffed animal signifies loss of innocence. This documentative photograph, whether staged or captured accidently, reflects how Jaina Cipriano makes acute observations of her surroundings to have deeper contemplation towards her state of mind.
With vigor and energy, The Lucky Ones reflects a documentary of the youth of an artist. These autobiographical portraits reveal environments which have shaped a generation in the daunting, distrustful outside world we now inhabit. This brilliant series reflects a loss of innocence and fleeting memories cherished in the form of mementos, symbolic gestures by her friends and self as actors in both a performative and documentative context. These works foreshadow the photographs and films she is known for today which depict a grand scale of manic theatrics with high production values of hand-crafted props, excellent writing, and witty commentary on the nihilism of suburbia and urban blight. In all of Jaina’s works, there is a sense of playful cynicism, a subtle mockery of digitized and global standards of logic through her indirect performances, ironic writing, and hallucinogenic visuals.