Sam Spratt

Moments of the Unknown: Enter Through the Thrift Shop Curated by @justinaversano and @ViktoriaNagibi1 November 11 - 26, 2026 60 - 62 East 11th Street, New York Opening Wednesday, November 11, 11:11AM - 8 PM; reception 5-8 PM Enter through the Thrift Shop, an artist-initiated exhibition by Justin Aversano, co-curated with Viktoria Nagibina, opens on November 11, 2026, across all seven floors of 60-62 East 11th Street in Greenwich Village. Bringing together 366 paintings, Super 8 film, Polaroids, sound, and generative media, the exhibition follows a year of encounters across seven continents in an ascent from past to present to future. The building is not a backdrop but a participant: its nineteenth-century photographic history is set in direct relation to contemporary ways of making, circulating, and preserving images. The exhibition took shape by chance. In June 2026, Aversano and Nagibina moved their studio into the building and only afterward learned that it had been built in 1895 as the headquarters of Scovill & Adams, the photographic-supply company and publisher of The Photographic Times, at a time when the blocks south of Union Square were among the world’s centers of photographic production. Aversano was then completing the 366 paintings, with no site yet determined for their presentation. Initiated and funded by the artist, who has reinvested the proceeds of his work in the space and its production, the exhibition is realized without gallery, museum, or outside financial support, proposing a model in which an artist builds the conditions for his own public presentation. Visitors enter through Bijan Royal Antiques, an operating store run by its owner since 1965 and the last of the antique dealers that once lined the street. The entrance gives the exhibition its title, and sculptures from the shop reappear on the floors above, placing historical representations of the human figure beside Aversano’s contemporary portraits. At the center of the exhibition is Moments of the Unknown, a three-part work on time, memory, and human connection that unfolds as The Past, The Present, and The Future. Its source is Aversano’s uninterrupted journey of 2023–2024, during which he filmed a different person in a different city every day on Super 8. Over the year that followed, he released one ten-second portrait a day and wrote a journal entry for each encounter, returning to it a year later to the day. Extending a lineage of serial, time-bound practice in which a fixed daily rule gives form to chance, the project brings these recorded encounters into dialogue with Polaroid photography and generative processes, and considers how images preserve individual lives while shaping a collective picture of humanity. Each of the three installations gives the recorded encounters a different temporal form: reversed and prolonged, unfolding in real time, or transformed into an imagined identity. The paintings carry this inquiry into material and process. Each begins with a single frame extracted from the footage and processed through AI image generation to clarify its forms for silkscreen. Color is painted by hand, one layer at a time, before a final black silkscreen completes the image. Every work has its own screen, and the variations produced in printing remain without correction: the process establishes a structure while admitting the effects of chance. An augmented reality application reconnects each canvas with its source footage, returning the still image to motion. 🧵1/2