Smoke and Mirrors by Justin Aversano

About Justin

Justin Aversano is a Co-Founder and CEO of Quantum Art, a platform focused on curating digital culture through NFTs. Before Quantum, Justin launched Twin Flames, a photographic collection of 100 sets of twins. Justin is also the co-founder and creative director of SaveArtSpace, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing community art to public spaces. A humanist and a social entrepreneur, Justin connects his art with the world around him through capturing moments, faces, and communities that surround him, bringing them together through the lens of his camera. Justin is currently based in Los Angeles.

Smoke and Mirrors

For “Smoke and Mirrors” I photographed 78 sets of artists, astrologers, psychics, tarot readers, and other forms of mystics from all around the world. Each subject represents a unique tarot card. I am creating a body of work focused on the existence of magic and mysticism through an immersive portrait survey and tarot readings. In the proverb of storytelling, psychics, and astrologers have an assigned position as the all-knowing gypsy with profound visions, within all concurrent and historical cultures—a charged spirit of the ethereal that encompasses destiny, luck, and faith. Mysticism has a deep root in shared folklore, conjuring metaphysical manifestations across the astrological, mythological, academic and the denouement, stringing together tangents of one’s everyday reality with cosmic synchronicity. I will be converting the black and white photographs into colorful silkscreen paintings by using three film formats; Polaroid, 35mm, and 4x5. Combining the elements of the real (photographic) and the surreal (painting) to facilitate a broad & reflexive mixed-media dialogue that discerns the characters, their powers, and the significance of their presence in this natural world. So that together, we may raise the vibration of consciousness.