SHINE
PORTRAIT
STUDIO

Shirts & Skins consists of a series of photographs by Nick Kline depicting horizontal lines composed from a selection of striped shirts worn and owned by paulA neves’ late mother, Maria, and snapshots of these same shirts framed from moments as they were worn in life, accompanied by paulA neves’ poems and essays. It is a meditation on immigration, insularity, acculturation—what it means to be American, mother, father, child, adult, and gendered within inherited legacies of cultural trauma and comfort, with Newark, NJ and its greater metro area’s Portuguese community always a presence. Shirts & Skins considers what it means to be whole and alive in one’s skin.