Islands
Inspired by growing up in the Caribbean and since traversing between the Tropics and the North, I’ve been creating a series of works investigating the island (sun-drenched, white-sanded, lush, with blue-watered coastlines) as a metaphor situated somewhere between isolation and uniqueness, the fascination of the faraway, the promise of a slower pace, shipwreck and utopia…
proCLAIM (2023)
performance at dusk as part of CLEAR DE ROAD: Counter Archives of Resistance – Fort Fredrik Museum, St. Croix, Virgin Islands. projections on the fort at dusk.
Chief curator: Monica Marin
WINDWARD (2021)
For WINDWARD I return to my roots at the sea. The theme revolves around movement, weightlessness and transformation. The artistic strategy developed here enables a constant immersion in sensually charged atmospheres. In a multi-layered audio-visual texture, I visualize tactile and acoustic sensory impressions, creating a lightness and bringing to light the lyrical tension between floating and silence. Here we enter a world where the boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds blur, fluidly transforming from one form to another.
shown as part of MEDIANAUTIK, VBK Berlin – curated by Monika Funke Stern
NEVER THE SAME (2018)
In September 2017, two hurricanes devastated the Virgin Islands where I grew up: Category 5 hurricane Irma followed by Category 5 Maria just two weeks later. There was not much left of our family home – the roof flew away, and with it, most of everything.
I spent much time removing mountains of garbage and scouting for our belongings. The house sat as ruin all of 2018, and we started rebuilding in 2019.
NEVER THE SAME consists of a video and an accordion fold book with drawings of floating objects that seem frozen, with nothing in their usual place. What fascinates me is the feeling of weightlessness in the simultaneous chaos. Objects float that are usually grounded to the earth. The shape of the accordion fold is particularly inspiring as the individual pages can be shaped like the walls of a house. For example, one of the pages has a cut-out open window, and another holds a ladder. The video shows surreal and poetic images taken after the hurricanes that keep showing up in the most unexpected moments; the only stable thing is a boat’s porthole. Sometimes it’s like you’re looking out, sometimes you’re looking in, but everything you see is not stable – images I collected after the storms that only exist because of the storms…
Shown at:
AFTERMATH, Bajo el Sol Gallery, St. John Virgin Islands (2018)
GEBUNDENE ZEIT (TIED TIME), VBK Gallerie Berlin, Germany (2018)
PUNTOS (2017)
an installation around the idea of origin and destination – presented as part of My Islands Do Not Make a Nation – Contemporary Art from the Virgin Islands at Casa las Américas, La Habana – curated by Priscilla Hintz and David Knight
PUNTOS performs a dialogue between home and away, migration and rootedness, imagination and desire, walking and standing still, embodied liveness and virtual space. The navigational maps holding the video are of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands airport.
Amala (2010)
a video collaboration with Cuban painter José Seoane inspired by an Afrocuban folklore, a “pataki”. Patakines were based on oral mythologies of the Yoruba culture transcribed into Spanish when brought to Cuba by slaves. The artists worked with the Cuban theatre group Macuba to tell the story of 2 deities: Oba and Chango. Chango represents the divinity of thunder and lightening, Oba represents the Orisha of home and marriage.
The idea of how far the act of giving can go before it becomes an act of sacrifice is here a metaphor that works not only within a relationship, but also for a group, as well as a nation (talking about the relationship first world – third world, inside – outside).
Olofi (2012)
a video based on a pataki on the origin of the world; the dialectics of discord and harmony as creative forces
MIRAME PERO NO ME TOQUES (2011)
(Look at Me (But Don’t Touch) investigates the question of difference; the gaze, the souvenir, tourism and why are we so intrigued by the “other”, by “lost cultures/places”.
Sun in PiSces
a 2-channel video as a mediation on the alchemical journey where spirit and matter are in a continual process of creation and destruction, with the sky being the one constant in our lives
