Praxis is pleased to present Stories of Wonder: When the Sea is my Land, a solo exhibition by Scherezade Garcia (b. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic). The exhibition will be open from September 16th until November 13th 2021. We are open to the public Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm at 501 W 20th Street, New York, NY, 10011.
As a Latinx contemporary artist, Scherezade Garcia’s work is concerned with the creation of narratives that are essential to the understanding of America and the American experience. Her work intends to unveil the many ongoing cultural encounters that continuously shape and reshape how we view, perceive, and color America. Her work is centered on the politics of inclusion. History plays a central role in her artistic practice of decoding and deconstructing visual narratives of power. Garcia engages history and historical ethnography to pay close attention to traditions, methods, and dominant societal points of view to visually bring forth other voices. Through the deconstruction, the juxtaposition of symbols of constructed Americaness, nationhood and freedom embedded in slavery and oppression, she aims to present the most outrages signs of resistance through the mixing of race, through a fierce Optimism.
Race, the politics of color (formally and conceptually) is essential to her work. The cinnamon figure has been a constant in Garcia’s trajectory since 1996. Mixing all the colors in a palette is an inclusive action, the outcome of such activity is cinnamon color. The new race, represented by her ever-present cinnamon figure, states the creation of a new aesthetic. This unique aesthetic with new rules originated by the lush landscape, the transplantation, appropriation, and transformation of traditions. Also, the catholic iconography with her mixed- race warrior/angels is a way of colonizing the colonizers, by appropriating, transforming and creating new icons.
The Atlantic, this blue liquid road and profound obstacle provokes Garcia’s imagination. The blue sea represents the way out and the frontier. It maps stories about freedom, slavery, and survival, it carries our DNA, and it’s an endless source of stories, evolving continuously, reminding us the fluidity of our identity, our collective memory. Resistance through beauty and joy. Las Americas transformed our world, created new values, a new race, redefined Christianity, and geography. In her neo-baroque tradition, with its inclusivity of spirit, Garcia navigates between tragedy, beauty, carnaval, and traces of divinity.
Through her drawings and mixed media paintings, Scherezade Garcia gives rise to visual codes which leads her to spontaneous compositions of intriguing meanings. Each artwork is created as an individual piece, united by a threat of thought, building in the process a narrative. These allegorical narratives are created by appropriating and transforming symbols and objects that have included life jackets, inner tubes, tents, newspaper clippings and religious icons.
