Monday March 22 – Thursday March 25, 10:30pm PT
Caribbean Revisited: Works by Joiri Minaya and Tiffany Smith
Q&A with the artists at 8:30pm ET via chat
Microscope is very pleased to present an online screening of works in single-channel and multi-channel film and video by New York-based artist Joiri Minaya and by Tiffany Smith. The approximately 60-minute program features works by both artists completed between 2012 and 2019 that grapple with issues including displacement, identity and representation, and at times incorporating performance.
Among the connections in Minaya and Smith’s works, are the revisitations — both physically and figuratively — to the places once familiar that now populate their memories. By looking at these environments with different eyes, the artists also reinvent or renew their relationships with theses regions. At play in these works is a more external or distanced look — somehow aligned with the camera’s point of view — that the artists gained through the passing of time and that introduces the viewer to their complex ties to these islands.
In Minaya’s video “Labadee,” a document of a cruise trip to Haiti, the artist finds that the travel industry has supplanted real life with what is in fact a resort leased to Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. through 2050, with theatrical scenes of tourist entertainment. Smith’s “Bahama Blues” presents through time-lapse video the artist’s first-person attempt at experiencing the areas of downtown Nassau (Bahamas) as a tourist by having her hair braided for the first time, while brass bands loudly pay tribute to a Bahamian historical figure.
A Q&A via live chat with Minaya and Smith will follow the program at 8:30pm ET on Monday March 22nd.
TO WATCH:
Passes for viewing give full access to video introduction, film program, and live Q&A.
General admission $8 (Valid through Thursday March 25, 10:30pm PT)
Member admission $6 (Valid through Thursday March 25, 10:30pm PT)
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Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013). She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop, ISCP, and Art Omi. She has been awarded a Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship as well as grants by Artadia, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Minaya’s work is in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Centro León Jiménes in the Dominican Republic.
Tiffany Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean diaspora working in photography, video, installation, and design. Using plant matter, design elements, patterning and costuming as cultural signifiers, Smith creates photographic portraits, site responsive installations, user engaged experiences, and assemblages focused on identity, representation, cultural ambiguity, and displacement. Smith’s practice centers on what forms and defines communities of people of color, in particular; how they are identified and represented, and how they persist. Smith received her BFA from S.C.A.D., Savannah, GA and her MFA from SVA, NY. Her work has been exhibited internationally including shows at National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, The Bronx Museum, MassArt, The National Gallery of Jamaica; during Photoville, Photo NOLA, and Spring Break Art Show; and in solo exhibitions at The Wassaic Project, Recess Assembly, Brooklyn, NY, and Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA. Her work has been published in Womanly, Nueva Luz, Field Magazine, Bitch, Culture, and Posture Magazine. Tiffany Smith is a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work from The New York Foundation for the Arts, an EnFoco Photography Fellowship Awardee, a Cameron Visiting Artist at Middlebury College, VT, a United Photo Industries We Women Grantee, and a current Artist in Residence with The Bronx Museum Block Gallery. Smith is currently based in Brooklyn, NY where she serves as Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects and teaches at Pratt, Parsons, and ICP.
Program:
An ocean in between
By Joiri Minaya, 16mm film, silent, 2012, 3 minutes 34 seconds
An ocean in between is a 16mm film and a series of photographic prints based on stills from this film. The film makes visual superimpositions of landscape from Dominican Republic and NYC, combined with footage of family videos and skype conversations. The short film is about displacement, immigration, memory and yearning.
Metonimia
By Joiri Minaya, HD Video, sound , 2013, 1 minute 54 seconds
Metonimia is a two-channel video showing sand coming out of female breasts through a funnel next to a looping video of waves crashing on a beach shore. As the title proposes (a metonymy is a figure of speech in which consists of the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant) the video proposes to establish a relation between the two images, making interchangeable their characters and actions. Metonimia is informed by the archetypical relation between the woman and the sea, being both bodies that feel or measure time through its cycles, to speak about fertility. However, being sand (an unfertile element) what comes out of the female breast, Metonimia also presents an alternative, sabotage or objection to the archetype of fertility as the ultimate fulfillment of female existence.
Siboney
By Joiri Minaya, HD video, sound, 2014, 10 minutes
I spend a month hand-painting the design from a found piece of fabric onto a museum wall. Once the mural is finished I pour water on myself and scrub my body against the wall while dancing to the beat of the song Siboney by Connie Francis, partially washing off the paint. This song was composed in 1929 by Ernesto Lecuona for piano, allegedly while homesick, away from Cuba. Later in the 50s, Connie Francis recorded the dramatic, drum-heavy, sensualized version used in the performance.
Labadee
By Joiri Minaya, HD video, sound, 2017, 7 minutes 10 seconds
Labadee is a short video documenting parts of a Royal Caribbean cruise trip in Labadee, Haiti, and the dynamics that unfold in this privately-managed space (the space is fenced and leased to Royal Caribbean until 2050). The subtitles in the video begin with text from the diary of Christopher Columbus when they first saw land, moving into a contemporary recount of the trip we’re seeing.
Containers (performance events)
By Joiri Minaya, HD video, 2016-2017, 1 minute
These performances evolved from a photo series with the same name. Considering the same ideas of the constructed body in landscape, the performances added new elements and pushed certain aspects further: the landscape, being a park or public garden, is no longer ambivalent about how it is a man-made construction. The performers are no longer anonimous or indefinitely static, but they come in and out of the body- suits according to a timeframe set by an female voice that plays out of a speaker concealed in each performer’s bodysuit. The audio duration determines the performer’s “shift,” during which they hold the pose dictated by the suit’s shape. Endurance-posing shifts lasts 5 to 15 minutes. The performance lasts about two hours. Visitors who stumble upon performers can listen when they get close to each figure. In between shifts, performers can take parts of their suits off, stretch, rest, talk to audience, etc. Meditating on landscape and gender, immigration, preservation, cam- ouflage, assimilation, otherness, refusal, agency and (in)visibility, my writing is mixed with a variety of appropriated and subverted texts, including: 17th and 18th century European expeditions in South Ameri- ca; books on how to communicate with your Spanish-speaking garden- er; tips for how to loose your native accent; botanical excerpts discussing cataloguing plants, transplant shock, protective coloration, etc.; online profiles from online catalogs for foreign men to date a DR woman during their vacation. The performance has so far taken place at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2016 and at the Monocot and Aquatic gardens at Wave Hill in 2017 with site-specific bodysuits and scripts.
Wine for Me Cardi B
By Tiffany Smith, single-channel video, 2019, 2 minutes 30 seconds
Wine For Me Cardi B! is a fan girl video compilation of rapper Cardi B, with whom Smith is actively obsessed. The artist scoured dark traverses of the Internet to collect fan-made and self-authored content that focuses on Cardi B in the act of a “wine” [wind] – a movement of the hips/buttocks in a circular motion referred to as such in Caribbean communities. The footage is edited together and paired with blaring, repetitive Soca music to call attention to Cardi B’s Caribbean (Trinidadian/Dominican) heritage, and connect cultural traditions of carnival dance and music to influences within her stage and public personas, while chronicling her skyrocket journey from stripper to Instagram star to Grammy winning performer.
Bahama Blues
By Tiffany Smith, single-channel video, 2018, 15 minutes 10 seconds
“Bahama Blues” aims to articulate differences in the ways that tourists and locals experience tropical vacation locales. The video documents the experience of the artist parading as a tourist and getting her hair braided in the Straw Market in downtown Nassau for the first time while visiting family on the island for the holidays. This time lapse footage is paired footage of a ritualistic reconnection with the ocean at one of Nassau’s public beaches, and finally with footage documenting the process of taking down the braids upon returning to NYC. The video is scored with Junkanoo music from a specific performance when in rare fashion, all of the bands that usually compete against each other came together to play a funerary tribute to a Bahamian cultural icon.
Mango Mango
By Tiffany Smith, single-channel video, 2015, 3 minutes 36 seconds
“Mango, Mango” is a performative video by Tiffany Smith in which two versions of the artist compete in a mango eating competition that interrogates cultural practices around eating the fruit – one character cuts the mango neatly with a knife while the other doesn’t hesitate to peel and eat the mango with her bare hands and teeth. The split screen format aims to communicate the duality of experience of individuals living in communities where the cultural practices that come as second nature to them deviate from the status quo. The visual references and the score pull from stereotypical representations of Caribbean culture, with “Iko Iko” and “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” providing the soundtrack to the gluttonous mango feast. In the spring of 2020, rapper and icon Cardi B went on Instagram Live and ate mangos in a variety of ways – tearing into it with her exaggerated long acrylic nails, dousing it with hot sauce and other seasoning – before a sometimes celebratory, sometimes dismayed audience. For a moment the world paused, and the artist felt truly seen.
Miss U.S.A.?
By Tiffany Smith, single-channel video, 2015, 6 minutes 24 seconds
“Miss U.S.A.?” compiles video footage from the 1989 Miss U.S.A. pageant with interview audio from one of the subjects of Tiffany Smith’s portrait series “A Woman, Phenomenally”. Typically displayed within a larger installation, in physical opposition to photographs from the series, the video serves as a counter narrative to the portraits. The footage was sourced from the year that Smith moved to America and the subject, who also migrated to the U.S. from an island turned 18, qualifying her to compete in such a competition had her beauty been considered representative. The focus on pose and gesture of pageant presentation juxtaposed with the opposing narratives of the images and audio act as a criticism of a lack of diversity in representations of beauty in mass culture and particularly, what is deemed “American”.
