FRanz Caba
Dominican Republic
Franz Caba is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and Dominican architect who graduated from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. Through drawing, painting and installation, he explores the problems that arise from the relationship between the body, objects and space. He has participated in different national and international exhibitions, including the artist residency Caribbean Linked V in 2018. He currently lives and works in Santo Domingo.
Artist Statement:
My artistic practice is an exercise in which I meditate and question the absurd within the narratives and fantasies of the Caribbean paradise through drawing, painting and installation. Through the representation of the landscape I materialize my explorations on the relationships between space, objects, animals and identity, crossed by the memories and fictions of my insular condition, resorting to the transgression of symbols as an act of reappropriation, perhaps of vandalism.
Addressing the dynamics of belonging and everyday life, I reflect on the issues of the identity product, otherness and imaginaries arising from our colonial past and the placement of images within our virtual realities of the contemporary Caribbean.
Taisha Carrington
Barbados
Taisha is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, installation and sculpture. Born in Barbados, she focuses on place making, adaptation and choices that drive immigration while proposing methods for reimagining the value of Caribbean people and communities.
Taisha graduated from Pratt Institute in 2018 with a BFA in Jewelry Design. Her awards include the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s CFDA+ Design Graduate, NYC Jewelry Week’s One For The Future award and Art Jewelry Forum’s Young Artist Award Finalist 2022. Her work is in the collections of The Dallas Museum of Art and Montreal’s Stewart Program for Modern Design.
Artist Statement:
I have found the natural environment to be a reliable informant on ways to navigate and understand our potentialities. The analysis of kinship across species is the basis for my artistic research.
My most recent body of work focuses on the pursuit of autonomy and self-actualization amid the sociopolitical environment, climate crisis and histories that shape current affairs of the Caribbean. Through a variety of media – performance, film, sculpture and painting – I create ways for my audience to access fantasy as a means to inform their reality.
I often employ long-format production; whether it’s waiting for plants to grow or water to desalinate via the sun to produce the artwork. I collect material from the land, sea, and people such as raw clay, ocean water, and human hair and marry them together in artworks to bridge gaps in time and physical spaces.
Through my work I aim to provide an access point for those outside of the region to have insight into life in the Caribbean beyond the images crafted for us by colonialism or tourism.
Chamika Germain
St. Martin
Born in 2000 in Saint Martin, Chamika Germain is currently an art student at the Campus Caraïbéen des Arts in Martinique. Her work speaks about child abuse in social services in Saint-Martin.
Growing up as a foster child in the very same system, she realised she was in need for maternal love and a healthy family environment. From the nursery to the foster families. In her painting series, childhood Trauma and anxiety are expressed through very colorful and fearful dark sceneries. They are populated by monsters, creatures and entities that tell children imaginary
and hers.
It is a testimony, a ritual of passage and of liberation that frees her from a traumatic past so that it can be witnessed without fear.
Artist Statement:
I explore this subject, having myself grown up in the social services community. I realized that I was in search of a «healthy» maternal or family love in which I believed first at the nursery, then in foster families, where those responsible are paid to love and bring stability in the lives of these
children who have already had a heavy experience. When a minor cannot be maintained in their family, child welfare is to meet all their needs. They are then welcomed either in an approved foster family or in a children’s facility of a social nature. So I go back to the «place of crime» to find answers to my childhood and adult questions, understand my past and recognize and deconstruct the present, at a distance.
The work of observing and capturing words, images and gestures made at the ASE took shape in a series of plastic productions that use photography, painting, volume, installation and interactivity. The photographic series that traces through portraits and scenes of the daily life of children and families is a first axis of work that translates immersion into images from the ASE.
Following this work, a whole series of paintings come to tell anxieties and trauma by mixing the bright colors of childhood and the dark complexions of fear. A world populated by monsters, of creatures and entities that tell the imagination of children, mine too. It is a testimony, a ritual of passage and liberation that frees me from a traumatic past, projects it into the world of the creation so that it can be observed without fear.
The audio gives me the opportunity to materialize memories of the nursery when the cradles become the place of confinement and the nightmare. Concrete iron, wood, plaster, glass, wire mesh, candle wax, stained sheets, baby slippers so many materials that bring back to the construction of a house but also in children in danger. The assembly of the parts, their dialogue, gives rise to the installation that reinforces the subject. The interactive device finally introduces the sound atmosphere, light and moving image to recreate the atmosphere of the reception house, its daily life.
Brice Lautric
Guadeloupe
Brice LAUTRIC is an artist from Guadeloupe. Born in 1990 in Bord de mer, Trois-Rivières in Guadeloupe, he took an early interest in art by drawing and reproducing what he saw.
After high school, he continued his art studies in Martinique at the Campus Caribéen des Arts in 2009 by strengthening his current and new practices such as drawing, screen printing, sculpture, video etc.
Artist Statement:
The question of memory is at the heart of my work. I deal with the landscape in a singular way, trying to break apart from a “doudouist” or identity side. The place is then thought not as a simple geographical point but as an inhabited, living, personal and collective space. So I address notions of absence and presence; to deconstruct the image to reconstruct it in order to give a different and sensitive regard.
The artistic approach is the reproduction of new images using a single image.
The portrait has always been central and fascinating, especially the biblical representations in encyclopedias. The first tendency of this artistic initiation was to reproduce identically the surrounding reality, to imitate it, to produce a realistic result. The realistic drawings were a first source of inspiration, as well as the whole popular universe: comics, manga, cinema, etc.
The self-portrait then intervened in this practice in a natural way and this subject of the “self” was questioned via various formats (drawings, sculptures) and materials (pastels, wood). By experimenting with this graphic and pictorial work of my own image, some parts of my face and body come to disappear, while making others visible, thanks to the technique of folding.
This creative process begins with printing my self-portrait on paper. This support is then manipulated, folded, refolded, unfolded. The intervention is then done on these images folded using different tools: pencils and India ink. The work is only done from one and the same image beforehand which makes the notion of series very significant. The idea is to create sensitive works, makes the viewer react, trigger emotions, thanks to different means (visual, format, etc.).
In connection with the self-portrait, which is about the intimate, the question of familiar landscapes is addressed, using the same working method. The image remains the heart of my work, it is drawn from a part of my life (for example my grandmother’s house, where I lived in
Guadeloupe, my home, which recalls and summons memories, anecdotes …). The idea is to show what the image hides in order to reveal it on large formats (often on a human scale) to obtain a real confrontation with the viewer (visual, auditory, sensory).
The paper support is simply replaced by a metal support (including offset plates). It is by chance in a specialized workshop that I notice this support hidden behind a piece of wood. I see in this material new possibilities of experimentation (sculpture, painting, etc.) and continue to explore this theme of interiority, which is mainly expressed through landscape and portraiture by experimenting with different techniques and supports such as glass. It is this practice that is at the heart of my research currently, and that will guide this creative project.
Caribbean Linked 