Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes
(March 13, 2014 – August 31, 2014)
Conversation with Edouard Duval Carrié and Tobias Ostrander, March 13 at 7pm
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) will present a solo exhibition of new works by Haitian-born, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié from March 13 to August 31, 2014. Generated over the past year, Imagined Landscapes features a series of mural-sized paintings and chandeliers, conceived as a single installation, depicting lush tropical scenes executed entirely in black and silver glitter. The exhibition will open with a conversation between Duval Carrié and PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander on March 13, 2014 at 7pm.
“Edouard Duval-Carrié has produced a very exciting new body of work with his dark “Imaginary Landscapes,” said PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander. “This suite of sparkling paintings and sculptures dialogue dynamically with the characteristics of the gallery space at PAMM, as well as with the context of tropical Miami as a Caribbean city. This series intriguingly reveals the strong influence of his recent pan-Caribbean research and outlook.”
Edouard Duval-Carrié is known for his innovative adaptions of traditional Haitian iconography, which he engages in order to address contemporary social and political conditions. Contrasting his signature use of strident colors, this new project presents works executed entirely in black and silver glitter. Involving extensive research, Imagined Landscapes presents lush tropical scenes that reference specific 19th century paintings executed in the Caribbean and Florida. These paintings, by artists such as William Heade and Frederick Church, were commissioned as part of Colonialist interests in promoting economic development of these areas of the world. The artists used pictorial effects, imagination and fictions to present the Caribbean as the “New Eden,” a fertile land of possibility. Duval-Carrié’s works translate these historical images into his own contemporary aesthetic language, in order to address the manner in which the tropics of the Caribbean and Florida continue to be sold as tropical paradises, in ways that often obscure traditional economic and social disparities that continue to be perpetuated in these contexts.
Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes, organized by PAMM, is part of a season of presentations and programs focusing on Caribbean art, and celebrating Miami’s position as a Caribbean capital. On Friday, April 18, 2014, PAMM will open Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, an unprecedented juxtaposition of historical and contemporary works. Duval-Carrié’s Le General Toussaint Enfumé (General Touissant Wreathed in Smoke, or Pretty in Pink), 2003 is on view in Caribbean. Also opening April 18 is a large-scale work by Simon Starling, Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA (House for a Songbird), a recently-acquired installation that traces the paradoxes of modernist architecture in the Caribbean. A large scale installation by artist Hew Locke, a British artist of Guyanese descent, For Those in Peril on the Sea, hangs in the museum’s front entrance. For more information about upcoming programs, visit pamm.org/calendar.