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Recasting Paradise
Andre Juste
Vladimir Cybil Charlier
New Collaborative Works
September 10th – October 17th, 2009
Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Recasting Paradise, an exhibition of recent mixed media work by the collaboration of Haitian-American artists Andre Juste and Vladimir Cybil Charlier. This will be their first show at the gallery. The reception is Thursday, September 10th, 6-8pm and both artists will be present.
Andre Juste and Vladimir Cybil Charlier’s new collaborative work continues to explore strategies that fuse their concerns for the aesthetic struggle between form and concept with playful ironies and poetic metaphors. They exploit their Haitian roots in their search for creative excellence and challenge our basic understanding about the nature of culture and recent thinking about globalization. They also acknowledge the complex nature of irony as a central aspect of much contemporary art, particularly postmodernism, opting for a more revelatory or objective type of symbolism. The works in this exhibition are affirmative critical propositions about discrete cultural and historical realities.
“Recasting Paradise” is an attempt to distill and reinvent various aspects of Haitian history and culture, especially as they are represented in the country’s art or art-marketing practices. The Charmin’ series, mainly landscapes made of woven and faux-woven bands of silk made to look like toilet paper, is symbolically a cleansing, dressing as well as an adjusting of the country as both geographical and aesthetically re-imagined place. Likewise the Buy the Yard series, which comprises bolts of contiguous pictures that could be bought by the yard, foregrounds the successes and failures of the art object (as well as the artist) as commodities. Of course the idea of paradise associated with Haiti or the Caribbean, or any other place that dollar-wielding tourists have flocked to, is essentially bogus. But the falsity of an idea does not necessarily thwart its currency and the artists succeed in trying to marshal fact and fiction, memory and reality, art and commodity into poignant, libratory gestures.
For some thirty-five years between them Andre and Cybil have mined Haitian art and culture for inspiration. Understandably, this is often reflected in their work. Andre left Haiti at age thirteen to settle in New York in 1969, bringing along with him the cultural influences that informed his consciousness. As for Cybil, she was born in Queens in 1967 and since then has practically straddled Haiti and New York, living andezo, that is, “between (two) waters." After showing together for 15 years in many venues in the United States, in 2005 they had their first collaborative solo show, "The Politics of Paradise," which focused on certain marketing practices that have brought to the fore the colorful and fantastic works that so often pass for Haitian art.Their work was exhibited in the 2007 Venice Biennale.
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