Scherezade Garcia | Under the Lace
Praxis is pleased to present Under the Lace: Stories of Floating Cathedrals, Resilience and Encounters, a solo exhibition by artist Scherezade Garcia (b. 1966, Santo Domingo).  The show will be open from Thursday, September 7, to Saturday, November 4, 2023. The opening reception will be on September 7, from 5 to 8 pm. 

If, in the words of cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, we move through this world as “oceanic eddies,” then Scherezade García is our visionary, offering insight into this epoch of rising tides through color, line, and form. For decades, the artist, who emigrated to the island of Manahatta/Manhattan from the island of Kiskeya/La Hispaniola, has been conjuring ways of imagining life with and through the seas. In Under the Lace: Stories of Floating Cathedrals, Resilience and Encounters, García’s follow-up to her 2021 solo Praxis exhibition Stories of Wonder: When the Sea is My Land, we meet a series of ethereal figures suspended within an aquatic expanse. Elegant and unyielding, these women float amid the blue seas, engulfed in tropical flora and ornate textiles whose opacities at once veil and reveal the figures beneath. In A Splendid Soil I, the figure at center gently flirts with our gaze, an island unto herself, surrounded by the eddies of waves, flora, and lace. Like a saint animated in a baroque altarpiece, the figure’s presence contrasts the ebbs and flows of the gestural waters, while the resplendent hues and swirling brushstrokes remind us that she is unmoored from land, awash in movement. As with all of García’s works in this series, the composition depicts a seemingly infinite expanse of foliage, feathers, textiles, jewels, and water; it is also a metaphor for the gravitas of diasporic embodiment in our watery world. García’s figures may seem to be adrift at sea, but their stoic presence roots them among the tides. In this way, García gives visual presence to lifeways that transcend conventional depictions of home, belonging, and memory.In recent years, artists, scholars, and writers have become increasingly captivated by the seas, their cumulative work giving way to what has become known as the “liquid turn” or the “blue humanities.” (...) García’s exploration of what she has come to call the “liquid highway,” a metaphor for and archetype of water’s visuality—layered, fluid, transformative—stands at the forefront of this movement and continues to evolve in ways that position her at the avant-garde of creative investigations into the memories and futures floating in our seas. (...) The phrase “liquid highway” evokes notions of modern ease of transit, of constant motion from one destination to another. The liquid highway also invites a deeper critique, one that implicates the violent routes of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, whose brutal voyages formally ceased in the 1860s, only to be replaced by submarine communications cables that trace global capital through the very same routes now submerged below the surface. Thus, for García, the liquid highway conveys meanings both personal and global, moving spatially and temporally. As aquatic repositories of earthen elements, such as dust, ash, and sand (themselves material compressions of myriad times and places), the seas quietly “carry portents of other times, both anticipatory and remembered,” migrating across the very same routes as ancestors trafficked for enslaved labor, displaced by war or famine, or who otherwise sought personal refuge. The persistence of the seas also foreshadows the millions whose displacement is yet to come and attests to migrations happening this very moment. For García, “everything is connected to the idea of how tangible this moving water is.” In other words, the seas, paradoxically, invite one to think about “ancestry and land.” As a self-professed “Dominicanyork” artist who proudly claims pan-Caribbean and pan-American/hemispheric heritage (and all of the slippages therein), García knows what it means to traverse the seas and to hold the conceptual fluidities wrought by those voyages within her memory and work. García’s knowledge thus transforms her canvases into more than a metaphor; rather, her work unveils the anatomy of our watery world and the beings born in and of its wake.    If the baroque stirrings and opulence of García’s work offers a seductive entry point into her compositions, it is the steadfast gaze of the figures that becomes the locus around which all other elements orbit. In this way, viewing a work by García is a peripatetic act, the gaze moving across myriad forms and colors. In this journey, the face of the figure in each of García’s compositions becomes a landing site, a place of respite, an anchoring force. According to García, the visages of her figures comprise an amalgam of the women in her family. The figure is neither portrait, nor ghostly visitation, nor an archive re-traced, but rather a manifestation of memory work in the present. Thus, even though the figure feels imminently grounded, she embodies a syncretic and fluid identity, rejecting fixation in or determination by one time or place. García underscores this notion in her triptych Harvest of the Sea, which features three individual women with attire from Africa, Europe, and the Americas, each on their own seafaring journeys. Although they possess individual agency as unique figures, they unite (knowingly or unknowingly) via resplendent golden sashes that, like sails, seem to carry them in harmony. It seems no coincidence that these women converge on the seas, the originary site where their heritages, stories, and experiences became forever entangled.  Unveilings Along the Liquid Highway
Lesley A. Wolff, PhD