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$3,500.00
Diaspora Vodou Survival Kit: The Saints Go Marching series, by Vladimir Cybil Charlier, 22 Prints (10″5/8” x 14″5 ea.), 1 Table of Content Poster (21” x 29”). 1 Porcelain sculpture (3.5″ x 1.5″ x 1″), 1 Birch plywood suitcase box (11″5/8 x 15″1¾x 2″1/4″).
My work engages the Caribbean and American cultural landscapes in its content and materiality. I have sought to create a language to articulate and bridge Afro-diasporic communities and cultures. The pieces draw inspiration from Pan-African pop culture and Afro-diasporic religions and explore how these experiences are visually expressed within a contemporary context. In a search for a language that mirrors a diasporic experience, the pieces marry formal elements with the language of self-taught art and craft as it weaves personal, historical, and colonial narratives. To examine how traditions reinvent themselves to adapt to new conditions, and how diasporic identities are constructed, the Pantéon, The Saints Go Marching! series casts mostly modern African American s/heroes as deities of Afro-diasporic religions. The series plays with “image as decoy,” the practice of using generic images of saints as stand-ins for the African deities that could not, historically, be worshipped openly in postcolonial societies. Starting with the older dual identities of these images and then, in a gesture of empowerment and self-actualization, creating iconic portraits from 19th- and 20th-century history, art history, or music. Thus St. George, who traditionally represented the warrior deity Ogoun is now embodied by Malcolm X; Bob Marley becomes Loko, spirit of trees, plants, and initiation, historically represented by St. Joseph. In the search for an Afro-diasporic cosmology, and to conjure New World Pan-African archetypes, I developed a more intuitive studio process; and it is in the dance of these two seemingly opposite yet complementary processes, intuitive and rational, that my practice resides.
Vladimir Cybil Charlier is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist. She was born in Queens, New York, to Haitian parents and grew up between New York City and Port-au-Prince, an experience that continues to inform her work. She earned a master’s in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts and attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Trained as a painter, Cybil has delved into many artistic mediums. Over the years, her work has focused on developing a cohesive language to articulate a diasporic culture and the search for that language has been the thread linking her different bodies of work, whether mixed-media paintings, prints, or three-dimensional work. Early on, Cybil started mining various forms of popular art and crafts from the Caribbean, looking at self-taught painting traditions, textile work, as well as the spiritual traditions and sacred art forms of the African diaspora; in essence rethinking these traditions within a diasporic perspective. Recent bodies of work include Pantéon, When the Saints Go Marching! which explores how the Afro-diaspora developed a visual lexicon as a means of adapting to unfamiliar and unforgiving conditions. Her Old World/New World painting series piece seemingly disparate cultural references and textures into modernist compositions. These works weave together personal histories with markers from both Caribbean and American cultures, generating a complex narrative for the viewer to decipher. For example, the blue jeans, boots, and straw hats that are recurrent images in the paintings can be read equally as iconic cultural markers that belong to American cowboys or as the sacred attributes of Zaka, the deity of agriculture in Haitian Vodou. The duality and ambiguity leave viewers to ponder how they personally construct meaning. Cybil’s artistic practice also encompasses public work and has completed a recent commission for JCC (Jewish Community Center) of Harlem which is now part of their permanent collection. Cybil has been a resident at the Studio Museum in Harlem and more recently, at Fountainhead studios in Miami. Her work has been featured in the 2006 Venice Biennale and exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio and The Bronx Museum. Cybil participated in the Biennial del Caribe in the Dominican Republic, the Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador, and the Panama Biennial in 2003. Her work has been included in Le Grand Palais in Paris and shows such as Relational Undercurrents at MOLA, Bordering the Imaginary at BRIC House, Caribbean Crossroad at the Perez Museum in Miami, and a solo exhibit at Five Myles Plus Space. A lifelong educator, Cybil lectures regularly and recent talks have included the LASA congress in Boston, Columbia University, Rutgers University, the CUNY Graduate Center, and Notre Dame University. She currently resides in Harlem and works from her studio in an old indigo mill.
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