ARCO Madrid: Joiri Minaya

March 6 - 10, 2024

Praise Shadows is honored to present Joiri Minaya in "the shore, the tide, the current: an oceanic Carribean" section of ARCO Madrid in Marco 2024. The section of the fair, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates and Sara Hermann, is a "reading of the complex and fecund intersection between land and sea articulated from and towards the shore. We suggest a point of departure, a place where we set forth, from the visualities, sonorities, essences, and senses, a dialogic proposal on histories, memories, and identities that are in constant flow, transformation, and mutation".

 

To request more information about the presentation, please email gallery@praiseshadows.com. 

 

To purchase ARCO Madrid tickets.

  • JOIRI MINAYA
    Photo by Auri Minaya

    JOIRI MINAYA

    Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multidisciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013). She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop, ISCP, Art Omi, Vermont Studio Center, New Wave, Silver Art Projects and Fountainhead. She has received awards, fellowships and grants from NYSCA / NYFA, Jerome Hill, Artadia, the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Nancy Graves Foundation, amongst other organizations. Minaya’s work is in the collections of the Santo Domingo Museo de Arte Moderno, the Centro León Jiménes, the Kemper Museum, El Museo del Barrio and several private collections.
     
    "My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas. It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S. / global North; using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity. I’ve learned there is a Gaze thrust upon me which others me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency. Inter-disciplinarily, I explore the performativity of tropical identity as product: the performance of labor, decoration, beauty, leisure, service." — Joiri Minaya
  • Mikhail Mishin for Praise Shadows Art Gallery (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Mikhail Mishin for Praise Shadows Art Gallery (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Mikhail Mishin for Praise Shadows Art Gallery (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Mikhail Mishin for Praise Shadows Art Gallery (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Mikhail Mishin for Praise Shadows Art Gallery (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

    Mikhail Mishin for Praise Shadows Art Gallery

  • Praise Shadows will present an installation by Joiri Minaya titled Sunset Slit, which comprises multiple elements centered around a performance from 2015. Included are photographic prints documenting the performance, a towel “painted” from her hair at the performance, a wallpaper design, and a photographic print.

     

    Sunset Slit is part of a body of work that deals with otherness, self-consciousness and displacement. It specifically relates to how the people and environments of the tropical regions have been historically idealized by others, and the subsequent internalization and re-performing of those fantasies by the subjects in which they are originated in the first place.

     

    Sunset Slit Installation

    2015 - 2022
    Commercial towels, charcoal pigment, wallpaper vinyl, framed archival pigment prints

    Towel: 193 x 90.5 inches / 490 x 230 centimeters
    Wallpaper: custom to install
    Print Triptych: (image size) 30 x 20 inches each / 76 x 51 centimeters

    Sunset Slip print: (image size) 16 3/8 x 11 1⁄2 inches / 42 x 29 centimeters

  • The towel installation is the result of a 2015 performance where Minaya repeatedly immersed her braided head in a bucket...

    The towel installation is the result of a 2015 performance where Minaya repeatedly immersed her braided head in a bucket of clean water and whipped her hair back. The water turned black and began to stain her white shirt, her white bikini underneath and the white rug on which she was kneeling. The rug is from 18 sewn white towels.

  • Sunset Slit parts from the exhausted image of a woman leisurely emerging from a big body of water and whipping...

    Sunset Slit parts from the exhausted image of a woman leisurely emerging from a big body of water and whipping her hair back. Usually presented in a still or slowed down form, this pop-culture trope carries a tired narrative that builds fantasies of leisure and pleasure from the cliché pairing of women and idyllic landscapes. By reproducing this idealized gesture over and over again in the incongruous, almost opposite context of a NYC basement, Minaya intended to create a space where meaning can be transformed through the absurd and the pointlessly laborious.