Joiri Minaya

Description of the exhibition

Québecers have built a fantasy of the South: “snowbirds” escaping the ice and cold to bask on a warm, sunny beach. Double Trouble evokes this fantasy. In it, Joiri Minaya critically examines how the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean have been imagined, commercialized, and consumed. In the gallery space, floral-print fabric, reminiscent of tourist shirts and other tropical-themed items, invites us to reflect on the notion of paradise, those who define it, and the exploitative practices that allow it to flourish.
On top of these textile prints hang framed images of women wrapped in similar fabrics. Their poses mimic ones from countless online images that Minaya found in a Google search for “Dominican women.” The body therefore becomes a vessel that carries our own projections of it, namely in terms of gender and ethnic identity. Here, the women highlight a paradox: although, much like the landscape, they seem to exist to be viewed solely through the dominant gaze of the colonizer, they also resist, and beneath their opaque veils they remain untouchable.

Artist biography

Joiri Minaya

(Born and lives in New York City, New York, United States)

Joiri Minaya considers her work a reassertion of self, an exercise in unlearning, decolonizing, and exorcising imposed histories, cultures, and ideas. In her most recent projects, she destabilizes historical and contemporary representations of imagined tropical identity. Her work, which has been exhibited in the Dominican Republic, the United States, Argentina, and Martinique, is in the collections of the Santo Domingo Museo de Arte Moderno, the Centro León Jiménes, the Kemper Museum, and the Museo del Barrio.