Reception
January 25, 2020, 6 – 10 pm
Entering Sacred Grounds
For her solo project at Dimensions Variable (DV), artist Charo Oquet will be creating an installation of recent work in our main gallery that will be activated by two performances and a conversation.
Although its production began in late 2018, This project has been in gestation since 2011, when the research for this work started. This project melds installation, ceramic, and movement with voices that addresses critical issues of contemporary Dominican immigrant and queer culture to explore issues of immigration and social injustices reflecting the current cultural, social, and political realities and the tenuous line between memory, and reality through narratives that unfold within a landscape.
Enter Sacred Grounds explores concepts of sacred spaces and spiritual encounters. It creates an ambiguous and safe space where fictional and functional dimensions are blended, creating a third territory of language. The installation will include works that imply that they are markers of energy that have become the conduits of energy. Like chakra stones that mark the radiation of energy within the earth or the body. It includes pieces from research into the origins of magic writing such as veves and the endeavor to unite abstraction with mythical concepts. It will highlight the multidimensional character of rituals and politics.
Charo Oquet
Charo Oquet is an artist, organizer, cultural producer, curator and founder of Edge Zones, Zones Art Fair and The Miami Performance Festival. Oquet’s art practice moves beyond the bounds of the studio, gallery and institution and extends into the realm of the social, where she explores systems of movement and migration, assimilation and resistance. With her work, the artist seeks to “engage with issues and contexts that affect Afro-Caribbean people both in their native countries as well as in the USA. Oquet works in a range of media: performance, installation, video, photography, paintings, sculpture and printmaking. The thread that connects her work is an engagement with social questions confronting decolonizing narratives, migration and aesthetics and a desire to push formal and conceptual boundaries while challenging stereotypes of African Americans. She has produced a wide-ranging body of work across multiple media
Oquet’s work is part of the permanent collection of The Frost Art Museum in Miami, The Bass Museum, Miami, The Museum of Ft. Lauderdale, New Zealand National Museum Wellington, N.Z. Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL, CAAM, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canarias, Spain, Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, New Zealand, Govett-Brewter Art Gallery, N. Z., Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wellington, N. Z., Museo de las Casas Reales, Dominican Republic.
Oquet has in numerous international solo exhibitions at museums and galleries such as The xiii Havana Biennial, Project Row Houses, Huston, TX, the Bass Museum in Miami; Audio Foundation, Auckland, New Zealand. Casal Solleric, Palma, Mallorca; Convento de Santo Domingo, Lanzarote Cannary Islands, Spain and has participated in prestigiously curated group exhibitions such as Art Religion and Politics (2005) curated by Jean-Huber Martin; Mami Watta, curated by Henry Drewal at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, (2008); After Columbus.com, Kunstnerne Hus, Oslo, Norway, (2003); V Biennal del Caribe’03, Museo de Arte Moderno de Santo Domingo; En Ruta PR’02, M&M Projects Puerto Rico, curated by Antonio Zaya; Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) Gran Canarias, Spain; and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, N.Z. In 1996 Oquet founded the non-profit arts organization Miami Arts Collaborative, which in 2004 assumed its current title Edge Zones. With Edge Zones, Oquet has curated numerous exhibitions and showcased Dominican and Miami artists nationally and internationally by creating year-round programs and has authored eight books: Arrayanos-(2016), Arrayanos Portraits (2018), Arrayanos – Interiors/Exteriors (2018), Charo Oquet – Performance (2018), (Miami Now (2005), Wet (2006), Wet II (2007) and Supermix (2008) which include the works of hundreds of Florida and internationally based artists. Oquet is also the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including: Map Funds 2014; Florida State Artists Fellowship Award; State of Florida Artists Enhancement Grant; South Florida Cultural Consortium 2015 and ’05 Visual and Media Artists Fellowship Award; Creative Capital Grant; South Florida Cultural Artists Access Grant; New Forms Florida Grant; and QE II Arts Council of N.Z. Artist Fellowship 84, 85 and 86. In addition being reviewed by Art in America, the Miami Herald, Atlantica Art Journal, African Arts, Art in America, Art Nexus and Art New Zealand, Oquet has been included in many publications including but not limited to New Hoodoo Art of a Forgotten Faith (2008); Files by Octavio Zaya; Miami Contemporary Artists; New Zealand’s National Museum Te Papa Calendar (2009); Dominican Contemporary Artists, Supermix and a book dedicated to her work “Charo Oquet – What the Mermaid Sees” that was published in Lanzarote Spain, by Antonio Zaya in 2002. She has published “Arrayanos”, “Arrayanos – Portraits” and “Arrayanos – Interiors” in 2018.
