Edge Zones Miami Extends its Borders – Vanessa Garcia

Courtesy of artist

Experimentation, risk and avant-garde, none of these terms are ever very far from Charo Oquet’s mouth. Miami artist and curator Charo Oquet is well-known in Miami as the mother hen of the emerging artist and the voodoo princess of the Diasporic installation.

Oquet is the founder of Edge Zones, an artist initiative in Miami dedicated to emerging and mid-career artists who are interested in exploring new zones of creativity. Pushing the cultural edge, so to speak, in her ex-feather-factory-turned-enormous-and-labyrinthine-art gallery, you can usually find a gem or two amid a large selection of sculpture, installation, photography, painting and mixed-media work by varying artists.

She has dedicated herself to both the physical space of the ex-factory and to the figurative one that extends beyond a wing’s sweep. This past March, I was lucky enough to be a part of Oquet’s latest venture, a project called "Reassessing the Diaspora," which took fifteen Florida-based artists to Santo Domingo. There, the artists explored both the city center and later, the opposite end of the country in Puerto Plata.

The idea was for the artists to create art and performances with materials they found in Santo Domingo. All the while, the artists tried not to impose themselves, but to create a dialogue with the people in what, to many of the artists, was a foreign culture in a strange city. Soon those strangers, however, became participants and the group of artists was invited to become a part of the cultural plaza around the Museum of Modern art in Santo Domingo. The plaza became full with the vibrancy of dance, movement, performance, painting, drawing, sculpture and cultural exchange. Here is a sampling of the artists and what they did.

Caryana Castillo is a painter and self-proclaimed "performancera." Castillo, a Dominican native, was the group’s Virgil on the trip: "our spiritual and rough-guide throughout the country." Born in Santiago de los Caballeros, she both lives and works in the Dominican Republic. Among her many interventions and performances throughout the trip, Castillo rode a bicycle with a banner of the ex-dictator Trujillo that read "Trujillo 2006," pointing to the political inadequacies that plague Santo Domingo and the DR.

Pip and Duane Brant are mixed-media artists. Pointing to yet another political inadequacy, the kind every American carries with him/her, everywhere they go, aka: the embarrassment of President Bush, the dynamic duo did as they always do; they spoke out. The Brants, among their many works throughout the trip, set up Woo Doo Parlors. The project, which has been to Lithuania, as well as Miami and Boston, is "meant to collect the comments, curses and praises about the current U.S. president," says Pip Brant. Throughout, Pip set up stuffed dolls of the president, with post-its, pens and pins. People could write as they wished on the post-its and then stick-it-to Mr. Bush.

Raimundo Travieso is what might be called a master draftsman. On the other end of the spiritual spectrum is Travieso, who’s long, gray beard and beady eyes, delicacy of touch and voice, might mistake him for a monk. In Santo Domingo, Travieso claimed also to "do what he always does," he says. To him this means, "to surprise people with [his] drawings where they wouldn’t usually expect them, in the hopes of leading people towards meditation." His drawings are simple lines that merge with digital pixels to form both the misshapen and heavenly of body. For "Reassessing the Diaspora," Travieso laminated his drawings to protect them from rain and placed these drawings not only outside the walls of the museum, but also near benches and amid the brick and stone walls of the colonial center or zona colonial in Santo Domingo.

Lauren Garber, a draftsman, who is also usually recognized for the use of drawing in her work, extended her lines in Santo Domingo and Puerto Plata through what she called her Yellow Bag Project. At one point, she tied yellow bags together at the MoMA, Santo Domingo, creating a long umbilical-cord-like-line that wavered and came to life when the wind hit it. She held one end at the entrance of the museum with a stone and allowed the line to drift outward, shifting, gathering dust and territory, but marking nothing permanently creating an ethereality that is present in much of Garber’s work.

Sara Stite’s work, speaking of ethereality, was the epitome of this on the trip. While her work often mixed with the literal landscape it also tended to disappear, both literally and figuratively. "Even though I brought with me the tools of my trade, paper, pencils and pens…I felt pushed by the very nature of the enterprise to use materials found in the city that I could infuse with my own practice," says Stites.

After making a lace-like mantle of found-plastic around the fountain in the museum, a mantle which disappeared the next day, she then made small sculptures that seemed to merge with the rock and plant life around her.

Margaret Ross Tolbert’s work on the trip, like Garber’s, also contained a certain ebb and flow. Tolbert explains "during several days of touring markets, streets, plazas, cafeterias … I sketched stream-of-consciousness renditions of people and places I encountered. I transferred these to large 1 X 1 or 2 meter sheets of plastic and strung them on lines between trees in front of the MoMA where they blew in the wind and offered a world of translucent cartoons cataloguing the interface between tourists and people."

Another Tolbert project included a dance she called The Ciguapa. The name is derived from a mythological, Dominican, female persona characterized much like a siren, the same long hair that lures. The Ciguapa, however, has the original quality of backwards-turned-feet, to help her evade her pursuers. As the Ciguapa, Tolbert danced to drums and shakers and vernacular instruments from the market, with backwards shoes on a hopscotch court.

Rachel Hoffman, also a transplanted Ciguapa of sorts, created a piece in a series of what she likes to call Trance Plants and/or Hechizos Para el Amor (Love Spells). Hoffman brought with her, from Florida, the beginnings of a red and gold costume that mixed attributes of Venus with the Yoruba-deity Ochun. The costume grew and morphed over the course of her visit, as she sewed on additions of fabric, musical instruments and adornments she found throughout her stay in the DR. She then performed in her costume, painting herself in red and glitter. "The metamorphosis of the sculpture, as well as the body became a metaphor for wandering, exodus, germination and the human ability to adapt to change."

Yovani Bauta’s performance, more visceral than Hoffman’s neo-fantastic suite, was, like Pip and Duane Brant’s piece, a critique of America. Dressed in army fatigues, he strapped a piece of meat to his back and journeyed from the market to the museum, attracting flies and spectators as he called out for people to join the war in Iraq. Bauta, who as of recently, was painting Soutine-like pieces of meat on canvas, appropriately took his painting to the next and most corporeal level yet.

Ivan Depena’s work played on a different idea of blood. His work entitled Have You Seen This Person, expounds on his rooting in the DR. "Since I have a genetic connection to the DR (in particular Santo Domingo) via my estranged father, I wanted to do a public self portrait that confronts the disconnection.

How he did it, after having his DNA sampled, he used the genetic footprint as a light sculpture that was temporarily displayed in the MoMA, Santo Domingo’s courtyard.

Oquet not only led the group throughout but she also participated as an artist with her partner in life and work, David Vardi. Among the many interventions led by Oquet, one was enitled Atadura or All Tied Up. Oquet, herself Dominican-born, tied herself to a Haitian, exemplifying the problems that arise out of being so physically lined to another third-world country. Together, the bound pair dodged the pegs of a rubber ball thrown at them as part of the performance.

As for myself, my trip to Santo Domingo was the first of a long series of trips within a project I am calling Model City. The idea is to collect information from around the world about how to create new cities in a globalized world and society.

Through journeys to ten to fifteen urban centers from New Orleans to Dubai, Santo Domingo to London, I will gather, collect, study and filter data. In Santo Domingo I interviewed city officials, missionaries, citizens and orphans alike. I asked them to tell me what their ideal city would be like. Many of them wrote their responses on a piece of paper, which I then stitched together at the MoMA, Santo Domingo. These ideas are the foundation of a painting I am continuing to make, the first in a series of blueprints for model cities. I will make one creative blueprint painting for each city I visit.

As for all of us as artists, nomadic as we are by nature, we went along throughout this trip to Santo Domingo, all of us gathering, collecting and leaving things behind as all seeds of Diaspora tend to do. Some of these projects will grow into larger ones, some will float as they are or, rather, linger.