Joiri Minaya makes work about what we don’t see. It’s not simply that her videos, photographs, and more turn a lens on ignored populations, such as locals walled off from a Caribbean resort in her video “Labadee.” Minaya invites us into the dark of our blindness — she calls it opacity — in her show “Gazing Back” at University Hall Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Minaya’s art registers a double consciousness. She was born in New York, was raised in the Dominican Republic, and returned to New York to go to art school. She still lives there. The Dominican Republic as a tropical paradise, her work says, is a fiction shaped by an imbalance of power that goes back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival there in 1492.
That alluring fiction includes sultry visions of Dominican women. Minaya’s photo-sculpture installation “#dominicanwomengooglesearch” features pixelated cutouts of chunks of bikini-clad women suspended from the ceiling. The format brings the unreality of the Internet into real space, and demonstrates how desire flattens and objectifies.
