In the midst of a global climate emergency, the artist’s timely photographic collages reconsider gender and identity in the Dominican Republic.
Who’s she smiling at? What’s she selling? What’s she hiding? She’s wearing the Caribbean blue sea. The hills. The palm trees. The flower: a third eye.
Joiri Minaya created Woman-landscape (On Opacity) #4 (2020) as part of a series in which she collages vintage postcards advertising the Dominican Republic, superimposing samples of commercially available “tropical prints” and archival images in a way that strategically obscures an easy knowability of the subject. Minaya, born in New York and raised in the Dominican Republic, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates the body within constructions of gender, identity, social space, and landscape, complicating hierarchies through hybridity, challenging otherness, and, most recently, thinking through opacity.
