BROOKLINE, Mass. — Aloe plants hang from the large front window of Praise Shadows Art Gallery. They are an apt introduction to New York-based artist Joiri Minaya’s solo show, The Great Camouflage; the plants are everywhere in Minaya’s work, patterning the bodysuits she slips out of in her three new photo collages, spotlit in delicate gouache paintings, or protecting the artist’s hair in the video “Sábila / Leche” (2015).

Used in purifying customs in her native Dominican Republic, the plants also represent their part in centuries of transatlantic displacement — healing, killing, perpetuating corrupt commerce. The pink-veined leaves so exquisitely rendered in the painting “Enfolding Castor Leaves” (2021) decorate the cloth used to cloak an imperialist monument in 2021, the same fabric Minaya has captured herself shedding in the photo collage “Shield” (2022).

Breaking through the camouflage in this piece is a slice of tender belly, and — with her brown flesh undisguised — the strength of her next act. For years she reflected society’s warped perceptions of Indigenous and diasporic peoples by positioning individuals in the reductive imagery of the mass-produced textiles used to exploit entire cultures and market them as vacation paradises. Now, she is beginning to reveal the people behind the patterns.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.