Scherezade Garcia: In Transit/Liquid Highway

Scherezade Garcia’s work inhabits a baroque universe. A natural storyteller, she uses drawing, printmaking, painting, installation, and other media to create contemporary allegories about history, colonization, and politics. Found objects, including life jackets, inner tubes, suitcases, mattresses, tents, umbrellas, religious icons, and newspapers, are transformed within her work. She has explored the consequences of migration, beliefs about salvation, and both optimistic and cynical notions of paradise. A recurring theme in her works is the very difficult experience of migration, and the feeling of being afloat, unmoored. Her works reflect on the losses and gains of emigration.

Memories lurk in the shadows beneath sun-spotted waves that can turn treacherous in the Canal de la Mona. The aquí y allá, the back-and-forth of the New York-Santo Domingo flight, journeys over so much deep water that in an instant can become a grave. On her lushly painted surfaces, delicate screen-printed drawings and stamped images surrounded by handwriting create a dancing linear web, a cresting froth. These waves, sparkling, inviting, and also terrifying and crashing, are metonyms for the journeys of transplanted Dominican communities. They are now the largest and most rapidly growing Latino community in New York, nearly a million strong. This new work explores what Garcia calls “the liquid frontier,” the wild, dangerous unknown that stands between the Caribbean, and a new life.

Scherezade Garcia's site-specific work for Miller Theatre Lobby is co-commissioned and co-presented by Miller Theatre and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery. This is the third collaborative project between Columbia University's two major artistic presenting spaces.