Jorge González Santos
Chaveli Sifre
Melissa Raymond et René Sandín
Joel Rodríguez Vargas
Radamés « Juni » Figueroa

L’état incertain / An Uncertain State
01.12–02.11.2023
Room 1

An Uncertain State gathers and weaves the works of a group of artists whose practices meander through territorial retrieval, sensorial awareness and contemporary notions of tropical aesthetics.

The exhibition is imagined as opening a discussion on the idea of what an uncertain state can be — both territorially, in reference to Puerto Rico’s associated relationship to the United States, and somatically, as in a state of being. The title is taken from an article published in 1983 by National Geographic — The Uncertain State of Puerto Rico — which gives a third-worldesque overview of Puerto Rico’s economic and sociopolitical dynamics of the time. Now taken almost forty years after, and in the context of the natural and political disasters that have kept inflicting the island nation in recent years, the notion surfaces that perhaps uncertainty is embraceable, in so far and as long as the opposite — certainty — is colonially defined.

The exhibition aims to rethink the gallery space as a tropical-infused sensorial environment: a microcosm that elicits a state of reception, an anti-productive tropicality, a gateway to kinship and the opening of the senses — all seen here as expanded forms of identity, and of resistance.

Through her scent-driven works, Chaveli Sifre invokes the non-static, permeating power of air and atmosphere — by the agency of aromas, auras, breeze or humidity — as a subtle subversion mechanism informed by ancestral Caribbean care and healing knowledge. Jorge González centers his practice around Boricua (Puerto Rican) folklore and craft, the sharing of know-how, and the act of weaving — that of natural fibers and community — creating an inclusive presence of the indigenous within the modern. The often jaunty works of Radamés “Juni” Figueroa, involving plants, balls, spiked tropical fruit fountains and typical miami style windows are a celebration of tropical living, while also a defiant stance against docility and well-manneredism. The sound works of Joel Rodríguez offer a filtered gaze of paradise, undercoated in political reverberations, mirroring the work of duo Melissa Raymond and René Sandín on the sensorial and geopolitical properties of color through the reproduction of color schemes found along Puerto Rico’s roads and utility poles.

The approach taken here is that of an “aménagement” of CLARK’s gallery — seeking to arrange and inhabit the space with the artworks — invoking a gateway to the Caribbean. By way of juxtaposing the works, allowing them to overlap and come together, the spatial boundaries normally given to artworks are blurred in favor of a communal, compounded perspective and portrayal of the Puerto Rican archipelago. One where the senses are summoned towards an approach to understanding land and identity.

— Melissa Raymond and René Sandín