
Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multi-media artist currently living in the United States. Plaisir’s work examines the concept of social domination, and explores issues of colonialism alongside those of race and class, through a range of media which include painting, sculpture, photography, installation, film, and performance to present intense visual experiences. She examines, in particular, the construction of identity, and she asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today through new reflexes and how people who were born in the struggle of domination and power behave. She underlines the common issues between US black history and Caribbean History: the labor movements, and the fights for equality through literature, philosophy, and history.
Plaisir’s work is first and foremost a research laboratory based on documentary history, as well as literary and sound sources that I mine recombine as visual tools in production. She, therefore, works fluidly in many media and may realize a concept of distinct materials, such as porcelain and bronze sculpture, drawings, monumental work in aluminum, natural fiber textiles, and videos. Many pieces combine different media to ignite the imagination and evoke emotions, and captive universal truths and aspirations by engaging powerful visuals, imagination, and history. Her work explores the concepts of meta/count narratives about domination and the construction of Identity, a hybrid between activism and dreaming.
Her visual narrative becomes an act of multifaceted and interdisciplinary translation, manifested in a multitude of synonyms, symbols, and codes - by which she defines acts of domination as playing a major role in the reproduction of social relationships that is at the heart of globalization.
The works both resist and hope- they are reflective and will not only draw awareness to the importance of challenging harmful histories, but also speak to the interconnections of humans, the universality of fractured identities, and the power of recognizing and depicting inner worlds.