Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club, 3925 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33140
Dates of Exhibition: November 14, 2024 through December 12, 2024
Marielle Plaisir is a French Caribbean multimedia artist, designer, and public art artist who has been living and working in the United States since 2015.
She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions across galleries and museums in Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and the US. She is represented by Snitzer Gallery (Miami, USA), Tafeta Gallery (London, UK), and K Contemporary (Denver, USA).
Since 2028, she’s collaborating as a design with the French Company Roche-Bobois. She’s the CEO and creative designer of the luxury fashion brand LES BARBARES.
Plaisir’s work is a profound exploration of the concepts of domination and supremacy, themes she has been investigating for many years. Although she began her career as a painter, she now works across a variety of disciplines—including painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance—to create intense visual experiences that delve into her French-Caribbean heritage against the backdrop of postcolonialism. Through her practice, she examines issues of race, class, and social domination in the contemporary world. By looking at prejudice through the lens of body politics, she identifies moments of struggle and social control over the Black body, then carefully deconstructs these systems to reconstruct new, liberating, and empowering realities and counter-narratives.
Plaisir’s creative process is rooted in research, drawing on documentary history, literature, and sound to inform her work. She blends different media to ignite the imagination, evoke emotions, and capture universal cultural truths. Within her work, she creates a unique, vibrant, and poetic universe that relies on lyricism and beauty to transform difficult, painful, and provocative subjects. Her art subtly but precisely penetrates the viewer’s consciousness, revealing the madness and irony embedded in what is often considered beautiful and elegant, particularly in relation to Black lives, celebrity, and citizenship.
Plaisir’s work focuses on the construction of identity and questions what constitutes our collective contemporary identity, especially for those born into struggles for domination and power. She highlights the commonalities between US Black history and Caribbean history, such as labor movements and the fight for equality, while extending her work’s relevance to any group that has survived acts of domination. Through her multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach, Plaisir’s work resists harmful histories and offers hope for a better future. She draws attention to the interconnections between humans, the universality of fractured identities, and the power of recognizing and depicting inner worlds. Her socially engaged works transcend temporal and cultural boundaries, offering a visual meditation on the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
The common thread throughout Plaisir’s work is a critique of prejudice, where she replaces moments of violence with overwhelming beauty, envisioning “a world in which no one ‘dominates’ or ‘reigns’; instead, everyone moves freely between reality and imagination.” Her artistic approach also draws parallels between different historical periods, exploring the representation of power and struggle.
Artist Marielle Plaisir presents “Rhapsody for a Beloved World.” Through a multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach, Plaisir strives to resist harmful histories and offers hope for a better future. Plaisir draws attention to the interconnections between humans, the universality of fractured identities and the power of recognizing and describing inner worlds. Plaisir’s socially engaged works transcend temporal and cultural boundaries, serving as visual meditations on the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity. The color-drenched collage features elaborate compositions of elements, combining intricate botanical images of lush foliage with salvaged vintage black and white photographs as well as elements of landscape paintings.
https://www.marielleplaisir.com/
Photo credit: Monica McGivern