Vickie Pierre | Fred Snitzer Gallery

Vickie Pierre’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, I Just Wanna Love Who You Really Are. Pierre’s presentation focuses on mixed media works from her ongoing Poupées in the Bush series. This series references her Haitian heritage, Caribbean culture, and broader cultural mythologies worldwide. 

Pierre continues investigating self-identity, ethnicity, and spirituality in her recent work celebrating the beauty, diversity, and blend of world cultures. Pierre references Folk art, Arts and Crafts, and Pattern and Decoration (Miriam Schapiro et al.) movements as departure points in her process. Her fem characters are voluptuous, zaftig forms that declare their presence while embodying divine otherworldliness. These mythological figures, inspired by Hans Bellmer’s provocative and deconstructed dolls, are both reclamation and representation of “she forms/sisters” or the black female body. The series is also meant as a rebuke of the images of indigenous women as seen in National Geographic magazines, etc., as savages or exoticized bodies. 

Pierre creates increasingly complex lattice-like structures that envelope each entity, an evolution from previous iterations. Other recurring adornments include various types of botanical imagery taking the form of crowns, flora clusters surrounding the body/forms, and gleaming golden jewelry elements like rings, broaches, and hairpins recalling tribal jewelry or ritual dress. 

Another development takes form in scale, expanding on her previously intimate-sized paper works to almost 6 ft height canvas-wrapped panels. Interpreted through the lens of the African diaspora, these two significant pieces loosely refer to Greek primordial deities such as Nyx and Gaia, personifications of the night and earth, respectively. Oval frames of collaged paper and glittered surfaces adorn each of the works, with the center of the figures’ faces coated in black glittered surfaces, absorbing the viewer’s gaze into the darkness of space and time, past and present.