Until January 8, 2024, Florine Démosthène unveils a sensational new body of work to contemporary art lovers. Through an assertive artistic practice, the artist achieves a powerful exploration of mysterious human forms in her exhibition “Mastering the dream“. An immersive artistic presentation at the SCAD Art Museum (Savannah College of Art and Design).
M. Florine Démosthène is a contemporary artist born in 1971 in New York, USA, who grew up between Port-au-Prince, Haiti and New York. She materializes her art through mediums such as multimedia, collage and experimental sculpture. Earning her BFA from New York’s Parsons School of Design and her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York, her artistic practice centers on black female forms that address more abstract themes such as human transformation and collective experience.
M. Florine Démosthène’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, Europe and Africa. The artist’s most recent exhibitions include In the Realm of Love at Galerie Mariane Ibrahim, Paris; The Armory Show, New York, with Galerie Mariane Ibrahim; and les histoires que je me raconte at Galerie 1957, Accra, Ghana. These works are also part of the collections of the Lowe Art Museum; the National Museum of African American History and Culture; Africa First; the Hessel Museum of Art; the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art; the University of South Africa (UNISA) and various private collections worldwide.
In her works, the contemporary artist depicts strange dystopian aspects of flesh and human forms in unstable settings. In her “Mastering the dream” exhibition, the viewer seems to catch a glimpse of craggy female silhouettes, assembled in amalgams of bodies on empty white backgrounds. The evanescence of the background is further enhanced by the use of paint, glitter and ink on mylar, lending a floating, translucent vision to the artist’s silhouettes.
The gleaming surfaces of the works and the figures appear to be made of marble and enhanced with an aquatic touch, drawing the viewer into a captivating phantasmagorical world. The forms that emerge from Mr. Florine Démosthène’s creations relate to twirling celestial beings that transcend spontaneous readings of identity. The idyllic glimpse provided by her works encourages the public to take a supernatural approach to deciphering their meaning.
The new pieces exhibited by the artist also make reference to the sanctuaries of the Fon people of Benin and the Ewe people of Ghana. Through this creation of unique works, M. Florine Démosthène reveals the recent spiritual influences that his stay in Ghana has had on his pictorial artistic practice. “Mastering the dream” is an exhibition that interweaves dream and nightmare, dream and reality, drawing the public into a complex, almost fictional dimension in which the artistic practice of contemporary artist Florine Démosthène evolves.