2024 Plural art fair
“Phylogeny is a body of work addressing themes of climate change and destruction, cross-species mutation and extinction, including humans, which is a set of ideas I believe to be thematically pertinent and relevant to my practice at this time. The series is intended to further realise and resolve past work about immigration and diasporic social, ideological, spiritual and cultural movement and change. The intention is also to move it into a space that critiques and analyzes the way we educate society through museums and museum display, archiving, and the practices related to that particular type of teaching and its inherent acceptance, tone, biases, assumptions, and limitations.”
– Rajni Perera
“I drew inspiration from family archive images of my parents’ generation in Haiti to create the the Ombre Portrait (Shadow Portrait) series. Reflecting on the concepts of cultural identity and memory, the darkness of these intensely opaque bodies resembles an abyss. These immense voids do not serve to erase their identities but rather to represent the vastness of stories and the numerous layers of memories.”
– Michaëlle Sergile
Manuel Mathieu (b. 1986) is a multi-disciplinary artist, working with painting, ceramics, film and installation. Mathieu’s interests are partially informed from his upbringing in Haiti – just after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship – and his experience emigrating to Montréal at the age of 19. His art investigates themes of historical violence, erasure, resilience and cultural approaches to physicality, nature and spiritual legacy.
