CHARO OQUET

REPRESENTED ARTIST

Charo Oquet is a Dominican born, Miami based, interdisciplinary artist. Charo Oquet's wide-reaching practice includes performance, sculpture, installation, painting, fashion, video, and photography. She has exhibited, performed, curated, and lectured around the world since 1981. Oquet has received numerous awards and Artist Fellowships. She is known for her dynamic installations, which incorporate idioms of popular Afro-Caribbean religions. Her work has been featured in notable publications. Oquet's work is found in the permanent collections in museums around the world. As an art activist, she founded Edge Zones, a non-profit arts organization in Miami, FL, The Miami Performance Festival and Zones Art Fair Miami. Oquet is the author of SuperMix, Wet 2, Wet, Arrayanos Portraits, and Arrayanos Interiors. As the artistic director of Edge Zones and the festivals, she has curated numerous exhibitions and festivals since 2003.

ARTWORKS

These gravity-defying ceramics stacked constructions struggle to soar beyond the boundaries of the spaces that contain them, often appearing to teeter in the brink of collapse. They are essentially diasporic, coming from various territorial and conceptual geographies that are the instruments of connection between today and the past and a new future. I try to create pieces where a process of mestizaje capable of arming dissident ways of live, intertwined with my family history.

The colors, bright, chaotic, disruptive of a rich tropical load, bright light, universe of the Caribbean pallet, have archetypal symbols connected to the African heritage, visual party made plastic, symphonic permanence, with a transmission of joy, cheerful feelings that evoke directly the therapeutic action of planting, building and maintaining a garden, in this case, a permanent garden, which is mud in a state of crystallization (ceramics).

The Jars Series