By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN
When she was four, the artist Widline Cadet was separated from her mother for six years as she emigrated from Haiti to New York to pursue a better life for her family. Cadet, her father and older sister remained in Thomassin, eventually joining her. During that time, her father would travel back and forth, bringing a small number of photographs between them — it was how Cadet learned she had a new baby sister, too, as her mom settled in New York City’s Hamilton Heights.
But photographs of her own childhood and family were scarce. At 10 years old, she reunited with her mother in New York, but as she grew into adulthood, Cadet realized that she didn’t know her well at all. Nor did she have a larger sense of her family, the ancestral threads that weave back through time. Her mother didn’t have a picture of her own mother. Memories faded with each passing year.
Now, for nearly a decade, Cadet has been crafting her own multi-generational “living archive,” mixing together photographs, video, sound and sculpture to explore the connection and disconnection of the diasporic experience, and make visible the elusiveness of memory. Over the past few years, she has shown parts of the archive at major museums, galleries and art fairs, and has published it in book form. The largest presentation of her work to date is on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum, for the show, “Currents 40: Widline Cadet.”
“Something happened in the process of me becoming a photographer that made me really think about these images and the roles they play in our lives,” she explained during an interview at the newly opened exhibition.
Cadet’s multimedia pieces have always been transportive, but walking through the show’s spacious galleries feels akin to traversing her mind, becoming swept into her enigmatic scenes based on fragments of memory or scarce family images, as well as the other photographs she’s made to fill the gaps. Often, she plays with both notions, towing the line being real and imagined, she explained.
“When I started making the work, I thought broadly about creating an archive — more so in the strict sense of taking pictures for the purpose of being archived,” she said. “But along the way, I think things got more imaginative and fluid in the ways that I’m thinking.”
Because of that melding, her photographs are rarely a straight read. She often embeds them with small videos, prints them to fold into the junctures of gallery walls, or frames them within portal-like half-circle frames, redolent of a window shape seen in one of her grandparents’ photos.
Within the artist’s images, faces turn away, figures disappear into the luminous dark, and hues nearly vibrate with technicolor saturation. She probes both the intimacy of relationships and the tricks of memory, casting strangers as her sisters or friends as stand-ins for herself. Even a photo of Cadet’s mother holding her baby sister — which the artist had never seen until she began hunting for images — feels like the soft edges of a dream. In the museum, Cadet printed the small, grainy image as a wall-spanning altarpiece, flanked by rows of colorful sculptures of aloe plants. It’s titled “I put all my hopes on you.”
“I use this image because I think it felt important as a starting point,” she said. “She’s my mom’s last child; she was born in the US. Thinking about my mom in that moment, all the things she must have been going through, I wanted to have a space for that experience.”
Kristen Gaylord, who curated the show, said that Cadet’s work has a resonance to it, even though it is particular to her own upbringing.
“She’s very deeply excavating her own archive, and there’s something about that specificity, almost paradoxically, that makes it more relatable to a lot of people,” Gaylord said. “The stories that she tells about her family makes visitors think about their own stories from their own families, and the relationships they have.”
Fracturing and mending
Across Cadet’s imagery, Haiti is present everywhere and almost nowhere — in reality, only in a few archival images and video clips. Yet she’s found echoes of the Caribbean country through the vibrant florals and architecture of Los Angeles, where she moved three years ago from New York.
She also sees it in fabrics, like a set of gingham dresses that resemble her school uniform, worn in a portrait of two girls laying on the grass. Sometimes she makes facsimiles of details that she remembers, like the terracotta-red breeze blocks she fits to a frame as a physical barrier to the image behind it. In the photo, a nighttime view of lush greenery lies just out of reach of clear recollection.
She imbues images with the ancestral beliefs of her birth country, too, such as the permeation of the spirit world with our own at night, or the ability to meet the dead in our dreams. Those concepts play out in velvety nighttime images — where Cadet’s technical precision quite literally shines — and portraits that explore ideas of twinning and kinship with subjects who she had only just met, who are actually strangers.
“What would it be like if I met with my grandmother who died years before I was even born?” she asked, of her mother’s mother. “Would she look like a stranger or not?”
Cadet hasn’t returned to Haiti since 2016, when her last living grandparent died. In more than one piece, she has interspersed a both mournful and celebratory video clip she took during the wake. She did not expect it would be the last time she would see Haiti, but her relatives there have all emigrated or passed away, and the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and ongoing political unrest has made travel difficult.
Her family today is spread out between New York, New Jersey and Florida. Cadet has several siblings and half-siblings, some of whom experienced different periods of separation, too, as they immigrated at different points. Becoming an artist helped her better understand all of their varied experiences, she explained.
“We’re very different people, but our relationships are good, weird in some ways. I think we’re still learning to be with each other,” she said. “And I would say the same thing with my mom and my dad. So much of how our relationships were formed is informed by the dynamics of our migration, but also our lived experiences, I have a very different lived experience than my younger sister, than my older sister — and all of those things I think are taken into consideration when we’re talking about who we are as people.”
As part of the work, she turned the camera on herself and her mother, filming a conversation in Haitian Creole on a split screen. In it, Cadet asks her a series of questions about her life for the first time — both an oral history for the archive and a daughter wanting to understand her mom.
“I think it changed my view of her as a person,” Cadet said. “She had ideas and dreams before she was married, before she had kids, and I don’t know that version of her. A part of it makes me sad, because she also has gaps between her and her mother as well. I think it’s made me want to be better to her.”
Their relationship is “a work in progress,” she added, but even through assembling the show, she’s felt things change. “So much has come up for me internally about my relationships with my parents and my relationships with my siblings,” she recalled. “Honestly, that’s part of it. That’s part of the work.”
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