DUPLEX is pleased to present Agony in the Tropics, Nereida Patricia’s first solo exhibition in New York City. Through sculpture, text, and painting, Patricia communicates new forms of storytelling. Mining personal experiences of resilience and survival, and examining postcolonial Black feminist theory, magical realism, and conventional mythology, Patricia builds a nuanced visual language about the transformation of the human and the collective body in the face of prejudice and violence. Known for her highly detailed glass beaded relief sculptures, Patricia chronicles fictionalized versions of herself and members of queer and marginalized communities, as well as those living and working in the street. With Agony in the Tropics Patricia presents a hero’s journey towards freedom and sanctuary.

For Patricia, freedom is not a destination, but a practice of moving through constraint. In a new series of beaded relief sculptures, Patricia transforms a story of violence into one of transcendence. Combining Christ’s Agony in the Garden, a biblical episode in which Christ must grapple with his mortality, with Josephine Baker’s 1925 performance in La Revue Nègre, where she famously donned a plastic banana skirt, Patricia transforms Josephine Baker into a contemporary Christ-like figure, navigating societal systems towards liberation and spiritual enlightenment. In the triptych, Agony in the Tropics, Patricia remaps the story of Baker’s fetishization, and in turn takes power over her own history. Instead of a garden, the story is set near Patricia’s home in Bushwick, where Josephine Baker becomes a street walker, a sex worker, a trans woman, moving against systems of opression towards a new world, guided by masked spirits symbolizing ancestors and guardian angels. Just as Christ laments his impending death following the Last Supper, Baker’s representation portrays the nuanced precarity and violence of buying into and navigating conventional systems that do not protect or empower, and constrict any support in survival. Referencing voguing and ballroom, Patricia transforms Baker’s dance into an act of resistance and liberation.

The central sculpted fountain, Ball Gag (from Fetish Series), Patricia describes as a reliquary and fetish object - a portal holding mystical potential for those who use and worship it. Mining historical references of pre-Columbian and diasporic African mask and clay vessels, the work reimagines dominant narratives of history, as strategy to upend erasure and move towards new forms of collective survival and celebration. In Agony in the Tropics, Patricia’s presentation of new social possibilities leads to a hopefulness and compassion in redefining our own realities of past and future alike.

Full press release here.

BIO

Nereida Patricia is a visual artist and poet based in Brooklyn, NY. Patricia’s practice spans sculpture, painting, and performance, and explores themes of mythology, trans poetics, and identity. Her work draws from postcolonial and Black feminist theory, Peruvian and Caribbean symbolism, as well as autobiographical fragments, to explore trans femininity, violence, gender, race and sexual politics. She has studied at The New School and holds Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute Chicago Her work has been exhibited at venues at DUPLEX, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Monique Meloche Galley, Chicago; Prairie Gallery, Chicago; Annka Kultys Gallery, London; the Museum of the Moving Image, Queens; and The Knockdown Center, Queens, among others. This fall Patricia will be participating in the Fountainhead Arts Residency and her work will be featured at Boil Toil & Trouble during Art Basel Miami Beach. The exhibition, Agony in the Tropics, at DUPLEX in October will be Patricia’s first solo exhibition in New York City.