Widline Cadet: How Far is Soon?

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present How Far is Soon?, Widline Cadet’s debut exhibition with the gallery.

Drawing from her family’s immigration from Haiti to the United States, Cadet’s interdisciplinary practice—spanning photography, video, sound, sculpture, and installation—explores migration, assimilation, and intergenerational memory and identity. The exhibition title, How Far is Soon?, refers to both distance and time, alluding to the geographical and temporal separation between the artist, her family, her birth country, and her visions of selfhood. 

In How Far is Soon?, Cadet reflects on her personal and artistic transformation within the context of living in diaspora in the U.S. and now specifically, Los Angeles. Photography remains central to the exhibition and the artist’s practice. In a series of over fifteen new images, Cadet shifts between genres—portraiture, landscape, still life, and interiors—each directly informed by memories, archival images, as well as cultural and interior mythologies which have and are continuously shaping her becoming. Cadet wonders how far away will her diasporic life lead her? How much longer before she becomes someone completely unrecognizable from the vision she once had of her original self? How many generations until her and her family’s presence is completely erased from her birth country? How far / how long until her fragmented memories disappear? How long until her internal signifiers become meaningless? And is it possible to resist the process or is surrendering the inevitable outcome / unavoidable consequence?

Many of her pictures either include herself or other women from within her community in Los Angeles. Cadet experiments with display methods such as framed photographs embedded with video screens, pictures rendered in half-circles, and, at times, mounted perpendicular to the wall referencing photographs in family albums and her fragmented memories.

While the relationship between object and image has long been part of Cadet’s artistic practice, this exhibition marks the first time she introduces ceramics. A collection of ceramic succulents are displayed in various configurations throughout the gallery, some standing tall in growth, others lying down in harvest. Each plant progresses through a gradual color shift as viewers move through the exhibition, serving as a metaphor for the ongoing process of personal and artistic evolution. These sculptures, which include larger than life sized aloe plants, with hibiscus flowers sprouting from them, a flower that does not naturally grow on aloe, serve as metaphors and stand-ins for Cadet and her process of transformation through the accumulation of new experiences in various environments that shapes her sense of self.

Life-sized ceramic lizards, creatures Cadet associates with her childhood in Haiti, crawl over walls and perch on the frames of her photographs. These creatures take up space in the gallery, much in the same way they occupy space in Cadet’s mind. Sometimes they are clearly defined, other times they are hybrids of various ephemera that are layered or combined together and live on the fringes and edges of her memories. Together with the ceramics, and video, these images form a collage of a cyclical journey—both personal and geographical—fluid, constantly shifting, and never fully complete.