Michelle Lisa Polissaint: Embodied Memories
August 29 - November 1, 2024Polissaint, a Haitian-American artist based in Miami, uses textiles, photography, and community engagement to explore personal and collective memory, identity, and human connection. Her work often reflects her experiences as a queer Haitian-American woman and emphasizes fleeting moments of everyday life, intimacy, and emotion. Her series "The Ballad of Me & You" traces her emotional journey, symbolized through photographs of objects marked by threads, evoking themes of presence and absence. Her art seeks to connect viewers through shared human experiences, emphasizing community, resilience, and the transient nature of life and memory.
The exhibition underscores the importance of community, support from sponsors, and the role of institutions in addressing issues of voting rights and personal identity.
Michelle Lisa Polissaint: Embodied Memories is a Haitian-American visual artist andarts organizer based in Miami, Florida. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida International University with a concentration in Photography – where she found her artistic essence - and fiber-based painting. She begins her MFA studies this fall at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Her organizing practice is focused on overlapping art, community, and activism. She encourages artists and community members to form collaborative relationships. As an artist, she explores the nature of human interaction through textiles and photographs.The Ballad of Me & You is a series of shots from different viewpoints, she retraces the stages of her successes and failures of her emotional sphere, looking for the light and the joy regardless of the positive or negative result of her experience and she does it by photographing objects in which she appears as an absent “presence” marked by a thread that has a beginning but not an end - an outline of a body that used to be there. Her work has been shown internationally at various institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta Contemporary, and most recently La Villa du Parc. Polissaint’s work at its most honest, responds to her experiences. Utilizing photography, textiles, and community engagement, her practice reflects the world through a black, queer, Haitian lens — moments between sheets, a neighbor walking past, a lovingly prepared meal shared with friends and strangers. Through reflections on personal experiences, be it loneliness, injustice, heartbreak, or the ephemeral, intangible feeling of a light breeze or a break in the ocean, it is Polissaint’s hope that her work connects to the broader and unifying experience of being human.”
Eric Lachance notes, Michelle Polissaint focuses on her personal experiences and memory as an intersectional, queer Haitian-American person. Polissaint's work evokes the fleeting moments of being human. Her photography and paintings on ephemeral and diaphanous textiles, invokes in the viewer the common ground that are our very emotions.
Everything we do is a community effort, and we could not do this without our sponsors and board members. Thanks to Pastor & Mrs. Ralph Canty, State Farm – Ben Griffith and Tammy Kelly, GRAYCO LLC, Deas Law Firm and Dr. Kendall Deas, Chip and Tammy Finney, Susan and James Allen, Rep. and Mrs. J. David Weeks and Weeks Law Office, Saroor Farooqi and Angela Burleson, and Hill Plumbing.
