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Marielle Plaisir

2021 State Fellow

Southern Prize Winner

Marielle Plaiser

Recipient Information

Location

Hollywood, Florida

Medium

Mixed Media

Year of Award

2021

Grant or Fellowship

Southern Prize and State Fellowship

Grant Amount

$5,000

Artist Statement and Biography

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multimedia artist living in Florida. Her work examines the concept of social domination, and explores issues of colonialism alongside those of race and class through a range of media which include painting, sculpture, photography, installation, film, and performance to present intense visual experiences. She examines, in particular, the construction of identity, and she asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today through new reflexes and how people who were born in the struggle of domination and power behave. She underlines the common issues between US Black history and Caribbean history: the labor movements, the fights for equality through literature, philosophy, and history. Her artistic outcome not only becomes an extraordinary research on materials, samples, and prototypes but a mirror of contemporary assumptions, critical of the current “social atmosphere” through the rear-view mirror of history and symbols. Through her work, she counters the concept of anti-blackness by presenting the color black, itself, as the subject of her paintings. Plaisir’s works demonstrate a strong urge to produce poetical pieces.

Plaisir earns an Honors Advanced School of Fine Arts and Decorative Arts of Bordeaux (France). Her work has been showcased internationally in Europe, Africa, the USA, and the Caribbean winning prizes and grants including the gold medals in Santo Domingo and Sao Paulo Biennial and South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship.

As a textile artist, she is collaborating with the French designer furniture company Roche-Bobois (Paris).