For this group exhibition curator Tyler Emerson-Dorsch invited artists to consider Edwidge Danticat's story “Sunrise, Sunset." With its metaphors for the delicacy of memories and conveying knowledge across difference, the story provides a map for thinking through what is at stake in what we as gallery, curator and artists do, where we are and who we are.
The video, paintings, sculptures and installations featured in the exhibition Sunrise, Sunset are part of a conversation that started just after Hurricane Irma spared Miami. Edwidge Danticat’s story "Sunrise, Sunset", published in The New Yorker the same week of the storm, grows outward from its rich particulars, becoming a parable about the entropic nature of knowledge and the urgency to connect before it is too late.
The story’s first impact is that it takes place in Little Haiti, where the gallery is located. Tyler Emerson-Dorsch writes: “Even more than its details about place, this story’s specificity comes from the emotional landscape of a Haitian-American family. I am new to this neighborhood. Everybody is still cautious, a little curious and polite. The story opens a window I wanted to find.”
The story begins with a grandmother named Carole, whose memories are fading even as she worries about her daughter Jeanne’s persistent depression. Jeanne has just had a son, and she needs to snap out of her blues. Neither knows how to talk to the other anymore, and it is only getting harder. The way Danticat structures the story shows how art can reveal to an Other (whether a reader or a daughter) what direct communication cannot. The sentiments contained within the story reveal why the impetus behind the art is important. It comes down to mortality. All of us only have a little time to make understood what is most important to pass on. Now is our chance.