“Firelei Báez” uses light to expose dark histories | Georgia Straight Vancouver’s source for arts, culture, and events

Arts Features

“How do you tell a history when that history hasn’t been recorded?”

Eva Respini, deputy director & director of curatorial programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery, poses the question while discussing the upcoming solo exhibition by Dominican Republic-born, USA-based artist Firelei Báez. The show, simply titled Firelei Báez, is the artist’s first-ever mid-career survey to be shown in Canada.

“Maybe,” Respini says of Báez’s approach, “one of the ways you deal with that history is through creative intervention.”

Starting November 3, the second floor, rotunda, and exterior of the Vancouver Art Gallery will be dedicated to showcasing the artist’s distinctive painting, sculpture, and installation, much of it devoted to engaging with the legacy of colonization in the Caribbean—one of the unrecorded histories Respini is alluding to.

“While Firelei’s work is deeply seated in a political dialogue,” Respini notes, “it is also incredibly beautiful.”

With lush details and dreamy colour, Báez uses portraiture, imagery from folklore, and otherworldly environments to draw audiences into an immersive world and imagine alternative futures. Respini describes one installation in the show as akin to a three-dimensional painting. The work, 2019’s A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), uses perforated blue tarps to evoke the night sky, the surface of the ocean, and emergency shelters all at once.

Still, Respini describes Báez as a painter first and foremost—one with a vibrant visual language that made an impression on the curator nearly a decade ago.

“Already at that point the pieces were large, they were bold. She is such an extraordinary draftsperson,” she says. “[Firelei Báez] is an opportunity to introduce audiences to this fantastic artist who I think is one of the most important voices of our day.”

Báez studied at Hunter College and the Cooper Union’s School of Art in New York, as well as the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and has exhibited at several notable institutions, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Many of Báez’s works are painted directly onto found material: maps, architectural drawings, and texts that reference colonial histories, layering new perspectives atop existing documents.

“When she is painting over charts, maps, and architectural diagrams of buildings made for imperial and colonial pursuit, she doesn’t entirely erase them,” Respini notes. “So it is not about an erasure of the past … It is a ground upon which she is building.”

In this sense, the exhibition itself is a similar project—wrapping and filling a distinctly colonial building with the work of imaginative otherworldliness. Respini notes that the current Vancouver Art Gallery building was once a provincial courthouse.

“This notion of law and order—power, how histories are recorded through the law—is in the bones of this building,” says Respini. It actually makes the Vancouver Art Gallery an apt venue in which to showcase the work of an artist who takes this tension as her inspiration. To Respini’s mind, Vancouver is a city primed to resonate with Báez’s work.

“Even though she grew up in the Caribbean, and many of her references are from the Caribbean and the Atlantic basin,” she says, “they resonate here by the very fact that this is a place that is dealing with its colonial past in a live way.” With Firelei Báez, the Vancouver Art Gallery—for years used by Vancouverites as a site of both protest and creative intervention—will add another layer to its complicated, artful, and ever-evolving story.

Firelei Báez is at the Vancouver Art Gallery until March 16, 2025.