The Brooklyn Rail

Tucked into a corner of Joiri Minaya’s Geographic Bodies is a small archival print, inconspicuous and unassuming. Images of two women overlap: in the larger image on the right, the woman dons a printed visor and bears a broad smile, while the one on the left wears her hair wrapped in a scarf, her expression more solemn. The white ruffle of an off-the-shoulder dress imbricates both, becoming a literal throughline linking the platters of pineapple both women offer.

They are separated by two centuries in time, as well as by media—the former is photographed, while the latter is rendered in oil. A Dominican waitress and a Haitian slave, they are also separated by occupation, at least ostensibly. But Minaya’s title, Continuum II (2021), beckons us to see similarities, and not just superficial ones. The Haitian slave, painted by François Malepart de Beaucourt in 1786, and the Dominican waitress, documented for a tourism brochure in the 1990s, both serve populations—slave masters, vacationing yuppies—who wield significant financial power. Adorned with feathers and a bamboo umbrella, the waitress’s pineapple cocktail is a highly ornamental symbol for the persistence of the Global North’s imperial project, whereby distant lands are plundered for the pleasures of the visiting few.

Here, as in nearly every work that she has created, Minaya lays bare the neocolonialism buried beneath the accoutrements—vivid flowers, bursting fruits—that represent the Caribbean in the Northern imagination. More often than not, these trappings are tethered closely to women’s bodies. The waitress’s brown skin, her flirtatious smile, perform alongside the cocktail to “sell” an image of the Dominican Republic as a tropical paradise to potential travelers. In her “Containers” series (2015–20), the work for which she is best known, Minaya dresses in spandex bodysuits printed with Caribbean flora that she has drawn by hand and then photographs herself posed in various outdoor settings. Contra the Aloha shirts that have become ubiquitous resort wear among American men, these bodysuits constrict her, inhibiting her movement. They also camouflage her, blurring the bounds between her body and her environment.

But there are still bounds. Viewing Geographic Bodies, I found myself drawn to the exhibition’s seams, its edges. A hard border demarcates the painting of the Haitian slave from the photograph of the Dominican waitress. Stitching on the face of the bodysuit in Container #4 (2020) reminds me where Minaya’s mouth and nose would be, were they able to be seen. Both call to mind the etymological root of the word tropics: tropikos, or “pertaining to a turn.” Like the Beach Boys’s fictional Kokomo, the “tropical” is a largely illusory signifier. Yet it also has a very real geographic referent. The tropics are where north turns to south, separated by a dividing line—the equator. They also share an etymology with the “trope,” a narrative motif that repeats across discourse, naturalizing attributes that are actually artificial. Minaya’s practice hinges on this double meaning. It is in the seams where she reveals tropes about the tropics to be exactly that—arbitrary constructions designed to further a particular, pernicious politic.

Sometimes, the seams rupture completely. In SHEDDING II (LOS TRES OJOS) (2022), Minaya begins to pull one of her spandex bodysuits from over her head. The sunset scene printed on her torso appears almost to be on fire, like the leaves in her gouache drawings Tabacco #2 and #3 (both 2020). These illustrations are distinct from the bodysuits in that they isolate individual plants against white backgrounds, rather than replicating them ad infinitum. In classical wallpaper prints like Martinique, which Minaya appropriates and pixelates in the Redecode installation (2015) on the exhibition’s left wall, Caribbean botanicals proffer leisure in American establishments like the Beverly Hills Hotel. But in Minaya’s yupo paper illustrations (all 2020), the plants are valued for their provisions to native populations: aji, bija, and guayacán are all associated with creativity, healing, and resistance.

The painstaking detail with which Minaya renders these plants shows the skill of her hand. Her own labor is everywhere present in the exhibition, which fastidiously demonstrates the time and research involved in her practice, rebuking those who might associate her work with the merely ornamental. Two films on view bring these efforts to the fore. She returns to her ancestral home in the Dominican Republic with her mother and grandmother in Promise of Progress (2023), where she records the local population’s ambivalent response to incoming resort developments. In the documentation for Encubrimiento (2021), we see her work until dawn with a team of technicians to carefully drape the statue of Cristóbal Colón in Santo Domingo with one of her printed fabrics.

As they shape the folds of the fabric, the technicians say her name: “Joiri.” Yet in the darkness of night, we cannot quite discern her visage—those who do not know her intimately will likely not recognize her on screen. Only traces of Minaya’s body can be found in Geographic Bodies: in her labor, her research documentation, and her mark-making. An Yves Klein-inspired diptych BODY IMPRINT I / BODY SMUDGE I (2019) serves as a sort of abstract foil to Continuum II. Rorschach-like smears left by Minaya’s flesh resemble a teardrop breast, a face in profile. But they are, like the tropic tropes, mere illusions. They are not representations of her body itself, which remains hidden from view.