Often unapologetic, diaristic, and placing the viewer in the position of the voyeur, Cristine Brache’s work ambiguously deals with identity, power dynamics, and templates of the female body and psyche in relation to public and private space. Born in Miami to Cuban and Puerto Rican parents, Brache's installation at Locust Projects is inspired by her childhood home and brings a hyperreal version of its front yard into the gallery. Exploring boundaries of private and public space in relation to womanhood, the exhibition centers around porcelain shrines of the maternal figures in the artist's life. Informed by Santeria shrines the artist saw as a child adorning lawns in her neighborhood, Brache uses Santeria's codification of Orishas and their attributes as a template for humanizing and preserving the central figures in her life, celebrating their many facets. In its totality, the artist says the exhibition is a “syncretized constellation of my personal experience, a diary of sorts, that adopts a unique facet of Miami’s cultural landscape in form.” 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Cristine Brache (b. 1984, Miami, FL) lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She received her MFA in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include those held at Fierman Gallery (New York and Puerto Rico); Essex Flowers (New York) and Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Ritter Art Gallery (Boca Raton); Team Gallery (New York); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Miami); the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami); Bow Arts, (London); Glasgow Short Film Festival (Scotland); Quartier21 (Vienna); and the Museum of Moving Images (New York); among others. She has a debut collection of poetry entitled Poems (Codétte, 2018). Her poetry has been published in Publishing Genius, New York Tyrant, and Fanzine, among others. Writing about her work has appeared in The New Yorker, and Cordite Poetry Review. Brache was awarded the 2017-18 South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Arts Fellowship and a 2017 Borscht Short Film Commission Grant.