Open Studio with Patricia Encarnación

As part of our summer curation NEW WORKS, artist Patricia Encarnación 🇩🇴 (Vol. 08) invited us into her studio space to learn more about her practice and the spirit behind her most recent body of work.

From the Artist: 

“I envision Evidence of an Unfinished Collapse as an archaeology of the present, assembled from the vantage point of a future, truly postcolonial world. I turn to quotidian objects—machetes, rum bottles, sugarcane, hair picks—and fragments recombined into vessels. They appear as witnesses to a world that calls itself postcolonial while colonial power continues to organize land, labor, race, desire, and belonging.

Their cracks, burns, wounds, and deteriorating surfaces do not represent a Caribbean in ruins. They expose the current Western hegemonic order as a ruin-producing project, an ongoing (un)civilization built through dehumanization. Yet the objects persist. Through salvaged clay, maroon memory, radical ancestral imagination, and acts of recombination, they become evidence not only of what this order has damaged, but also of what it has never been able to fully govern or erase.”

Thank you to our guests who showed up excited and engaged! Special thanks to Powerhouse Arts for hosting us for such a special evening celebrating art, community, and the Caribbean