Description

The horizon is both a physical phenomenon and a conceptual device. In the Caribbean, it is an ever-present line where sea meets sky, where land gives way to the unknown. Volume 08 gathers artists that view the horizon not as an end, a border line, or a place of division, but as a parameter of liberation. Their work runs counter to the idea of a fixed or determinate aesthetic of Caribbean artistic production. “Just Past the Horizon” becomes an interstitial holding place for the imperceivable, a site where complexity, ambiguity, and resistance are actively produced.

Through diverse mediums and perspectives, we welcome artists to challenge the long-standing expectation that Caribbean art must be figurative, narrative, or ethnographic in order to be legible. For some artists, this alternate realm is articulated through abstraction and material experimentation by using color fields, gestural marks, and layered surfaces to evoke the sensation of looking outward into something vast and unreachable. Other artists may approach the horizon as an ancestral realm with the sea carrying the memory of those who did not arrive, those whose lives were claimed in transit. Conceptual and installation-based works can invoke the horizon as a portal to submerged histories and spiritual presence. The horizon can also be a place where artists are challenging violent military colonial structures by building and imagining new futures for life in the Caribbean.

In Volume 08, artists confront historical erasure through a visual and conceptual language that emphasizes imagination, creativity, and aspiration that centers the Caribbean as a realm of possibility. This volume brings together contemporary artists from the Caribbean who engage the horizon not as a backdrop or compositional device, but as a threshold into other ways of knowing and being. Here, the horizon functions as a speculative zone: a site where memory drifts, where ancestral knowledge surfaces, and where alternative futures emerge. In this space that collides reality and fantasy, Caribbean artists articulate new ways of seeing that honor the past, confront the present, and gesture toward possibilities that remain just beyond the line where sea meets sky.

Contributors

Ana Reyes-Cid, Bri Mangra, Dana Marie Bullock, Edra Soto, Edwidge Danticat, Firelei Báez, Georgia Semple, Hasani Sahlehe, Ivan "Shie" Moreno, James Allister Sprang, Jordan Beal, José Parlá, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, La Vaughn Belle, Manuel Mathieu, Mel Corchado, Nathyfa Michel, Olivia "Lit Liv" Morgan, Patricia Encarnación, Pedro Troncoso, Planta Industrial, Poncili Creación, Richard Nattoo, Stephen Arboite, Thibault Cocaign, Velvet Zoé Ramos

Details

Format: Softcover, paperback
First edition of 1500 copies
Measurements: 6.7 x 8.6 inches