TOP: 1999 | UNTITLED (FLÂNEUR UNDERGROUND) | PERSONAL WORK
BELOW: 1999 | UNTITLED (FLÂNEUR) | PERSONAL WORK
Emerging Talent No. 5: Adler Guerrier
Adler Guerrier’s work is an exploration of the effects of geographical,
political and historic environments on identity. “I have a
mainly photo-based art practice,” says Guerrier, “but I also make
sculptures, videos and drawings using various printmaking techniques.
The aesthetics of my works are shaped by various influential
art-historical moments, like the works of Atget, Ruscha,
Truitt, Baldessari and Hammons.”
Places and events around him also affect his work. “Guerrier
has always been an intellectual artist,” writes art critic Alfredo
Triff in the Miami New Times. “His work deals with the redundant
life of the contemporary individual, and at the same time, with
the flâneur [from the French verb flâner, which means “to stroll”]
who explores the ominous range of the city—all while beholding
his own social condition.” Guerrier has embraced the concept of
the flâneur, a stance popularized by poet Charles Baudelaire and
numerous other thinkers to indicate understanding, participating
in and portraying urban phenomena and modernity. Guerrier,
in his role of the flâneur, is a detached observer of his city. But as
an aesthetically tuned artist, he comments on it through his work.
“I make works about places, cities, neighborhoods and the narratives
contained within them,” explains Guerrier. “The works are
the manifest of the investigation of the places and the attempt to
understand the uses, history and aesthetics.”
Through multimedia compositions—some involving typography,
others a single photographic image—Guerrier maps everyday
places and people. “In Adler’s work, it is his typography, what
is missing or blocked or filled in, that communicates the message,”
notes Maggy Cuesta, dean of Visual Arts at the New World School
of the Arts, where Guerrier received his BFA. “I particularly like
his black-on-black typographic pieces.”
Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Guerrier lives and works in
Miami. Both locations appear in his work. He has been included in
many exhibitions, including the prestigious Whitney Biennial in
2008, which featured his provocative piece “untitled (BLCK—We
wear the mask),” which centers on an installation by “BLCK,” a fictional
Miami-based artists collaborative from 1968. All the works
in the installation were actually created by Guerrier as an aesthetic
dialogue between nameless artists from the once-vital, mostly
black Miami neighborhood of Liberty City that suffered in the
aftermath of riots coinciding with the 1968 Republican National
Convention in nearby Miami Beach. This work pays homage to
the anonymous heroes of the civil rights movement.
Guerrier’s creations have also appeared at Miami Art Museum,
Miami Art Central, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Santa Monica
Museum of Art, Frederic Snitzer Gallery and the Newman Popiashvili
Gallery, among others.
www.dig.thenextfewhours.com | http://www.whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_guerrier
WEB-EXCLUSIVE CONTENT!
