Just Another Day

Just Another Day, 2024

Dominique Hunter, Guyana

Mixed media collage/painting on canvas (acrylic paint, magazine cut outs, inkjet
color prints, metallic gift-wrapping paper)

60in x 48in

Description:

The pieces I have produced for the Mustique Caribbean Contemporary Art Show are
part of an ongoing series of work that started back in 2016 while on residency in Aruba,
although I had started examining Caribbean tourist economies while living and
studying in Barbados from 2012 to 2015. At the time I was exploring various ways of
engaging with both colonial and contemporary representations of black, female bodies
in contrast to white female bodies. I was interested in the way the tourism industry
“packaged and sold” women, and the way those ideals were consumed by men and
internalized by women. This in turn led me to consider the role advertising agencies
played and continue to play, in the way certain stereotypes of Caribbean people and
Caribbean spaces continue to be perpetuated.

Just Another Day and Any Other Night are both 5ft x 4ft canvases that feature one
of the tile patterns I found in Aruba, as a repeated framework within which I have
inserted images of the exposed parts of women’s bodies that I sourced from various
Caribbean and US magazines. The bodies are surrounded by prints of the beach

morning glory vine that I had photographed while walking along Guyana’s seawall
back in 2017. This particular vine can also be found growing and stabilizing the
coastlines of several other Caribbean countries, and my decision to include it in these
works signals an attempt to bridge two separate bodies of work that I have been
developing for several years. The first series is titled Yesterday, Tomorrow, Forever,
and the second is titled Cusp.

While the overarching theme of these new works examines the tourism and advertising
industries in the region, the inclusion of the beach morning glory vine is a direct link to
the Cusp series, in which it was used as a metaphor for migration and particularly
those of us who, while rooted in a very specific space, either opt to or are forced to
leave for “elsewhere” in order to sustain ourselves and our families.

At the center of each canvas is a semi-transparent self-portrait framed by what could
either be described as a window, doorway or portal where two sets of the tile motifs
should have been. Behind each figure is a sterile and almost artificial-looking space
featuring only sand, sea and sky. Other elements in both works include monarch
butterflies (which is thought to exhibit the most highly evolved migration pattern of any
known butterfly species), caterpillars and various types of beetles, indications of a
thriving eco-system.

Just Another Day and Any Other Night feature color palettes that suggest the time
of day in their respective titles. I opted to reference day and night as a way of alluding
to the perpetual cycle we, as inhabitants of this Caribbean space, seem to be caught
in. I wanted to explore the complexities that come with having multiple converging and
diverging identities, experiencing multiple systems of oppression and ironies in a
space that is often considered both a playground for the rich and a “shit hole country”;
paradise and the periphery; tax haven and third world. When I think about “Caribbean
Soul,” these are the ironies that come to mind.