Firelei Báez. Sci-Fi Creatures

Firelei Báez, To see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls, 2015. Gouache and ink on paper, 84 1/2 x 50 inches.

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There is a futuristic, otherworldly quality to much of Firelei Báez’s work, even when referencing the residue of colonial history and power. To see beyond it and to access the places that we know outside its walls (2015) is a self-portrait that references the artist’s earlier “Can I Pass?” (2011–13) series, only instead of depicting herself in muted skin tones, she’s rendered in neon pinks and greens, decorated with a bursting prism of light. The artist’s use of fantastical color activates a space “beyond the walls” of persistent structures of oppression. Looking at the history of “surreal mythmaking of the New World” by seventeenth-century Dutch colonists, whose imagery of the Americas—one of “cannibals, vampires, and unicorns”—shaped a narrative of otherness,¹ Báez’s supernatural figures offer alternative representations. She directly references the mythological Ciguapa, a female trickster in Dominican folklore whose changeable appearance the artist projects upon as “a radical, fluid, and active site, standing outside the typologies outlined by Western colonization.”²