By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN
When she was four, the artist Widline Cadet was separated from her mother for six years as she emigrated from Haiti to New York to pursue a better life for her family. Cadet, her father and older sister remained in Thomassin, eventually joining her. During that time, her father would travel back and forth, bringing a small number of photographs between them — it was how Cadet learned she had a new baby sister, too, as her mom settled in New York City’s Hamilton Heights.
But photographs of her own childhood and family were scarce. At 10 years old, she reunited with her mother in New York, but as she grew into adulthood, Cadet realized that she didn’t know her well at all. Nor did she have a larger sense of her family, the ancestral threads that weave back through time. Her mother didn’t have a picture of her own mother. Memories faded with each passing year.
Now, for nearly a decade, Cadet has been crafting her own multi-generational “living archive,” mixing together photographs, video, sound and sculpture to explore the connection and disconnection of the diasporic experience, and make visible the elusiveness of memory. Over the past few years, she has shown parts of the archive at major museums, galleries and art fairs, and has published it in book form. The largest presentation of her work to date is on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum, for the show, “Currents 40: Widline Cadet.”
“Something happened in the process of me becoming a photographer that made me really think about these images and the roles they play in our lives,” she explained during an interview at the newly opened exhibition.
Cadet’s multimedia pieces have always been transportive, but walking through the show’s spacious galleries feels akin to traversing her mind, becoming swept into her enigmatic scenes based on fragments of memory or scarce family images, as well as the other photographs she’s made to fill the gaps. Often, she plays with both notions, towing the line being real and imagined, she explained.
“When I started making the work, I thought broadly about creating an archive — more so in the strict sense of taking pictures for the purpose of being archived,” she said. “But along the way, I think things got more imaginative and fluid in the ways that I’m thinking.”
Because of that melding, her photographs are rarely a straight read. She often embeds them with small videos, prints them to fold into the junctures of gallery walls, or frames them within portal-like half-circle frames, redolent of a window shape seen in one of her grandparents’ photos.
Within the artist’s images, faces turn away, figures disappear into the luminous dark, and hues nearly vibrate with technicolor saturation. She probes both the intimacy of relationships and the tricks of memory, casting strangers as her sisters or friends as stand-ins for herself. Even a photo of Cadet’s mother holding her baby sister — which the artist had never seen until she began hunting for images — feels like the soft edges of a dream. In the museum, Cadet printed the small, grainy image as a wall-spanning altarpiece, flanked by rows of colorful sculptures of aloe plants. It’s titled “I put all my hopes on you.”
“I use this image because I think it felt important as a starting point,” she said. “She’s my mom’s last child; she was born in the US. Thinking about my mom in that moment, all the things she must have been going through, I wanted to have a space for that experience.”
Kristen Gaylord, who curated the show, said that Cadet’s work has a resonance to it, even though it is particular to her own upbringing.
“She’s very deeply excavating her own archive, and there’s something about that specificity, almost para