Scenes From a Verdant Place

The book collects a series of efforts to bring together personal snapshots of tropical backyards and other greens spaces with recovered--through digital reproduction-- geometric exercises of the sort that once indexed modernism's progressive impulses. The strange combination of these two distant worlds--the photographs suggesting not a only an autobiographical register but a link to the Caribbean and its complex history and the hard-edged overlays--generates the tension that holds the book together and begins to probe the strange hybridizations that happen at geographic and discursive edges, the jerry-rigged conceptual assemblages that often tease potentials from the seemingly-spent forms that have been left behind. Things supposedly expired, geometric abstraction, and things supposedly minor, personal photographs, are twined here into new compositions, which, in their quiet way, pipeline to the surface the increasingly-effaced histories of both the Black Atlantic and the modernist project. And more than this: they pipeline back into the picture the vital translations that major forms undergo in their passage from the Metropolis to the unruly territories of the margins.