M. Florine Démosthène (b. in New York; lives and works between Tulsa, OK, and New York) considers the Black female body to be a vessel of collective experience. Multimedia collages of marbled mylar on paper with suspended figures in blank space encourages viewers to engage with the figures’ experience of bodily transformation and regeneration.
The figures, composed of glittering marble-like skin, are frozen in the midst of a metamorphosis. Ideas of a beginning or end lose meaning in Démosthène’s work as the mechanisms and processes of change are continuous. The artist lures viewers into a phantasmagoric sphere, plunging into her intertwined almost science-fiction dimension where Black female heroines are paramount.
Démosthène is the recipient of a Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Arts Moves Africa Grant and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Her work can be seen at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Washington D.C.), University of South Africa (UNISA) (Pretoria, South Africa), Lowe Museum of Art (Miami, Florida), the CCS Bard College Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-On-Hudson, New York), and in various private collections worldwide.