Opening December 19th 6-9pm
Closing reception December 21st 5-9pm
This series addresses the ingenuity of non-English speaking immigrants when faced with the challenges of identifying and interacting with their unfamiliar surroundings.My objective is to celebrate the resilience that empowers individuals who strive to establish a new home and to demonstrate the authority that “naming” provides to a community in the process of integration. My parents, like most of our community, emigrated from rural parts of the Dominican Republic, a small country in the Caribbean sea. They didn’t speak English when they arrived, yet they had to navigate through a land where there were many things they had never seen. Out of necessity, or perhaps efficiency they referred to those “novelties” phonetically, and essentially pronounced the non-translated words in a “thick” Spanish accent. I call this jargon, specific to the Dominican community in New York City, Dominiconics.