The Cut: Widline Cadet makes photographs of memories and myths

In this year’s “Focus” section, photographer Widline Cadet’s solo presentation from Shulamit Nazarian is highly anticipated: The Haitian-born, Los Angeles-based artist explores regional details like light, color, flora, and architecture as a way to string a thread connecting her native country to the coastal oasis that is California. Cadet’s work is at once an escapist study of paradise and a critical look at migration, memory, and erasure; her self-portraits, still lifes, and landscapes exist in the liminal space between homes: one inherited, one chosen. Cadet makes the myths of the Caribbean visible through her haunting renderings of inherited stories and rituals. She places herself along a spectrum of time and space with her photographs as a way to exist in two places at once: Haiti and the U.S., past and future. Cadet’s practice also includes video, sound, sculpture, performance, and installation, making her multifaceted approach to creating visual archives for the future one to watch.