With Her First Solo Museum Show in the US, Widline Cadet Conjures Scenes She Can’t Quite Remember
It’s late afternoon in early May in the sunlight-starved lower level of the Milwaukee Art Museum. As real trees begin to bloom outside, photographer Widline Cadet picks through two playfully oversized bouquets of positively unnatural plastic flowers.
Cadet, who spent several years working as a florist, prunes the thick green stems of the faux lilies and roses. She’s delighted. “My mom is obsessed with decorating her living room with plastic flowers,” she says. “A Haitian living room is never plain. It’s always colorful, almost gaudy.”
The polymer blooms are part of a carefully assembled interior Cadet, 33, is building in the museum: laminate flooring printed in a tiled pattern; ceramic angels resting on a glass-topped wooden table; framed family photographs dotting the walls. The installation could be read as an invocation of Cadet’s mother’s Washington Heights apartment. It feels like a folk chapel for a reason. “For Haitian families,” she says, “the living room is a sacred place.”
And yet, this is no mere facsimile of a Haitian living room. Where curtains would otherwise hang, Cadet has installed a wall-size portrait of her father on his 60th birthday. His gaze is direct, unflinching. The image pervades the space. Like much of Cadet’s work, the installation, titled Altar #2, hovers between reality and fantasy.
"Currents 40: Widline Cadet" is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. On view in Milwaukee through August 9, the show brings together 52 photos and videos that explore facets of her family’s migration story. At a time when the images and stories of migrants and migration in the United States portray a crisis, Cadet’s works present a poignant, intimate counterweight. The imagery, made in Haiti, New York, Florida, and her current home of Los Angeles, uses both personal, documentary photographs and more surreal, formal portraits to link Cadet’s personal history to a broader meditation on the Black diasporic experience. They present a unique visual language that investigates what it means to live with a fractured sense of home scattered across place and time.
“Widline is taking on urgent questions in a way that feels open, like an invitation,” says Kristen Gaylord, the Herzfeld curator of photography and media arts at MAM. “The work isn’t just about what’s been lost, it’s about what she’s built in its place.”
Cadet, who is gracious and thoughtful but reserved, was born in Haiti and lived there until she was 10. Her mother immigrated to the United States when Cadet was quite young, and the photographer joined her years later.
Her early memories of Haiti are hazy, a feeling she evokes in many of her images. “I remember walking to school together with my sister every morning,” Cadet says, “wearing a uniform and passing these plants and flora along the walk.” Otherwise, she has almost no coherent memory of her girlhood.
Cadet’s visions of her mother during those early years are also sparse. “One day she was there, and then one day she wasn’t,” she says.
For much of her childhood, Cadet’s relationship with her mother was sustained through occasional phone calls and, more tangibly, photographs. Once or twice a year, Cadet’s father would hire a photographer to take formal portraits of Cadet and her sister, which he sent to Cadet’s mother. Cadet later found one such photo tucked into a book in her mother’s New York apartment in Washington Heights; in it, the sisters stand side-by-side in complementary red and pink dresses. They wear matching white socks and Mary Jane shoes. Each holds a stuffed animal, grins stretched wide across their faces.
“Photographs [were] a way for my mom to keep tabs on us while we were still in Haiti,” Cadet says. “They were objects that could travel across distance and time.”
Cadet reconfigures those memories in her photograph Si Ou Ta Dwe Bliye Wout Lakay Ou (Lè Tout Limyè Yo Etenn) (Should You Forget Your Way Home (When All The Lights Go Off). The work centers twin women in gingham dresses modeled after Cadet’s school uniforms, their backs turned and faces obscured as they enter a dense brush. Behind them, the camera lingers as if it might follow the girls into the unknown.
“It’s more important to me to communicate the feeling of not fully remembering,” Cadet says. “I want to replicate the experience of diaspora, this floating landscape that lives in my mind.”
Painter Calida Rawles was drawn in by Cadet’s sense of story when she first encountered the photographer’s work at Frieze Los Angeles. “It feels like she’s portraying intimacy,” says Rawles, herself a celebrated and widely collected artist, and among several Black women artists and writers who have lent pieces for the Milwaukee show. “It feels timeless, like I can escape into it, create my own narratives, and dream with it.” Cadet’s work, adds Rawles, also ”shows that there are so many layers within the Black experience.”
Cadet moved to the United States in 2002. In contrast to her gauzy memories of Haiti, she recalls her first hours in New York clearly. “I remember it was getting dark,” she says, “and the city was super-bright with all the night lights. That felt bizarre to me.” The smellscape, too, was new. “My mom lives one block away from a supermarket and I remember I could smell all the fruits. I didn’t recognize a lot of the smells.”
Cadet’s disorienting arrival inspired her haunting photograph Future Visions (Arive a), in which a ghostly woman figure is shrouded in darkness. The image is a nod to Haitian Vodou traditions in which night is understood as a threshold between the living and spirit worlds. The image is also inspired, in part, by the anime cartoons Cadet watched when she first moved to the US. “I liked seeing a world where you could build and be anything you wanted to be,” she says. In anime, “flowers are for someone who is out of this world in some ways,” Cadet says. They suggest the “arrival of something divine or dreamlike.”
Arrival, however, also carries its opposite—and Cadet is just as interested, she says, “in what you lose when you arrive somewhere.”
Cadet explores that negotiation in her 12-minute video Views From Home, her first major work in the medium. Shot mostly with her iPhone, Views stitches together footage of Haiti and of her relatives’ homes across the United States. There are glimpses of a Zoom birthday party and scenes of middle-class suburban life in Florida. Images are joined by voice memos in Creole from Cadet’s mother. New joys and sorrows connect with ones left behind.
The video is part of a larger series Cadet has spent the last decade making, much of which is on view in Milwaukee. Titled Ritual [Dis]Appearance/Seremoni Disparisyon—which loosely translates to “ceremony of disappearance”—the project functions, Cadet says, as a kind of family archive, a record of both what is remembered and what she has had to imagine.
One of Cadet’s most indelible images is also among her most arresting. In the carefully staged portrait Ki Jan Nou Wè Tèt Nou Nan Tan Kap Vini An #1 (How We See Ourselves In(to) The Future #1), Cadet sits in her mother’s Washington Heights living room, staring directly into the camera. She wears a ruched satin dress and has painted her lips with gloss and carefully arranged her braided hair. A large bouquet of plastic flowers rises behind her shoulder, echoing the ones Cadet so meticulously arranged in Altar #2.
In the Milwaukee gallery, Cadet has installed the self-portrait beside a photograph of her mother. Together, they face Cadet’s oversized image of her father. The arrangement makes it feel like the family is together, in that New York apartment, deep in conversation with one another. The charged exchange seems to ask the trio to not only look at one another, but to truly see each other—and for the rest of us to see them, too.
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