(Haiti, Tuesday, January 12, 2010), 2012
Fowler Museum at UCLA, X2013.35.1;
Constant created Haiti madi 12 janvye 2010 after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake. Over the course of a year, she filled the canvas with scenes she had witnessed in her own community. Tombs and the cityscape converge on the same picture plane, collapsing into each other. As Constant said, “On that day the city became a cemetery.” Images of Haitians experiencing pain, grief, and chaos appear alongside individuals helping one another. Gede, Grann Brijit, and Bawon Samdi, lwa of death and sexual regeneration, command the foreground. Gede, ordinarily a joyful trickster, is on his knees, weeping. His disbelief echoes the words stitched on the two tablets: “Look at our suffering! We cannot count how many thousands of bodies have died, have disappeared, in the earthquake on 4:53 pm, Tuesday, January 12, 2010.”
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