Cristine Brache: I Love Me, I Love Me Not

“How can one wish to continue existing as an embodiment of the past,
while simultaneously wishing the past never happened?”

“In Puerto Rico, they sampled some twenty thousand people and found that a large portion of their DNA consisted of Native American ancestry, likely to be Taíno or Ciboney. All of it was female. They were unable to find any traces of male Native American DNA in a single one of their subjects”

Colonial style Domino table (self-portrait)
porcelain, silicone, curly maple, dried oxeye daisies, glass
33 x 33 x 45 inches overall
2017

Cristine Brache’s new show I Love Me, I Love Me Not, uses sculpture and video as self-portraiture to confront a complicated relationship to the self, identity and history. As a child of immigrant parents from both Cuba and Puerto Rico, Brache describes her experience as a type of “cultural amnesia.” Her body is imprinted with colonial violence—and she is unsure on which side of that violence she can locate herself. Feeling herself as an embodiment of colonialism, Brache grapples with a sense of self that is rooted in violence and displacement, while living a contradiction in which she cannot fully be accepted by her Puerto Rican family, nor feel fully at home in the America of her adolescence. She is denied an authentic acceptance by both sides. I Love Me, I Love Me Not is a show about the complicated nature of self-love, about erasure, and the fracture of culture, heritage, and history. This is the individual attempt to reconstitute identity and the intangible past through objects. I Love Me, I Love Me Not is on display at Fierman gallery in New York now until March 19th. For further information, read the press release for the show here.

Fallen hands
porcelain
10.5 x 10.5 x 2 inches overall
2017

1 Families Chrismas (replica)
porcelain, Panasonic TV/VCR combo, video [Sequence 02 1 (plantain mix), 19 mins 37 secs on loop]
15 x 16 x 20 inches overall
2017

My porcelain hat

porcelain, National Public Seating stool
47 x 14 x 14 inches overall
2017