Widline Cadet, Sé Sou Ou Mwen Mété Espwa m#1 I Put All My Hopes On You #1I), 2021

Widline Cadet: My name is Widline Cadet. I am an artist currently based in Los Angeles, but originally from Haiti, born and partly raised and then raised in New York as well. The work we're looking at are two different images made about twenty years apart or more. The larger image is this photograph of this landscape that I made at my sister's house in Florida.

The smaller image that's inserted within that landscape is a photograph of my mother holding my younger sibling. I think this was taken on the day of when she was baptized. So this is one of those rare photographs I have in my family album of my mother and my younger sister.

I was thinking about the idea of my family settling here in the U.S. and all of the things that we left behind and no longer had access to as a result of leaving Haiti. And so land and geography were some of the things that I was thinking about and thinking about the lack of access that we no longer have to that in Haiti. I was thinking about how I wanted to create a space where all of these things could come together, where I can physically embed my family in the geography of the U.S. and Haiti as well.

The title of the work is Sé Sou Ou Mwen M´té Espwa m #1. “I Put All My Hopes On You, Number One.” It's something my mom has said over and over again to me and my siblings when we were kids, and it was also just this unspoken thing that my parents, my mom specifically moved to the U.S. and moved us to the U.S. as a means of having hope for us, and I think about the idea of hope, how it can be such a beautiful thing, but also such a burden.

The frame around the images are just as important as the image as well. Going back to talking about the idea of weight and heaviness, I wanted the frames to feel like something that could contain all of those.