A family visit has turned into an opportunity for a Haitian-born artist to showcase her experiences in the diaspora through her art.
Tamerlie J. Philippe, known as T.J., 29, was born in Haiti and moved to Montreal when she was 18.
An exhibit of 13 of her works in acrylics starts Friday – the First Friday Art Walk – and runs through August at the Lebanon Valley Council on the Arts, 770 Cumberland St., Lebanon.
While Philippe was visiting her mother, Marie Enise Simon, who’s lived in Lebanon for nine years, she met council president Sharon Zook. Philippe has been in the area since mid-June.
“When I first met Sharon, my intention was to do an informal internship with her, since I was here,” Philippe said in a phone interview. “And it sort of happened – she was like, I would love to exhibit your paintings if that’s possible.”
A Canadian friend then brought the paintings to her.
“And my friend, she was coming to visit anyway, so I asked her if she could bring some of them, because most of my artwork was still in Canada,” she said.
Zook had high praise for Philippe’s work.
“Her connection with her Haitian roots is painted into each piece,” she said. “In a country that has been fragmented by gangs, poverty, and unimaginable setbacks, her art shows the centrality of family and dance. Her art is vibrant and hopeful.”
Philippe is currently a senior at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, majoring in commerce and marketing; she will graduate in January. She’ll leave the area to go back to school in early September.
She explained why she chose the Eastern European school for her undergraduate studies; she completed an associates degree in financial management at CDI College in Montreal.
“Canada is expensive, first of all,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to live in Europe, and I knew that I didn’t want to live in the western part of Europe – I wanted to explore a little more the underrated countries.
“And the cost of (living) in Hungary was very favorable when I was doing my research. I thought it was going to be a very interesting change of scenery as well,” she added.
Her paintings are based on “impressionism, personal experiences, and Haitian culture,” according to her website.
“For example, I have a collection called ‘Fading Memories’ – we’re all spread (out) family-wise because of the Haitian situation,” one of near-constant political instability and natural disasters, she said. “I realized very quickly that faces started to vanish, like you really have to look at pictures to realize, oh my god, this is what that person actually looks like.”
And indeed in some of the paintings, the facial features of the subjects are indistinct or nonexistent.
“I also have a painting called ‘Wosle,’ which is a traditional Haitian game I used to play when I was a kid,” Philippe said. “So little things like that, or (times) we went to Carnival. I try to have a lot of colors in my paintings, which represents my culture, because we also have a very colorful culture.”
The exhibit will feature some of the “Fading Memories” series, as well as her most recent painting.
“There’s a neighborhood in my country that has a lot of stacked houses, so I did that to represent this part of the community,” she said. “I haven’t found a title for it yet.”
Philippe also does digital art, which has a decidedly more cartoonish, humorous feel than her paintings. She explained how that segment of her work evolved.
“You know sometimes when you have events that you can’t really explain and you tell people, oh my god you had to be there to understand?” she said. “This is how it all started. I was like, I’m just going to sketch it for the people and make a small comic strip out of them, and that was how it began.”
Along with her freelance art career, Philippe also works remotely as an assistant to Montreal artist Geraldine Dambreville and interns remotely at The Literary Traveler in West Concord, Massachusetts. She has participated in several other exhibitions and has done work for several publications, including The Literary Traveler and Montreal Rampage.
And while she’s been here, she’s been volunteering at the South Sixth Street Playground, “monitoring the children, creating activities for them, (and) doing crafts.”
“And making sure everyone is in one piece mostly – it’s very important!” she said with a chuckle.
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