Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multi-media artist currently living in the United States.  Plaisir’s work examines the concept of social domination,  and explores issues of colonialism alongside those of race and class, through a range of media which include painting, sculpture, photography, installation,  film, and performance to present intense visual experiences. 

She examines, in particular, the construction of identity, and she asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Through her work, Plaisir examines how people who were born in the struggle of domination and power behave. She underlines the common issues between US black history and Caribbean History: the labor movements, the fights for equality through literature, philosophy, and history. 

Through her work, she counters the concept of anti-blackness by presenting the color black, itself, as the subject of her paintings. Rather than use ready-made black paint, Plaisir chose to create her own shade- utilizing every color in her palette as a symbol for the beauty, power, and multitudes of blackness. 

Then, Plaisir creates her background with lush imagery drawn from nature— constellations, natural forms, and flowers, inspired by both her Caribbean roots and her imagined ideal of a utopia without oppression. The works both resist and hope- they are reflective of Plaisir’s wish that her work will not only draw awareness to the importance of challenging harmful histories, but also speak to the interconnections of humans, the universality of fractured identities, and the power of recognizing and depicting inner worlds. Her paintings are beautiful and powerful.

She is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most distinguished social scientist of the 20th century. According to Bourdieu: the artistic object is not simply given by the work of art, but is also given above all by the social context, full of symbolic violence which in its habitat explains the way in which an individual internalizes the dominant culture and unintentionally reproduces it on the patterns of domination. 

Marielle investigates the perspective of a world in which no one dominates or reigns, a world in which each one moves in total freedom: from the reality of life to the capacity of imagination, overcoming barriers such as the concept of home and immigration, of race and color, of life and death.