TEN NINETEEN presents Back Home, an exhibition of new work by Tiffany Smith (b. 1980). Comprising self-portrait photography, video, and a site-responsive installation, the exhibition honors migratory Caribbean histories and locates them in the blend of African diasporic traditions that emerge within the cultural practices and architecture of New Orleans.
“Back home” is an idiom that situates one’s place of origin as elsewhere, or describes a return to ancestral roots. Smith grew up in Nassau, Bahamas, and Miami, Florida. Her people come from all over the Caribbean: Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and Barbados. Having lived in New York City for more than a decade, Smith recently relocated to New Orleans, the "northernmost Caribbean city," a place that reminds her of home. Her installation considers the legacies of Caribbean migration between New Orleans and the West Indies.
Within the exhibition, home is an abstract concept reflected in the physical, fragmented elements of house and garden spaces. Blending locally salvaged materials and flashy, polished surfaces, Smith has built false walls, impenetrable openings, stairs to nowhere, and compromised columns to evoke a dream-like scene from her memory of a family home in an ongoing conversation between past and present.
Smith’s garden spaces feature predominantly native plants set in grass, soil, and sand terrain. Planted with species that thrive locally, including plants with culturally relevant medicinal and culinary uses, the gardens serve as living ancestral altars, acknowledging the ingenuity and resilience required to navigate an ever-changing terrain. Informed by gardening traditions though the African American South and the Caribbean diaspora, Smith honors the garden as a site where traditions and cultural practices are inherited.
Interspersed through the installation are Smith's self-portraits from the series For Tropical Girls Who Have Considered Ethnogenesis When the Native Sun is Remote (2014-2024). Using early ethnographic photographs and family photos as points of departure, Smith creates fantastical self-portraits that question identity constructs and the psychological implications of iconography. She masquerades in costumes and sets that mine the personal and collective memory of the Caribbean, using her own experiences and stories to reclaim its representation.