Adler Guerrier: come… sit with us

Plants and flowers, as depicted throughout the exhibition, introduce a non-human temporality to the works. Plants are not just adorning our spaces, cleaning the air, offering beauty, but they offer themselves as guide and meter to set a pace for living, and as framework for a practice of patience, humility, and care. A flower in a yard, a potted plant on a windowsill, a bonsai, a community garden maintained by neighbors—each gestures toward conditions for a better living. This vision runs through Guerrier’s photographs, where he adopts the figure of the flâneur wandering in modest places to “stand and stare,” attentive to fragments of the everyday. His lens lingers on textures and fleeting details—plants glimpsed against the sky, the delicate interplay of focus and blur, the quiet corners where perception transforms into reflection. These images are not mere documents, but invitations to drift, to inhabit the in-between where memory and poetry converge.

The same spirit infuses the Fold series, in which Guerrier expands photography into collage, repetition, and painterly intervention. Black-and-white photographs of suburban Miami, tilted sideways, depict archetypal backyards and gardens—scenes where one’s reality and a neighbor’s reality, are adjoined, and appear almost indistinguishable within this shared structure. Onto these images, Guerrier layers cut forms and color swatches borrowed from commercial paint catalogues, where the naming of hues—“Gris Bamako,” “Rose Pasada”—carries desires and expresses identities and imaginings across geographies. Through these juxtapositions, the suburban is reframed as a site of latent intelligence. The “whispered intelligence lurking in the leaves” becomes a constellation of voices, spirits, and social realities hidden within the canopy of the everyday.

Reminiscent of the revolutionary slogan Bread and Roses, Guerrier’s images of flowers carry an idea of resistance inseparable from his Haitian heritage. Here, resistance is understood less as confrontation than as cultivation: the creation of conditions where life can flourish, where community can imagine its own forms of freedom and renewal. come… sit with us is an invitation to inhabit these fragile commons, to recognize their political and poetic force, and to imagine with Guerrier a peaceful, quiet revolution—one that insists on the right not only to live with the indispensable, but to strive toward betterment.