From raw to refined: Edouard Duval-Carrié’s "Sugar Conventions" (2013)

This article argues that "Sugar Conventions" (2013), an unstudied,<br>mixed media work by the Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-<br>Carrié, challenges established notions of Eurocentric visuality to<br>locate creolization as a process entangled with, though historically<br>veiled through, canonical Western image production. By<br>destabilizing and denaturalizing Eurocentric conceptions of<br>originality, ‘whiteness,’ and colonialism, "Sugar Conventions"<br>negotiates the consequences of sugar cultivation and its product,<br>ultimately raising new questions about the complicity of images<br>in producing and obscuring colonial dynamics. To consider the<br>myriad ways in which "Sugar Conventions" medially and figuratively<br>elevates the physical, moral, and material costs of sugar, this<br>article looks to the three layers, rendered on Plexiglas, that<br>together comprise the work. This article suggests that each layer –<br>background, middle ground, and foreground – negotiates visual,<