EMERGING is a regular column where ARTINFO spotlights an up-and-coming artist.

“I am really drawn to images that are both beautiful and unsettling, and unravel slowly with you long after you’ve seen them,” explained Firelei Báez in a recent conversation with ARTINFO. Born in 1980 in Santiago De Los Treinta Cabelleros in the Dominican Republic to Dominican and Haitian parents, and now based in Brooklyn, the idea of self in the Caribbean diasporic communities provides a fertile theme for her mixed-media portraits and paintings.

Her “Geographic Delay” series includes powerful, large-scale gouache and ink portraits of participants in Brooklyn’s massive annual West Indian Day Parade that bring out “the unmentioned histories present in these performers’ bodies.” Her work “Not Even Unalterable Limitations” references the knotted headdress known as a tignon that all women of black ancestry, whether free or slave, had to wear in Spanish colonial Louisiana as a class distinction. The women had such strong and elaborate interpretations of this headdress that they ended up influencing Paris fashion, before ultimately overturning the law. In Báez’s piece, the headdress has transformed and bloomed into a dense garden drawn in graphite.

She approaches her work as a way of connecting the past and present, as well as the real to the fictional, examining existing power structures of race, gender, and society. For example, her “Carib’s Jhator” and “Ciguapa” series of disjointed figures confront the passive role of women in language, “subverting expectations of beauty and normalcy with seductively frightening specters.” But amid the artistic tumult built from cultural ambiguities is a consistently playful perspective. “I’ve discovered that although drawing from these spaces and experiences can often be turbulent and uncomfortable, there is also an incredible amount of humor and fantasy involved in self-making within them as well,” she stated.

Báez graduated with a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2004 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008, later earning an MFA from Hunter College in 2010. Her studies come out in her detailed work with a variety of media, including painting, watercolor, drawing, and collage, all laced into forms on paper. “I am usually drawn to surfaces that act as surrogates for the bodies being depicted or evoked,” she said. “I am drawn to the fragility and flexibility of paper, how it has a memory from which it expands and shrinks back to, it scars, colors, and ages in ways really similar to our physical selves.”

Currently, she is part of “Fore” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and earlier this year she had her first West Coast solo show at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2013 her work will be featured in the second edition of the Phaidon drawing anthology “Vitamin D2,” and she will participate in Wave Hill’s “Workspace” and their show “Drawn to Nature.” She also has upcoming residences at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York and at Headlands Center for the Arts in California, where she will continue to explore interactions between people and history in her pursuit to capture the lushness of life and culture.

Click here to view a slideshow of Firelei Báez's work.