In her artist's statement, Colette Gaiter says: "I have visited the island of Cuba three times since 2007. I originally went to study graphic design, particularly posters, which are a major art form in Cuba.

When I travel, I always take photographs, to document objects for future reference in my writing and teaching, and for the usual reasons—to remember. Before these trips, photography was a part of my work, but not the focus. I still maintain that I am not a “photographer”. I take photographs, and use them to try to understand and communicate something.

In my many years as a multimedia artist, I have made photographic montages and manipulated images and text into animations, videos, or web sites. At first, using a still image as a final piece for exhibition, even though it might be manipulated, seemed like cheating somehow.

I now think of myself as an artist who uses photographic images. I contextualize and juxtapose images to convey ideas, phenomena or paradoxes and ironies. My favorite part of the process of making my work is looking through the images and finding connections between them that add up to something new. Occasionally I capture an image that has enough narrative and aesthetic quality to stand alone, but my intention is to combine images.

I say, “This is Not Cuba” because it is too easy to reduce the unknown into a stereotype.  Photogenic images of beautifully restored 1950s cars parked on architecturally significant streets in Old Havana have become the icons we rely on to represent this country which is forbidden to U.S. tourists.

The title refers to the semiotic reality (made famous by Magritte’s pipe series) that an image is always a representation, it never is the object it refers to. It is always codified, edited, and filtered through the lens of its presenter."  

Colette Gaiter, a new media artist and graphic designer, is an associate professor in the art department at the University of Delaware. Working with computers since 1982, Gaiter uses a range of digital media to create environments for exploring – and exploding – personal and collective myths. She is especially interested in the American 1960s—a time of turbulence, hope, and change played out in mass media. Her works (CD ROMs, DVDs, web sites, installations, and print works) combine images, text, sound, animation, video, and interactivity to reconsider recent history.

Gaiter has exhibited multimedia works internationally in SIGGRAPH (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) and ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) exhibitions. Her work has also been shown at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and in numerous galleries, museums and public institutions in the United States. Spanning multiple media, her work ranges from digital prints and artist books to web sites and interactive installations. Her essay on the work of Emory Douglas, artist for the Black Panther Party, is published in the Rizzoli monograph, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas. (New York: Rizzoli, 2007). Colette Gaiter has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and graphic design from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and an master’s degree from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. She has worked as a graphic designer in Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and New York City and taught at the Minneapolis College of Art, Columbia College in Chicago, and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, before joining the art faculty at University of Delaware.