Hiding and Seeking with Tonya Wiles

‘tongue’ 2008. Porcelain wash basin, leather, tongue. Dimensions variable.

I initially saw Tonya Wiles’s work at her first solo show, which opened at the Zemicon Gallery in Bridgetown on June 7,  2009. One week later, I attended her talk at which, according to Tonya, she wanted to “explain” her body of work to the Barbadian audience.

Her exhibition Hide and Seek played with established local norms about viewing art in a gallery space. I asked Tonya how different it was for her to locate her work in Barbados versus situating it in the UK, where she had spent the last three years. She felt that given the greater exposure of a UK gallery culture predisposed to understanding contemporary work, returning to Barbados forced her to ask the question, “Is art viewing universal?”

She wondered if the work made sense in a Barbadian context, and we spoke about how the work functions differently in the two spaces. UK-based viewers might be well exposed to, and therefore more comfortable interacting with, objects like Tonya’s in a gallery space, whereas in the Barbadian context the work reveals a tension. Hide and Seek exposed the conformity of a small, conservative, insular island society that prefers to know the rules of the game before playing.  Members of the audience, Tonya told me, not sure what to do with her work, sought explanation from her before engaging or participating.

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A Walk in the Night

Photo courtesy Wendel Fernandez

“…Walk Into the Night was inspired by the history of the Cape Town Carnival and was intended to obliquely tell the story of the forced removals in Cape Town. It was billed an “invisible masquerade” – a processional shadow play, with various elements worn or carried by a multitude of participants, casting shadows onto horizontal and vertical planes along the itinerary of the procession, from hand-held white screens, to buildings, the sidewalk and the ground, participants and audience.”
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 ”Kibri a Kulturu”

Marcel Pinas; teaching the former motherland…

 ‘Un de ete’ (We are still here), 72.000 spoons and wire, 2009

There is still a lot left unsaid about the history that lies between the Netherlands and their former colony Surinam. Let alone that in Holland one often speaks of the Maroon people that live deep in the forests of the interior. The Municipality Museum of The Hague invited Surinam artist Marcel Pinas (b.1971) for an exhibition in their satellite space called ‘Gemak’ in the center of the residential city of the Netherlands. As a member of the Maroon community, the Ndyuka from the Eastern parts of Surinam, Marcel Pinas seems to be on a mission to tell the world about his culture, his people and his view on the distressing situations they have been through.
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“Yes we did”

Buffalo Soldiers

The émigré community of Little Haiti, located in the city of Miami is home to the largest population of Haitian immigrants of anywhere in the nation, many of whom - despite the U.S. government’s discriminatory immigration laws - escaped abject poverty, political anarchy and ravaged conditions in their homelands to reside in America, only to face a more perplexing case of racial and social inequality.  Those who were fortunate enough to dodge deportation and become citizens; flocked to the voting booths during last year’s election in hope of a change to the double standard that have victimized them for over 50 years (more…)

CRY SURINAM

In 1992 the Curacao born artist Felix de Rooy made the assemblage ‘Cry Surinam’. It comprises a cream coloured (glowing) oil stove with a book about Surinam on top of it, on top of that is a large bone and the head of a black Surinamese with widely gaping mouth. He is crying out. A parody of the Surinamese leaving the warmth of his own country for the chilliness of the Netherlands. A work that can stand, unintentionally, as a symbol for art in Surinam.

Why does contemporary art play such a modest role in the former Dutch colony? Why are there no Surinamese artists (with a few exceptions) to be seen at international exhibitions? Why is almost nothing written about it? Why are they hardly ever included in the collections of the major Dutch museums?
Is there any Surinamese art or does the art there not want to be Surinamese? Why is the colonizer’s culture still the dominant culture?
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En Route . . . Of Bridges and Barriers
Marlon Darbeau at Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad
December 10-13, 3008

click on the image to go to enRoute flickr folder

Logic and careful organization are seldom ingredients found in response to a particularly frustrating or aggravating situation. But last December graphic artist Marlon Darbeau pulled off such a feat with En Route . . . Of Bridges and Barriers—a social commentary via installation mounted at Alice Yard in Woodbrook, Trinidad.

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http://www.archivenotes.net/shift/

This site explores material found on the web about slavery (specifically North- American and West Indian) and re-configures this into a series of fragmented narratives. (more…)

From my notebook May ‘04 (Christopher Cozier)
Things that occurred to me while driving from Laventille over the Lady Young Road after visiting Che’s studio at CCA7.

Three Kings Tuesday

“So, wha’ it is he go come out with?”

“So, wha’ it is he go come out with?” is now a traditional, (or already anachronistic?) question around the idea of a “Tuesday” presentation. Derived from the conversations of Carnival past, the question demands a spectacle, one that may be beguiling, simply proceeding to dazzle the eye or one that intends to invoke thought and the prospect of transformation. Transformation from the ongoing devaluating processes of a not-so-recently-anymore “Independent” cable blitzed head-space.
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White Skin, Black Kin: a Postcolonial Exposé of (white) Female Creole Identity

video still

“In the Caribbean we are all performers … we all try to act out the roles that our skin reads out to us” (Benítez-Rojo 236). As Antonio Benítez-Rojo observes in The Repeating Island (1992), because of the colonial plantation system’s resettlement and reculturization of racially diverse populations through institutionalized transatlantic slavery, the postcolonial Caribbean is a site of multi-layered discourses where white guilt / contrition and black retribution plague racial identity’s conceptualization. (more…)

Permission To Mash Up The Space

by Christopher Laird

The Launch of Basso Leonard Architectural Collaborative (BLAC)

I was invited to attend the launch of an architectural firm, Basso Leonard Architectural Collaborative (BLAC) one evening early in May, I arrived to the sound of Ray Holman, Brian Perkins and friends, The Ray Holman Ensemble, playing high in the building unseen by the crowd gathering in the yard… the sound of the city? Drinks being served at a bar under the mango tree, little eats being passed around by confident little children. A bandstand was set up at the back framed on one side by an installation by Robert Young of The Cloth, a scaffolding draped with his trademark white cotton with appliquéd designs and on the other by Akazuru’s stuffed burlap shapes, ropes and strings, strung from the building’s gables to the ground like a ruin or a great tree hosting epiphytes. The traditional form of this St. Clair house at once facilitating and appropriated by the irrepressible spinning constructions of a textile Anancy. Dean Arlen’s red arrow sculptures hung overhead from the buttresses. (more…)