Losing your head in the Photobooth
By Dave Williams

In my time in the “arts” in Trinidad & Tobago, I‘ve come to notice an interesting shift in the power and pursuits of artists. According to artist, Christopher Cozier, “artistic enterprise was about rendering or representing an inventory prescribed as Caribbean”. Consequently, artists produced works that were also intended to be inventory – made for sale. Today, however, in ‘e’ environment where the www has forever altered the transactive processes of the arts landscape, artistic practice has become more than just paints and canvas and exhibitions. Additionally, given the widely perceived shrinking of ambitions and voices of journalists, social scientists, teachers, priests, shrinks and operatives in every other social institution, artists are stepping in and filling the void.

(more…)

Dhiradj Ramsamoedj / Kwatta / Paramaribo

Dhiradj Ramsamoedj’s Adji Gilas ( photo Christopher Cozier )

Notes from Paramaribo Span September 2009

A few examples of Dhiradj Ramsamoedj’s Adji Gilas cups are placed on the red-oxide-coloured floor of his studio. This is a typical painted floor for a house in Kwatta, west of central Paramaribo, and this looks like a typical cup. We could be in Trinidad or Guyana. He is explaining to me that “adji” means maternal grandmother, and that these aluminium mugs were from her once-active business renting wares for festivities and other events.

(more…)

 Gun - Hemoglobin tastes like hate, that’s what demons love / Mixed media on paper, 38″ x 50″, 2008

“Concerned with the growing violence among youth occurring in the city I approached spoken word artist Joseph Daly and asked that he write a poem inventing an imaginary world where similar problems occur. These drawings depict a confused world searching for answers. Through strange and suggestive imagery they share the various emotions felt upon hearing that another young man has been killed by gun violence.” Sandra Brewster

One would assume, from reading published reports in the Canadian press and from watching news reports on television that the Canadian public had reached the apex of its outrage and tolerance over gun violence in December of 2005, the year that Jane Creba was killed. (Creba was a white teenager who was fatally shot while out shopping with her family on Boxing Day after being caught in the crossfire of gunplay between warring gang members). While we remember the name and face of Jane Creba, the names of countless racialized others who have been felled, injured or traumatized by gang-related violence have disappeared from public memory.
(more…)

Branding Ideologies

Everywhere we go, it seems that advertisements are progressively invading our public and private spaces. We are constantly being bombarded with messages trying to persuade us to consume a certain product or brand. Billboards hovering over crowded highways are a perfect example of this effort in mass consumption. According to Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, “the concept of the spectacle, taking the form of advertisements or propaganda, is a social relationship among people mediated by images.” The image consequently becomes the propulsor of urban conversations and discussions. The artist Jason Mena tries to do just that. In his photographic series Urban Landscapes, Mena appropriates the billboard, a space usually pertaining to advertisers, and transforms it into an active platform for the promotion of  ideas.
(more…)

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.”
(more…)

Catherine Matos Olivo: The Exploration of Self

( Guardia de Seguridad ) Trabajo = Trabajo / postcard edition 2008

” …In these photographs, the artist is caught in the act of some everyday scenario in the work life of an average person. These acts consist of different roles such as feeding a number of cats, working as a cashier at a store and piercing a client at a tattoo shop. I began to wonder if in fact it was an artwork. However, a closer look revealed the ideas behind the work and more importantly gave rise to many questions regarding art and its relationship with everyday life. At what point do we draw the line between art and everyday experience? What makes these photographs worthy of such reflection?… ”

(more…)

“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?
(more…)

Shades by Caroline “Bops” Sardine

“Every Island is Different – Every Island is the Same”

by Therese Hadchity

“Every Island is Different – Every Island is the Same” is presented as a collaboration between Caroline Sardine, or Bops (as she prefers), and Philip Nanton. Perhaps it is more precisely described as an ongoing relay, which started with Nantons lively interpretation of Bops’ painting ‘Sunnii-side-up’ for the group-exhibition “Words on Paintings” in 2008. Nanton followed up by inviting Bops, in turn, to design a cover for, and subsequently comment – in painting - on each of the mono- and dialogues he launched later that year as a CD titled ‘Island Voices’. It is a collaboration which, of course, prompts the viewer to ask whether the two artists have anything other than their Vincentian origins in common, and - if not, whether their interaction has been meaningful nonetheless.

Zemicon Gallery, Bridgetown,           Barbados, March 15th – 31st 2009. (more…)

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.

(more…)