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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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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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…)

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Popopstudios Center for the Visual Arts is an independent art studio and gallery dedicated to the preservation and advancement of alternative Bahamian visual culture.  The goal is to educate, expose, and defend new and challenging developments in contemporary art in the Bahamas. Popopstudios exists to harbor both seasoned and developing artists interested in new media and mixed media processes, while projecting these efforts to a national and international audience.

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Aus den sieben Tagen,2008 (From The Seven Days), mixed media - monoprints, photographs and mirrors, H 68″ x W 76″

A Willing Suspension of Disbelief

-to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, 1817).

In the last work Nick Whittle made for this exhibition, there is one image among many. It is a photograph of the artist himself. Naked; eyes closed; arms outstretched; he floats in a shallow pool of green-tinged sea. Weightless and unguarded. Light reflects off the surface of the water creating a fractured pattern that emanates from the artist’s head. He is both suspended and immersed within the sea; his facial features, his breasts rise above its surface like islands. This is the artist that I know, and yet as I have never seen him before.

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Painting, Light, and the Caribbean

Trinidad in and out of Light / CLAIRE TANCONS

Curtain Piece / Anna Serrao

Lighting the shadow describes the duality of life in the Caribbean. It is an expression used by lighting designers and it is literally what the artists in the exhibition attempted to do—without the help of lighting designers.

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