Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions

Curated by Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores

January 21, 2011 – March 10, 2011

EXHIBITION CATALOG

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions presents works in a variety of media, including photography, video, painting, graphic arts, sculpture, and installation. The scope of the objects demonstrates how the region’s contemporary artists are confronting stereotypes about the Caribbean without denying their own surroundings or rejecting the worlds in which they operate. Through investigations on history, tourism, globalization, popular culture, and gender, these artists urge us to reconsider our own expectations on how a Caribbean image should look.

Characterized by scholars as “the laboratory of globalization,” the Caribbean is a multifaceted locale that transcends geographic boundaries. Its culture has European, African, Asian, Latin American, and Native American roots. It is not surprising, then, that several artists in the exhibition explore themes of
migration, the spread of culture, and global citizenship. For co‐curator Christopher Cozier, “this is a conversation about movement in the Atlantic world—a dialogue about dispersal rather than displacement.” Many of the artists themselves no longer live in the Caribbean, residing in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia; nevertheless, their experiences are the result of complex historical, economic, and cultural processes that are part and parcel of what it means to be Caribbean.

Past and present, local and universal, and self and other are among the dichotomies addressed in this exhibition. Marlon James’ blunt and direct portraits depict young people who look like they could be from anywhere. Ebony Patterson’s provocative portrayals derived from Jamaican dancehall culture—with its ironic face bleaching and androgynous fashions—are equally global. By contrast, Joscelyn Gardner engages the historical archive. Her series of hand‐painted stone lithographs Creole Portraits III pays tribute to faceless women victims of slavery by depicting a typical African hairstyle juxtaposed to an iron collar. Among other images conjuring colonial history is Nikolai Noel’s drawing Toussaint et George, in which Haitian liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture and George Washington seem to stare each other down on equal footing.

In John Cox’ paintings of boxers, the notion of the prize fighter as confident and infallibly masculine is turned on its side. The works introduce unresolved tensions by depicting subjects fighting against their doppelgangers or striking their own faces. Heino Schmid challenges that status of the image as a conveyor of meaning. In the case of his Temporary Horizon video, two glass bottles momentarily keep one another standing, but then fall. A man’s arms and waist appear on screen, and he puts the bottles back into place. They fall again, and the anonymous man’s Sisyphean task continues.

As a group, the works in the exhibition demonstrate the dynamism and creativity of the current generation of Caribbean artists. According to co‐curator Tatiana Flores, they also “allow us to reflect on our own assumptions and preconceptions regarding the meaning of place, the articulation of difference, and the construction of past and present. Whether they challenge, delight, frustrate, or disgust, these images provoke a reaction.”

FEATURED ARTISTS
The Bahamas:
John Cox
Blue Curry
Kishan Munroe
Heino Schmid

Barbados:
Ewan Atkinson
Joscelyn Gardner
Sheena Rose
Tonya Wiles

Belize:
Santiago Cal

Dominica:
Pauline Marcelle

Guyana:
Roshini Kempadoo
Hew Locke

Haiti:
Jean‐Ulrick Désert
Barbara Prézeau‐Stephenson

Jamaica:
Charles Campbell
Keisha Castello
Marlon James
Ebony Patterson
Oneika Russell
Phillip Thomas

Saint Kitts and Nevis:
Terry Boddie

Saint Lucia:
Nadia Huggins

Saint Vincent and the Grenadindes:
Holly Bynoe

Suriname:
Sri Irodikromo
Patricia Kaersenhout
Marcel Pinas
Dhiradj Ramsamoedj

Trinidad and Tobago:
Nicole Awai
La Vaughn Belle
Marlon Griffith
Jaime Lee Loy
Richard Fung
Abigail Hadeed
Nikolai Noel
Rodell Warner
Natalie Wood