Monday, November 04, 2019

"Where Is Here" Museum of the African Diaspora.

 
An interview about "Little Gestures"  2017

Where Is Here, curated by Jacqueline Francis and Kathy Zarur, evokes the real and conceptual space through which we travel. The exhibition presents the works of contemporary artists who are developing personal and engaged visual and musical systems to claim, make, and describe space. The imagery is both straightforward and poetic.

New Level Head(s)

Rising Waters Confab
Rauschenberg Residency: April-May 2016










People(s) afloat or on the move.
New communities?
Social relations formed by rising water levels globally.
New social relations formed by common practices and predicaments.
In my past work I thought often about the difference between being displaced and being dispersed.
I come from the rest of the Hemisphere or planet. We have always been on the move between owned spaces or territories. What has been our response?
Transgressing or crossing borders.
I have always drawn these submerged heads. They refer to a condition - to a state of being - of suspension, on the move, between territories, be it cultures, nations and other social constructs.
About being and not being in “history”?
Maybe this (dis)respectful and investigative distance, or divestment in place, is old and simultaneously new – a way of living/being in perpetual uncertainty about owning or
having to own.
CAPTIVA / 2016

Installation version from RELATIONAL UNDERCURRENTS: CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE CARIBBEAN ARCHIPELAGO SEPT. 16, 2017 

Sunday, April 14, 2019

Cannonball Residency, Miami, 2015

“What I look for a lot of time [in my work] is empathy,” Cozier said. “I’m just using a different vocabulary. One of the weirdest things about artists like myself is that people don’t see my work as Caribbean in the Caribbean.”
See more here



Saturday, August 29, 2015

Enredos / TEOR/ética

July 15 - September 26 / 2015














See information here
See review from Experimenta also translated on Repeating Islands


Friday, August 28, 2015

Entanglements / June 27- October 18 / 2015

Curated by Yesomi Umolu, 
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.
Installation shot of Gas Men & Globe courtesy the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum.














"...Cozier presents two recent single-channel videos, Gas Men and Globe (both 2014), that explore the presence and impact of multinational oil companies in various international locations. Filmed on Lake Michigan—a site that in recent years has witnessed repeated crude oil spills at BP’s Whiting plant in Indiana—these works address the politics of the global oil economy. In each video, men in business suits draw fuel pump nozzles and hoses like pistols, swinging them in the air in a manner reminiscent of cowboy-style rope tricks or the whip cracking of carnival performances. These figures’ actions play out in the staccato rhythm of a crude stop-motion animation, their standoff recalling a Spaghetti Western set to a haunting soundtrack of sitar chords, live vocals, and sirens. In this take on what he calls “B-movie male heroic spectacle,” Cozier calls attention to the power dynamics of an economic paradigm that has grave effects on seemingly anonymous places, lives, and histories...".
See more here  

Video still from Gas Station Gene

Afro-Ophelia on Lake Ontario






























Very Ironic, especially now. A detail from my "Tropical Night" series (2005 - ongoing) represented Trinidad in a project for the Pan Am/Parapan Games. The image “Afro-Ophelia” makes a link between the Pre-Raphaelite image of Ophelia in my Nelson Reader, the book through which formal English was conveyed to me as a child, and the front page images of the local dailies which showed the dead body of a young woman ( Beverly Jones ) who was part of a political group, called NUFF, ( the National Union of Freedom Fighters) in the 70's. I did not attempt to capture her likeness. Images of her are hard to find. I used a graphic poster like representation feeling more like a Pam Grier movie poster of that time.  I often feel that this moment, to which we have developed an astonishing blind spot, may explain something of our current social predicament. The image was also in the Trinidad Guardian, of all places, a few weeks ago and an image symbolizing her was representing Trinidad on Lake Ontario and, if that is not enough, the project was called "Watercolour." ( image courtesy the Textile Museum of Canada )

Monday, April 06, 2015

Francoise Heitsch / Munich / Mar 19 - Apr 30.



















Videos gas men, Globe and related drawings at Francoise Heitsch, Munich until April 30, 2015.