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 )