Visual Matters

Little Gestures - Into the Mix at KMAC

2012-01-19T18:18:00.007-04:00

"Little Gestures" installation [recent Substation version] as well as Alice Yard design collaboration with Marlon Darbeau from the Global Africa Project adapted for - Into the Mix - at KMAC. More soon.

Substation Card 1 / Johannesburg

2011-11-13T12:06:00.005-04:00

Since I was given this archaic object, I have been wondering about how education sometimes gives us the language to articulate and even the countenance to accept the random conditions created by those who simply have the money to do what they want? I think of the outrage being expressed by young people occupying various financial districts around the world. It is a device to brush crumbs from a table. I thought it would be interesting to use the lino cut and Century Schoolbook type with creole - like grammar to make the unfamiliar object and the language fit.
The Substation Residency Dislocating the Studio is a series of residencies featuring local and international cultural practitioners, structured as a challenge to the space of the studio / gallery. Wits School of Arts, Wits 2013 Strategy, Wits Vision 2022, CISA and the Africa Centre - see further images here

FURTHER INFO. AVAILABLE ON THE EDITION FROM DAVID KRUT PROJECTS, NY AND JOHANNESBURG, HERE

"development box" and other moments

2010-11-14T09:58:00.012-04:00

"MADE IN CHINA" stamps have been so much a part of our lives growing up in Caribbean. In the past it was pencils and plastic pencil-sharpeners, yellow twelve-inch-rulers etc. Modest items with all the associations of developing countries and low level consumption. Today, in the same locations, for people with bigger budgets, it is now monolithic structures and narratives of progress.

I bought this little stamp in a mall in Port of Spain. I began to see these little stamps more and more over the years. Apparently they are quite commonly used for labeling, on arrival, in small shops? Why are they being labeled here in Trinidad? What would the value of labeling my work this way in narratives of development and progress? So far I have begun to label drawings of pedestals for politicians to stand upon. Within the narrative of "Development" this object can allow them to feel taller and more important or they could use it to hang themselves.
A friend, Cecile, offered the following comment on my blog:
"I've heard of "suitcase traders" using these stamps when importing goods that aren't labelled with a country of manufacture. Such a label is necessary to bring these goods here "legally". So, traders take these stamps with them to wherever they go to get their goods and if there happen to be any items which are untagged, they place a little "Made in China" stamp on to avoid any trouble with Customs."

"Little Gestures" from the "Tropical Night" series.

This was my first drawing of the bench (peera ) which I called "little gestures" in 2006. Through the dialogues instigated by architect Sean Leonard at Alice Yard, this simple everyday object, enlisted into my symbolic vocabulary, became an object for design investigation by designer Marlon Darbeau.
See further thoughts here.

Tropical Night in Martinique

2010-11-10T12:58:00.004-04:00

Click on image to read more. Click here for the "Tropical Night" site.
See Video by Marco Lora Reid.

NOW SHOWING

2010-07-18T23:46:00.026-04:00

Limited edition silk screen ( 100/100 ) done at Axelle Fine Arts, NY. commissioned by the Trinidad +Tobago Film Festival 2010, ( 27 x 20 inches ). The edition was launched on Friday July 16th at the National Museum.

For information about purchasing click here
Still from “The Life Movie” by Nicholas Laughlin

Download discussion by Richard Rawlins in Draconian Switch #13

FROM MY NOTE BOOK ( MAY - JUNE 2010 )

1. "Stains on paper;" is an idea that has been with me throughout my career. It's the title of an older work from the mid 90s. As with many of my images, the idea that my thoughts, visually, feel like a smearing or a staining of a pristine surface or field of art making ( I am thinking historically/internationally as a mere "native" who does not know better.) This is also implied locally as I do not come from the “Culture-producing-caste/cast” in the narrative of nation. You can look at it from within the confines of ethnic narratives or from class and family name etc. - the local bullshit that I faced when I was younger and now starting out as an artist in the mid-late 70's. (The “who-are-you-to-feel-you-could do – x” stuff. ) So, there is, in my work, a dialogue about beauty and order deferred in sociological / existential ways. I was thinking about that anxiety which people like Naipaul discuss in their early lives and careers.

The stain - that grey grimy feeling - is the feeling of walking the streets of the city or of those kind of primary schools or institutional spaces like courts, government buildings, hospitals - any traditional waiting room around Port of Spain, still. But, it could also be Baltimore in the 80's or in those particular places in cities like Caracas or Johannesburg - those places where you find the darker people. Those places that people who inherit an idea of power think that it’s okay or natural for the rest of us to occupy?

2. The "12.30 show" from Walcott and the Vybz Kartel Clarks song meet or collide within my visual vocabulary therefore bringing together the formal and the vernacular. Again, it is about the spaces I navigated growing up here and remain curious about when I travel. Also this is derived from the collaborations I have done with David Rudder and also Sheldon Holder of the band 12. There exists a visual interpretation of the "Mad Man's Rant," by Rudder, which the artist and myself discussed in great detail over time. This print is a follow on in some way.

Much of the writing in my images are random but sometimes related thoughts that come to me while drawing. So next to the bread on wheels I wrote my own thoughts and also something derived from a line from a song ( Salt ) by 3 Canal where they ask - where you going with all that dough boy - or was it millions…tens of millions or something like that. That line and tone of voice in their performance matches the line..where you get them new Clarks dey daddy….

3. The cut - tree ( cut-nature ) is, of course, the one outside the Forensic Center in Federation Park. I have been looking at it for some years now - and especially so - since the rise in daily murders in our city. I find it interesting that the tree was cut down, the trunk burnt out, yet it's sprouting again. To me this says something about history - about persistence and hope. But, it also says something about how the tree in the sun, in a “tropical” sense, can have different meanings based how one encounters it. In this image I am more interested in the topical than the tropical.

Often, I am driving past this location. The people standing around it may have lost a son, a father, a brother or relative, for example. While waiting, they are hearing gunfire from the police shooting range over the wall. It’s the background of our ongoing and often denied violent history. The mysterious cracking sound in the back of Chekhov's play, The Cherry Orchard, comes to mind.. the something that makes people build higher walls or more burglar bars or stay home at night….but now its playing out for a different class and group in another place. It impacts upon the flavor of the promise of mobility and liberation.

4. The bare feet and Clarks shoes could be dancing feet stepping to an urban beat. Bare feet may mean impoverishment in one narrative or folk-ish rural fortitude from old national and socialist forms of representation and the shoes - a kind of grassroots stylish-ness or bling. Bunji mentioned the Citizens' Conservation Core and his commitment to Clarks as a sign of rooted-ness some years ago in his personal narrative - in an early hit, about people wanting him for fetes all over the country.

I wore Clarks in my youth and my kids now do so also. It’s funny how these conservative Brit shoes have been co-opted into Caribbean macho narratives.

The feet could also be the feet under those goofy old fashion Carnival costumes or the feet of shot youth sticking out from under a cloth at a crime scene on the side of the road. The feet also could be the feet of marching protesting workers carrying placards as was the case in my earlier "intersection" series from Johannesburg. It could also be the feet of a vagrant in the city sticking out from under cardboard as you walk by. Its patterning recalls the fringe on a dress or the pompoms on a Midnight Robber's hat. A friend who works in emergency services once told me that they are always puzzled by why the left shoe seems always to fall off first when someone runs or becomes injured. So one shoe on and one shoe off is suggestive in that sense.

5. The empty lot or car – park can be interpreted as history converted to property ( or maybe just the continued story of the purpose of property and the mercantile purpose for being here in our context ) has been with me for the last 5 years and is a development related to my use of the podium from Copenhagen in the "Terrastories" series. Now, it is about the empty lots in the city. The way our history is reduced to its most expedient exchange value as real estate - thus the reference to the dollar bills. It’s about the value/status of our past experiences/knowledge and ways of living in the current narrative of development and progress. It also infers the Peschier family plot as a form or sign as the Savannah continues to be paved, threatened and violated.

6. Is the loaf of bread on wheels going or coming? It’s derived from an image of a local minister in a cool car giving the "no comment" look from behind his wheels to journalists. This image from the daily newspapers in the mid 90’s made me think of those 1970s Tony Falcon movies from the Phillipines that I saw at Globe - the words "once you have bread and wheels you good to go..." came to mind.

7. The the faded figures in the center continue to reference the kinds of movies I grew up seeing in the 60s-70s. Wang Yu in "One Armed Swordsman', Clint Eastwood and Amitabh Bachchan are seen. Then of course there is “the block” derived from our local Percy moment in the last elections. The link between action movies, karate and spiritual blocks are played with. Some how, the imagery from what is called "Blaxploitation” films slipped out of the net even though they factor heavily in my other works. Somewhere in there is also a lady in patterned maxi- dress looking like those from the early 70's. This like many of the other images came from the newspapers. It is an image of our past national spiritual adviser.

8. The box on the head of the silhouette (which comes up again and again in my work) with the "made in china" stamp and the mysterious figure that stands on the box like the Cipriani statue “in town” or like the contemporary politician who thinks that development status could be bought. But, the head is also "carrying-load" which is also a reference to previous works. I do not mean to compare Cipriani in this way but I wanted to express something by comparing our past with our present.

9. The image has both topical and conceptual ideas of the moment or of my general concern. It tries to capture a moment or the moment so there is a time bending in that the world this work describes is any place like this, but also, this place. The recent "Dudus" event and similar ones here and in other parts of the hemisphere make that clear. It’s not a new question this collision of art and life. The word's "Now Showing" are layered into the image. Are we living in a movie unmade?

Tropical Night in AFRO MODERN.

2010-01-30T04:22:00.001-04:00

Installation of larger version of "Tropical Night" in AFRO MODERN at the TATE, Liverpool. 189 drawings were used instead of the 136 used in the "Infinite Island" show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. See details on the Tropical Night site.

"Sound System II" at Rockstone and Bootheel

2009-11-12T14:49:00.013-04:00

Sound System graphic - "arena"

Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art

Curated by Kristina Newman-Scott and Yona Backer
Opened November 14th at Real Art Ways.
See info. about exhibition and also download sound sample here
See fragment of the artist's notes here

"it real nice"
"...Ideological lyrics man, with erection, between two dancing girls....thinking about the traditional politics of the space..."

e-magazine link for San Jaun

2009-04-03T17:16:00.013-04:00

Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe.
Opens on April 18th.

Click on the image to go to link to download your own copy.
To my surprise and thanks to curator Julieta Gonzalez, "Availalble At All Leading stores" may have a continued life (even in this Obama moment?). Curious and excited to see how this takes shape. I remain astonished at the potential of designer Richard Rawlin's e-magazine link for this project, and Nicholas Laughlin's response, which also gives it yet another life.

San Juan installation. Click on the image to see more.

ongoing thoughts

2008-11-20T17:30:00.010-04:00

ongoing thoughts...little hand printed and cut out benches,(implying much hope? )
There is also the “pira” or the little bench that refers to small incremental gestures that build up over time. This what I feel that I am going after with my little daily drawings.
It’s the kind of bench that people use to do simple humble daily things like weeding a garden or vending at the side of the road or shining a shoe and so on. It’s often portable and is often intriguingly worn or weathered into shape by use over extended periods of time. I feel that these little gestures are the foundation of a global economic reality that is not seen for what it is. Often it is discussed as some kind of inefficient and errant form. A messy problem to be corrected or reformed. This is why I brought it together with the old Colonial map - for the moment.

Further thoughts:10/03/09
Is Hope an idea or a concept that is easily materialized or inferred? Maybe not - because it may be an active conjuring or imagining of possibility? I was attracted to the bench design as it recalled a modest however naïve and idealistic time in my life. A time in which I was not too “exposed,” so to speak, and so I had to figure ways or functioning with very little in hand. By the way, then, the “little in hand,” felt like the world and the ability to transform these few things through imaginative reverie, as, for example, in the games of childhood, was quite exhilarating.
It all keeps coming back to me when I see the way these little work-benches are put together or designed. Designed is the better word as it implies a solidity of intent.
I was concerned with ( inspired by?) the make-shift which I knew and had come to understand, even accept in a place like Trinidad . However its familiarity was less than comforting or consoling than it was comfortable or accommodating.
Through my knowledge and or familiarity, a tension lingered in my mind/sense between it being “ all I know” or just “what I know.”
So I keep drawing and investigating this bench form.

Port-au-Prince

2008-07-07T00:06:00.019-04:00

Working at Place public Canape Vért with local artists and various children who just joined in. I worked with Karim Bléus, artist and sign painter, as well as with artist Tessa Mars who translated my text into creole. See hers and mine here - "creole text"

I am not sure if the image done on ply-board with house paint worked out but the process of working outdoors in a public space and the resulting comments were interesting. Habdaphai, of Martinique, as well as Edwige Aplogan of Benin worked with other artists at the same location. This was all part of the Forum Transculturel de Port-au-Prince. Click on the images also to see more in Flickr.

Child's shoes, Haiti

2008-06-16T16:25:00.003-04:00

This was the only photo from for my entire time while in Haiti. On my last visit, I just could not take pictures. I had to ask a colleague ( Karole Gizolme ) to take this image for me. I noticed the shoes on the ground near to where I was sitting. Something about the way that the shoes had become so worn out struck me. I kept thinking that no one growing child could have worn that shoe long enough for it to become so worn down. The shoes were just on the ground in a yard in the Capital. They looked like islands in the sea but also like the two countries that make one island facing off. The hardness of the ground and light had an effect on me also. I go to Haiti this week to do another project. The shoes also reminded me of the way that very similar, or the same, cheap items move around the globe. The same kinds of shoes can be bought Port of Spain, Johannesburg or Paramaibo, for example. I have been thinking about these shoes ever since.

Sound System ( version 2 )

2008-04-20T14:46:00.018-04:00

Car park of the Philipsburg Cultural Center, St Maarten.
Click on the images for more details.
I arranged with two DJs with cool and very loud sub-woofer systems in their cars to pull-up in the car park, behind the exhibition space, to play the sequences. They also mixed in other stuff of their own when they felt like it. This was my contribution to DVG’s ( Diaspora Vibe Gallery ) workshop in St Maarten 2008....
Photo Deborah Jack

Kicker Sub-woofers in the trunk.
Photo Christopher Cozier.

Bread on Wheels in Chicago

2008-01-17T19:55:00.003-04:00

Click on the image to see more about this installation called " Once you have bread and wheels, you good to go " at the Chicago Cultural Center. The show is called "Here There Everywhere." Another version of the work is also on tour, in Canada, in "Reading the Image, Poetics of the Black Diaspora"

Studio floor

2007-12-03T07:54:00.000-04:00

Line-up of hand printed cards on the floor of the studio. Click on the above image to see images of the other works in this group. You can also click on the following for notes on "card experiments"

"Little Gestures" sequence

2007-10-04T08:49:00.000-04:00

Image of the artist in the exhibition space at Dartmouth College photographer Joseph Mehling.
You can also click on the following for an ongoing conversation between Nicholas Laughlin and Christopher Cozier on the entire series as it develops - "Tropical Night"

Dartmouth set-up images

2007-10-03T10:42:00.000-04:00

Click on the above image to see images of the other works in this installtion. The show eventually opened on Oct. 2nd. You can also click on the following for notes on "cross currents"

Thinking about Lloyd Best

2006-04-18T23:07:00.000-04:00

Two voices in my head in the early 90s: David Rudder called himself the lyrics man but certainly Lloyd Best must be his literary equivalent, in terms of stretching the boundaries of language (our given and constructed ones) to grapple with giving shape to what we see and experience within the social landscape. Lloyd has generated many a linguistic hook to match many of David’s.

Like many Trinidadians, I knew Lloyd before he knew me. After work in the evenings, I used to visit a designer colleague, Eric Macallister, who was designing and pasting up the Tapia Newspaper on Cipriani Blvd. In those days, Lloyd was a robust man with a heavy commanding voice, wearing some kind of West African sarong under his T-shirt and or shirt-jac — but in local terms, it was a skirt! — and, of course, sandals to match. He was an intellectual. In the late 70s, this was not always a compliment — perhaps even today, in a place like Trinidad.

He always challenged you to have an opinion, or provoked questions. “What’s your opinion … or position?” As a "youth-man" then, I was always a bit circumspect about the Shirt-Jac Posse — I did not study at UWI, even though most of my family did.

Other shirt-jac men like Burrows, Coard and Burnham, or just ordinary territorial Civil Servants, were already playing themselves in the region or about to. But, to me, Lloyd represented the other camp, something different — something which shaped the way I used my first opportunity to vote in 1981, for example. I had developed a critical and an aware self and had become equally as weary of ribbons, flags and floating balloons.

When I returned to Trinidad from studying abroad, in 1989, Lloyd invited me to write for the Trinidad and Tobago Review. Again he was questioning and provoking me into public debate. A brief comment I had written and submitted about an artist doing something other than rendering birds, boats, shacks and tracks slipped through and was published in one of the dailies. Shortly afterwards, Lloyd called and offered me space to write about art in the Review. As I said, I did not really know him. He was the shirt-jac man I had seen in the papers and on TV while growing up — the person who had taught or influenced my father and older siblings at UWI. People began to ask me if I was a Tapia man — this was all very confusing to me.

The features editor at the daily newspaper called me in also, advising that my submission, which was just over 400 words or so, was too long, would take up too much space and needed simpler, more entertaining language that was more inclusive. I kept thinking to myself, How many people reading the papers then, or in a product T-shirt wriggling in the Oval, still, or even ever knew what a leg break was, or silly mid-off? Why was he picking on me?

Lloyd, unlike the rank and file operators within the various cultural territories or properties we have in Trinidad, never questioned my right to have a say or an opinion. I could never imagine Lloyd as just another appointed or aspiring estate policeman.

I proceeded, with his support and encouragement. He corrected my spelling and grammar but never encroached upon my point of view. I had permission to have and to express ideas! Of course, I was one of many. I wonder how, over the years, he maintained this optimism and commitment in a place like Trinidad and survived.

This is not characteristic of senior generations, in this Post-Post-Independence era. They mostly talk to each other about each other and their academic and/or pre-Independence (or early nation building) accomplishments, as well as the list of 70s disenchantments. One gets the impression that subsequent generations came into existence merely to listen. The world was already made. The sermon already scripted.

But many of us live in another space now, of trans-shipment empires, territories and arrangements, daily murders, kidnappings and the occasional Queen show. So, right before my eyes, as in a B-movie, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly had now transformed into The Greedy, the Anxious and the Desperate. The listeners in “house” began to shift in their seats, those in “pit” were out of their seats and out of patience, and “balcony” had bodyguards or had already left.

While other artists were questioning my entitlement to have opinions or threatening to break my fingers, the phone would ring every month and Annie or Lloyd would say “we are waiting on your piece — we cannot go to press”. The schoolmaster had called and homework had to be done. Sometimes I would be nervous to pick up the phone — was it an artist calling to cuss me for my last article, or was it Lloyd calling to keep me to my deadline? He was one of the most encouraging voices in my life then.

He made me feel normal for having ideas and for wanting to express them. I never assumed that he was interested in my artwork or agreed with my thoughts. It was the principle of providing a platform for ideas that concerned him most. So, by example and as a matter of principle, Lloyd was asking, Who gets permission to participate and to dream in this space that we have been in the process of constructing so far? What would be the best indicator that real democracy, or the prospect of it, was our business or concern? This was not the Trinidad I knew. How does he maintain this enthusiasm … this openness? Why is it so rare in the society today?

It was Lloyd who eventually introduced me to Annie Paul and David Scott in Jamaica, which lead me to become part of the Small Axe Collective. This has been one of the most fertile interactions for me as an artist living in the region.

The last thing I think of is a dream that I once had in the mid 90s, a time of much confusion in my life. It was Carnival, but in the past, near the Bleachers, where I saw mas in the 60s with my parents — it was Lloyd as a Gladiator! He was playing an individual. He had net, axe, leopard-skin coat, a Ken Morris breastplate, with a series of people, who I cannot recall, keeping his cape off the ground.

I was about to acknowledge him, but he held his hand up and said,that he could not recognize me — Who are you? What are you playing? Go home and get your costume and then we could talk! He said.

In other words … what’s your position?

New on the Market

2006-04-18T21:11:00.001-04:00

I was thinking about "FEAR" Has it now replaced ethnic identity as a new political (even national) commodity? In its current 10 oz. packets, it can easily be distributed for consumption.

from my note book:
28/06/06
“Available at all leading stores!”

A collaboration with curator Andrea Fatona from “Reading the image: Poetics of the Black Diaspora” currently touring Canada.

Curator, Andrea Fatona calls from Toronto…she has seen another of my graphic works on my blog site. In this work, I am speculating about “fear “ as a new political commodity. People in Trinidad are supposed to be living in fear so we need a new government or new security measures to save us. They also say we need a renewal of moral and religious values! I keep asking myself – like the Nation who is selling this and why?
As usual someone told me that the work looked foreign and that that there was nothing distinctively Trinidadian about it…they said it looked generic.

The way I see it, these local concerns place me in a larger less anxious and competitive domain in which a kind of empathy can take shape between myself and others in other countries and cultures who are facing similar challenges and manipulations in the fast expanding global economy and social order. Maybe on islands people look inward and outward simultaneously.

So the curator and I begin to collaborate. We are imagining how this work will fit in to or shape her idea and if she can take the responsibility to make aesthetic choices in the implementation and placement of the work in the space and context. I decided that a simple rubber stamp made at an office store would do. This means that people entering the exhibition could make the stamp themselves on the little cardboard boxes.

To me this is exciting. It occurred to me that this is a collaboration not just between myself and the person that enters the show and gets to stamp the fear label on a box and take it home but also with Andrea. She gets to actually choose the boxes and order the stamp and have a say in how it will work. The work enables a number participants and I am more of an instigator than a sole maker “artist-man” in the old fashion sense.

In the early 90’s the term “ marketable historical injury “ kept coming up in my speculations about the use of identity. It was my final departure ( hopefully / optimistically ) from the territorial prospects ( but designations ) of multicultural politics and particularly now the reductivist political commodification of self and sensibility within local electoral politics and the lucrative postures of newspaper columnists. The seed of further distrust and by extension the marketability of fear and insecurity were coming on stream.

Belmont wall

2006-04-08T14:29:00.000-04:00