Annalee Davis on Tonya Wiles
Hiding and Seeking with Tonya Wiles
‘tongue’ 2008. Porcelain wash basin, leather, tongue. Dimensions variable.
I initially saw Tonya Wiles’s work at her first solo show, which opened at the Zemicon Gallery in Bridgetown on June 7, 2009. One week later, I attended her talk at which, according to Tonya, she wanted to “explain” her body of work to the Barbadian audience.
Her exhibition Hide and Seek played with established local norms about viewing art in a gallery space. I asked Tonya how different it was for her to locate her work in Barbados versus situating it in the UK, where she had spent the last three years. She felt that given the greater exposure of a UK gallery culture predisposed to understanding contemporary work, returning to Barbados forced her to ask the question, “Is art viewing universal?”
She wondered if the work made sense in a Barbadian context, and we spoke about how the work functions differently in the two spaces. UK-based viewers might be well exposed to, and therefore more comfortable interacting with, objects like Tonya’s in a gallery space, whereas in the Barbadian context the work reveals a tension. Hide and Seek exposed the conformity of a small, conservative, insular island society that prefers to know the rules of the game before playing. Members of the audience, Tonya told me, not sure what to do with her work, sought explanation from her before engaging or participating.
On opening night I observed the audience checking out familiar objects rendered useless by Tonya, who had also engaged performers to stick their wet tongues through porcelain dishes at the audience…. A nervous cacophony of giggles echoed throughout the space. Moving past the anxious laughter begged the question, what’s the value of these porcelain objects from Swan Street, glued onto wallaba posts, tightly wrapped in upholstery fabric, or soft leather-lined dishes waiting for us to press our selves into them? What are we to do with these objects? Tonya wants us to play with them, interact with them and even look silly while doing so?
And while Tonya asks if she can make an object useless, the viewers are wondering how to respond to the inverted equation of others looking at us, as objects ourselves to be viewed.
Sit 2009. Wood, fabric, buttock. “Nanny nanny boo boo (1)” 2009. Wood, leather, gloss paint, tongue. “Count to 10” 2009. Wood, found ornaments, leather, gloss paint, head. Ginger 2009. Oil on Canvas.
Imagine the relief when the audience happened upon Ginger — a lovely, heavily patterned painting. Ginger was created, Tonya told me, to create an atmosphere for the rest of the work. I would have called it “Oxygen” — it offered breathing space to an audience that kept gathering around it, relieved to see something they could relate to in terms of repeated patterns, familiar notions of beauty, and the well-known medium of oil on canvas. Here was a painting one could safely stand in front of, call it a thing of beauty, and no one would laugh at us for doing that.
In contrast, the expectation that the viewer would stick one’s elbow, nose, and tongue into familiar objects lined with leather and metamorphosed into interactive sculptures, was a bit too strange. The audience was obviously perplexed by this work … not to mention aware of the potential of contaminating the Influenza A – H1N1 virus by sharing space with other wet tongues in Nanny Nanny Boo Boo 1 & 2!
Tonya’s “explanation” took place one week after the opening, and in contrast to the inversion of role playing, she too conformed to the convention of doing the accepted thing by carefully explaining her work. (It reminded me of Kadooment … revelers playing at abandonment — safely cordoned off behind rope barriers.)
In speaking to her work, Tonya asked a number of questions: Can an object have a useless purpose? Can an object be about the people who see it? What does a work look like that has a useless function? How can we use it, touch it? How does an artwork make a person look ridiculous? She spoke about her interest in having a dialogue with the gallery space, and inverting the relationship between the viewer and the performer. In some cases, the viewer becomes the performer (unwillingly, perhaps), invited to touch the work and interact with it and play in the space. In others, the viewer may become traumatized as a result of feeling that the performers are viewing the viewers, while talking and playing with the audience through the works.
Hide and seek 2009. Oil on Canvas
For the moment, Tonya tells me of her plans to return to the UK, attend graduate school, and spend some time there before possibly returning to the Caribbean. She told me that her influences and current conversations are still rooted in the European environment where she spent three years at art school, and cited influences from Marcel Duchamp to the more contemporary Rebecca Horn. Noteworthy was when she told me that she did not have any Caribbean references.
This statement made me pause. One might imagine education for two years at a tertiary-level Barbadian art institution would have included exposure to contemporary Caribbean work and sent Tonya off with some understanding of her critical environment. Although the Anglophone Caribbean does not have museums of contemporary art like those in Havana and Santo Domingo, there have been significant artist-led initiatives taking place from the Bahamas in the north of the region to Suriname in the southern Caribbean.
Born in 1986, Tonya was awarded an island scholarship in 2005, and went on to graduate from Wimbledon College in the UK in 2008. Although keen to eventually attend graduate school in the UK, she recently returned to Barbados where, like many contemporary Caribbean visual artists, she has a full-time day job at a local upscale boutique as Retail Visual Merchandiser — dressing windows and decorating shop interiors for five hotel outlets.
For my part, seeing Tonya’s work for the first time made me think, not of Horn or Duchamp, but of Osaira Muyale from Aruba. It was out of curiosity that I asked Tonya if she ever heard of Lips, Sticks and Marks, an exhibition I helped coordinate back in 1997, and which included Muyale’s work back in 1997. Her response was, “Nope, I had no idea about Lips, Sticks and Marks.” I shared the catalogue of this exhibition with Tonya, who flipped to the page with Muyale’s work and words, and said to me, “Listen to this…” and read Osaira’s poem “A letter to myself”.
“I know you for a long time
We were playing hide and seek…”
Although I see a clear link between Tonya’s work and Osaira’s — two Caribbean women rendering common objects in an uncommon way — it is clear that Caribbean references are not in Tonya’s peripheral vision. Her sources, she says, are the same for her whether she is in Barbados or London. Tonya looks to Eve Dent, Tino Sehgal, Marcel Duchamp, Zoe Mendelson, and Rebecca Horn.
“Count to 10” 2009. Wood, found ornaments, leather, gloss paint, head
On a related note, I recently had in my studio four 2009 graduating students from the local five-year Fine Art degree programme. They were also unaware of regional enterprises such as Alice Yard, Small Axe and CCA7. Surprisingly, they were also unacquainted with the Art Foundry, a local gallery space which, although closed in 1999, was the first gallery in Barbados to make a critical regional reach and importantly, left an archive of catalogues with critical texts to document their exhibitions. (The Art Foundry is also to be credited with providing a path for local writers to join AICA – having published reviews in the gallery’s exhibition catalogues.)
The Anglophone Caribbean is witnessing an unprecedented expansion of artists, bloggers, curators, and writers keen to, as Christopher Cozier writes in the blog Paramaribo SPAN, “participate in questions about the role or value of visual practice in the wider Caribbean.” These independent projects are continually developing outside of national institutions and agendas and in response to the needs of a dynamic regional art community.
“Playing our selves” through words, images, the internet and via collectives is forcing potent spaces to develop, and confirms that critical work is being produced and written about, in an expanding archipelago, in conversation with itself and others.
These regional networks and discourses are redefining the archipelago’s reach, far beyond the insular spaces we inhabit physically. Tonya’s current lack of awareness about her regional colleagues is not a critique of her choices, but more a reflection of the inertia in the region’s higher institutions of learning, as noted by Barbadian writer George Lamming, who recently spoke of the University of the West Indies fast becoming a suite of national polytechnics.
I am refreshed by Tonya’s peculiar collection of objects, her confidence, and her articulate nature. I am curious to see where her hiding and seeking will lead both her and us.
June 2009
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