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.

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Installation and video collaboration between Christopher Cozier & Richard Fung.

A-Space Toronto

Curated by Andrea Fatona ( Jan 2004)

The Work of Art in an Age of Neocolonial Production

Aaron Kamugisha

Though they often do not realize it, the West Indians of today cannot afford to go on regarding this region as a tropical estate to be exploited for its economic returns. Whether they like it or not, this is their home. So, we need to face the problems of making the West Indies a more acceptable physical and social environment for ourselves and those who may come after us. Even now, we often have only the vaguest understanding of the true nature of our present ambiguous situation.

Elsa Goveia, Past History and Present Planning in the West Indies (1966)

While delivering the inaugural Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture at Warwick University in October 1991, Stuart Hall made the point that “one of the perplexities of the independence movement certainly in the British Caribbean islands is that … in the early phases of those movements so-called political independence from the colonial power occurred, but the cultural revolution of identity did not.” This apt comment strikes at the heart of the Caribbean post-colonial condition, and questions our periodisation of this era as one of ‘independence’, ‘neocolonial times’, or a ‘postcolonial’ epoch. In what follows, I hope to locate the artwork of Christopher Cozier within a larger problematic – which can be described as the crisis of postcolonial citizenship and identity in the contemporary Caribbean.

Aaron Kamugisha

(more…)

Installation and video collaboration between Christopher Cozier & Richard Fung.

A-Space Toronto

Curated by Andrea Fatona ( Jan 2004)

The Work of Art in an Age of Neocolonial Production

Aaron Kamugisha

Though they often do not realize it, the West Indians of today cannot afford to go on regarding this region as a tropical estate to be exploited for its economic returns. Whether they like it or not, this is their home. So, we need to face the problems of making the West Indies a more acceptable physical and social environment for ourselves and those who may come after us. Even now, we often have only the vaguest understanding of the true nature of our present ambiguous situation.

Elsa Goveia, Past History and Present Planning in the West Indies (1966)

While delivering the inaugural Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture at Warwick University in October 1991, Stuart Hall made the point that “one of the perplexities of the independence movement certainly in the British Caribbean islands is that … in the early phases of those movements so-called political independence from the colonial power occurred, but the cultural revolution of identity did not.” This apt comment strikes at the heart of the Caribbean post-colonial condition, and questions our periodisation of this era as one of ‘independence’, ‘neocolonial times’, or a ‘postcolonial’ epoch. In what follows, I hope to locate the artwork of Christopher Cozier within a larger problematic – which can be described as the crisis of postcolonial citizenship and identity in the contemporary Caribbean.

Aaron Kamugisha

(more…)