Parasitic Periphery
Parasitic Periphery (P.P.) was a public art project, executed between May and July of 2008, in downtown Port of Spain, Trinidad. PP’s material components were over seven hundred prints of two-inch square, woodcut images were installed throughout the city.
If this work was diminutive, in the physical scale of its components, it was because it was part of a larger idea.
Dreams (Sueños) (2008)
a dream in three parts
This short film is a visual poem in three parts. Footage included in the film is from Miami, Miami Beach, Ann Arbor, and Havana, Cuba. The soundtrack of the film includes music by Duke Ellington, from the album Black, Brown, and Beige as well as poetry by Langston Hughes read by the author himself. dreams (sueños) alludes to the tension that exists around the relationship between the US, particularly Miami, and Cuba, as well as offers a glimpse into the possibility of change.
Aus den sieben Tagen,2008 (From The Seven Days), mixed media – monoprints, photographs and mirrors, H 68″ x W 76″
A Willing Suspension of Disbelief
-to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, 1817).
In the last work Nick Whittle made for this exhibition, there is one image among many. It is a photograph of the artist himself. Naked; eyes closed; arms outstretched; he floats in a shallow pool of green-tinged sea. Weightless and unguarded. Light reflects off the surface of the water creating a fractured pattern that emanates from the artist’s head. He is both suspended and immersed within the sea; his facial features, his breasts rise above its surface like islands. This is the artist that I know, and yet as I have never seen him before.
Symbiosis: A Discourse on the Psycho-Social Jungle of the Jamaican Experience
Winston C. Campbell
Installation detail
‘SYMBIOSIS’ is the title of the newest installation by renowned Trinidadian artist, Marlon Griffith at the CAG(e) Gallery at the Edna Manley College and apparently makes reference to the ever shifting/ever stable interconnections that are present in the Jamaican (and Caribbean) societies. Lexically, the word suggests relations, dependence, mergers, sacrifice, encouragement, similarity, dissimilarity and a host of other inter-connected references. Without being heavily grounded in theoretical approaches to discussing Caribbean peoples and their cultural realities, one cannot help but accept that the term seems quite appropriate when attempting to describe the Jamaican cultural situation.
The Un-Familiar
Detail from Roaches and Flowers: War in the Home
This exploration of a psychological crisis is in fact a visual narrative of conquest, where gender politics and violence against women become visible through the vocabulary, iconography, and mechanisms of the home interior. Domestic items such as cutlery and plates, intermingled with flowers and nails, form roaches and other unseemly insect-like forms. These roaches, sometimes camouflaged or constructed with flowers, represent invasion, the unwelcome, the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, found in a space associated with familiarity and comfort.
In Late 2007 Jaime Lee Loy began working with the domestic space as a site of war, intimately exploring the psychological crisis that occurs, when something familiar becomes suddenly unfamiliar.
click on image to read more
Alice Yard is the backyard space of the house at 80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain, Trinidad. This was once the house of architect Sean Leonard’s great-grandmother. Four generations of children played and imagined in this yard, and now Leonard continues this tradition. Since late 2006, Alice Yard has been home to 12, the band led by musician Sheldon Holder. A series of weekly Friday-night “Conversations in the Yard” organised by Holder bring musicians, artists, writers, and audiences together for informal performances and interactions. Alice Yard was pleased to present its first international artist-in-residence: Ugochukwu Bright Eke from Nigeria. He is a winner of the Commonwealth Foundation’s Arts and Craft Award for 2007, and has chosen to use his award grant to visit and work in Trinidad.
The Universal Human Experience
A Digital Journey – click on the image to see where in the world the artist is currently
Paramount to Kishan Munroe’s project is the investigation of peoples on opposing sides of various contemporary conflicts which have historically changed modern regional and global socio-cultural interaction. The range of the dialogue shall span a myriad of disputes; by way of example: the Holocaust to the Iraqi war to Haitian/Bahamian relations; the white/black racial divide; gang rivalry; controversial Australian Immigration practices; the war against Terrorism; and the Rwandan Civil War.
“Bonche” is a public intervention in the one of the most popular bus routes in Havana-the P4. With transportation being one of the key problems in Cuba the “guaguas”, buses, are notoriously crowded, uncomfortable and unreliable. They are spaces that belong to everyday life where various elements of a society converge creating a roaming microcosm. However, the strange intimacy created by bodies being pressed together reminded me of another public space-one of a party, concert or carnival. I was attracted to the hedonism inherent in “una fiesta” and the contrast that it provokes in a society characterized by enduring hardship.
I always thought that everyone is the same
If each human being is an individual with a complete network of senses of his own and a special combination of abilities, then the vision of each human being will be different, and the way in which each individual determines his life will be a unique interpretation. Captured in the complexity of civilization, man often loses sight of his human destination. The artist not only records the physical data of his own being, but has to act as an interpreter, a translator of human experience. Art functions as diagnosis, definition, and standard for human life.
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