Christopher Cozier
2015
44 x 30”
Ink on Paper
From the Entanglements Series produced in Port of Spain, 2015, “Strange and Unfamiliar Garden Creatures … Leaving the frame as quickly as they appear”
Christopher Cozier
2015
50 x 38”
Ink & graphite on paper
Produced at Cannonball Residency in preparation for Dark Circles Installation at the Betsy Hotel, Miami Art Basil, 2015.
Christopher Cozier
2012
From the exhibition-
Taking Note: WORKING DRAWINGS {2000-2012} Mixed Media on Paper .
59 x 60”
Christopher Cozier
2012
From the exhibition-Taking Note: WORKING DRAWINGS {2000-2012} Mixed Media on Paper .
59 x 60”
Christopher Cozier
2003 .
From the exhibition-
Taking Note: WORKING DRAWINGS {2000-2012}
Mixed Media on Paper .
59 x 60”
Christopher Cozier
2003 .
From the exhibition-
Taking Note: WORKING DRAWINGS {2000-2012}
Mixed Media on Paper .
59 x 60” .
“My work aims to transform conventional readings of where I am from – or about what I am supposed to be concerned. How do my experiences coming from a place like the Caribbean, and now, moving through others, shape how I see the world?
Investigating the relationship between the contemporary and historical conditions, I often enlist mundane everyday objects, along the way, seeking to transform them into signs/vocabularies to generate dialogues across geographies, histories and contemporary experiences. From my on-going personal notebook drawings – making notes or taking note – I develop public actions trying to figure diverse ways of making and conveying work or of creating an experience or an awareness.”
– Christopher Cozier
Christopher Cozier
From the Thupelo Workshop – Cape Town
1999
Mixed Media on Paper .
59 x 60” .
“This drawing is about looking at old photographs of people and architectural spaces that felt familiar… but I was in South Africa… and thinking, in general, just as in my context, whether of family/ancestors, or just people like myself, how they all looked familiar but just as unreadable or inaccessible.
One can only speculate as to their countenance to cope or contend with all around them within that captured moment.
Produced in a workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, I fused these kinds of photographic images with an antique mirror I came accross which reminded me of the type of mirror in a Colonial threshold, or hat and umbrella stand at the entry of my Barbadian grandparent’s home. I placed the stick fighter’s heart shaped breastplate in the image to pay homage to the struggles of these people in the images across the Atlantic.
Even though visible, they felt fenced in or off, within a history that was as familiar as it was unknowable to me now…”
– Christopher Cozier
Christopher Cozier is an artist, living and working in Trinidad and a co-director of Alice Yard, a collective, which will be participating in Documenta 15.
He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2004 and is a Prince Claus Award laureate, 2013.
Through his notebook drawings to installations derived from recorded staged actions, Cozier investigates how Caribbean historical and current experiences can inform understandings of the wider contemporary world.
Exhibitions include the 5th & 7th Havana Biennials, Infinite Island, The Brooklyn Museum, (2007) Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic (2010), TATE Liverpool, Entanglements at the Broad Museum, Michigan 2015. Relational Undercurrents at MOLAA. L.A. (2017) and The Sea is History, Historiskmuseum, Oslo, 2019. Cozier participated in the public program of 10th Berlin Biennial, 2018, exhibited in the 14th Sharjah Biennial in 2019 , the 11th Liverpool Biennial in 2021, Industrial Art Biennial, Croatia, 2020 and currently in Más Allá, el Mar Canta (Beyond, the Sea Sings) at the Times Art Center, Berlin, as well as Fragments of Epic Memory at the AGO ( Art Gallery of Ontario) and Experiences of Oil at the Stavanger Museum, Norway.
