Collections by
Christopher Cozier
Edward Bowen
Roberta Stoddart
Roberta Stoddart
2025
12 x 12 inches
Oil on hardboard
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Roberta Stoddart
2025
19 3/4 x 16 inches
Oil on hardboard
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Roberta Stoddart
2025
15 1/2 x 14 inches
Oil on hardboard
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Roberta Stoddart
2025
11 1/4 x 10 inches
Oil on hardboard
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Couch Odyssey
Couch Odyssey is a creative journey exploring new content and perspectives. In these works, I am largely uninhibited by my own expectations of myself and the expectations generated by my past work.
Couches and armchairs, interiors and floors, are ordinary, everyday physical objects most often associated with shared interior spaces, domesticity, leisure, rest and style. I experience sheer joy when experimenting with ideas and subjects which, on the surface, seem simple. There is a blend of past and present influences — mid-century modern, the 1960’s and 1970’s — the period in which I was raised. After this, my couches and interiors take on a life of their own.
There is great freedom in having no agenda, no goal in mind, other than to be led by my intuition. I can just “be”. Authentic creativity accepts that the intellect is a poor guide and a fragile bedfellow. Instead, Soul is awakened and nourished in the presence of the ordinary, and by what is “true”. With the freedom to respond to whatever the heart desires, to fully explore my range and depth as an artist without fear of consequences, I encounter the sacred in work and life.
Roberta Stoddart’s paintings have been described as brave, dense, bold, thoroughly executed, and deeply felt. Intense and disturbing, they stimulate questions about our collective prejudices, our psychological spaces, and our notions of belonging. Stoddart has published two books, Seamless Spaces (2000) and TheStoryteller (2007), produced seven solo exhibitions, and participated in important local, regional, and international group shows, the most recent being the Kingston Biennial 2022. She is the recipient of a Peoples’ Choice prize in France and has exhibited at the Werner Gallery, Berlin, Germany. Born in Jamaica, she lives and works in Trinidad.
-Roberta Stoddart
Image by Abigail Hadeed
Site of Exchange
The empty lot or car park – all that’s left – can be interpreted as our history converted to cash. Could it be that even those who render our architecture are also involved in the same conversion – cashing in on the erasure?
Christopher Cozier (b.1959, Port of Spain) is an artist living and working in Trinidad and a co-director of Alice Yard, which participated 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 and Experiences of Oil at the Stavanger Museum, Más Allá, el Mar Canta, The Times Art Centre, Berlin, 2021, Fragments of Epic Memory, AGO, Toronto, Forecast Forms at the MCA, Chicago 2022 and Unraveling The ( under – ) Development Complex, Savvy, Berlin 2023.
The artist is in Prospect 6 (2024) and Project Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica at the Art Institute of Chicago (2024). His works were recently acquired for the collection of the MCA in Chicago and MoMA, NY.
This piece was an experiment, the latest in a recent series. One of the imperatives was allowing a juxtaposition between recognizable structural form, but assembled from its abstracted parts, as is a word written or spoken, the language itself formed from smaller pieces, indices, lines, dots, gestures, smudges, mixings and impressions. The etching in a Sumerian tablet gives you a picture, a description, a story.
The background to this piece is the recent resetting of two organic gardens, and more concentrated Studio disciplines inside and surrounded by this process.
Born 1963, Eddie Bowen studied at Croydon College, UK from 1981-1985. He has since been living and working in Trinidad, often letting his environment in San Souci, be his muse.
Image by Melissa Miller
