In the space @ Y Art Gallery, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago.
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. 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.
Wendy Nanan
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.
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.
Note book drawings from the “Terrastories” series and “in Development” series – connected to the “Works in ‘Progress’ ”
Christopher Cozier
1999-2003
Mixed Media- ink, charcoal, graphite and pencil on paper
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
1999
59 x 60”
Mixed Media on Paper
Sold
I started making figurative carvings from whole trees in Tobago, where I am free to do what I like.
There is an assumption in England and Germany about what art is, and figurative work, carvings, ceramics are not serious art. There is a prejudice against folk-lore, religious, ethnic and decorative work.
And messages or stories in work of art are labelled literal, and therefore not art.
So I have been lucky to work very far away from any art scene, and to develop my own ideas. First I drew, painted and carved nature studies in Tobago. Then I studied the folklore of Trinidad and Tobago, and carved those figures.
I have always been a passionate dancer, and I love ballet in all forms, particularly Nijinsky, the Russian genius of the Ballets Russes around 1911. I still carve figures from those ballets. Recently in Cuba I have made sculptures from wax, which totally liberates shapes and possibilities from the limits of tree trunks. However, once a year in May or June I carve tree trunks in the forest of Germany.
I went to Suriname and Guyana to study Maroon art, and incorporated those designs into my house. The local Baptist religions have a very close resemblance
to the Voodoo ceremonies I saw in Haiti, and to the Orisha religions of Africa. When I came to Cuba I saw people dressed in white , witnessed the rumba, saw Orisha shrines in most houses, and am learning about that religion.
It is quite wonderful if a work of art has more meaning than just l’art pour l’art, which is so predominant in European art. But now from the former communist countries of the East, Russia and East Germany, have risen well-trained artists who paint pictures with stories in historical, pictorial, literal decorative styles- all is allowed and well fashionable. I admire the work i see in Cuba, and the people I am lucky to be working with at the Taller Cultural in Santiago de Cuba. Their work tells a story, or carries a message, and their training and cultural background is so rich and undiluted that for me Cuba is the centre of the arts in the Americas.
I show my work every two years in Trinidad, and my museum in Tobago is open every Sunday for four hours. I get a lot of response, and the occasional sale, without having to exhibit all over the place, which, for a sculptor whose main material is wood, is not possible; sculpture from solid trunks cannot take different temperatures without opening.
– Luise Kimme
Bolero, 2008
From Tacarigua to John Donaldson Technical Institute to UWI to Ontario College of Art and Design. From Jewellery to Visual Art to Installation Art… “My perception of visual art has evolved towards a performative act-tion within the political socio-economic life of the urban, the rural. A kind of schizophrenia within aesthetics, as I rethink the value of the studio and how the practice engages its space. There is a conscious consideration of art for tomorrow” – Dean Arlen
