THE I AGAINST I SERIES

This section is a collection of items related to the I AGAINST I series of works. You can view videos, writings and images that relate to the series. Take some time to explore and be sure to leave your responses by clicking the word 'comment' at the bottom of each item. Join the discussion!

I Agianst I Writing

Setups Situations Solutions

The latest exhibition at the newly expanded popopstudios featured new works by the trio of John Cox, Heino Schmidt and Blue Curry. As always the work offered many interesting directions to guide the wandering mind through the collision of mixed media and traditional techniques like painting and pencil drawing. All three artists featured new work that seemed to be addressing or responding to different ideas with equal levels of wit and invention.

Heino Schmidt’s Six of One, half a Dozen of the Other was a very satisfying combination of shaky dashboard video driving through Nassau’s streets and some well executed line drawings of a rugged looking man in 360 degrees. Heino articulated just enough to give the drawing character but still allowing you to fill in the details. Check out the video to see what I mean. This has got to be the most moving piece of Heino’s that I have experienced. i will have to go back and watch the whole video loop.

Blue Curry’s video installation REPAIRWORK traces the history of a statue that was unveiled in the 1800’s in Nassau to great celebrations. Within a few years the holiday honoring the man in the statue was taken off the books and a few years later the statue landed in the Bahamas National Library storage. Blue discovered the statue’s sorry state in 2001 and began to reconstruct its lost history. The research reveals many details from a Tourist’s comment post on an internet forum to the story of colonial Nassau. It is as if new technologies are helping to reboot our discarded histories by re-infusing it’s artifacts with meaning - or irony, I am not sure which direction Blue might have been leaning. Reading the timeline that he had printed while watching the video make-over is essential as well as both amusing and thought provoking.

John Cox continues in his intriguing exploration within the I Against I series. Four of the six canvases this time do not feature words and simply offer shadowy sea greens and low res blue images which convey a much less confrontational stance than previous works in this series. The absence of textual symbolisms to guide (or distract) the viewer gives the pieces a soothing calm. The final two pieces are a study in opposites. I Against I‘s cold blues and shocking night-safety writing is a cluster of clashing energies while Champion is a soft mesh of tranquility. This piece speaks to me of resolution. As if the first piece when you enter is the first punch that starts the fight. Through the four large muted blue and green canvases, we get a few rounds of give and take that engage you and then suddenly the knock out punch: Champion. With the figure of Cox now buried beneath an cloudy mix of zen floral shapes, the overall image is beautifully abstract and decidedly more feminine in tone than anything I have seen in Cox’s previous work. It will be interesting to see where this series is headed given that the oppositional ideas that it seems to symbolize require both a winner and a loser.

Once again the work from all three artists was powerful, interesting and executed with a high degree of technical skill and the new exhibition space really allows you more room to take in the scale of the larger pieces while also inviting interesting juxtapositions between the different mediums and subject matter.

by: seeward

Posted on Jan 17, 2008 | comment(0)

Bahamian Art Goes Beyond Tourist Trade

Sweeping sand.

Slaying dragons.

Savoring color.

It’s all in a day’s work to make art in the Bahamas.

These jobs come to fruition in the art for WORK! at Diaspora Vibe Gallery, organized with Popopstudios in Nassau. It’s a challenging show of art made with sand, color and even a dragon—but this beast is more verbal than vicious. It appears as a word on a painting by John Cox, who founded Popopstudios eight years ago in Nassau.

It makes sense that art from the islands comes to Diaspora Vibe in Miami’s Design District. ‘’I’ve been exposed to so many Caribbean artists by coming here,’’ Cox said at the opening party on Aug. 9. ``I’ve met artists here from St. Martin, Trinidad and Cuba. Miami is definitely a hub for the Caribbean.’’

‘’It’s a smaller version of the world,’’ said Heimo Schmid, another artist in the show. ‘’The Bahamas is extremely diverse. . . . We have Germans, Americans, Canadians, Jamaicans, Haitians, people from Europe and Asia.’’ Cox named Popopstudios for the grandfather he never knew, a furniture maker who died before Cox was born. For a time Cox, who studied at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, made furniture in his no-nonsense building.

About 2 ½ years ago, Cox, Schmid, and the others in WORK! got together in the place and started talking about how they might broaden their audience. Artists Blue Curry, Toby Lunn, Jason Bennett and Michael Edwards have been friends for years with Cox and Schmid. Their resumes show they’ve had sophisticated art education and exhibits far beyond their island home. All but one of the artists came home to make art in Nassau full-time.

Back in the Bahamas, they ran into the same barriers.

‘’We have similar struggles to identify ourselves,’’ Cox said. ``We’ve been around. But when you go back home you have to fight to validate yourself all over again. It’s like meeting someone for the first time over and over—every time you see them, you have that same conversation.’’

The audience for contemporary art in the Bahamas is limited. Most tourists want to take home predictable art: easel paintings of sand, sea and sun with lots of color. To most Bahamians, what’s made for tourists defines artworks. To Cox and his artist friends: ``We created a word for them. We call them brochuristic. The subjects are very nostalgic, romantic, idealistic—the good old days in the Bahamas.’’

Their talks about art at Popopstudios grew into a creative, collaborative spirit made for and by forward-thinking Bahamian-born artists. Cox and the five others in this Diaspora Vibe show nurture Bahamian artists by creating a community to support experimental work that gets little recognition on their home turf but wins respect in the United States and Europe.

Although they’ve had shows of their own beyond the Bahamas, their show at Diaspora Vibe is the first time they have traveled together as an artist collective.

The art in WORK! centers around a common theme: the struggle to be heard at home as professional artists respected beyond the Bahamas. Some artworks are more dynamic than others, but none looks like illustrations on brochures to market an island paradise worth millions of tourist dollars.

Struggle and work play out as visual metaphors in Cox’s Dragonslayer. Construction workers’ materials are metaphor: Instead of the stretched canvas, he has used a painter’s drop cloth. Two plumb lines hang from each side of his mixed media painting. A system of pulleys and strings connects these tools to another system of branches and coral rocks.

This system of objects plucked from landscape and toolbox frames the central imagery of Dragonslayer, two men boxing each other in a tense face-off. Look hard and you’ll see that the men are identical. Both are self-portraits of Cox, a metaphor for a region fighting for its own still-under-construction identity.

The short video by Michael Edwards, Lundby Strand, works as a visual poem about change. It gives a nuanced view of heavy machinery and workers tearing apart an old warehouse used for shipbuilding in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Compelling artworks in the show are Schmid’s drawings of dead or sleeping dogs. To make them, he photographed dogs sprawled motionless by the road, a common sight in the Bahamas, where dogs aren’t pets.

‘’I don’t remember if this dog was alive or dead,’’ he says of one. His art, he explains, is about ``a certain disrespect for life. I know the Bahamas is projected as a paradise, but the murder rate is . . . high. That’s something you never see in the advertising.’’

Photographs and video by Blue Curry are fascinating. They document his conceptual piece, Like Taking Sand to the Beach. They show Curry and workers excavating 500 pounds of sand from a postcard-perfect Bahamian beach, pouring it into 165 plastic bags, and then pouring sand on the parquet wood floor of a gallery in Germany. It stayed there six weeks for his show.

Curry’s video shows a child in a red coat making a sand angel and giggling. Even though the room was chilly with fluorescent lighting, kids and grown-ups couldn’t resist playing in the sand. ‘’People laid on the sand and they covered themselves in it,’’ he recalled.

After six weeks, the sand was swept back in the bags and ‘’released’’ on the same beach in the Bahamas. About a quarter of the sand was gone. It had left the gallery in Germany, clinging to people’s shoes or tucked in their pockets.

Light glinting on sand, sea, and colorful flowers is another Bahamian sight that’s touted to tourists. This magical light and color, in different ways, pervades mostly abstract paintings by Toby Lunn and Jason Bennett.