What does it mean to be Bahamian in an increasingly global cultural dialogue? How does an emerging nation, like the Bahamas, participate in and shape the global cultural landscape when it still has many issues of national identity unexplored? Will the Bahamas be swallowed up in the monolithic stream of North American consumer culture or will it retreat into its historical identity as an escapist paradise?
These are the questions that contemporary artists in the Bahamas are struggling with. At the forefront of this struggle and exploration is a core of emerging artists who are willing to transcend the traditional definitions of Bahamian identity in favor of discovering new expressions that remain hidden beneath the surfaces of our national tourism facade. From his Popopstudios in Nassau, John Cox is creating work that challenges viewers to suspend their preconceptions and journey with him into the symbolic depths of his fluid identity.
A first encounter with his work does not evoke images that seem to directly relate to life in the Bahamas. Littered with Sumo wrestlers, Kimonos, religious symbols from many traditions, and the occasional patch of animal skin, Coxs work challenges the viewer to go beyond the tensions presented on the surface to reveal the uniting soul of each piece. Working in many mixed media forms, with an emphasis on screen-printing, Coxs work is parallel to the urban musical process of sampling. Rather than his pieces being a linear visual narrative such as a traditional Bahamian landscape, they present a clash of differing points of view. In a piece called, Me, this clash of perspectives takes center stage. Visually the triptych weaves from water buffalos to baseball players to engineering drawings. The overall effect pulls the viewer into Johns internal vocabulary of symbolic meanings. The piece is experienced like a coded message that requires the viewers to apply themselves to the task of interpretation. Even on the surface, we are a long way from the nice little paintings of island fishing expeditions that have come to monopolize the traditional definitions of Bahamian art.
This tendency to push the viewer beyond the surfaces of his work has also propelled Coxs exposure beyond the borders of the Bahamas. Although the support for Johns work within Bahamian circles is growing, he has always found much more receptive audiences around the globe. With exhibitions in Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, Cox has called other Bahamian artists to look beyond their borders and consider the relevance of their work in a larger global context. There is a deeply ingrained local insecurity that before the Bahamas can compete in a global culture, it must first have a clear definition of what is uniquely Bahamian. Johns work sidesteps this sentiment by choosing to see perspective itself as the only unique thing that the Bahamas has to offer. Rather than defining what is Bahamian based on the content (or sometimes even just the colors) of a piece, Cox chooses to define it as the perspective that the artist comes from and fuses into their work. For him the playful Bahamian spirit is our most unique quality and one that has a relevant voice in global dialogue. The smashing together of High and Low culture, the freedom to laugh at ourselves as well as the overall commitment to having fun are all aspects that can be fused into work of any subject matter. It is this playfulness that Cox considers the Bahamian perspective and offers a key to unlocking the symbolism in his work. He is making serious art that hangs in respected galleries but he doesn’t take the work or the process itself too seriously. The works themselves are actually seen as artifacts cast off by the process of synthesizing meaning from one’s experience of living. Like engineering or architectural drawings the works point beyond themselves toward something greater, taking on a secondary quality to the actual art of living.
It is Coxs personal art of living that is the Rosetta stone for interpreting his work. An avid cyclist, one series of pieces presented a diverse set of objects (rubber tubing, small wooden sticks, and rusted metal shards) that John had gathered during his cycling adventures. These apparently random objects were infused with personal symbolic meaning though their re-contextualization as works of art. Almost nothing is off limits to this kind of symbolic sampling. Through portals like cable television, the Internet, and fashion, the act of living in the Bahamas has begun to fuse with cultural touchstones from all over the map. As a person living in this haze of influences, Cox expands his vocabulary to include symbols from the pantheons of art history to the corporate logos that have begun to dot the roadways of most emerging nations. They are all fair game for reinterpretation and they are all ingredients in what it now means to be Bahamian.
Christian McCabe
From : Wynwood Art Magazine and One Small Barking Dog
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.
ELISA TURNER
Bahamian contemporary artist John Cox is redefining art as most know it in the Bahamas.
John received a BFA in Illustration in 1995 and went on to receive a Masters in Art Education from Rhode Island School of Design. He originally went to school as an architecture student and eventually found his niche in illustration. He began making art and organizing shows of his work at such universities as Cambridge, Brown and Harvard. On his trips home from school, he was involved, with much success, in a two-person show at the former Bahamian Art Gallery. Cox left school fueled with the utmost confidence choosing to return home and develop his career in the Bahamas.
Cox’s mixed media work is unrehearsed, spiritual and eclectic. He fuses elements of historical figures such as Mao, Billy Holiday and Jackie Kennedy with newspaper clippings, torn magazine pages, creating something he calls his own. Similar to the sampling of new age or the always misunderstood urban poetry, hip-hop, Cox’s work samples on elements already existing in mass media. He recycles basic materials overlooked by the average person and creates oversized dramatic pieces which overwhelm you with their multiple levels and complexities of interpretation.
When asked why he feels that his work is not generally accepted because of its complexity, John stated, “I find my work challenging to create and challenging to the viewer as well. One thing I’ve come to realize is that people don’t like to be challenged. They find it intimidating, a strain to actually have to think about the work and to question something. I don’t think I am a household name here in the Bahamas but I have a good amount of support. The work is different in this context and environment. It’s not what people immediately associate with how they define art or something that they can immediately recognize or mentally conquer. It has elements of many different things, abstract elements, surreal at times. It communicates in many different ways.”
He is presently a curator of the Bahamian National Art Gallery and part time lecturer at the College of the Bahamas. He works from his studio, Popop Studios in Nassau, creating mixed media pieces and abstract furniture design.
From Bahamasb2b.com
What do you do with a 6ft x 10ft painting?
If you’re John Cox you create from everything around you and you give your gestures room to breathe, despite their breadth. You fill in life’s blank spaces. You create something that becomes an object in itself, something no one has seen before.
“I’m trying to create new things,” Cox told Arts&Culture, comparing the process by which he creates his large scale works to discovering a naturally formed object like a piece of driftwood on the beach.
“But the thing is it’s not a representation of something else; it’s just an object. It’s an arbitrary object that...is not meant to be representative of something else. It’s supposed to be what it is.”
Cox’s show “Large Paintings” will open officially at the Central Bank on Thursday, Oct. 11.
The show features works from both the artist’s collection and a private collection, created between 1998 and 2004. Cox was offered a space that was available in the gallery’s calendar and thought about how he could give context to his work.
“I thought, well okay, this is a good way for me to screen out works that I’d like to show, and one of the things I guess I have been known for over the last couple of years is making these really, really big paintings,” said Cox.
Then came seven of his gigantic paintings — paintings that you can step into and bathe in their emotions, their expressions. The gallery, with its high ceiling and open balcony, is a great space for works of this size.
“That space works for those paintings because you get to look at them from 20 to 30 feet away, and that’s really when you get to feel how the work comes together,” Cox said.
“The paintings do have a double quality in that you can read them from far and get a sense about them,
and then as you get close to them, you can pick through them and look at little markings.”
At the exhibition, a taped interview in which Cox talks about the challenges of creating and placing large scale works plays on a small television screen near the foot of the stairs in the gallery. The interview plays continuously.
Creating large scale works “comes with a whole other set of situations and challenges and dynamics that sort of seem like a very simple thing,” said Cox. But the “scale of the work does present a unique set of circumstances that you have to deal with.”
The circumstances vary from actually making the works to finding space large enough to accommodate them. Cox said that placing the works, which become like sculptures due to the size, is like working with an architect on the placement of a house on a piece of property.
“I think that there are things that we don’t really pay much attention to. Those kinds of sensibilities come into making works that are large.”
The works, done in house paint, incorporate objects such as fabric, wood, a light bulb, drawing you into the artist’s sphere as much as it opens your own.
Cox said that his influences are as wide as his gestures. “I’m really very influenced by things other than visual art. I’m a big fan of electronic music. I like jazz music. I sort of enjoy even the television; there’s something about the way you can flip through the channels and you can have things going on,” he said, recalling an experience of watching several television screens at once, all airing different events and channeling separate messages that were disparate but oddly cohesive at the same time.
“Most of the times when people aren’t paying attention that’s when I like to pay attention.”
By: THEA RUTHERFORD
The Nassau Guardian
The most effective way for me to articulate this series of work is compartmentalize the process. I separate my relationship with piece in two parts, one part teacher one part student. To connect the two parts I will use four simple components Content, Process, Materials and Presentation to bridge the bridge the gap.
CONTENT
The main content of the piece is found in the title of the work which is ‘How Much Do You Love Me’ but found in the piece is the response ‘This Is How Much I Love You!’ The piece communicates by using an extracted part of an intimate dialogue (with my spouse). Where one party looks to quantify or validate the others love for oneself. The piece functions differently depending on which character you choose to be. At its core the exchange is at best cliché’ and a bit embarrassing but true. Usually the response to ‘how much do you love me? Is a suggestion of something infinite like the ‘stars in the sky’ or the ‘sand on the beach’. The main focus (content) of the piece is to personify the idea of the infinite measure. Using love as the reference it allows the subject love to be defined and redefined over and over again. The idea of love encompasses so many things at once. The immediate theme of the work is personal and at first hokey, and a bit embarrassing but later has much broader and less obvious implications.
The work redefines love as honor, respect and dedication to a particular person, or any person, or anything, or any action. It doesn’t only suggest infinity in an additive way; but also addresses the subject of love in terms of tolerance and discipline. Also the piece investigates love within the context of an intimate relationship. As well as social or political relationship to society and lastly a measure of validation yourself against yourself. I chose only to use the text to keep the imagination of the viewer as universal as possible.
PROCESS
The earlier versions of the piece were silkscreen on double-sided 15ft. canvas. The paper cut silkscreen created a static texture, which before long became almost unreadable. Having the phrase ‘this is how much I love you!’ gradually deconstruct then become clear again helps reinforce the abstract nature of the subject while taking the response way beyond a normal level of attention in to a something more hypnotic or like a hallucination. Each phrase is printed individually so the pattern doesn’t get noticeably redundant. I thought this might allow the viewer to specify his own interpretation of the work and also add to a kind of sadistic/obsessive act of printing this pattern line by line.
MATERIAL
With this version of the work being 100 ft. long I wanted to use a material that would as the work traveled appear lighter and lighter and that could layer to create density. The plastic visquene seemed appropriate because it was translucent which allowed both natural and artificial light to participate with piece. I want to appropriate the site specificity of each presentation regardless of the length. I spray painted the same stencil I used for the silkscreen to produce the phrase. Also the spray paint adhered to the plastic much better than the printing ink. Also it gave me almost the same static texture that the silkscreen provided.
PRESENTATION
The major component of the piece is the scroll itself. The installation can find new formations depending on the venue. I have created a structure inspired by a newspaper printing press which soles purpose is the exaggerate the length of the work allowing it at times even to integrate with the ceiling. This also gives the viewer to view the scroll for more dynamic points of view. The physicality of the presentation suggests that there is no end to the work.
CONCLUSION
These four components work in collaboration with each other with a single goal of sparking curiosity and hopefully evoking a sense of the immediate and familiar about our feeling of love for each other, for society and for ourselves.
By John Cox
The exhibit 'Exit' which recently opened at Popop Studios was personally, not as good as I had hoped for. Consisting of the usual Popop crew, excluding Michael Edwards, the show was reaching for a new level of contemporary Bahamian art. Purposefully opening the night after the internationally acclaimed exhibit 'Funky Nassau' at the National Art Gallery Of The Bahamas (NAGB). Funky Nassau's success proved to the outside world that Bahamian art is on par with art internationally. Exit then using Funky Nassau's success as a platform to go beyond, produced the idea that Bahamian art can now change because of this new door being opened. The small community fear of being inferior is now exiting as contemporary Bahamian art makes a stand to prove itself to the world. However, this wonderfully thought of idea was not translated through the presentation of the works and the works themselves. On entering the gallery space my attention was stolen by a very large 116" x 90" painting by JASON BENNETT. Originally being overwhelmed by its size in the limited space of Popop, the work 'Twister For Cats' shows change from Bennett's usual scale, presentation and to some extent, style. Taking the works on paper to a new level by using not pre-bought art paper but pages of a book, and layering these pages; which is mildly refreshing. Thankfully the usual targets and contour lines were dismissed for this piece giving the viewer a new experience. However, the lack of consideration for the condition of the piece (i.e. the paper bending at its joints) could be a negative for a buyer, since the piece still presents itself in a saleable way. Also, the not so flattering "COB" style of framing appears to be a later thought and confines the density of the piece. Even though Bennett's work appears to be evolving, 'Twister For Cats' seems too pretentious for the space, and appears to be stuck in-between a state of simplicity and completeness. The artist consisting of the most real estate within the exhibit was abstract painter TOBY LUNN. His work consisting of nine wood stain and enamel paintings belonged not so much in Popop Studios as they did a Lyford Cay beach house. His once engaging technique of movement has become nothing short of repetitive and bland. The work combined with its traditional style of hanging and lack of creative display led to a very disappointing product, particularly considering the initial goal of the exhibit. The piece 'Society' by JOHN COX, appears to only be a sample of something about to come. The conceptual side of the piece remains strong, however with the edition of size as well as languages it successfully expands the idea further. Given the change in scale however, the piece now wishes it were larger than it is, making it appear incomplete. 'Society' is more of an experience than it is something you view. The work feels as though it wants to be more sculptural and interactive because of it having different dimensions and so many parts; making me wish that the wall would have continued until it hit the other corner of the room, and even possibly been on the floor and higher up the wall than it was to make the viewer feel encompassed by the piece. Even having all of the cubes except for one, displayed on the wall created a more distant gallery experience and not an interactive one. The three dimensional quality of the cubes become more relief and less sculptural when on the wall making me unsure of the encounter Cox wanted the viewer to experience. 'Via Someone Else's Mouth' by HEINO SCHMID has many qualities of contemporary art on an international level. Based around ideas, appearing to do with identity and intimate experiences the piece ventures in a new direction for Bahamian art. Unlike the other pieces in the exhibit, 'Via Someone Else's Mouth' is documentation of a representation of an idea and is not based so much on visual aesthetics. The piece itself is strong and works well with the original idea of what the show wanted to accomplish. Though it could have been displayed differently for the 'Exit' show. Due to the piece being heavy on the video installation, where viewers need to be able to watch and listen the space given to the piece was unfit. The low television screens created an uncomfortable space for viewers that felt irrelevant to the intent of the piece. Also the proximity to BLUE CURRY's 'Potcake' made the sound levels clash and the experience of watching Schmid's piece became difficult. BLUE CURRY does it again with a well thought through, surprising and engaging piece of work. Potcake is nothing short of a Bahamian Icon made immortal by the piece 'Potcake'. The now popular found object art strikes again. The strength of the piece comes from the authentic nature of the trolley itself as well as the cleverly placed camera and display of the camera. The video of Potcakes daily journey on the streets of Nassau through the eyes of the Iconic object itself, using an old television set that could be believed to even be in Potcake's trolley to begin with, the piece elevates the person/object we all know giving him importance. Making the question asked by the piece both engaging as well as relevant to the time, "Where does the Disneylandification of it all end?" Nevertheless, unlike the rest of the works in the exhibition where the presentation was too traditional or galleryized the grand trolley itself could have used the galleryification and been elevated on a plinth giving more prominence to the piece. by Jonathan Murray
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