Wednesday, January 13, 2010

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International recognition grows for Bahamian Artist Blue Curry By THEA RUTHERFORD ~ Guardian National Correspondent ~ thea@nasguard.com: It's been a great year for artist Blue Curry. Curry, a Bahamian artist who recently completed the MFA program at Goldsmith's, College of London, was listed in former Art Review editor Catriona Warren's Top Graduates of 2009 at murmurart.com in October. He is in the middle of production of a BBC4 documentary on emerging artists scheduled to air in the Spring of 2010, and the artist is ending this year with participation in "The Global Caribbean," an Art Basel, Miami Beach exhibition of contemporary Caribbean art, curated by Edouard Duval Carrié. "It puts the Caribbean on a world stage because people come from far and wide for Art Basel," said Curry of the show that opened at the Little Haiti Cultural Center on December 4. In a wide-ranging show that includes fellow Bahamian artist Kendra Frorup, Curry exhibits a version of one of the contemporary art pieces that caught the eye of Catriona Warren during his MFA show. In his untitled sculpture over 700 hours of cassette tape cascades from a bull shark jaw suspended about 17 ft. into the air by a rope. Curry made the piece for "The Global Caribbean" show while sitting high atop 20 foot scaffolding for 50 hours. On a recent visit home to Nassau, he spoke a little about the process of making the piece: "It's really a time consuming process to reel out the tapes and groom the sculpture." Meant to evoke a souvenir and a cultural relic while being a contemporary art piece, the sculpture weaves together all of the threads of Curry's ongoing discourse with himself and with his audience about what Caribbean art is — both in its limitlessness and the limitations placed on it by external perceptions. "I think that usually these objects kind of dance between all three in some ways," he said. "If a book full of images of contemporary art washed up on a small island and then the natives went about fashioning contemporary art based on what they had available, and mimicking what was in that book, this is what they'd produce... That's a lot of the stuff that I think about. "I do think the objects move around," said Curry. "They're not easily identifiable as one thing or the other...The shark jaw is a very strong icon in the Western perception for the Caribbean.... The work is a criticism of the way Caribbean art is received in the West and of the expectation that people still n See Recognition on L2 have of art from the region. Inevitably, the work will attract a lot of misdirected criticisms. I'll have curators outside The Bahamas tell me that my work isn't Caribbean enough just because of all of these expectations of the tropical, the native. It's too conceptual, too slick, too clean. It connects into the perception that people have of the islands from the outside. In some ways the work is a criticism of the way that we continue to foster this image of the tropical through our support of tourism. We pump millions into that every year, and so we suffer from this image that we create of ourselves." The boundary placed on art from the region is something Curry continues to grapple with. "I think I've been frustrated with this idea that my work has to look a certain way because of where I'm from," he said. But even as he wrestles with this expectation, new doors have begun to open up for him and his art. In addition to a full exhibition schedule in London where he has made a home, Curry continues to exhibit internationally. He is one of 39 Caribbean artists, along with Heino Schmid, whose work is currently being exhibited in "Rockstone & Bootheel," a contemporary West Indian art exhibition at Real Art Ways gallery in Hartford, Connecticut. "I feel like it's definitely a different period for me," he said. "There'll be more opportunities." Saturday, December 12, 2009