The Bahamian Art & Culture eMagazine writes: Last week, Bahamian artist Blue Curry was one of 45 artists and artist collaboratives from 16 countries who participated in the inaugural edition of SITElines, SITE Santa Fe’s new biennial exhibition series Unsettled Landscapes with a focus on contemporary art from the Americas. Curry’s installation entitled “S.S.s,” is one of the 13 commissioned works for the biennial and is an installation in three parts that creates a conversation between the locales of Nassau, Bahamas and Santa Fe, New Mexico by appropriating commonplace objects of tourism—cruise ships and beach towels—and re-contextualizing them as sculptural objects.
Bahamian artist Blue Curry.
Curry uses the port of Nassau as a site for sculpture and critical engagement. A live video feed is being streamed from Nassau to the exhibition in Santa Fe showing the daily assembly of cruise ships in the port while on a nautical flagpole outside the SITE gallery, one of 40 customised beach towels, transformed into flags, will be raised and lowered to mark the arrivals and departures of the cruise ships in Nassau’s harbor, which are also projected via live-stream into the gallery.
Blue Curry stands in front of part of his installation entitled “S.S.s” – flag/beach-towel pole component that signals when a cruise ship has entered Nassau Harbour. (Photo: Amanda Coulson)
From the exhibition’s catalogue, curator Christopher Cozier writes about Curry’s piece: “Shifting between London and Nassau, Blue Curry extends the conversation around visual culture in both locales. How does one read a small blue portable electric cement mixer, humming away as it stirs gallons of coconut-scented sunblock, in Liverpool, an industrial location historically implicit in the slave trade and the birth of transnational modern economic engines? The ordinary and the familiar are observed in Blue Curry’s work, but are not always recognised in their new roles. He restaged moments of exchange derived from a long history of people from places like the Caribbean, moving between narratives and making visual mischief to bring understanding to misunderstood shared histories. Consequently, one should always be a bit cautious when encountering the work of Blue Curry, which confounds and confronts with a precise and strategic composure. While often there are no titles, the descriptions of works, whether a list of items conscripted into his conceptual arsenal or the account of an action, provide sly commentary.”
Interior shot of Gallery that lists the names of the artists in the SITE Santa Fe Exhibition. Next to it is part of Blue Curry’s installation, the custom designed towels. (Photo: Amanda Coulson)
Cozier continues, “I almost said the word ‘ready-made’… But the artist’s live streaming of cruise liners’ arrivals and departures transforms this commonplace event to generate a critical awareness. In part, the work registers the Internet’s significant role in Caribbean visual dialogues. The standard beach towel dispensed at a tourist resort or a docked cruise ship are both fair game. They are enlisted in a conversation about the history of declaring and seizing territory. The towels are now deployed in flag-hoist signalling at SITE to announce new arrivals or invasions of cruise liners in Nassau. Since Santa Fe is inland, maybe it’s also SUVs. Both locations have shifting histories of occupation, invasion and, now, tourism.”
The collection of bespoke towels all designed by Blue Curry to represent the different cruise lines that dock in Nassau Harbour. (Photo: Amanda Coulson)
The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas Director Amanda Coulson was present at SITE’s opening and commented on the exhibition and the significance of a Bahamian artist being invited to take part. “SITE Sante Fe was an extraordinary event, looking at The Americas as a single unit of creativity, both revealing and fostering connections between artists as far afield as Ottowa, Havana, Los Angeles, Lima, San Francico, Bogotà, Samtiago, Cape Dorset (Nunavut, Canada), and Nassau”, says Coulson. She continued, “The conversation regarding landscape — how it is appropriated, colonised, used, exploited — is what binds them and created a very cohesive exhibition, despite being curated by 4 curators (plus various advisors) and including 45 artists, of all different ages and mediums.”
She adds, “The show itself was exceptional and the fact that a Bahamian artist was invited is of significance for us as our nation becomes less peripheral in these global art events and conversations. Curry, at the Davidoff Art Dialogue, articulated that what gave him the most pleasure was being treated as “just an artist,” on a level playing field with all the other artists, and not as something “exotic” or “different… It would seem there really is no longer a “periphery” and to be marginalised means to allow oneself to be overlooked; one needs to actively insert oneself into the global conversation and Bahamian artists are doing that”. For Coulson, “Curry easily held his own amongst some extremely renowned artists of the 20th/21st century was of great satisfaction both to me, as the Director of the NAGB, and to Curry himself. I was able to meet several other museum directors, biennale curators and galleries, and the interest level in the Caribbean as a whole, but The Bahamas in particular, is really tangible and extremely exciting.”
Still of the live feed from Nassau’s Port
As part of the opening events, Curry took part in the Davidoff Art Dialogue, entitled ‘Confronting Paradise: Land and Landscape in The Caribbean’ on June 19th along with Exhibition Curatorial Advisor, Christopher Cozier of Trinidad, and artists Deborah Jack, Sara Hermann and Glenda Léon. The Davidoff Art Initiative has a four-pronged outreach: Grants, Residencies, Editions and Dialogues. The Dialogues take place at Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Basel Hong Kong and at various other sites during art events. The Dialogue organised during SITE Sante Fe was a conversation about the Caribbean landscape, but addressing the theme of the show “Unsettled Landscapes,” that is, seeing landscape not as a mere object of beauty but a place with socio-political meaning.
Blue Curry speaks about his work at the Davidoff Art Dialogue. (Photo: Amanda Coulson)
The panel participants were asked to address “What does the Caribbean landscape mean to you?” And where appropriate, they were to refer to their artwork in the biennial. Deborah Jack’s piece, Bounty, for example, was comprised of 30 ten-by-ten inch light boxes with images of the salt hills in St Maarten, which — at first glance— appears to be the Arctic (i.e. the antithesis off the Caribbean locale) and addresses issues of colonialisation and trade, slavery and commerce. The final talk will eventually be viewable on the SITE Santa Fe website.
To read the original article in the Bahamian Art & Culture Newsletter, click here.