Prior to (e)merge (October 2 – 5), nine of the 10 artists in the NLS + ARC suite are stopping into our live podcast IN for a series of conversations probing each other’s work. The conversations air this Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (September 23 – 25) at 8 PM EST (Jamaica)/ 9 PM EDT (East Coast U.S./Eastern Caribbean) on the NLS Youtube Channel.
“I don’t rely on mirrors so I always take polaroids” courtesy Ian Deleón
The schedule is as follows:
- Tuesday, 8 PM: Becca Kallem, Leasho Johnson, Nadia Huggins
- Wednesday, 8 PM: Ian Deleón, Stephanie Cormier, James Cooper
- Thursday, 8 PM: Mark King, Anabel Vázquez and Oneika Russell
Send questions during the segment and have the artists answer them LIVE. Tweet to NLS at @NLSkingston or send the artist questions as a private message through NLS on Facebook. RSVP to event on Facebook.
(e)merge art fair running from October 2 – 5 hosts an exhibition that puts local artists in direct conversation with contemporary art outside of the Caribbean. The 10 international artists being represented by ARC and NLS at (e)merge are James Cooper (Bermuda), Stephanie Cormier (Canada), Ian Deleón (Cuba/Brazil), Nadia Huggins (St. Vincent and the Grenadines), Leasho Johnson (Jamaica), Becca Kallem (Washington, DC), Mark King (Barbados), Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez (Puerto Rico), Oneika Russell (Jamaica), Storm Saulter (Jamaica).
About the Artists:
James Cooper was born in Bermuda in 1965 and went to university in British Columbia Canada, where he studied landscape architecture. He was a pro athlete (triathlon) in his early twenties, where he represented Bermuda at a few world championships. His introduction to photography was primarily commercial as he owned a production company and produced all sorts of fashion and editorial shoots for U.S. and European clients, in Bermuda. Bermuda is a key part of his work, which consists largely of underwater photography, however Cooper’s work isn’t about documenting aquatic life in picturesque waters. Instead he depicts people in water accompanied by surreal props like horse masks, spray paint cans or bright strings.
Stephanie Cormier was born in Montreal, Canada, grew up in Barbados and has since lived in the UK and Toronto, where she currently resides. Stephanie completed her BFA at OCADU (Toronto) and holds an MFA from The University of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario). Her work has been exhibited across Canada as well as internationally, she has earned several national grants and awards and her work can be found in the Carte Blanche Photographers Book I.
Ian Deleón’s work is a personal journey of familial and cultural discovery, with societal implications that highlight lingering narratives within popular culture that seek to exoticize, romanticize, or apologize for colonialism in all of its forms. By means of video, the internet, performance, text, ready-made sculpture, recycled materials, education and activism, he strives to take these messages and subvert them, re-contextualize them, creating symbols that encourage new narratives and individual reflection on the systems of power that extend oppression and domination into the twenty-first century.
Nadia Huggins is a self-taught photographer from St.Vincent & the Grenadines; her primary focus for the past 11 years has been documentary and conceptual photography. Her photography has been featured in several online and print publications, including Fubiz, Words Without Borders, Pictures from Paradise: A Survey of Contemporary Caribbean Photography and See Me Here: A Survey of Contemporary Self-Portraits from the Caribbean. Her work has been exhibited regionally and internationally, including Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions held in Washington DC in 2011 and is held in the World Bank collection. Also most recently her work was featured as part of the Pictures from Paradise exhibition featured at CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto. She is the co-founder of ARC Magazine and a full-time freelance graphic designer.
“Body Double # 3″, Storm Saulter, Digital photograph 20″ x 30″, 2014
Leasho Johnson works in painting, ceramics, as well as graphic and fashion design. Johnson has shown locally at the Mutual Gallery and National Gallery of Jamaica, and internationally at Kadé Gallery in the Netherlands, and Real Art Ways in Connecticut. He is also a founding member of the Dirty Crayons collective, and has organized exhibitions in non-traditional spaces as part of that group. Johnson renders the raw and rejected of contemporary Jamaican culture using techniques traditionally esteemed in Jamaica. His ceramic avatars adopt the Kawaii aesthetic from Japanese art to depict an inner-city woman surrounded by her bawling babies. Leasho received his BFA in Visual Communication at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica.
Becca Kallem received an MFA in painting from the University of New Hampshire, with a BA in Art and Spanish from the College of William and Mary. She held a Fulbright teaching fellowship in Madrid, Spain and currently teaches elementary art. Most recently, her work has been exhibited in the DC area at Pleasant Plains Workshop, Heiner Contemporary, Hillyer Art Space, and Mary Washington University. She is a resident artist at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia.
Mark King holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. In 2011 the Lucie Foundation selected Mark for their apprenticeship program. In the same year he participated in a screen-printing residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. In 2012 he took part in an artist residency at Alice Yard in Trinidad. In 2013, he participated in two residencies; Fresh Milk in Barbados and Ateliers ’89 in Aruba for the Mondriaan Foundation’s Caribbean Linked ll.
Oneika Russell lives and works in Kingston, Jamaica. She studied Painting, Media, Film & Video Art in Jamaica, Japan and the UK. She also lectures in the Fine Art Department at The Edna Manley College of the Visual & Performing Arts in Kingston. She was a 2007 awardee of the Commonwealth Arts & Crafts Award and Visiting Artist at The Pratt Munson Williams Proctor College in Utica, NY. She has exhibited in solo & group exhibitions in Singapore, The US, UK, Japan, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Martinique and Canada.
Storm Saulter is a filmmaker, photographer and visual artist born in Negril, Jamaica. He is the writer, director and cinematographer behind multi award-winning feature film Better Mus’ Come. International critics have recognized Better Mus’ Come as heralding a new movement of independent filmmaking throughout the Caribbean. He is co-founder of New Caribbean Cinema film collective. Storm’s experimental films have been exhibited at The British Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, and The National Biennial of Jamaica. His photography has been published in Rolling Stone Magazine, the FADER, and Billboard Magazine. Saulter received the 2011 Jamaica Gleaner Honor Award for his work in developing Jamaica’s Film Industry and the Jamaica Observer has named him one of his country’s most influential people.
Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez is both an artist and independent curator. Her work explores sociopolitical issues from an autobiographical perspective, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Vázquez Rodríguez studied Painting at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and Photography and Film at The Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Curators:
Deborah Anzinger is an artist and the executive director of New Local Space (NLS), a Kingston-based visual art initiative, through which she has organized and curated pioneering exhibitions locally and internationally, written for regional publications such as Caribbean Beat and ARC Magazine, sat on panels for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Transformer, Washington, DC, hosted local artist studio visits at NLS for the Pérez Art Museum Miami and Thyssen Bornemisza Art Foundation, and run an international artist residency program. Anzinger is an artist whose work has been exhibited in Jamaica at the National Gallery of Jamaica, in the Caribbean at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival and Liquid Courage Gallery (Nassau, Bahamas), and in the DC area at Transformer, Arlington Art Center, George Mason University, Civilian Art Projects, Hillyer Art Space, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She most recently exhibited in FLOAT a group exhibition of artists based in the Caribbean presented by Transformer and reviewed by the Washington Post. Her work with NLS has been covered by the Jamaica Observer, Jamaica Gleaner, Trinidad Guardian, Frieze, and the Washington Post. Anzinger received her PhD in immunology and microbiology in 2005 at Rush Medical Center, Chicago.
Holly Bynoe is a visual artist, curator and writer from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. She is currently living and working across the Caribbean. Bynoe is the co-founder and director of ARC Magazine, the premiere visual art and culture publication focusing on contemporary visual art created throughout the Caribbean and its diaspora. As editor and director of ARC Magazine, Bynoe and has organized and curated various exhibitions across the Caribbean and the diaspora in collaboration with several formal and informal art spaces including New Media, an annual collaborative exhibition held in conjunction with the trinidad+tobago film festival. In 2013 and 2014, through ARC Magazine and a programming partnership with VOLTA NY, Bynoe directed the production and execution of panel discussions on Caribbean Contemporary Art and an artists’ talk around related issues of production, exhaustion and holistic creative economies. Bynoe has also overseen production of Caribbean Linked, a residency program and exhibition held in Aruba in collaboration with Ateliers’ 89, The Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. and the Mondriaan Foundation. She was appointed curator of the International Biennale of Contemporary Art: Martinique (BIAC Martinique), which took place November 2013-January 2014, and led the production of two exhibitions for Transforming Spaces 2014 in The Bahamas. Her upcoming projects include New Media 2014, and she has been named co-curator of the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas’ National Exhibition 7, Antillean: an Ecology which will run through April 2015. Bynoe holds a M.F.A from Bard College: International Center of Photography.
More about (e)merge can be found here.
NLS
New Local Space is a contemporary visual art initiative in Kingston, Jamaica founded in 2012 as a subsidiary of Creative Sounds Limited. NLS provides financial, critical and administrative support for the work of visual artists committed to breaking new ground in their chosen disciplines, and connects such artists to the global contemporary art community and market. Our programs include cuting-edge exhibitions, artist residencies, studio rental and webcasts about art.
Media Contact:
NLS – Deborah Anzinger, Deborah@NLSkingston.org / 876-406-9771
ARC Magazine – Holly Bynoe, holly@arcthemagazine.com / 347-871-4929