A conversation with Marlon Griffith

Thursday 11 November, 2010, at 7.30 pm


From the Powder Box Schoolgirl series (2009), by Marlon Griffith

Marlon Griffith, a member of Alice Yard’s network of collaborators, is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2010 Commonwealth Connections International Arts Residency. He is currently preparing to travel to Nassau, where he will work for several months supported by the Commonwealth residency. On Thursday 11 November, Griffith will give an informal talk at Alice Yard about his recent projects and work in progress.

All are invited.

Artist’s statement:

“Marlon Griffith is an artist whose practice is based upon a reciprocal dialogue between mas (the artistic component of Trinidad Carnival) and art as a means of investigating the phenomenological aspect of the embodied experience: it is situated at the intersection of the visual and public performance.

“Through this he has created installations and performance-based works which operate outside the context of mas and which look at fundamental questions in perception and how these actions respond to contemporary culture. In his refashioning of Carnival forms, the work challenges both commercialisation of Trinidad’s rich traditions of performance and their various appropriations by both Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians.

“Through this work he is able to use symbols that define Caribbean society and social groups, which are stripped down to their basic form and abstracted to create new images and narratives that are both public and participatory, responding critically and poetically to the socio-cultural environment which powerfully evokes the uneasy tension-filled interdependency between competing social groups that shapes contemporary Caribbean societies.”