Three months in Trinidad

New work by Tessa Mars
Thursday 17 December, 2015, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Haitian artist Tessa Mars arrived in Trinidad in October 2015 to begin a three-month residency at Alice Yard. On the evening of Thursday 17 December she will present her work in progress from her stay in Port of Spain, including a series of drawings, paintings, zines, and prints. These include twenty unique handmade zines available for sale, and a photocopied zine which will be freely distributed to the audience.

During her time in Trinidad, as she describes in a recently published note, Mars has created a character named Tessalines, an alter ego through whom the artist has processed the sometimes overwhelming “influx of information and sensation” resulting from her immersion in a new place and context.

Mars’s residency at Alice Yard is supported by a travel grant from the French Institute (“Visa pour la creation” programme/Afrique et Caraïbes en Création).

All are invited.

“A time of letting go”

Haitian artist Tessa Mars arrived in Port of Spain in October 2015 for a three-month residency at Alice Yard, supported by a travel grant from the French Institute (“Visa pour la creation” programme/Afrique et Caraïbes en Création). She offers some reflections on her time in Trinidad thus far.

Tessalines, a fictional alter ego created by the artist


My time in Trinidad and Tobago has from the beginning been a time of intense discovery. Everything around me is new and different, from the food to the vegetation and wildlife. The flashes of familiarity I often experience during my day-to-day dealings with local culture are altogether too brief. Though excited, I find myself at times overwhelmed by the newness.

But instead of retreating from this sudden influx of information and sensation, in the early days of my stay, I spontaneously created an alter ego figure named Tessalines to deal with it for me. Tessalines allows me to keep my distance from the world around, filtering the immersion experience through the lens of her self-fullness, reducing it to key moments of my stay, as insignificant as they may be, for easier consumption (or assimilation).

My work has thus taken a completely surprising and unexpected turn. I am holding on to Tessalines while trying to better understand who we are together here, and develop us even further. Because, although her main reason for coming into being was to offer me a safe and unchangeable haven, her existence cannot be reduced to this only function. Tessalines has a name, attributes, a personality, and a past that I intend to explore. It is an exciting journey that begins here at Alice Yard. A long work of reflection, research, and questioning starts here, that will continue past the time I return to Haiti. For Tessalines will surely continue to surprise me in my homeland.                                                                  

My stay at Alice Yard has so far been a time of letting go. Letting go of the “project”, accepting that it is evolving, adapting, that plenty needs to be reconsidered, thought about again. Letting go of the idea of having a clean finish, of having an answer to the riddle of my stay. I have taken the time to be a spectator of my own creative process, to sit back and observe the slow unfolding of an idea from day to day. To be surprised and to be both indecisive and in control in turns. I truly believe I can only grow as an artist from this process.

Lara Dahlmann: Currents

Monday 9 November, 2015, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard 

“[Lara Dahlmann’s] notebook studies of the back steps of modest middle-class concrete houses, the occasional Barataria night-scene, or the shape of breadfruit leaves, all visual phenomena that we often ignore, became her own personal visual vocabulary or sensorial mapping. As her responses evolved, she began to have fun, and invented ‘exotic’ hybrid animals and personages taken from the labels of local consumer items or the Murtis of Hindu calendar art, while still engaging and processing the expectations one conjures from old-fashioned geographical annuals…”

— Christopher Cozier, from the catalogue of a piece of pomerac, June 2009, Leopold-Hoesch-Museum and Papiermuseum Düren


Lara Dahlmann is a German artist, living and working in Hamburg. For the past three weeks, she has been artist in residence at Alice Yard. On the evening of Monday 9 November she will present a series of drawings and a mural in an open studio event at Alice Yard.

Earlier stays in Trinidad had a deep impact on Dahlmann’s work and inspired her to create a visual vocabulary of her own mythologies as a constant exchange with the surroundings. These previous visits also suggested the possibility of working with space: her silhouettes began as shifting installations of paper clippings on a wall, were then executed as two-dimensional cut-outs, and have expanded back onto the wall again as a paper installation.

Her current series of larger cut-outs was influenced by a visit to Caroni Swamp, and depicts views of the swamp as a constantly revolving system of creation and destruction. Deriving from this meditation on stillness and transcendence, the works are now about the underlying dynamics, the circulation and the motion.

All are invited.

Introducing Lara Dahlmann and Tessa Mars

Artists in residence, October to December 2015

In the final quarter of 2015, Alice Yard is hosting two artists in residence, Lara Dahlmann (October to November) and Tessa Mars (October to December).

Lara Dahlmann is a German artist, living and working in Hamburg. She graduated with a diploma in illustration from the University of Applied Sciences and received a travel grant from the DAAD/German Academic Exchange Service to visit Trinidad and complete her studies in 2000. She later participated in residencies at Caribbean Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Trinidad in 2006, and at La Paternal Espacio Proyecto in Buenos Aires. Dahlmann has exhibited in various spaces in Hamburg and Berlin, and at the Leopold-Hoesch Museum in Düren. For more information on her work, visit www.laravlaska.com

Tessa Mars is a Haitian visual artist living and working in Port-au-Prince. She completed her bachelor’s degree in visual arts in France, at Rennes 2 University in 2006. From 2006 to 2013 she worked as a cultural projects coordinator at Fondation AfricAméricA. Her work has been exhibited in Haïti, Canada, France, Italy, and the United States. In 2015 she was awarded a travel grant by the French Institute (“Visa pour la creation” programme/Afrique et Caraïbes en Création), and is subsequently in Port of Spain for a three-month residency at Alice Yard. During her stay she will be shaping her personal mythology and exploring how new surroundings influence our narratives. For more information, visit www.tessamars.com

Both artists will give public presentations of their work at dates to be announced.

AY24/7: Alex Kelly

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The latest in Alice Yard’s 24/7 series of artists’ installations is a mural drawing by Alex Kelly, part of an ongoing exploration of the concept of “force ripe.” The work at Alice Yard, writes the artist, “seeks to examine the roles that education and the rapid acquisition of wealth have played in the development of the current social and cultural realities of Trinidad and Tobago since it gained independence in 1962.”


About the artist:

Alex Kelly is a contemporary artist working in Trinidad and Tobago. He recently graduated from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual Arts. Over the period of his study at the university, Kelly participated in several public art projects.

He has exhibited in three group shows with the University of the West Indies, and in 2012 produced the mural Slave at the Night Gallery, Woodbrook, Port of Spain. Most recently, Kelly participated in the Caribbean Linked III artists’ residency and exhibition in Aruba, where in August 2015 he spent three weeks producing original works and participating in engagements that have expanded the scope of his practice from a national focus to a regional one.

Kelly is one of the resident artists at Granderson Lab, Alice Yard’s adjunct incubation space in Belmont, Port of Spain.


AY24/7 is an ongoing series of artists’ works installed in the Alice Yard Box, a modest gallery space accessible to viewers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

A conversation with Ivan Sigal

Friday 9 October, 2015, at 7 pm

Kabul, Afghanistan, 2004, from White Road


Ivan Sigal is a photographer, writer, media producer, and executive director of Global Voices. His book White Road, published in 2012, is a meditation through images and text on the aftereffects of history, the restlessness of travel, and the possibilities of human encounter, based on his experience living and working in Russia and Central Asia from 1998 to 2005. A more recent project, The Karachi Circular Railroad, reported for the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting, circumnavigates the Pakistani city, telling stories about its past, present, and possible futures.

On Friday 9 October, 2015, at 7 pm, Sigal will give an informal talk at Alice Yard on his photography and reporting projects, the compulsion to document, and how photographs can find truths behind the grand narratives of nations and official histories.

All are invited.

Proximities 2: Destinos Posibles

Curated by Meykén Barreto
Presented in partnership with the ttff/15 new media programme
Wednesday 23 September, 2015, 7 to 10 pm at Alice Yard

Still from Inversión, by Glenda Leon

This selection of video works, first presented in 2014 as part of the groundbreaking exhibition Cuban-American: An Empire State of Mind at Lehman College Art Gallery in New York City, tackles tricky themes inspired by the United States: as the familiar homeland for second- and third-generation children of Cuban parents, or as the distant, imagined place that has historically empowered diverse ideologies in Cuba. The larger exhibition was co-curated by Yuneikys Villalonga and Susan Hoeltzel, while the video art programme, presented here, was organised by guest curator Meykén Barreto.

Including works by Allora & Calzadilla, Juan Carlos Alom, Humberto Díaz, Felipe Dulzaides, Luis Gárciga, Tony Labat, Glenda León, and Ana Olema, this is the second in the Proximities series of video works presented by Alice Yard, exploring relationships within the Caribbean region.

Technical support is generously provided by North Eleven.

Curator Meykén Barreto writes:

“The video programme was designed considering possible links between Cuba and America through the work of some artists whose video practice I consider remarkable, and who offer different approaches to the subject: some explicit and others with an apparently tangential relationship. I also wanted to reinforce the idea of a fluid, open, and completely unprejudiced concept of Cuban identity. Therefore I chose works by eight Cuban-born artists for whom video has been a key medium within the scope of their artistic practice, working in a range of genres: documentary, video performance, action documentation, and fiction. I was interested in including works addressing topics such as identity, Cuban and American cultural interferences, history, and contemporary conflicts in the hemisphere of the Americas, among others.”

All are invited.

We are here / we are everywhere

 

From Actor/Transporter, a performance work by Charles Campbell, part of Alice Yard’s 2011 series ACT 5: The Performative Moment
 

On 15 September, 2015, Alice Yard marked its ninth anniversary as a space for collaboration and exchange. Over the coming year, as we imagine our way towards our tenth anniversary, the Alice Yard co-directors will issue a series of brief reflections and provocations on some of the key concepts that have occupied us and the members of our network, the enduring questions we keep returning to in our conversations. We welcome responses from our friends, colleagues, and audience.


Tuesday 15 September, the ninth anniversary of Alice Yard’s debut as a public space, was an ordinary day for us, with no planned commemorative event. Two of our three co-directors are away from Trinidad: Christopher Cozier in Miami, at a Cannonball artist’s residency, and Nicholas Laughlin in New York City, at the Brooklyn Book Festival. Meanwhile, founder and third co-director Sean Leonard continues to quietly manage and observe the actions and interactions of our network at Alice Yard and Granderson Lab.

In some ways, this physical dispersal of the Alice Yard co-directors is the apt reflection of a characteristic dynamic. From the beginning, Alice Yard has been a specific, modest location: literally the backyard of a house in Woodbrook, shaped by its urban neighbourhood, open to the life of the street. At the same time, Alice Yard has also been a conceptual space, harder to delimit or define: it is a network of creative and intellectual collaborators, a forum for critical conversation, an experiment about modes of exchange and sharing.

So sometimes we are “here”, sometimes we are not, but all times we are “everywhere”: which is to say that Alice Yard operates wherever there are artists, musicians, writers and others in generous conversation with us. A chart of locations where our network is currently active through exhibitions, projects, performances, residencies, meetings, etc. is a map of almost the whole globe. In merely the past three months or so, those active locations have ranged from Toronto to Havana, Amsterdam to São Paulo, Cambridge to Wellington, Nagoya to Port-au-Prince, and dozens more points in between.

This dynamic of “place” versus “space” is an open question at the core of our evolving understanding. It is a question in contention with the restrictive idea of a “territory” requiring a boundary patrol or a price of admission — an idea inherited from the particular history of the Caribbean. The physical gate to the Alice Yard driveway is open, as is our ongoing conversation about what we are doing and why — as are our hopes that Alice Yard is not another opportunity for asserting territorial claims. Instead we are fascinated by the possibility of a process that defies and supersedes such modes of assertion. We are fascinated by mobility within, across, outside, and returning to a space that is simultaneously here and everywhere.

— SL   CC   NL

Richard Mark Rawlins: The General Public

Tuesday 1 to Friday 4 September, 2015, 7 to 10 pm

During the first week of September, Richard Mark Rawlins will show two works at Alice Yard. The artist is seeking to close a loop of political exploration which began in the lead-up to Trinidad and Tobago’s 2010 general elections with his Button Project.

Rawlins’s KAMLAFLAGE Jacket — a new work created in 2015 — is “a visual response to the ubiquitous political modus operandi of using subterfuge and smoke and mirrors to divert public attention away from the real, substantive issues of the day,” he explains.



#didyouhearyuhself 2014, previously shown at the 2014 Jamaica National Biennial, is a series of 35 text-based works “inspired by the political soundbites, reportage and utterances of a number of Trinidad and Tobago’s government representatives.”

All are invited.

Lola Flash: Portraits

Monday 17 August, 2015, from 7.30 pm

Nickolai, from the [sur]passing series

During her current residency at Alice Yard, New York-based photographer Lola Flash has been working on three ongoing portrait series, Surmise, [sur]passing, and Salt. On the evening of Monday 17 August, Alice Yard will host an informal exhibition of images from these series shot by Flash in Trinidad, alongside examples of work by participants in her recent portrait photography workshop.

All are invited.

Find out more about the artist here.

Announcing the winner of the inaugural Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing

The co-directors of Alice Yard are pleased to announce that the winner of the inaugural Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing is Stephen Narain, born in the Bahamas and now living in the United States.

From the shortlist of five writers, two more have been selected for honourable mention: Katherine Kennedy of Barbados and Nicole Smythe-Johnson of Jamaica.

The other shortlisted writers are Brandon O’Brien of Trinidad and Tobago and Aiko Maya Roudette of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

The winner was selected by Alice Yard’s co-directors after consulting with the judges and reviewing their notes and comments. Narain’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Virtual Reproduction” stood out for its unconventional angle of approach, its range of inquiry, and its attempt to consider the visual in a broader context that includes the literary. The essay grapples with the implications of ubiquitous digital media for the way we now experience and circulate visual culture.

Narain will receive a cash award of US$1,000, and his essay, along with Kennedy’s and Smythe-Johnson’s, will be published in The Caribbean Review of Books.

Launched by Alice Yard in 2014, the prize is an annual award for an original piece of critical writing on contemporary Caribbean art by a Caribbean writer aged 35 or under. It aims to encourage new writing on Caribbean art and artists, and to identify emerging voices in contemporary Caribbean art criticism. Originally it was expected that the winner of the inaugural prize would be announced in late 2014. Despite the delay in the timetable, the prize will continue to be awarded annually, and the 2015 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing will open for entries in September.

The co-directors of Alice Yard wish to thank the 2014 prize judges — Krista Thompson, Charles Campbell, and Courtney J. Martin — for their time and critical engagement.

A conversation with Lola Flash

Thursday 30 July, 2015, at 7 pm

New York–based photographer Lola Flash will be artist in residence at Alice Yard from late July to late August 2015. On Thursday 30 July, at 7 pm, Flash will give an informal talk on her recent work and the projects she will pursue during her time in Trinidad. These include two portrait series for which she is seeking models.

All are invited.

About the artist:

Lola Flash uses photography to challenge stereotypes and offer new ways of seeing that transcend and interrogate gender, sexual, and racial norms. She received her BA from Maryland Institute College of Art and her Masters from London College of Printing in the United Kingdom. Flash works primarily in portraiture with a 4x5 film camera. In 2008, she was a resident at Light Work. Most recently, Flash was awarded an Art Matters grant, which allowed her to further two photographic series, [sur]passing and Surmise, in Brazil and London. Flash’s work is included in important public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her work is featured in the publication Posing Beauty, edited by Deborah Willis, and currently on exhibit across the United States. Her work is also featured in the current award-winning film Through A Lens Darkly. Flash’s work welcomes audiences who are willing to not only look but see.

 

Portraits from the Surmise series

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Regime of Forgetting

Nikolai M. Noel / Matthew P. Shelton
21 to 26 July, 2015

From 21 to 26 July, 2015, artists Nikolai M. Noel and Matthew P. Shelton will open a portal between 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and Alice Yard in Port of Spain, via web stream. Over the course of the week, from their respective locations, each artist will make the same series of artworks that reference cartography, astrological charts, and divination. Incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives on history and memory, they will produce a trail of twin objects, actions, and marks as they continue their ongoing attempt to discover the Other.

About the artists:

Since 2011, Nikolai Mahesh Noel (b. 1976, Port of Spain), and Matthew P. Shelton (b. 1982, Danbury, North Carolina) have fed their curiosity about the individual as a historical creation and the aftershocks of colonialism through conversation and discursive art projects. Their collaboration utilises the artists’ respective subject positions for an inquiry into concerns about the self, otherness, power, and memory.

Noel is a person of African and Indian heritage from Trinidad and Tobago, and Shelton is a white Southerner; both are coming to terms with the ramifications of those designations within their respective homelands’ differing amnesias. While Shelton and Noel maintain a web-based, epistolary practice, they periodically activate their dialogue materially, as they did in their project CONSTELLATIONS%ARCHIPELAGOS, a 2012 collaboration and exhibit at the ICA at Maine College of Art in Portland. Regime of Forgetting resumes their object-oriented work together.

“How to be here”

“In the eight and a half years since the founding of Alice Yard, one of our primary concerns — both practical and conceptual — has been vocabulary. How do we describe and define what Alice Yard is, our evolving sense of purpose and method, the organic structures which have grown around this enterprise?

“Alice Yard began not with a mission or an agenda, but with an opportunity and a series of questions. The opportunity was to take a modest domestic urban space — literally the backyard of a house in west Port of Spain — and open it to the imaginative investigation of artists, musicians, writers, and others. The questions were if, why, and how this creative community would respond.

“Their answers have been unpredictable, illuminating, occasionally frustrating, occasionally inspiring. And they have challenged us to devise a language focused enough to discuss the particularities of our space and time, but also expansive enough to comprehend the organic openness of a process that has never had a specific end in sight.”

From “How to be here”, an essay by Alice Yard co-director Nicholas Laughlin, included in You Are Here — Rethinking Residencies, an e-book and website recently published by the Factory of Art and Design in Copenhagen, following on from a seminar on the same topic in June 2013.

Lauren Marsden: ECSTATIC TIME

Screening one night only
Friday 22 May, 2015, from 7 pm

Lauren Marsden, still from Against a Brick Wall, HD Video and animated GIF, 2015

During her time in Trinidad, Alice Yard’s current artist in residence Lauren Marsden has made a new series of media artworks called ECSTATIC TIME. Her project responds to a sense of place through the mediums of slow-motion videography and animated photography. Expanding on filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s notion of “ecstatic time,” her project presents a set of short, looping videos and animated GIFs that document a series of performative gestures in Port of Spain and the surrounding area. Performed by family members, friends, acquaintances, and local dancers, these brief gestures (some staged, some spontaneous) portray a sense of redundancy, futility, and slowness in a local cultural context. During interactions with the natural and built environments of Trinidad, her characters defy gravity, dive in and out, hide in plain sight, push forward, retreat ... (and repeat).

On Friday 22 May, Marsden will present ECSTATIC TIME at a one-night event at Alice Yard.

Artist talk: 7.00 pm
Screening: 8.30 pm
Reception to follow

All are invited.

About the artist:

Lauren Marsden, who has family roots in Trinidad, received a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Victoria and an MFA in Social Practice from the California College of the Arts. She has recently exhibited her work at the Victoria Film Festival, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, LIVE International Performance Art Biennale in Vancouver, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Frutta Gallery in Rome, Italy. She is currently teaching at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, and is the editor of Decoy Magazine, a Vancouver-based online platform for critical arts writing.

A conversation with Kellie Romany

Thursday 21 May, 2015, 7 pm

18, 32, 35; oil on board, 6"x6", 2014

Kellie Romany is an abstract, non-representational, figurative painter interested in bodily representation, materiality, and the history of the painting process. Born in Trinidad, she moved to the United States in the late 1990s. She received a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008. Romany has exhibited both in the US and internationally, including Stan McCollum Gallery in Atlanta, Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, Parade Ground Gallery in New York, Amel Bourouina Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and Minninger Gallery in Cologne, Germany.

On Thursday 21 May, at 7 pm, Romany will give a short informal slide presentation on her work at Alice Yard. After the presentation, Romany will engage in a discussion with her mother, Jasmine Loney. While Romany’s work has always dealt with familial narrative, she very rarely speaks to her family about her work. This performance will allow the audience to experience an intimate moment in which the artist exposes herself to the questions of her mother.

All are invited.

ECSTATIC TIME: Media Works in Progress by Lauren Marsden

Friday 17 to Friday 24 April, 2015, at Alice Yard
7 pm to 10 pm each night

For the next seven nights, Alice Yard artist in residence Lauren Marsden will be screening new video works in the Alice Yard space. Each night, a different image from her project ECSTATIC TIME will be on display. Come by and meet the artist and see her work in progress.

As part of the Trinidadian diaspora, Marsden has been using her time at Alice Yard to respond to a sense of place, through the mediums of slow-motion videography and animated photography. Expanding on filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s notion of “Ecstatic Time,” her project at Alice Yard involves the creation of an index of short looping videos and animated GIFs that document a series of performative gestures in Port of Spain and the surrounding area. Using family members, friends, acquaintances, and local dancers as her subjects, these brief gestures (some staged, some spontaneous) have been documented and edited to portray a sense of redundancy, futility, and slowness in a local cultural context.

Zong!: Hearing Voices

Tuesday 21 April, 2015, 7.30 pm

Alice Yard invites you to a reading/performance by M. NourbeSe Philip, from her celebrated book Zong!

Professor Patricia Saunders of the University of Miami will introduce the event.
 
— It can’t be told; it must be told! It can only be told by its untelling. Hauntological and polyvocal, Zong! addresses the lacunae in the fabric of “History“ and tempts, even as it attempts, a remembering, an unforgetting. Through modes of repetition in the unequal exchange of sound for silence,  Zong! limns the poetics of the fragment to ex-aqua the infinite in memory. —

M. Nourbese Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright (and former lawyer) who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. Author of five books of poetry, one novel, and three collections of essays, her most recent work, Zong!, is a genre-breaking, book-length poem which engages with law, history, and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade. Winner of many awards, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships and the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award, she is also a Dora Award finalist for her play Coups and Calypsos.

Introducing Lauren Marsden

Artist in residence, March to May 2015

Alice Yard’s current artist in residence, during the period March to May 2015, is Vancouver-based Lauren Marsden.

Her practice involves various forms, including performance, video, photography, and texts. Using devices such as voice-over narration, ritual gestures, camera movement, and descriptive text, her projects interact with contentious sites, often through the perspective of a misplaced or unreliable narrator.

Marsden is interested in challenging what might constitute a performance and how it is recorded or circulated. For example, she has staged events involving choreographed etiquette drills in a public library, hired paparazzi photographing inanimate objects, a flag-raising on a demilitarised island, the filming of a horror movie with no actors, and conducting an auction that sells itself. She works in collaboration with a range of creative professionals, using a style of direction called structured improvisation, which allows others to articulate their unique skills within the conceptual parameters of a piece.

Her project at Alice Yard will involve creating an index of short looping videos and animated GIFs that will document a series of performative gestures in Port of Spain and the surrounding area. Expanding on filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s notion of “Ecstatic Time,” these brief performances will manifest a sense of redundancy, futility, and slowness in a local, cultural context. See more at her project Tumblr page, laurenaubreymarsden.tumblr.com

Lauren Marsden as Miss Department of Energy. Shot on location at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, San Diego, California

Marsden, who has family roots in Trinidad, received a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Victoria and an MFA in Social Practice from the California College of the Arts. She has recently exhibited her work at the Victoria Film Festival, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, LIVE International Performance Art Biennale in Vancouver, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Frutta Gallery in Rome, Italy. She is currently teaching at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, and is the editor of Decoy Magazine, a Vancouver-based online platform for critical arts writing.

laurenmarsden.com
vimeo.com/laurenmarsden

A conversation with Kaneesha Parsard

Monday 23 February, 2015, 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Michel Jean Cazabon, View of Port of Spain from Laventille Hill

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard is a PhD candidate in American Studies, African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. During the 2014-15 academic year, she has been based in Trinidad conducting research for her dissertation, “Improper Dwelling: Space, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernity in the British West Indies, 1838-1962.” In October 2014, Parsard was researcher in residence at Alice Yard.

On Monday 23 February, at 7 pm, Parsard will give an informal talk at Alice Yard, based on the section of her dissertation on nineteenth-century artist Michel Jean Cazabon. She will examine Cazabon’s body of work in the context of post-emancipation land use and planning, focusing on scenes that contain overgrown plant life, winding paths, and figures that cast gazes beyond the frame. These scenes reframe the nineteenth-century Trinidad landscape as anti-picturesque, a space that challenges control, order, and production.

All are invited.

Passing Presence

Gerard H. Gaskin, Roshini Kempadoo, and Camille Chedda
Tuesday 6 and Thursday 8 January, 2015, at Alice Yard

Alice Yard begins the new year with two events featuring three visiting artists:

On Tuesday 6 January, at 7 pm, Gerard H. Gaskin and Roshini Kempadoo will join Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier for a conversation about images, archives, and visual histories, based on their recent work.

And on Thursday 8 January, also at 7 pm, artist in residence Camille Chedda will present her current untitled work in progress, created during her time at Alice Yard, which follows her recent investigations of the disposable and the degradable, temporality and violence.

All are invited.

Work in progress by Camille Chedda

• About the artists:

Born in Trinidad and based in the United States, Gerard H. Gaskin earned a BA in Liberal Arts from Hunter College in 1994. As a freelance photographer, his work is widely published in newspapers and magazines in the United States and abroad, including The New York Times, Newsday, Politiken, Black Enterprise, Ebony, and others. Additional clientele are record companies including Island, Sony, Def Jam, and Mercury records. Gaskin’s photographs have also been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Duke University Gallery, Syracuse University Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum of Arts, the Goethe-Institute in Accra, Ghana and Imagenes Havana in Cuba, as well as in the 2006 Galvanize programme in Port of Spain. His book Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene (Duke University Press) won the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

Roshini Kempadoo is a photographer, media artist, and lecturer at the University of East London. Her research, multimedia, and photographic projects combine factual and fictional re-imaginings of contemporary experiences with history and memory. Having worked as a social documentary photographer for the Format Women’s Picture Agency, Kempadoo’s recent work as a digital image artist includes photographs and screen-based interactive art installations that fictionalise Caribbean archive material, objects, and spaces. They combine sound, animations, and interactive use of objects, to introduce characters that once may have existed, evoking hidden and untold narratives. She is represented by Autograph ABP, London.

Camille Chedda was born in Manchester, Jamaica. She graduated from the Edna Manley College with an Honours Diploma in Painting, and received her MFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Her works have been featured in major exhibitions at the National Gallery of Jamaica, including the 2014 Jamaica Biennial and New Roots (2013). She has also exhibited internationally in Boston, New York, Germany, and China. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Albert Huie Award, the Reed Foundation Scholarship, and the inaugural Dawn Scott Memorial Award for an outstanding contribution to the 2014 Jamaica Biennial 2014. Chedda currently lectures in Painting at the Edna Manley College in Kingston, Jamaica.