Monday, July 20, 2015

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.

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