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.