Year of the Snake Eating Itself

With this bread

FROM last night's launch of Bread - a new EP by the band with the best band-name ever, Gyazette - at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, Belmont. FIND out more here.

 

Check out Draconian Switch 20

From 'Lightraits' by Kriston Chen, featured in the latest issue of Draconian Switch.

Draconian Switch, Issue 20, ably designed by the excellent Kriston Chen, is now out. Edited by Mariel Brown and published by Richard Rawlins, this issue features fiction from Sharon Millar, art by Sheena Rose, Ewan Avery, Kriston and much more! Am also pleased to be included in this 20th issue via a review of Trinidad artist Steve Ouditt’s latest show at Medulla Gallery (special thanks to Kriston for his company on a recent visit to the Medulla space). CHECK out DS 20 here.

'Bodies clothed in solid colour'

Mohammeds - an exhibition and artist talk by Sandra Brewster at Alice Yard

 

 

Sandra Brewster has been artist in residence at Alice Yard during February and March 2013. While in Port of Spain, she has created a new body of work, Mohammeds, which has evolved from her ongoing Smiths series. On Thursday 4 April, to mark the end of her residency, Brewster will show this new work at Alice Yard, and give a short artist’s talk. The exhibition will be open to the public from 7 to 10 pm on 4 April, and from 6 to 9 pm on 5 April.

From the artist:

Among the series I’ve worked on, the Smiths have been a recurring theme. The name Smith, a large section of a North American telephone directory, conjures up ideas of sameness and commonality and invisibility, as there are so many. Offering an element of humour, I use the name to mock the notion of a monolithic Black community — of course not all Smiths are related, or look or act the same. The Smiths are afro-headed characters that I present as paintings on slabs of wood, their bodies clothed in solid colour and their faces replaced with the Smith section of the phone directory. I continue to use them in various visual narratives and pieces that offer a questioning around concerns of identity and representation. Now the Smiths from Toronto have turned into Trinidadian Mohammeds.

READ MORE here.

'I see myself as a double outsider'

"I see myself as a double outsider.  In Trinidad I am a white person and in the UK I am a Trinidadian, even though Roffey is a British name and I have British passport. I am born here. So I am a Trini in the UK and here I am a white Trini. I’ve learnt how to sort that and make that work. As a writer it is absolutely fantastic because the more marginalized you are, the more accute your perspective is pulled in and you have to deal with that. You have to deal with being an outsider in both cultures. So for me that works..."

***

The Trini novelist Monique Roffey gives an insightful, provocative and altogether delightful interview at Spaces Between Words. LISTEN to full interview here.

135 drawings and collages by Steve Ouditt

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

"Visual artist /designer Steve Ouditt will be exhibiting locally for the first time in 18 years at Medulla Art Gallery in March. The exhibition, Proceeds to Mental Health is a prolific body of work comprising 135 drawings and collages exploring mental illness and its correlating transgressions in daily cognitive perception, social behavior, class, politics and corruption.

 

"Proceeds to Mental Health runs from March 7 to April 4 at Medulla Art Gallery, on Fitt Street, Woodbrook. Medulla has been steadily earning a reputation as a public exhibition space for showcasing contemporary art works that radically challenge traditional and social perceptions while maintaining high aesthetic value. In Medulla, Geoffrey MacLean, Martin Mouttet and Isabel Brash have created a Gallery to promote art, not only as a social expression, but also as a medium for therapy and growth."

FIND out more here.

Neither here nor there

Installation, Eastern Main Road, St. Joseph, Trinidad. 2013

"ALL OVER Trinidad and Tobago, strange sculptures are appearing. Small, angular and at odds with the shapes and geometry of things around them, they look like alien sand-castles beamed down from a space-ship. On the Brian Lara Promenade in the capital, Port of Spain; around the scenic Queen’s Park Savannah; along the busy liming spot of Ariapita Avenue; on an island in the middle of a busy main road or camouflaged on a non-descript pavement that could be anywhere on the island, they provoke stares and wonder. What are they? Where did they come from? Who put them there?

"These objects seem to materialize overnight. Though they look like little sand-castles, the sculptures are made out of grey board, wire, fiber rods, and duct tape. Some are covered with bond paper and then sand is stuck on their surface using wood glue. Beneath their apparently casual incongruence, then, is a careful deliberation. This is the work of the collaboration known as Pinky y Emigrante: artists Alicia Milne and Luis Vasquez La Roche..."

-From an essay on the collective known as Pinky y Emigrante (P&E) at the ARC website. P&E is a collaboration featuring  Alicia Milne and Luis Vasquez La Roche, with whom I recently collaborated with for an e-chapbook. READ the full essay here.

P&E will talk about their work at Alice Yard this Thursday. FIND out more here.

Luis' experiment

FIND out more here.

Gerard Gaskin Wins CDS/Honickman First Book Prize

Backstage at the Evisu Ball, Manhattan, 2010. Photograph by Gerard H. Gaskin.

READ about it here.

Film review: Zero Dark Thirty

The central achievement of Zero Dark Thirty is that it manages to be an effective thriller, even though we all have a sense of what the ending is going to be.

Like The Hurt Locker - which must be regarded as this film's logical companion piece - Kathryn Bigelow's thriller seeks to approach the war on terror from the perspective of the human characters on the ground fighting it. This time around, her focus is on an intelligence agent, Maya, who, like the Jeremy Renner bomb expert in the The Hurt Locker, internalises pain and her own mysterious circumstances under a kind of steely, relentless ambition to do the job no matter what. Only at the end is there some kind of release, but we never get close enough to understand what else the ambition may stand for or whether it stands for anything at all besides a purity of devotion; a single-minded integrity.

Once more, there are some excellent set-pieces where the suspense is almost unbearable. A key operation to lure a potentially invaluable source in the hunt to kill Osama Bin Laden turns out to involve incredible risks on the part of many involved; there is much danger lurking in public places where agents search for clues; homes are attacked; there are scenes of torture.

Speaking of torture, there have been claims that the film glorifies torture as a method of getting valuable information. I disagree. The film has no opinion: it simply shows an account of what it says happened and leaves the audience to judge the moral issues involved. This is also the approach to the final, nail-bitingly suspenseful scene at Abbottabad. And, ultimately, this is the film's approach to its central character who at times seems to over-step lines in a manner that sometimes raises questions about whether or not she can be trusted. Something of Claire Danes agent in the TV series Homeland seems to inevitably come to mind here. There is a puzzle at the heart of the performance of Jessica Chastain that asks the audience to decide whether or not we trust her or are willing to make a leap of faith. The film is so good because of this move. The movie lets the audience decide what they need to decide about her without getting in the way, right down to the last scenes.  

Bigelow is not big on lecturing to audiences and it shows with the film's single-mined focus on the action at hand. That focus comes to mirror the resolve of the agent.

Sound System Version 4

"Land of Tomorrow and the University of Kentucky Department of Art, in coordination with the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, are pleased to present Sound System Version 4, a sound collaboration between Christopher Cozier, Daniel Haun, Robin Foster, and Martin Raymond, with sound sequences by Ebony G.Patterson, Sheena Rose, Jomo Slusher, Sheldon Holder, Chantal Esdelle, Christian Campbell and Yvette Grey."

READ MORE AT Visual Matters HERE.

Film Review: 'The Hobbit' has a heart of darkness

The Hobbit is easily the best of the Lord of the Rings films. It's powerful and self-assured and I found it far more enjoyable than the previous two instalments. Perhaps what causes this is a combination of factors including: a more conscious effort to cultivate areas of ambiguity in the plot while keeping that plot elegantly focused; the sense that a mythic world is being powerfully reinforced; and knowledge of the events which are to unfold in the later movies and the resultant sense of dramatic irony bathing everything.

On the first point, consider the opening montage recalling the fall of the Dwarf city Erebor to the dragon Smaug, the key event that sets in train the action of the film. It is suggested that the timing of this event is linked to the discovery of a strange stone – called the Arkenstone – in the depths of the mines beneath the city. Like the titular rings of the series, the stone has an effect on whoever possesses it; the power represented in the inanimate object achieves a kind of physiological corruption. The causal connection between the stone and Smaug is never explicitly explained but the narrative seems to hinge on some unspoken force, suggesting a moral compass rather than stating it. As in a parable or myth, we are invited to wonder about the link between the physical and the moral: corruption of the soul (greed) appears to invite a physical attack on the city. In the end, the film never shows us Smaug overtaking the city. The entire sequence makes clear that he takes over Erebor without actually showing his face. What we do see are silent mountains of gold, hoarded by the Dwarves, glimmering, bringing fire and doom.

Then there is the matter of the 3-D which is something of a gift: giving us Gollum like we have never seen him before. Gollum was already creepy in 2-D CGI but to see his eyes glow after catching a sliver of light in 3-D is to better appreciate his animus.

Another aspect of the older films heightened in this movie is the use of the eagle as a kind of motif. As in the Return of the King, eagles arrive at a key point to save the day. They were seen on-screen briefly and almost indirectly in the last movie. Here, Peter Jackson gives us more time with them, to see them clearly against the sunlight, though they never take over the show as the Tiger does in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. These eagles ask us to accept them as symbols. At the same time, and much like the Tiger in Life of Pi, they cut open the narrative and ask us to accept something more sublime and ambiguous than just an easy metaphor involving the role of the United States in World War II. Summoned by butterflies, these eagles are not political and want to inhabit a world of their own, flying above Middle Earth, unknown and unknowable to its inhabitants. A part of the story, they desire to remain free of its cage. They could represent technology, but in this world magic is already technology. They ask how the natural, supernatural and technological may be related, then fly away.  

There has been much discussion of The Hobbit’s high frame-rate, but this will not be a factor in most cinemas which are not equipped to play the new format (which supposedly renders a sharper image). Though it’s easy to say this film was nothing more than just another money-making opportunity for the producers, I found The Hobbit to be the justifiable foundation stone upon which all the other films are built. In this movie, there is the clear sense of being enmeshed in another world, a sense exquisitely heightened by the 3-D which – more than just being a means to justify a higher ticket price – allows greater room for differing textures of golden light and for a deeper immersion into that never-ending darkness Milton described in Samson Agonistes (“O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse”). The film, one of the best of the year, provides spell-binding sequences which linger in the mind. It is a majestic entertainment.

****

Dark and Unaccustomed Words

Dark and Unaccustomed Words from Riposte Pictures on Vimeo.

An experiment

Emigrante Experiments Pt1: sample#4 from Pinky y Emigrante on Vimeo.

Eddie Bowen's San Souci

FROM THE ORGANISERS:

Medulla Art Gallery invites you to

PAINTINGS FROM THE MONASTERY
SANS SOUCI 2009-2012
by Edward Bowen

Opening Reception: Thursday 18th October 2012
7:00 pm – 9.00pm
at 37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain.
RSVP 740 7597 medullaartgallery@gmail.com
Exhibition continues until Tuesday 13th November 2012

ABOUT THE SHOW:

This exhibition by Edward Bowen features selected works from an intensive three year residency and working period in Sans Souci. The presentation brings together dominant elements in the artist's working process illustrating a continuous effort to further develop a personal aesthetic in painting.

In the past years of a fiercely independent and frequently controversial career path, the work has been characterized by powerful drawing, radical content and innovative, original, colour sequences and combinations. This affirmed Bowen’s highly individualized and specialist position in local fine art practice.

On several occasions since the late eighties, Bowen has been a national representative at international art forums, an Express columnist, lectured for many years at the University of the West Indies, with a short stint with the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2010 for the new fashion design programme. He is currently in private studio practice and consultancy, operating between studio locations in Sans Souci and Port of Spain.