Khia Poitier, a winner of the Popopstudios Junior Residency Prize (PJRP) in 2010, is now a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she is pursuing a degree in illustration.
The PJRP is an intensive “artist in residence” program to encourage young Bahamian artists under age 25. It is made possible through the generosity and support of the D’Aguilar Art Foundation.
During her residency at Popopstudios Khia was grappling with the idea of college and her potential future as an artist.
“I was thinking about college,” she said, “I was thinking about choosing a major … and I was getting really stressed out about it because you feel like you haven’t lived a quarter of your life yet and yet you have to make all of these big decisions about who you ultimately have to be and it feels so permanent at the time.”
“The residency on the whole was completely life-changing, honestly,” said Poitier.
“I’m very, very grateful and it’s made me believe that actually I can pursue art now.”
Khia recently graduated from the College of the Bahamas (COB) having spent two years earning her Associate’s in Art. John Cox, Popopstudios founder and Khia’s teacher at COB expressed how proud he was of Khia for pursuing a higher education at RISD. He said she that she has much potential. Under Cox’s coaching, Khia left her artistic mark on the COB campus in the form of a large mural installed in the Harry Moore Library and Information Center.
RISD is one of the highest-rated fine arts colleges in the US and Khia follows in the footsteps of many other Bahamian artists who attended the school – including John Cox, Michael Edwards, Jolyon Smith, Dionne Benjamin-Smith, Jace McKinney, Tavares Strachan and Janine Antoni, to name just a few.
“I’m really looking forward to a change in environment and being around artists that I have no cultural connection to and to prove myself and see that what I have to say is valid and different,” she says. “I’m excited to see how I do amongst the best of the best.”
Portions of this article were taken from articles written by Sonia Farmer and Thea Rutherford from the Nassau Guardian
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) campus
The “Kendal Hanna – Happy Birthday to Me” catalogue is now available.
The catalogue, designed by artist Nicholas Meicholas, is a retrospective of Hanna’s works over his near sixty-year career and was produced as part of the Retrospective exhibition at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas.
The exhibition, which officially opened in July, will remain on display until the end of 2011.
The catalogue is available at the NAGB Gift Shop for only $30.
[departure] new work by Margot Bethel
The exhibition will be on display at Popopstudios until Saturday, September 3…if you haven’t seen it yet, stop by.
Read the Art Review – “Time on A Two Dimensional Plane: Margot Bethel’s Departure” by Krista Thompson
Where do the boundaries of nation, personal identity and environment begin and end? Where do they intersect?
This summer, two artists have been creating bodies of work in new and influential surroundings that address these very concerns about place.
This past Thursday at the Ipswich Art School in Ipswich, the UK, Bahamian artist Dede Brown and UK-based artist Bettina Furnée presented the work they completed during their residencies abroad in an exhibition titled “Material Response”.
Brown has been working intensely at the school and through the Colchester & Ipswich Museums since June and Furnée has spent two months at Popopstudios in Nassau which she will follow up with a last month of work in Ipswich.
Their cultural exchange was part of the “Stories of the World” series put forth by the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad which promotes exchange between UK-based artists and international artists. The aim was to explore the interaction between people, cultural artifacts and the negotiated territories of cultural identity.
Indeed, though the two artists worked exclusively in their new surroundings and approached the aim from different angles — whether personal or political — their work deals with similar themes, straining to define and then challenge cultural identities.
DEDE BROWN
For Dede Brown, being immersed in the creative and cultural worlds of England for the entire summer allowed her the space to create work that directly references The Bahamas — something which her work hasn’t necessarily done in the past.
“For some reason, being away from home you kind of want to go back to it or express it or show other people what it’s like,” she explains.
She continues to explore anonymous female figures in striking positions with surprising pops of color, but the figures now wear elaborate headdresses, drawing into the portraits the cultural artifact of Junkanoo as its centerpiece.
Besides a series of paintings, she also explored costume-making, creating a complete Junkanoo outfit with a headdress, shoulder piece and trousers, which she will display with cowbells, a whistle and a horn.
Yet the work as a whole — about 25 pieces in total — only hints at Junkanoo, taking certain parts from its signifiers and combining them with signifiers from British military uniforms.
Though the traditional shape of Junkanoo is there in the three-piece costume, the color is predominantly red like that of many uniforms of the Royal British Army; though the trousers are fringed in a traditional Junkanoo way and made out of Bahamian-made fabrics such as those from Bahama Handprints, they too display the blue, red and white colors of the British flag; though the costume headdress and those in the paintings are unmistakenly Junkanoo in silhouette, the addition of feathers from a British pheasant brings the work almost out of focus for Bahamian audiences.
“I was trying to offset this link between the Bahamas and the UK and one way I wanted to do that was bring in the colors of Britain,” she explains.
“When I was going through the collections (at the Colchester & Ipswich Museums) their historical uniforms stood out to me — there was just so much detail and emphasis put into them, it does seem to be about their national identity and the whole idea of costume. So linking that with Junkanoo costumes made sense.”
Viewers may come to see the work as a postcolonial object, critical of the overlapping cultures between the ex-colony and the colonizers, bringing forth questions of an independent cultural identity.
Indeed, Bahamians and British alike may find the combination of signifiers so dear to their hearts and so very ingrained in their individual cultures as challenging and even somewhat uncomfortable or insulting.
Yet the work itself resists entering into political territory through the use of the personal — Brown’s own connection to the work is through a search for personal identity, and how such personal identity relates to culture and nation. Her figures, though painted in striking poses that demand attention and command space, are anonymous, alluding to something missing, something yearned.
“It started because — I’ve had this my whole life — when you leave The Bahamas and you go somewhere else, meeting people, their response to you when you say you’re from The Bahamas, sometimes there’s disbelief,” she explains, pointing out that she is a white Bahamian and is often not thought of as an “authentic” Bahamian in the wider global mindset — and even the mindset at home, too.
“I’ve been trying to make that the whole underlying theme — the whole search for personal identity,” she says. “It’s a cross between personal and national identity and trying to decide what the difference is between those things. I don’t know if I’ve quite figured it out. It’s all an ongoing exploration.”
Indeed, the reason the piece may incite awe over anger is through the evidence of this personal involvement, allowing the pieces instead to act as new cultural artifacts through which audiences can think about their own personal identities.
“I hope the audience get a little more insight into The Bahamas and what we’re all about, culturally and in terms of people,” she explains. “A lot of people have an expectation of what a person looks like or sounds like from a certain region and I’m pretty sure I’m not what they were expecting so I hope I’m giving them something to think about in that sense; we all have our stereotypes.”
The residency itself has been a fantastic experience for the artist who works at home out of Popopstudios, allowing her to explore the galleries and cultural spaces all over the UK and to provide a time to focus solely on this new body of work.
When she returns to Nassau later this month, she hopes to either display the pieces themselves at home or continue to create work in the same vein.
“I think I could because personal identity is never something you necessarily solve, it’s just a continuous journey,” she says. “So the work might take a new direction but it’s definitely something I’m not finished with I think.”
To see Dede Brown’s journey take shape week-by-week, visit her blog.
BETTINA FURNÉE
In her time lapse video, “Here’s Luck”, of a silver tent on Adelaide beach washing out to sea as the tide moves in, Bettina Furnée raises many questions of the relationship between a land designated as a country and its people, and what culture this may create.
Does the tide taking the tent out of sight tap into some fear of the water which could overwhelm the shore via tsunami or hurricane? Does it “do away with” the stereotypical perception of natives living on huts on the beach? Or is it a glimmering treasure, a construction of paradise floating out of sight?
If the tent floats back to shore, what does that say about migration and immigration? What does it say about colonization and extinction? How does tide defy our human-imposed rules of boundary — tides and waves that can and have moved and eroded and created entire shorelines?
And finally, what does the flash of human presence at the end say about perseverance in a culture that lives with all of these aspects — presently, historically, and looking to the future?
The film is a rather unassuming, yet hypnotic, piece, but it presents a veritable Rorschach test of Bahamian culture — what does the simple move of a tent floating out to sea mean for Bahamian identity?
For UK-based public installation artist Bettina Furnée, site-specific work usually has some form of social engagement, often dealing with interactions between people and nation by addressing the political boundaries of such places through land and language.
From 2004-2006, she worked with writers Simon Frazer and Tony Mitton to create “If Ever You’re in the Area”, a series of site-specific works on coastal locations of Suffoulk and Essex, the UK, about the effects of World War II on the human consciousness.
As part of that project, the time lapse film of one year captures the fate of one installation, “Lines of Defense”, where letters on a series of thirty eight flags in five lines spelling out the phrase “Submission is Advancing at a Frightful Speed” disappear into the ocean as the coast is eroded. The piece uses the ocean and the natural environment to tap into the fear of climate change while using the language of war.
Indeed, one of her concerns as an artist is the role the environment plays in human constructions such as boundaries and maps. In The Bahamas, she was particularly interested in the relationship between humans and an environment that could turn on them at any time with a hurricane.
“I was interested in hurricanes and how people live here and how environmental change makes them — how a whole community or country accepts that hurricanes happen,” she explains.
“It must be strange to live in a place that can be blown down every five or six years and you just get up and keep going. But you do it really well.”
For her, residencies abroad are perfect for her site-specific work — and The Bahamas was no exception.
“When they approached me and asked if I wanted to do a residency in the Bahamas, I mean, you cannot say no! It’s The Bahamas, it’s such a magical thing,” she laughs.
Yet Furnée did not begin to formulate her project in The Bahamas right away, taking her visits one month at a time — in April and then again in July — allowing her to submerge herself in the Bahamian art world, starting with the annual island-wide art tour of Transforming Spaces.
“It is different. You realize what a western outlook you come with. It’s inevitable,” she says. “So it took me a little time to get used to it. But I was really excited by the level of commitment and energy.”
Yet the time she waited to begin creating her final project also allowed her the prolonged experience necessary to transcend any cliched ideals she may have held about the perceived paradise.
“We’ve got all these ideas about being on a desert island that fruit drops off trees and there’s a sweet spring,” she says of the books and representations in popular culture of the construction of paradise.
“But then coming here you realize how harsh the climate is — it’s difficult to stick to the land, in history people found it hard to stick to this land,” she continues. “So I had an interest in island nations and identity and how you perceive coming and going on a place like this.”
Her piece also addresses the politically-driven issues of immigration and migration — tapping into the relationship between the Bahamian and Haitian nations and also Bahamians who settle abroad rather than at home and how that changes the demographic.
Furnée herself is no stranger to this — having been born and raised in The Netherlands, she migrated to the UK at eighteen.
“It enabled me to reinvent myself which is great, but to fit the land, to take ahold, is very difficult because your history is very different and that first bit of life you can’t replace, so you’re left with this disjointment,” she says.
“Plus once you’re on an island, there is that barrier of the sea too. You’re kind of isolated and I guess The Bahamas has that situation too, just much more.”
Though Furnée spent two months in The Bahamas making the film and exhibited it with an ambient soundtrack of waves in the background, this month is the last month of her residency. She’s hoping to finish the piece by creating a different soundtrack, weaving together voices of Bahamians.
Before she left in July, she held a “Story-Writing Workshop” at The Hub art gallery and invited writers to create and then read out loud a piece inspired by the three-minute film. Those in attendance explored themes of loss and recovery through lyrical narrative or anecdote, allowing listeners to understand the layered and complex identities that make up a place and people.
“I love language and I love spoken word,” Furnée says. “In a sense, language is almost a material that you can pick up. Language holds so many of our structures in it, it’s a nice metaphor for where we’re coming from and who we are.”
“Having these writers was a good opportunity for that,” she continues. “I’m interested in people reading to each other but if I like something in my recordings I hope to come back to somebody and see if they’ll work with me maybe.”
“Here’s Luck” by Bettina Furnée.
Sonia Farmer The Nassau Guardian
Due to complications resulting from Hurricane Irene, the Opening of Omar Richardson’s Exhibition at the Central Bank of The Bahamas, which was scheduled to open tonight (September 1, 2011), has been postponed until further notice.
Bahamian artist Dede Brown has added her own Caribbean flare to the Never Ending Mural and has confirmed that the Bahamas loves Ipswich!
Dede is participating in an Artist’s Exchange Programme between Ipswich Art School and Popopstudios in The Bahamas, for the ‘Stories of the World’ Programme set up for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. In the three months that Dede has been in Ipswich she has made some strong connections, especially with Never Ending Mural.
Dede has turned her skills to mural painting while she has been residing in Ipswich. When speaking about the Never Ending Mural she said; “the mural has become a very enthusiastic community driven project, involving many people living in the town. Having played a small part it is easy to see how this inspirational project has captured the town’s imagination”.
About the Project The Never Ending Mural is an ambitious community led project that will transform the face of Ipswich, and will see artwork installed at a number of locations across the town for Ipswich residents and visitors to enjoy.
Bahamas artist Dede Brown has brought her own cultural influences to Ipswich by helping install a new huge 30metre wide artwork on the derelict ‘Silo’ building on Bridge Street. The artwork will be chosen as part of a community competition led by the Evening Star to welcome visitors and residents to the Waterfront and promote the Ipswich Maritime Festival.
Information Source: Ipswich Borough Council
Student artists are getting a chance to explore their creativity, experimenting with various art forms as they develop their skills.
College of The Bahamas students Richardo Barrett, June Collie, Keva Fawkes and Alistair Stevenson are all Junior Residents at Popopstudios.
June, Keva and Alistair are the 2011 winners of the Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts Junior Residency Prize which is offered in conjunction with the D’ Aguilar Art Foundation. Richardo received the Antonius Roberts Residency Award.
The students have been given a studio to share and have enjoyed the ability to interact with practicing artists who hold studios at Popop.
An exhibition of work by artists Bettina Furnee and Dede Brown, who have participated in an Artists in Residence Exchange between Ipswich and Popopstudios in The Bahamas, as part of Stories of the World, a project at the heart of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.
Four Junior Residents At Popopstudios ICVA Reflect On Their Summer
At Popop Studios Center for the Visual Arts, student artists are getting a chance to form their future artistic practice in a creative, experimental and educational atmosphere.
College of The Bahamas students Richardo Barrett, June Collie, Keva Fawkes and Alistair Stevenson were all selected by Popop Studios CVA as their second set of Junior Residents, receiving studio spaces within which to produce their work from June to August.
To Popop Education Officer and COB teacher Katrina Cartwright, the four demonstrated promising skills that helped them stand out as the nation’s artists-to-watch: the ability to work independently, think innovatively and take energetic and enterprising approaches to their practices.
“It’s not one of those situations where we look for people who will do things by the book and who are very academic — we’re definitely looking for individuals who have a very open-minded avant-garde approach to their medium, whatever their medium is, and those we can see who have the potential to go even further if they choose to,” says Cartwright.
The Junior Residencies, funded by The D’Aguilar Art Foundation, is something that Popop Studios CVA hopes to continue to offer to a group of promising young artists every summer. It’s also another small step they’ve taken toward becoming an educational center of sorts in the future.
“I think that’s a way to bring in more young talent because they get to be here, they get to work, they get to interact with other professional artists and see that there is a way to have a career as a professional artist,” says Cartwright.
Though they experimented and worked intensely on their pieces, the junior residents also gained invaluable experience working with well-practised Bahamian and international artists on the premises.
In July, they visited the renowned Schooner Bay settlement being developed in Abaco to take part in an outdoor installation piece with Antonius Roberts, John Beadle and John Cox. As the settlement is known for its sustainable values, the piece was fittingly made from found objects washed up on shore in order to bring awareness to clutter and recycling.
Afterward, they embarked on a 10-day intense learning experience in New York City, soaking up the sights of an international artistic hub.
The summer proved to be a valuable time for the four junior residents, who will use the lessons and experiences they gained far beyond the close of their studios next week.
RICHARDO BARRETT
Spending the summer between his two-year Art Associate’s degree at Popop Studios CVA provided Barrett with a great community of artists while he produced his work.
“One of the things I valued what the fact that there was a community of artists and a dialogue that happened amongst us being there,” he says. “It wasn’t only me in the my studio creating work; I also got to communicate with other artists.”
Barrett’s work — found object assemblages and reused cardboard — offers viewers fascinating insights into perspective and reclamations. It’s this method he got to put to good use in Schooner Bay.
“Starting off the residency at Popop with found objects, I didn’t really take into consideration that when we went to Abaco we would also be working with found objects,” he says. “So it kind of opened up my mind more about what I could actually do with found objects.”
New York City, too, provided another excellent community he could be a part of, even for a short while.
“The environment there was so engulfed with art,” he says. “Even on the streets there you see art, and the people are just so vibrant. It was great to experience that.”
JUNE COLLIE
A semester away from earning her Associate’s in Art, June Collie is grateful for the time to focus on her ceramics and painting while dipping her toes into making art films.
“I just wanted to experiment, that’s what I wanted my time to be here — experimenting without the limitations of school,” she says.
“My experience here was amazing,” she continues. “When I walk away from this program I’m definitely walking away with a lot. I look at how much I’m grown with my work and that’s very important to me.”
The work she’s produced over the summer is luscious in subject matter — scalloped female torsos in ceramic decorated with leaves and paintings of the voluptuous female figure in unapologetic lines and flat colors are evident of an artist with a bold eye and playful spirit.
For Collie, the experience itself of being at Popop Studios CVA, surrounded by other local and international artists, holding conversations with them, truly helped her expand her perspective — and trips to Schooner Bay and New York City helped her realize that.
“I learned a lot just listening while we were all working,” she says. “How they approach things and how they look at design — I was just floored, because I didn’t see things how they did. Sometimes you just have to open up.”
“The one thing I can appreciate about New York is that they’re open to everything,” she continues. “You could have any type of art — you could put a toilet in the middle of the road and they don’t judge it. First they’ll listen to why you did it and then talk about it. There’s freedom there.”
KEVA FAWKES
Finishing up her Art Education Degree, Fawkes knew about Popop Studios CVA long before she became a resident — she spent a significant amount of time there already since many of her friends at College of the Bahamas were residents the previous year. But nothing prepared her for her own experience.
“To say that it’s been amazing is an understatement because there are just so many opportunities you get to experience — you meet a lot of local and international artists and just the fact that you get to be in a space with artists means you’re able to just grow at Popop,” she says.
Visiting Schooner Bay had a significant impact on Fawkes, who spent the earlier part of her residency producing large volumes of different types of work.
“Usually I’m interested in ceramics or building, so when I went to Schooner Bay I came back with a different outlook on making art,” she says. “Art doesn’t necessarily have to be a situation where you purchase something to make something else — it made me more interested in found object art and just creating things from already existing objects.”
On a similar note, she became trusted with recreating the back entrance at Popop itself into a more engaging space. At the moment, it’s cluttered with discarded materials or work on pause from the artists on the premises, yet Fawkes’ revisualization is a clean, exciting and fresh space from the mind of a detail-oriented and visionary artist.
“I would like it to be a space where you can still do work but its also an entertaining space,” she says. “A lot of the people who come to Popop usually end up coming to the back space, so I think it should be a lot more inviting.”
ALISTAIR STEVENSON
An art education major just one and a half years shy of his degree, Stevenson felt that working in a space with other more mature and practiced artists really helped him learn about his own craft and practice.
“Just having that constant environment, living and working in that environment, has been one of great education — being able to learn from each other and understand things that we’re being taught, it helps to teach you as an artist how to grow and how to develop,” he says.
It wasn’t until his trip to New York City, however, that he gained that push and inspiration necessary to help him form a consistent artistic practice.
“It was my first time in New York and being able to visit these museums and experience the work there in person — you see this work in art history books, in lectures, on the internet, and when you look they’re right in your face,” he says. “I got that confidence to produce work more geared towards what I actually want to do.”
The clay pieces he’s been producing explore combinations of “nature and refined living”, juxtaposing tree trunks with streetlamps and other architectural objects, all with a sense of decay or decomposition — evident of a young artist able to pierce the veil of reality.
“Now my challenge is to just produce the work on a consistent basis that follows a particular theme and being more self-critical in understanding how I’m producing the work and why,” he says.
“I would hope to see us working more consistently as artists, independent, outside of COB, working within the art community more.”
SONIA FARMER The Nassau Guardian Arts & Culture Section
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