ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Here Comes the Sun traces the origins of extractive tourism in the Caribbean through the lens of four contemporary artists whose practices examine the colonial legacies of the region’s crop plantations and service economies. The artists in this exhibition—Irene de Andrés, Katherine Kennedy, Joiri Minaya and Ada M. Patterson—expose new points of entry into complex histories and struggles centered on the fantasy of the Caribbean and its commodification.
The exhibition gestures towards the complicated relationship between the tourism industry and its international stakeholders, the intrusive colonial gaze and constructions of beauty, and the violent histories of the plantation era that still endure. The selected works problematize the paradise trope ascribed to the Caribbean and pose questions about the construction and propagation of this image: What are the historical foundations of this trope, and for whom was it built? Together, these works resist the Western gaze, addressing the shared complicity between tourists, land developers, and other foreign interests to critique reductive conceptions of the Caribbean as a site of escapism. The artists of Here Comes the Sun prompt critical dialogues about the histories of the Caribbean, the extractive forces of tourism, and the realities and burdens of living in so-called paradise, issues that are endemic across the region.
Here Comes the Sun is titled after Jamaican-American writer Nicole Dennis-Benn’s fictional novel that tells the story of three Jamaican women against a backdrop of tourism and its social and economic fallout.
The first iteration of the exhibition, which ran from April 22 to August 20, 2022, was curated by Noor Alé for the Art Gallery of Burlington.
EVENTS
Opening Night
Friday January 27, 2023, 5:30 to 8:00 pm
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
Nuit blanche 2023
Collage workshop Tropicalisation
Saturday February 25, 2023
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
More information here.
Closing Night and guided tour by
Claudia Mattos & Noor Alé
Thursday March 16, 2023, 5:00 to 8:00 pm
Guided tour starts at 6:00 pm
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
Online exhibition Paraíso Maldito
Februrary 2nd to March 9th 2023
SBC social medias
Visit the online exhibition on our website with this link.
THE CURATORS
Claudia Mattos is a curator, writer, and researcher whose interests include the intersections of art, global politics, and emergent technologies; art as a tool of critical pedagogy; global histories of new media art; the aesthetics of the web and technological failure; and contemporary art of Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas. Claudia shares a collaborative curatorial practice with Noor Alé, Associate Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Together, they curate projects, screenings, and exhibitions as AXIS.
Noor Alé is a curator, art historian, and writer. She is the Associate Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics. At The Power Plant, she curated Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT, Hiwa K: Do you remember what you are burning?, and she was an institutional curator for Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity. As an independent curator, she curated Here Comes the Sun.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Joiri Minaya (1990) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work navigates binaries in search of in-betweenness, investigating the female body within constructions of identity, multi-cultural social spaces and hierarchies. Recent works focus on questioning historic and contemporary representations of black and brown womanhood in relation to an imagined tropical identity from a decolonial stance. Born in New York, U.S, she grew up in the Dominican Republic. She graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic (2009), the Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013).
Irene de Andres graduated in Fine Arts at Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 2009, and did a Master of Research and Artistic Production. She has been one of the artists in residency at Escuela FLORA ars + natura, in Bogotá, Colombia (Artistic Residency Program sponsored by AC/E) and also at The Harbor – Beta Local, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Recently, she has finished a Residency at Academia de España en Roma (Italy). Irene’s work is strongly related to the fact she grew up in one of the most desired tourist destinations, for people looking for sun, beaches and parties.
Containers is a series of photographs in which the Joiri Minaya wears bodysuits with tropical prints and interacts with seemingly natural landscapes that are in actuality manufactured, echoing the constructed aspect of beauty as it is projected onto both women and the natural world. The series reflects on the construction of femininity in relation to nature through the imperial, Eurocentric, and patriarchal male gaze that demands leisure and pleasure from the lands and women of the Caribbean. The body suits are sewn in shapes that forces the body to conform to them in poses drawn from images found in Google search when typing “Dominican women.” In performing these poses, Joiri Minaya’s body takes on forms that allude to art historical tropes, conventions of ethnographic photography, and marketing images for tourism.
In the exhibition, Containers is set against Redecode: a tropical theme is a great way to create a fresh, peaceful, relaxing atmosphere, a patterned wall covering that appropriates mid-century American wallpaper designs that romanticized tropical landscapes during a period of American military imposition throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Recedecode contains camouflaged QR codes containing links to cultural references that highlight the paradox of this history.
El Segundo Viaje (The Second Voyage) gathers official and personal records of Irene de Andrés to compile an image of Puerto Rico as envisioned by those who have passed through the island: from the first Spanish colonists in the 1500s to the international visitors ferried across its beaches by tour operators in the present. In videos and images gathered from the Archivo General of Puerto Rico and the artist’s travel records, Irene de Andrés challenges representations of the island as depicted for tourists and investors in advertising campaigns. Puerto Rico gained independence from Spain in 1898 before being claimed as a territory of the United States only 48 hours later. Its Spanish name translating to “rich harbour”, Puerto Rico once sheltered the ships of the West Indies fleet as a colony of Spain, and now receives Royal Caribbean cruise ships as a territory of the United States. De Andrés’ work records the island and captures a more transparent reality of life divorced from the idyllic vision of touristic paradise.
Ada M. Patterson (b. 1994, Bridgetown) is an artist and writer based between Barbados and Rotterdam. She works with masquerade, performance, poetry, textiles and video, looking at the ways storytelling can limit, enable and complicate identity formation. Her recent work considers grief, elegy writing and archiving as tools for disrupting the disappearance of communities queered by different experiences of crisis. Patterson was the 2020 NLS Kingston Curatorial and Art Writing Fellow. Exhibitions include “Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now” at Tate Britain. Her writing has featured in Sugarcane Magazine, PREE, Mister Motley and Metropolis M.
Yuh Too Sweet is a visual poem by Ada M.Patterson that describes tourism as the new plantation crop of the Barbadian economy. Against the rumbling percussion of boiling cane syrup, the video unfolds as a voiceless narrator pointedly tells a story that extends a metaphor in which plantation labor and tourist service labor are the same: “One strange crop to another… We planted beach towels and plumed parasols on our sandy fields… The tourist crop grows aplenty within those secret gardens—estates walled within javelin spikes, even taller than the [sugar] cane.” Weaving together dreamy and fleeting images of sugar, sand, beaches, and resorts held within the cupped hands of the narrator—who remains out of frame—the work illustrates the succession from plantation to tourism. The work, however, reminds the viewer that there is yet another reality—or perhaps another crop—beyond the sand.
Katherine Kennedy is a Barbadian artist and writer. She graduated with a BA in Creative Arts (First Class Hons.) from Lancaster University, UK, and has exhibited locally, regionally and internationally in Barbados, London, Glasgow, the USA, Aruba, Jamaica, Nigeria, New Zealand and South Korea to date.
She currently works for the Fresh Milk Art Platform in Barbados as the Communications and Operations Manager, and has contributed to ARC Magazine of contemporary Caribbean art as a Writer, Editor and the Assistant to Director.
Biorhythms, from the artist’s ongoing Invasive Species series, interrogates picturesque images of the Caribbean: Those sold to tourists for marketing the region as a destination, as well as those that are nostalgically projected by diasporic communities onto their home countries in the Caribbean while now living elsewhere. Transfiguring sea shells with synthetic materials, Katherine Kennedy creates a gaudy, fantastical world full of beauty and farce to pose the question: What does an escape look like for someone entrenched in the realities of the Caribbean? How can the Caribbean’s beauty be enjoyed and celebrated while also acknowledging the problematic exploitation of the Caribbean and its one-dimensional depictions? Biorhythms also addresses life, beauty, and artifice, with the decorated shells becoming animated only when covered in synthetic material. The work offers a somewhat ironic depiction of death and decay in this fictional environment, as the shells become still and lifeless only after reverting to their natural states. The fantasy of the Caribbean similarly requires its artifice to remain alive.
