#sexypink/shows in Trinidad on now

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SOFT BOX GALLERY PRESENTS:

EXHIBITION OPENING RECEPTION of "Water and Spirit" - Nurturing the Soul of India 

Christine Norton Humanist Photographer

Sunday 6TH November, 2022  from 4:00pm -6:00pm

Exhibition continues until  26th November 2022.          

Monday - Friday 9am - 5pm Saturday 10am - 3pm.

 at Soft Box Gallery, # 9 Alcazar Street, St. Clair, P.O.S. 

You are invited to attend "Water and Spirit" - 

 Nurturing the Soul of India, an exhibition of photography

        ___________________________________________________

Water, light, song, meditation create balance. In Varanasi, Mumbai, Roget in India the Aarti, the Waters of the Ganges and Music of the drums are part of the rhythm of daily life."My art reminds us how finding the soul helps us find ourselves."                   ___________________________________________ Christine Norton is a humanist photographer. She combines years of work in international development with her interest in photography to focus on documentary photography and mixed media photography. Christine’s interest in capturing the emotion, and the complexity of everyday relationships and environments leads her to continually pursue evolving forms of expression in photography. She exhibited selected pieces of  her work on Varanasi, India at the 'Its Liquid' show at the Venice Biennale in Italy.

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Eden's Apple - Interpretation and ire in the works of Stuart Hahn

Medulla Art Gallery featured a talk with the Artist Stuart Hahn on Wednesday eight August twenty twenty-three. It started tentatively and ended boisterously with interviewer Natasha Ramnauth steering the conversation into territory raised by a guest about the carnivalesque. That was provoking enough, but there was a much more niggling issue that caught my attention as Mr Hahn spoke about his work.

As an avid admirer of his prolific collections over the decades I was alerted when yet again I heard him mention that he could not show nudity in public. At prior shows he had said those exact words to the audience.

Stuart Hahn - The Fall of Man

In Jamaica,the Laura Facey bronze sculpture Redemption Song is met with all the respect it deserves in a declared homophonic island. No one is deeming the public work indecent or homocentric. I found myself wondering why and how Mr Hahn has been dealing with this no man’s land quite literally for so many decades?

What does Mr Hahn have to be apologizing and hiding for? Is Stuart Hahn a maverick where nudity and male at that is concerned?

The short answer is no.

Stuart Hahn - The Fall of Man

He is preceded by the likes of Boscoe Holder and Hugh Stollmeyer. It is curious, but not fully necessary to know that those names represent men who were homosexual or bisexual. This is to be included only because of the fact that sexual history has been hard fought particularly in ultra religious spaces like Trinidad and Tobago.

Is Mr Hahn exploiting the form by showing explicit sexual acts? No.

In fact Mr Hahn only uses naked imagery in contexts where they are called for.

But instead of being caught up with his exceptional skills as a draftsman of the anatomy it is easy for the media to continue to hound his use of drawing what I can only call the subversive penis. Vaginas and breasts hold neutral ground.

Meanwhile it seems that the erect, semi-erect and inert penis causes great consternation.

We all reel daily as we read and hear of barbarically cruel murders. Yet, the penis in art is being ‘held’ as too unpalatable for sensitive constitutions.

Is there a connection between crime and the male body?

This may be an absurd question, but Mr Hahn’s work and legacy might hinge on the fact that a sense of being out of touch with the body is an important marker for all of us. An automatic fear or distaste to observe classical art in a caribbeanesque context narrows the lens.

Mr Hahn was born in Nevis of a St. Kittitian mother and Trinbagonian father. Of Caucasian heritage in a mostly brown land, a child of colonialism in San Fernando and a gay man in the Caribbean space during Black Power and Oil Money is dizzying enough. It makes one want to tear off one’s skin.

Nudity and the drawing of skin titillates. It is peeling back layers and finding oneself in private territory. Art has lauded nakedness for centuries, so, to now grapple on an island with what it means - is curious to me particularly when a few years ago Trinidad and Tobago was given the dubious honor of being in the top ten of users of porn sites in the world.

Stuart Hahn - The Murder of Abel

Mr Hahn’s Biblical, Classical Literature, Indian Mythology and local Folkloric pieces do far more than occasionally dabble in nudity. By focusing on the trite, everything that his work demonstrates gets shunted to the side. Mr Hahn’s work connects the complex past with the continuously confusing present. He shows great discipline when drawing and rendering the form with prisma color pencils and pen and ink when paint is so much faster - his almost religious penitence in lauding his characters with wings, togas and ropes of hair - yes there is homo eroticism in the work.

However, homo simply means man. I will not go down the prickly path of Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. I also will not convince anyone of changing their sensitivities or sensibilities. I write to place Mr Hahn’s work where it needs to be. He is neither a pornographer nor a sensationalist.

That is so clear in societies great love of Derek Walcott's TiJean and his Brothers the children’s book and his innovative approach to the Black Madonna and Child way before it was fashionable to do so. As a white, Caribbean gay man making Art in Trinidad and Tobago and causing debate makes Stuart Hahn’s career an important marker in Art history - one that we all take for granted. We speak fluidly about Impressionism or Abstraction. But what of Stuart Hahn’s drawings? I suggest that as we look at Art in Trinidad and Tobago, we begin to observe what is before our very own eyes:that we respect and honor ours in the same way that we have finally given Pan the attention deserved.

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Sexypink - a closer look at the work of Stuart Hahn

………………………..

Observations from the Artist Stuart Hahn

What strange and wonderful times we live in...

At my interview with Newsday there was a major problem choosing accompanying work to show (pictures of myself, roundly objected to but mandatory, it turns out, were far more important than the art actually discussed)... nudity, male nudity especially, (with penises, God forbid!) being absolutely out of the question, so I proposed this piece in all my innocence and the innocence of the little child himself. But no. Not that one either. Infact, no no NO, But Why? Because (and silly me not to know),rolling eyes... PEDOPHILIA!!! I suppose all those literally countless little baby Jesuses running through the whole history of art must also be - well but of course they are! - PEDOPHILIA, and like Michaelangelo's sinfully naked David, should be totally removed, absolutely obliterated from books and education itself lest our children and we adults too be corrupted forever...

Anyway...

The Fall Of Man

From the current exhibition EDEN at Medulla Gallery

Ink on paper.

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Sexypink - A k u z u r u ‘s Parthenogenesis is on at the Central Bank Museum.

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Sexypink - A k u z u r u ‘s show has been extended a few more days. Go see it.

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Sexypink - Heaven sent.

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Sexypink - Starting today, seventy-one pieces, 53 member Artists.

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Sexypink - You are invited....join me... Monday 18th December 2023...Style...Craftsmanship... Colour... Magic.... There's a piece with your name on it!

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Sexypink - The latest work of Painter Kenderson Noray.

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Sexypink - Medulla Art Gallery presents

West Indian dolls, a portrayal of blackness.

by WENDY NANAN

NOW SHOWING

(*There won’t be a formal opening but you can visit anytime for the duration of the exhibition)

Exhibition continues until: Friday 29th September, 2023

FREE ADMISSION - OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Gallery hours: Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-2pm.

Address: #37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain.

For more information please contact:

Telephone: +1(868)680-1041, +1(868)622 -1196

Email: medullaartgallery@gmail.com

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The dolls were acquired on travels with my father throughout the Caribbean, from Caracas to Cuba, in the 1990’s. Bought in handicraft shops, made for the tourist trade, I was first intrigued by the political and social implications of how we were representing ourselves in a modern, post colonial society.

Why the use of the Aunt Jemima black face and the exotic and quaint depiction of servitude to appeal to wealthy foreigners? Why the acceptance of racist stereotypes and negative imagery, sourced from American caricatures of black people – Sambo Memorabilia?

But I also collected them because they were beautifully and intricately handmade, showing the signatures of their creators, much like fingerprints on ancient Sumerian pottery. I imagined the women making the dolls, hoping for sales, having to pander to the ingrained racist and sexist views of the buyers. More concerned with everyday survival than perpetuating these prejudices.

I recently saw a Facebook post asking for a photo-op of a coconut vendor with donkey cart. We are still painting pictures of La Belle Creole, with wooden ajoupa houses in forested clearings. In my childhood, Tourist Annie walked the streets of Port of Spain, looking very out of place. How do we see and understand ourselves, descendants of the many mixtures of colonisers, slaves and immigrants? And how have we commercialised this history and imagery into clichés to make it marketable for consumption by outside worlds? Is this the masque of our blackness as island people?

Wendy Nanan 2023

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1955, Wendy Nanan is the first Indo-Trinidadian, and among the first Caribbean women artists to have a long and sustained professional practice. She obtained her BFA at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, England in 1979. Her work is included in many public and private collections, including Trinidad and Tobago’s National Museum. In her practice, Nanan takes on core questions at the heart of historical and contemporary struggles about identity, culture and power in the region. She has produced work that is at once historically and geographically specific to the place she inhabits, and timeless, gently provocative and persistently infused with her feminist politics. While Nanan is deeply respected by peers and critics in the Caribbean, she remains an under-attended-to artist, in part due to her determined locally-situated practice, she has remained in Trinidad since completing art school in 1980, and is famously reclusive, her philosophy being that “it is more important to create the work than to seek an audience for it.”

by Dr. Andil Gosine

Image: Caribbean Madonna, 2023

Artist Bio Text: Dr. Andil Gosine

Follow @medullaartgallery on Facebook and Instagram

If you wish to subscribe to our invitation list kindly email: medullaartgallery@gmail.com

**Update: https://newsday.co.tt/2023/09/25/artist-wendy-nanan-explores-post-colonialism-identity-through-dolls/

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Sexypink - There's a thought-provoking exhibition on now at the Rotunda of the Red House: there's a surprisingly wide range of paintings and photos by names like Carlisle Harris, Shastri Maharaj, Marlon Rouse, newcomers, paintings by prisoners...The gallery is open Mon-Fri 9am-4pm

Text via Judy Raymond

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Sexypink - NALIS Exhibitions on now - My Evolving Journey - James B Solomon

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Sexypink - Che Lovelace - Trinidad and Tobago

& from his Facebook page...Very very excited! My first full scale New York gallery exhibition opens one week from now on Thursday 9th March at the Nicola Vassell Gallery in Chelsea.

The exhibition brings together paintings, some of which I’ve been working on for several years, all focused around the body and water.

Our relationship with water…the sea, rivers etc. here in the Caribbean is a complex one, and I have tried to translate through my own experiences what that relationship feels and looks like.

Folks in the New York area do come by and say hi at the opening (6-8pm) or check out the show when you have time…it runs until April 15th

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Sexypink - Wendy Nanan - Shows on now in Trinidad and Tobago

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“No Man Is An Island” an exhibition of recent works  by Bianca  Peake  @p3ake ART EXHIBITION OPENING FRIDAY 27th MAY 2022  from 6pm - 9pmExhibition continues until Saturday 11th June 2022.