A review by Marsha Pearce You might keep a promise, the Sabbath or the rules. You might keep memories: vivid shapes or half-formed, shadowy contours. You might keep a note of happenings or keep on keeping on. In such contexts of meaning, to “keep” is to carry out, perform, consent to, retain, nurture, write down and persist. In the space of the latest group show The Things We Keep, audiences confront these various nuances of the word but the disquiet underlying painted images, glossy photographs and hybrid objects makes it difficult to keep your feet.
The exhibition features the work of Alicia Milne, Jaime Lee Loy, Nadia Huggins and Michelle Isava.
Lee Loy shares a child's play tent made of bed sheets. Inside, an invitation to “sit with me” greets viewers, who soon find themselves in the company of teddy bears. It is a safe place to disappear from the gallery; to retreat from the real world—a threshold to the imagination where the tent can be anything and anywhere: a ship in outer space or a submarine twenty thousand leagues under the sea.
Lee Loy takes audiences back to their childhoods. Yet, it is a journey to a vulnerable place because the tent's interior—reminiscent of a movie theatre—features disturbing images: a rocking horse, miniature furniture and a doll's leg covered in sugar confections and ants. The artist suggests the sweetness of prepubescence infected with a sting. Can innocence be kept?
To heighten this tension, acrylic washes on canvas are found mounted on the wall, outside the tent. These images keep the ants as a motif. The insects are pictured crawling on a young girl—a number of them carrying fragments of her clothing as she stands in torn underwear and a violated skirt. Audiences are pricked into thinking about the recollection and repression of abuse, about what is kept close and what is kept from oneself as a tactic of self-preservation.
These images form the basis of a storybook included in the show. The hard-cover publication is dedicated to Lee Loy's three-year-old self but it is no bedtime tale. In it, the artist writes: “Do you remember the pain? I think it bit like stinging ants, when someone else was sitting in your chair and laying on your bed. Calling to us with tickle monsters and promises of sweet things.”
If the viewer keeps Lee Loy's images in mind and holds on to the emotions they evoke, they can be put into a productive dialogue with Alicia Milne's pieces. Lee Loy's reference to a chair, for example, takes on added significance in the space of Milne's work. Her Bodies That Bind is a chair salvaged from her grandparents. Its seat is hardened clay, fashioned by Milne, in which she has gouged a network of routes that appear like river tributaries. This furniture will not provide comfortable seating—who can keep still on it? Milne's art contributes to a mounting sense of agony while exploring shared reservoirs of experience. If viewers left Lee Loy's work thinking that it is her isolated narrative, then Milne seeks to make connections, underscoring linked histories.
Nadia Huggins' underwater self-portraits, in the medium of photography, demonstrate an identity that refuses to be kept—one that will not conform to or perform normative constructs of gender, sexuality and race. In the water she is free of social constraints but the presence of knotted fishing lines remind the viewer of a fraught environment in which conceptions of being are held taut and unyielding.
Michelle Isava also attends to social frameworks. Her papier maché Venus figures echo the Venus of Willendorf, the Paleolithic statuette found in 1908. The artifact is said to have functioned as an aphrodisiac, a fertility stimulant and a talisman. Isava plays with these ideas, questioning chastity, arousal, sexual maturation and a keeping or saving of oneself—perhaps for marriage or the “right” partner? Her piece Force Ripe shows a female figure with a slackened undergarment from which a lock hangs—appearing to have been forcibly opened.
The keeping of local myths is also part of Isava's creative investigation. The sculptural form titled Red Woman, though shrill in hue, seems innocuous until viewers notice the blades embedded in the figure's hips. The Red Woman is read as quietly dangerous. In T&T it is often said: “the only good red thing is a dollar”—a disparaging statement made against light-skinned women.
Milne picks up this subject in her piece titled Shell-Local Beauty, which considers appeal and value. An unsettling combination of a conch shell with protruding tufts of the artist's curls is set before a mirror in a stance that provokes the question: who is the fairest of them all? This is a line of enquiry that is in keeping with Milne's sustained interrogation of her white identity. Who is considered a local beauty and—given the conch shell, a feature of tourism images—how are concepts of beauty packaged and presented in the context of the Caribbean? What is kept in the foreground in promotions of tropical place and its people and what is kept back?
When considered next to Isava's work, Milne's shell with tresses can be seen as a Venus, a symbol of beauty in the visual and literary arts. Her piece recalls Sandro Botticelli's painting The Birth of Venus, which depicts a woman riding to shore on a shell, her long golden hair curling in front of her genitals, while an attendant waits on land to cover her naked body.
One can challenge the need for some of the repetition seen in this show. For example, Lee Loy puts the same images seen in the tent into View-Master toy stereoscopes. However, taken together, this exhibition illustrates a careful juxtaposition of artworks that triggers critical exchanges. Each piece is an interlocutor in conversations that throw audiences out of kilter, pushing them to consider what is lost or taken, what remains unconscious or uncontested-what is often kept for keep's sake.
The Things We Keep opened on March 23 at Medulla Art Gallery, 37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Port-of-Spain. The group show runs until May 1.
More info: Email: medullaartgallery@gmail.com