In the first video in our art video series, we spoke with Maria Laura Mascelloni while she was on a trip to Jamaica. She was in the process of collecting artwork for her curatorial work with The Benetton Foundation's Imago Mundi Project. She speaks about the challenges of being a curator and some of the practices that she operates by.
Greg Bailey - Jamaica
The project asks selected artists to contribute a miniature artwork on a set format. The work is then donated back to the project by the artists. The many miniatures then become part fo the collection of the country/ countries catalogued under the individual curator's project.
Imago Mundi Project Catalogue
The resulting collection from Mascelloni's mission to the region features artwork from Jamaica and Haiti. The collection is held in Venice but there is also an online gallery that can be seen here. The collection also yielded a beautifully printed catalogue of images and information about artists titled Islands: Haiti and Jamaica. To purchase the catalogue visit Fabrica store online.
The Yashar Gallery show in December has received some attention by writers. Three arts writers, Liza Renia Papi, Jessica M. Rodríguez Colón and Erin Gleason have given their feedback on the show. What we enjoy most is the varying perspectives and readings of the work.
Sandra Stephens & Jeanne Proust
'...The traces of cultural signification revealed by artists Oneika Russell, Sharon Norwood, and collaborators Jeanne Proust and Sandra Stephens, engage with a deeper level of meaning than what lies on the surface. In a clever twist, the artists – women who all have roots in Jamaica or Guadeloupe – compel the viewer to contemplate deeper meanings of selfhood and identity by taking a closer, and slower, look at the surface of things.' - Excerpt from Erin Gleason's review, "Surface Traces" at Yashar Gallery, Brooklyn NY
Sharon Norwood
'...These conversations go from philosophical ideas to the art market all the way to the understanding of post-colonial female Caribbean identity. The traces of our Caribbean bodies go from our everyday actions and objects to our bodies and its relation to those who see us as other; all the way to inserting our voices into the dialogues.'
'...Hegel completed his idea of freedom and beauty when he stated that by freeing ourself, the mind perceives the spiritual content of the work of art, which must also be free in order to be Beautiful. Nature must be reversed with its antithesis, the idea, which brings about the inner unity necessary for spiritual content: nature, idea, spirit = art.'
On December 2017, we had the chance to work on this very exciting exhibition opportunity with conversationXchange's Sandra Stephen's and ART Shape Mammoth. The show opened on December 9th at Yashar Gallery located at The Brooklyn Art Studios, New York and it ran until December 30th, 2017.
Jeanne Proust & Sandra Stephens
Sharon Norwood
The artists included in this exhibition were Sharon Norwood, Oneika Russell and Jeanne Proust & Sandra Stephens as collaborating artists. We want to thank Brooklyn Art Studio's resident artist Stephen Eakins really made the show possible by co-ordinating things on his side.
Oneika Russell
'The exhibition explores the
relation of the trace to the surface. A trace can be seen as a residual mark left over in time or an
outline that follows a fixed path. It can also be a conceptual tool used to interrogate the other within
the self. Each of the artists connect to the ways the trace relates to history, time, memory and the
other. Born in the post-colonial Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Marie-Galante, Guadeloupe, all the
artists play with notions of hybridity and unfixed notions of subjectivity to visually push this concept of
the trace of the body on the surface and within its environments.' - press release
