Fresh Milk featured in Chronicle on WCVB Channel 5 segment on Barbados

February 11, 2016February 11, 2016Leave a comment

Thanks so much to Chronicle on WCVB Channel 5, Boston, for including Fresh Milk in their programme focusing on Barbados, which aired on Monday, February 8, 2016. Take a look at Fresh Milk’s founder Annalee Davis and Barbadian artists Simone Asia and Versia Harris speaking about their work and experiences with the platform.

In this short segment, we share the clip with Lennox Honychurch who speaks about the Morgan Lewis Windmill.

This video is courtesy of Chronicle on WCVB Channel 5. View the original clip on their website here.

Season’s Greetings from FRESH MILK: 2015 in Review

December 21, 2015December 21, 20151 Comment

FRESH MILK exists because of the tremendous support we receive from artists, our volunteers and the wider community. This has been a great year, and we are pleased to share our newsletter highlighting activities we undertook in 2015.

We wish everyone a wonderful season and all the best for the upcoming year. We look forward to continuing to engage with you then! Fresh Milk wants to kick off 2016 by learning more about what young artists and filmmakers in Barbados are doing. Graduates of the Barbados Community College (BCC), Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination (EBCCI) and all creatives: share your practice with us by sending in a CV, 200 word bio, 500 word artist statement and 5-10 images and accompanying image list or links to your video files. Send all information in one email to freshmilkbarbados@gmail.com by January 29, 2016.

In the meantime, we invite you to take a look at our 2015 in review newsletter!

FRESH MILK XVIII Photos

December 2, 2015Leave a comment

Fresh Milk invites you to take a look at some photos from our recent public event FRESH MILK XVIII, which took place on Thursday, November 26, 2015.

The event featured Danish artists Maj Hasager and Ask Kæreby who were in residence at Fresh Milk for the month of November. Maj was in conversation about her recent publication Making Visible with Barbados-based curator Therese Hadchity, while Ask made a presentation about his work in experimental sound art and spoke about the workshops he conducted at Fresh Milk.

Also on the platform were members from local company Beyond Publishing, who spoke about self-publishing in the graphic novel industry in Barbados.

All photography is by Dondré Trotman.

Titles by Beyond Publishing

Screening Maj Hasager’s film ‘We Will Meet in the Blind Spot’

Maj Hasager and Natalie McGuire

Screening Maj Hasager’s film ‘We Will Meet in the Blind Spot’

Sammy Davis and Natalie McGuire

Therese Hadchity in conversation with Ask Kaereby

FRESH MILK XVIII

Maj Hasager and Alicia Alleyne

Annalee Davis introducing the featured guests

FRESH MILK XVIII

‘Making Visible’ by Maj Hasager

FRESH MILK XVIII

Therese Hadchity in conversation with Maj Hasager

FRESH MILK XVIII

Ask Kaereby presenting his work

FRESH MILK XVIII

Ask Kaereby

FRESH MILK XVIII

Annalee Davis

Some members of the Beyond Publishing Caribbean Team: Alan Lynch, Matthew Clarke, Delvin Howell and Tristan Roach.

Some members of the Beyond Publishing Caribbean Team

Maj Hasager documenting the event

Alan Lynch, Matthew Clarke and Delvin Howell from Beyond Publishing

Matthew Clarke and Delvin Howell from Beyond Publishing

Some members of the Beyond Publishing Caribbean Team

Annalee Davis and Andre Woodvine

FRESH MILK XVIII featured speakers: Tristan Roach, Delvin Howell, Matthew Clarke, Alan Lynch, Therese Hadchity, Ask Kaereby and Maj Hasager

Annalee Davis speaking with Beyond Publishing

Katrina Harewood and Deanne Kennedy

FRESH MILK XVIII

November 17, 2015November 20, 2015Leave a comment

The Fresh Milk Art Platform is pleased to present FRESH MILK XVIII, taking place on Thursday, November 26, 2015 from 6-9 pm. The event will feature Danish artists Maj Hasager and Ask Kæreby who are in residence at Fresh Milk for the month of November. Maj will be in conversation about her recent publication Making Visible with Barbados-based curator Therese Hadchity, while Ask will make a presentation about his work in experimental sound art and speak about the workshops he has been conducting at Fresh Milk.

Also on the platform will be members from local company Beyond Publishing, who will be speaking about self-publishing in the graphic novel industry in Barbados.

This event is free and open to the public. Limited numbers of Making Visible will be on sale, as well as graphic novels and t-shirts by Beyond Publishing.

Directions to Fresh Milk can be found on the ‘About Page’ of our website here.

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About the featured speakers:

Maj Hasager

Maj Hasager is a Danish artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She studied photography and fine art in Denmark, Sweden and the UK, earning an MFA from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. Her work deals with power structures, identity, memory, the construction of history, and architecture, looking at how these interlinked phenomena are interpreted and represented culturally and spatially. Her artistic approach is research-based and interdisciplinary, and she works predominantly with text, sound, video and photography. The recent years Hasager has used oral history interview techniques as a method for accumulating information relating to personal stories, a site, and historical or political matters. It allows the material to unfold itself through different voices and from different perspectives and functions as a way of mapping an area or a context. Often these interviews lay the ground for the way she makes use of narrative forms and fictional writing as a tool to address personal stories in the context of socio-political matters.

She has exhibited her work internationally in events and institutions such as; Society Acts, Moderna Museet Malmö (2014), A voice of ones own, Malmö Konstmuseum (2014), Community works, Cleveland Institute of Art, 2014; Past Upon Past, Red Barn Photo Gallery, Belfast, Ireland (2013), Decembers, LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, Poland (2012), Liverpool Biennial, UK (2010). She has been awarded grants in support of her work from the Danish ArtsCouncil, The Danish Arts Foundation, Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (Beirut, Lebanon), ArtSchool Palestine, Danish Centre for Culture and Development and the Danish Arts Agency. She is the programme director of Critical and Pedagogical studies at Malmö Art Academy, and is a guest lecturer at the International Academy of Art – Palestine, Dar al-Kalima College, Bethlehem and University of Ulster, Belfast.

Ask Kæreby

Ask Kæreby is a Danish composer. He studied music production in Copenhagen, earning a MMus degree from The Royal Danish Academy of Music.

Kæreby’s artistic practice is interdisciplinary and research-based, including elements of experimental composition, sound design and electroacoustic music. He is interested in the presentation of narratives by means of sound – not through traditional musical gestures, but using different approaches such as musique concrète or the futurists’ bruitism. Working in the intersection between known formats, Kæreby wishes to challenge our ways of listening – to music (live as well as recorded), to our surroundings and to (sonic) art.

He has been awarded grants in support of his work from The Danish Arts Foundation, Danish Musicians’ Union, Wilhelm Hansen Foundation, Familien Hede Nielsen Foundation, Dansk Artist Association, Ellen & Erik Valdemar Jensen Music Grant, Anders Månsson & wife Memorial Grant and Karen Margrethe Torp-Pedersen & husband Foundation.

Therese Hadchity

Therese Hadchity is an independent art critic, curator and teacher based in Barbados. She was the owner/curator of the Zemicon Gallery in Bridgetown from 2000-2010. She has authored numerous catalogue-essays on Barbadian art and artists, including Ras Akyem Ramsay, Ras Ishi Butcher, Nick Whittle, Winston Kellman, Ewan Atkinson, Alison Chapman-Andrews and Eric Belgrave. Her current research-interest is in the impact of the transition from anti-colonial nationalism to post-colonial anti-nationalism on visual arts conversations in the Anglophone Caribbean.

Beyond Publishing

For many people a comic book or graphic novel was one of the first fun, casual reading experiences, filled with various themes of heroics, bravado and thrill. They provide an imaginative escape from reality and may reinforce or shape cultural values through various themes.

Comics and animation have mostly been imported into the region, and as a result we have rarely seen the Caribbean experience or our own identity in this format. Although the group is relatively new, Beyond Publishing has made promising strides and has published 7 individual titles to date.

Beyond Publishing focuses on comics and graphic novels in digital or print media, showcasing stories with a Barbadian or Caribbean flavour through several genres: comedy, adventure, education and drama.

Beyond Publishing has won the following awards for their work:

3rd place in 2012’s Automotive Arts Entrepreneurship Competition;
The series ‘Life and Death in Paradise’ has won two prizes from the Caribbean Advertising Federation Addy Awards: The Judges’ choice for WOW and a Gold Addy for Publication Design (Magazine or Book);
Offset #1 has won a 2015 Gold Addy for Publication Design (Magazine or Book) from the Caribbean Advertising Federation Addy Awards as well as a 2015 Glyph Award for Best Cover;
Hardears #1 has won two prizes from the Caribbean Advertising Federation Addy Awards: a Gold Addy for Book Design and another Gold Addy for Illustration.

Nadijah Robinson’s Residency – Week 4 Blog Post

November 5, 2015Leave a comment

Nadijah Robinson shares her final blog post about her residency with Fresh Milk, concluding with her thoughts on how history is written, told and understood, and the value held in the land and our own bodies in remembering/passing on these stories. She also shares the impact of her presentation to the final year students in the BFA programme at Barbados Community College (BCC) in considering her goals as a socially engaged artist. Read more below:

My last week at Fresh Milk. I have been wrapping up my work in the studio, making connections, having conversations, getting souvenirs, seeing my Bajan family and seeing some last sights.

On my last morning in the studio, I finished the piece I’ve been working on, although it doesn’t have a title yet. I know now that it is about how the history that I want to recognize is not written in books, it is written in the earth, in the land and in our bodies and blood. It is most accessible in oral stories, by observing ourselves and the culture we create, and by intuitively knowing what we do.

I did my presentation to a 3rd year art class at BCC this week. I gave a talk and slideshow presentation on my history of community-engaged work. This is a collection of my work that sometimes approaches and is within the realm of ‘social practice art’, but is also peppered by work that is more appropriately called arts-based youth work. In preparing this presentation I realized how much my practice has been formed from a desire to do something with my artwork.

I remembered a moment of crisis in high school when I felt like I had to make the choice that would change the rest of my life and set me on a particular path – the middle and high school years in Canada felt full of these deciding moments. I felt I had to choose between being a professional artist and a teacher, more specifically whether to take grade 11 Art, or something more ‘academic’. These were two career paths I’d known for a long time that I’d wanted to pursue. At the time, becoming a teacher was a promising career in Toronto – there was a teacher shortage that would soon after become an incredible teacher surplus. The pay was decent, and it was basically the definition of job security. I had watched all of the terrible, misguided teacher-saviour films, and they had created in my mind a sensational image of what being a teacher could be – a way to effect change in the world, locally. I wanted that, to be a vehicle of social change. But mostly I just wanted to make art, though this was not the wise career choice. There’s no money in art, and I didn’t want to be poor and struggling forever. Not only that, but I didn’t want to be preoccupied with the self-involved, decorative, wishy-washy activities that having an art career seemed to be all about. I wanted a way to make artwork that meant more than that one-dimensional caricature-like story I was presented. My younger self wanted to make art that was all about edgy stuff and politics and was ground-breaking and would one day make it into an Adbusters magazine. I wanted to make artwork that would infect people’s minds with possibilities of better things to come, and place a how-to handbook in their hands. I chose in the end to take grade 11 Art, because I had the genius realization that I could be an art teacher, and have an art career in my off time. I’m glad I did.

In doing this presentation more than 10 years later, I realized how I came to reconcile wanting to make art that does stuff for people. I’m still working on it, but I have been listing for myself a set of guiding principles as I go, the first of which was that I must know what I am trying to do with my work, who I’m doing it with (as opposed to for), and in what language (medium and vernacular) I would do it. Along the way I added things like prioritizing integrity, and supporting community-led projects and speaking with my own voice.

I feel very grateful to have had this experience at Fresh Milk, and it is significant that I did my residency here, in Barbados. Being able to reconnect with my family, with Bajan culture and with the history of this place, and having had the conversations that I have had this month has shifted how I see my own particular cultural makeup. The diaspora upon diaspora, the historical memory and living in North America, Toronto in particular. Some ideas have shifted and some have solidified, but they are complex things to reconcile and I feel as if I’ve just begun again.