‘Victoria’ at Bathsheba

Leave a comment
Installed at Bathsheba

Photograph by Llanor Alleyne

Fresh Milk  and Adopt A Stop continue the Fresh Stops collaborative project this month with Mark King‘s piece titled ‘Victoria‘. In an attempt to bring art into the public space, six artists were commissioned to produce original artwork for benches that will appear at varied locations around the island. ‘Victoria‘ by Mark King has been installed at Bathsheba St. Joseph. Thank you to Adopt A Stop for partnering with us to produce this beautiful bench!

The other participating artists  include Evan Avery, Matthew Clarke, Versia Harris,  Simone Padmore and Ronald Williams. This project creates visibility for the work of emerging creatives, allowing the public to encounter and interact with their pieces in everyday life, generating interest and inviting dialogue  about their practices.

Photograph Llanor Alleyne
Photograph Llanor Alleyne
Photograph Llanor Alleyne
Photograph Llanor Alleyne
Photograph Llanor Alleyne
‘Victoria’ by Mark King installed at Bathsheba. Photograph by Peter Sandiford.
‘Victoria’ in process
‘Victoria’ in process

Artist Statement: Victoria

“Victoria” serves as a temporary spatial reference anchor that alters a cherished space. The bench thus acts as a marker that activates the environment lending a different perspective to the passer by and participant.

Biography

Mark King

Mark King is a multidisciplinary Barbadian artist who explores archetypes and social norms. Interested in notions of topography and megalography, Mark makes coded, often satirical work that highlights social phenomena. The son of a former diplomat, mark has called several places home. Growing up in the Bahamas, Belgium and the United Sates has left Mark with a unique perspective that directly influences his artistic practice.

Mark holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the Academy of Art University is San Francisco, California. In 2011 the Lucie Foundation handpicked Mark for their apprenticeship programme. During the same year he participated in a screen-printing residency at Alice Yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad. In  2013, he participated in two residencies – Fresh Milk in Saint George, Barbados and Ateliers 89’ in Aruba for the Mondriaan Foundation’s Caribbean Linked II. Last year he released his first monograph, ‘Plastic’ through MOSSLESS publishing at The Newsstand in New York. Plastic has gone on to The 2013 New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, The 8Ball Zine Fair, the 2013 I Never Read Art Book Fair in Basel, Switzerland, and The 2014 LA Art Book Fair in the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. In July – August of 2014, Mark’s work was on display as part of the International Artist Initiated project (IAI) hosted by the David Dale Gallery & Studios as part of The Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme, which took place alongside this year’s Commonwealth Games.

About Adopt A Stop:

The Adopt A Stop project provides socially beneficial advertising in the form of bus shelters, benches and outdoor fitness stations at prime sites around Barbados. They embrace solar lighting, local materials and tropical design in keeping with their goal of environmental sustainability.

Caribbean Digital 4-5 December 2014, A Small Axe Conference

Leave a comment

Artwork (detail) by Rodell Warner

Small Axe presents Caribbean Digital, a unique two-day conference in which they intend to engage critically with the digital as practice and as historicized societal phenomenon, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by the media technologies that evermore intensely reconfigure the social and geo-political contours of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Presenters will consider the intersection of digital technology, new media, and Caribbean studies in a series of wide-ranging panel discussions. The conference will be preceded by a one-day researchathon dedicated to the construction of a comprehensive bibliography of and on the work of Kamau Brathwaite. They look forward to engaging with you – live or online!

The transformation of the academy by the digital revolution presents challenges customary ways of learning, teaching, conducting research, and presenting findings. It also offers great opportunities in each of these areas. New media enable oration, graphics, objects, and even embodied performance to supplement existing forms of scholarly production as well as to constitute entirely original platforms. Textual artifacts have been rendered literally and figuratively three-dimensional; opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration have expanded exponentially; information has been made more accessible and research made more efficient on multiple levels. Scholars are called upon, with some urgency, to adapt their research and pedagogical methods to an academic climate deluged by a superabundance of information and analysis. This has created opportunities for open-ended and multiform engagements, interactive and continually updating archives and other databases, cartographic applications that enrich places with historical information, and online dialogues with peers and the public.

The need for such engagements is especially immediate among the people of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Information technology has become an increasingly significant part of the way that people frame pressing social problems and political aspirations. Moreover, the Internet is analogous in important ways to the Caribbean itself as dynamic and fluid cultural space: it is generated from disparate places and by disparate peoples; it challenges fundamentally the geographical and physical barriers that disrupt or disallow connection; and it places others and elsewheres in relentless relation. Yet while we celebrate these opportunities for connectedness, we also must make certain that the digital realm undermine and confront rather than re-inscribe forms of silencing and exclusion in the Caribbean.

Fresh Milk will be participating in Session 7 – Trans-Caribbean Creative Praxis at 3:45 EST / 4:45 pm Barbados time. Fresh Milk presenters include Amanda Haynes and Annalee Davis. See full schedule.

Fresh Milk welcomes International Resident Creatives from Toronto – Christian Campbell and Kara Springer

Leave a comment

Past work by Kara Springer

FRESH MILK is happy to welcome Toronto based poet and cultural critic Christian Campbell and industrial designer and visual artist Kara Springer to our International Residency Programme between December 1st – 19th, 2014. While in residence, Christian, a Trinidadian-Bahamian, will be working on poems for a new manuscript and on essays. In addition he will be offering two “creative critical writing” workshops to Barbadian writers as a way to open up exciting and rigorous new ways of talking about writing and expressive cultures. Christian’s “Critical creative writing” workshops will be held on Saturday December 6th and 13th at Fresh Milk.

Of Bajan and Jamaican heritage, Kara was born in Barbados, and raised in Southern Ontario, Canada. This residency will provide her with a first opportunity to develop her art practice in her native island, Barbados. Kara will work on a series of temporal sculptural installations in the natural landscape – a continuation of a series begun in Nassau earlier this year. Her minimalist structural installations exist in the natural landscape and establish a dialogue that challenges standard ideas of minimalism as an aesthetic and a practice.

Stay tuned for more information including more on Fresh Milk’s final public event for the year which will take place on Friday December 19th from 6.30-8.30pm where Christian will read from his writing, Kara  will share work produced on the residency and we’ll kick off the season with cheer!

Read more about the residents and their practices below.

About Christian Campbell

Christian Campbell is a Trinidadian-Bahamian poet and cultural critic. His widely acclaimed first book, Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was a finalist for the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection, among many other awards. Running the Dusk was also named one of the best books of 2010 by the Caribbean Review of Books,Horizon Review and Poetry International. In 2015 Running the Dusk will be translated into Spanish and published as Correr el Crepúsculo by Ediciones Santiago in Cuba. His poetry and essays have been published widely in journals and newspapers such as Callaloo, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Small Axe and Wasafiri.  He studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and currently teaches at the University of Toronto.

About Kara Springer

Kara Springer is an industrial designer and visual artist.  Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, she currently lives and works between Toronto and Detroit.  Her interdisciplinary practice explores the intersections of the body and industrial modes of production through sculpture, photography and designed objects. Kara completed an Hon.B.Sc. in Life Sciences from the University of Toronto concurrent to a B.Des. in Industrial Design from the Ontario College of Art & Design.  She received her M.A. in New Media and Contemporary Technology from ENSCI Les Ateliers in Paris in 2007. Her work has been exhibited at the Frankfurt Museum of Applied Arts in Germany, the Politecnico di Torino in Italy, the Cultural Center of Belem in Portugal, and is currently included in the 2014 Jamaica Biennial.

Reading Pictures: What We Think About When We Look at Art – #CCF

Leave a comment

Reading Pictures: What We Think About When We Look at Art by Alberto Manguel

The first time I stepped into an art gallery I was lost. I didn’t know how to engage with the the works that were mounted and framed on the walls. I didn’t know how to read or find a narrative in the beautiful, sometimes disturbing pictures that I was seeing. Manguel’s book Reading Pictures: What We think About When Look At Art is not a how to book, it makes no pretentious claims about what the reader should have achieved after closing the back cover, instead what his book offers are few examples of how certain art works can be interpreted based on common understandings, iconography or image writing.

The above excerpt is from Kwame Slusher’s review of Reading Pictures: What We Think When We Look at Art by Alberto Manguel, this week’s addition to the Fresh Milk Books Tumblr – the online space inviting interaction with our collection in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room.

For new Critical. Creative. Fresh reviews every week, look out for our #CCF Weekly posts and see the great material we have available at Fresh Milk!