Photograph by Bim ROCK Magazine
The premiere issue of BimROCK Magazine is out. Thank you to Kishmar Shepherd, Publisher of BimROCK and Rachelle Grey, Editor-in-Chief for featuring the Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. in this, their inaugural issue. Thanks also to Versia Harris, Ronald Williams and Lauren Craig for lending their voices to the feature. See the full feature and magazine here: BimROCK Issue 1.
Click here to read the feature.
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.
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 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.
FRESH MILK will be hosting a two day workshop on “The Art of the Essay/The Essay on Art” with Christian Campbell on Saturday December 6th &13th. Join us from 10:00am – 12:00pm, to discover new ways of writing about expressive culture. Registration and fee required. Read more in the flyer below.
Christian Campbell Writing Workshop
FRESH MILK is happy to welcome London based multimedia visual artist Lauren Craig to our International Residency Programme between October 13 – November 4, 2014.
During her time on the platform, she will be continuing her series titled ‘Cleanse‘, a site specific, multi-sensory work exploring the intersectionality of sculptural installation, performance and ritual/alternative therapy. As well as taking inspiration from the natural Barbadian environment, Craig will host participatory sessions examining the mental and creative blockages that build up through our busy, overworked lifestyles. Because our bodies do not discriminate against what information they retain in daily life, they act as repositories or ‘palettes/palates’ that accumulate everything, becoming overloaded with unnecessary or negative information. With the artist’s gentle guidance in conjunction with nature, participants will be invited to work through these pile-ups, using art as a catharsis to reflect their ‘cleansed’ state.
Read more about the artist and her practice below, and stay tuned for more information about her residency!
Artist Statement:
Since 2003 I have been working with flowers, and coined the phrase ‘floral installation’ to describe the ephemeral, emotive and sculptural nature of my practice. I created an award winning organisation, Thinking Flowers?, around this idea and used it to challenge global corporations and their approaches to sustainability in the cut flower industry. My work is live, in a sense, and the medium is ever changing; working with living things and the opportunities it brings allows me to explore memory and emotions with a brevity of context and subject. Flowers as a medium have allowed me to bridge gaps and blow away social and economic boundaries and inequalities regarding race, gender, class, disability and health. More recently this work has grown into a more itinerant expression of floral interests, moving into site-specific, immersive happenings and experimental sculptural installations: areas of scent; audience participation; co-creation of content and narrative; playing with ideas of viewers/consumers and producers. My concerns are with the context of flowers in our everyday practice, rituals and ceremonies their origins and their presence in our lives now.
About Lauren Craig:
Lauren Craig is a social entrepreneur and artist researcher based in London. She has designed systems and living business models that have challenged large corporations in areas of racism, minority and women’s rights. Her art and entrepreneurial activity tackle big questions around ethics, equality, sustainability and community engagement in the cut flower industry whilst delivering practical floral alternatives locally, through her organization ‘Thinking Flowers?’
As an entrepreneur, Lauren is involved with social issues such as environmental destruction, London street crime and equality, aiming to promote positive change through ethics, sustainability and engagement. She has developed therapeutic methods using photography to document and tackle street crime and runs a pioneering ethical florist. Additionally, she has founded ‘Field’ – an innovative pop-up community retail space in Brixton Village, pioneered urban green waste schemes and floral donations services whilst campaigning for human, working and women’s rights further afield. She is currently setting up the Field Foundation, which will work to reconnect people with the creative cultural industries.
Her recent work includes ‘Petal Tank’, an experimental film featuring collage of autoethnographic darkroom photography, poetry and sculpture. (Tate Modern Tanks, 2012) ; An artist residency at the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2013-2014) ; Sculptural Garden, collaboration with Paul Jones, Royal Collage of Art for Space Station 65, London (2014) ; ‘Sense and Sensibilities’ at Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014) ‘Modern Measures – Holding, Pouring, Stirring’ at The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London as part of University College London Museums & Collections (2014). Collaboration with visual arts and research collective ‘X Marks the Spot’, initiated at Studio Voltaire 2011, engages with the archive of photographer Jo Spence to explore concepts of class, race, gender and wellbeing.
In September this year Fresh Milk announced a collaborative partnership with the local initiative Adopt A Stop to bring art into the public space, commissioning six young Barbadian artists to produce original artwork for the benches which will pop up around the island from October. The first artist to have their work presented will be Evan Avery, whose bench ‘Let’s Go to the Future Together‘ will soon appear at a location near you.
The other participating artists will include Matthew Clarke, Versia Harris, Mark King, Simone Padmore and Ronald Williams. This project is an opportunity to create visibility for the work these emerging creatives are doing, allowing the public to encounter and interact with their pieces in everyday life, generating interest and inviting dialogue about their practices.
Artist Statement: Let’s go to the Future Together
I’ve used the bench as a way to talk to the public with colour. Art in the public setting provides a way to strengthen communities, and everyone could use some colour in their lives. Straying away from my character and text driven work, I took a minimalist approach and experimented with polygonal shapes and lines to convey a message of connectivity. The straight lines and juxtaposed angles have a haphazard flow to them, creating interesting movements, wrapping the bench with a mesh of colour.
Biography
Evan Avery
Evan Avery is a young, Barbadian artist; and a graduate of the Barbados Community College, receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine arts. His primary medium is acrylic paint; working with flat, bright colours, he creates compositions with characters ‘the Miniis’ which he uses to represent himself or others, as well as events in his life. He is now in the process of creating a business around his work, transferring his characters and ideas onto clothing and other objects as a means to share the ‘Miniis’ with people all over the world. From September 2013 – March 2014, Evan’s work was exhibited at Casa Tomada, Sao Paulo, in their public art programme ‘A Casa Recebe’.
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.
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