#sexypink/On Drawing

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Sexypink - On Drawing, an exhibition of drawings by faculty of the Edna Manley College. Opening Tuesday September 12 at the Cage Gallery on campus, 6pm. Free, open to the public.

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Sexypink - A fun time was had yesterday looking at the work of freshman year degree students works at the Department of Creative and Festival Arts.

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Sexypink - Christopher Cozier is at MOMA.

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Eden's Apple - Interpretation and ire in the works of Stuart Hahn

Medulla Art Gallery featured a talk with the Artist Stuart Hahn on Wednesday eight August twenty twenty-three. It started tentatively and ended boisterously with interviewer Natasha Ramnauth steering the conversation into territory raised by a guest about the carnivalesque. That was provoking enough, but there was a much more niggling issue that caught my attention as Mr Hahn spoke about his work.

As an avid admirer of his prolific collections over the decades I was alerted when yet again I heard him mention that he could not show nudity in public. At prior shows he had said those exact words to the audience.

Stuart Hahn - The Fall of Man

In Jamaica,the Laura Facey bronze sculpture Redemption Song is met with all the respect it deserves in a declared homophonic island. No one is deeming the public work indecent or homocentric. I found myself wondering why and how Mr Hahn has been dealing with this no man’s land quite literally for so many decades?

What does Mr Hahn have to be apologizing and hiding for? Is Stuart Hahn a maverick where nudity and male at that is concerned?

The short answer is no.

Stuart Hahn - The Fall of Man

He is preceded by the likes of Boscoe Holder and Hugh Stollmeyer. It is curious, but not fully necessary to know that those names represent men who were homosexual or bisexual. This is to be included only because of the fact that sexual history has been hard fought particularly in ultra religious spaces like Trinidad and Tobago.

Is Mr Hahn exploiting the form by showing explicit sexual acts? No.

In fact Mr Hahn only uses naked imagery in contexts where they are called for.

But instead of being caught up with his exceptional skills as a draftsman of the anatomy it is easy for the media to continue to hound his use of drawing what I can only call the subversive penis. Vaginas and breasts hold neutral ground.

Meanwhile it seems that the erect, semi-erect and inert penis causes great consternation.

We all reel daily as we read and hear of barbarically cruel murders. Yet, the penis in art is being ‘held’ as too unpalatable for sensitive constitutions.

Is there a connection between crime and the male body?

This may be an absurd question, but Mr Hahn’s work and legacy might hinge on the fact that a sense of being out of touch with the body is an important marker for all of us. An automatic fear or distaste to observe classical art in a caribbeanesque context narrows the lens.

Mr Hahn was born in Nevis of a St. Kittitian mother and Trinbagonian father. Of Caucasian heritage in a mostly brown land, a child of colonialism in San Fernando and a gay man in the Caribbean space during Black Power and Oil Money is dizzying enough. It makes one want to tear off one’s skin.

Nudity and the drawing of skin titillates. It is peeling back layers and finding oneself in private territory. Art has lauded nakedness for centuries, so, to now grapple on an island with what it means - is curious to me particularly when a few years ago Trinidad and Tobago was given the dubious honor of being in the top ten of users of porn sites in the world.

Stuart Hahn - The Murder of Abel

Mr Hahn’s Biblical, Classical Literature, Indian Mythology and local Folkloric pieces do far more than occasionally dabble in nudity. By focusing on the trite, everything that his work demonstrates gets shunted to the side. Mr Hahn’s work connects the complex past with the continuously confusing present. He shows great discipline when drawing and rendering the form with prisma color pencils and pen and ink when paint is so much faster - his almost religious penitence in lauding his characters with wings, togas and ropes of hair - yes there is homo eroticism in the work.

However, homo simply means man. I will not go down the prickly path of Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. I also will not convince anyone of changing their sensitivities or sensibilities. I write to place Mr Hahn’s work where it needs to be. He is neither a pornographer nor a sensationalist.

That is so clear in societies great love of Derek Walcott's TiJean and his Brothers the children’s book and his innovative approach to the Black Madonna and Child way before it was fashionable to do so. As a white, Caribbean gay man making Art in Trinidad and Tobago and causing debate makes Stuart Hahn’s career an important marker in Art history - one that we all take for granted. We speak fluidly about Impressionism or Abstraction. But what of Stuart Hahn’s drawings? I suggest that as we look at Art in Trinidad and Tobago, we begin to observe what is before our very own eyes:that we respect and honor ours in the same way that we have finally given Pan the attention deserved.

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              Danielle Boodhoo Fortune - Rebirth of the Daughter, 2022

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     Jackie Hinkson - From Emancipation to Canboulay. Charcoal. Circa 1999.

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           Trinidad and Tobago Artist Christopher Cozier @ Documenta 15

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                                            On at Y Gallery

                                  Group Show titled HEATWAVE

Janis Löhrer is a German artist living in Düsseldorf, Germany. In his drawings and paintings he often uses a monochrome palette and explores different approaches to pictorial space. He creates a play between distance and proximity, using principles of repetition and accumulation. Up close, his works show a variety of male figures, often in an intimate or vulnerable state.The exhibition, Heat waves, opens July 16th. 

Part I  features:

Ryan Huggins (b. 1991) Trinidad, lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Tadashi Toyama (b.1985) Japan, lives and works in Düsseldorf

Jana Zatvarnická (b.1988) Slovakia, lives and works in Düsseldorf

Janis Löhrer (b.1991) Germany, lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Photography Melissa Miller

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Sexypink - Studio Zano’s portrait workshop - save the date.

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Sexypink - For those in Jamaica.

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Sexypink - Carnival shows aplenty.

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Sexypink - Fitzroy Hoyt provides a great initiative for Artists and students alike.

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Sexypink - On the Horizon - New show by Stuart Hahn

Sexypink - More on the show...from Stuart Hahn...

The Farewell

Ink and coloured pencil

So many have asked what these drawings - now exhibited in my show at Horizons - are about, what's the story. They were inspired by the extraordinary last movement, Der Abschied (the Farewell), of Gustave Mahler's Song of The Earth symphonic song cycle. This is an extract of the text which of course the music amplifies to an almost excruciating intensity of sorrow and loneliness... I have translated the location to the place of my own youth in our beautiful island, the central rolling countryside which was then but is no longer covered with wind blowing sugar canes and royal palms and swaying bamboos... and the glory of a magnificent yellow pouis every now and then.

The brook sings melodiously through the darkness.

The flowers grow pale in the twilight glow.

The earth breathes, heavy with peace and slumber.

All yearning turns to dreams.

Tired folk go homewards

To remember forgotten happiness

And youth in sleep.

The birds quietly perch on their twigs.

The world is falling asleep.

A cool breeze blows in the shadows of my spruce.

I stand here and wait for my friend.

I wait for him to bid him a last farewell.

I long, O my friend, to enjoy

The beauty of this evening by your side!

Where are you? You have left me alone so long…

I stroll up and down with me lute

On paths swollen with soft grass.

O beauty! O world, drunk with eternal love and life!

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                 Drawing at its finest. Do not miss Sabrina Charran’s show

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Sexypink - JACQUELINE BISHOP, writer and visual artist, born in Kingston, Jamaica, and who now lives and works in New York City. She has held several Fulbright Fellowships, and exhibited her work widely in North America, Europe and North Africa. She is also an Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Studies at New York University.

On one hand, the market woman/huckster is the most ubiquitous figure to emerge from plantation Jamaica. Yet, as pervasive as the figure of the market woman is in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, she remains critically overlooked. In this set of fifteen dishes, I am both paying homage to the market woman—centering her importance to Caribbean society from the period of slavery onwards—and placing her within a critical context. In particular, I place the market woman within a long tradition of female labor depicted in diverse imagery that I have sourced online, including early Jamaican postcards, paintings of enslaved women from Brazil, the colonial paintings of the Italian Agostino Brunias, and present-day photographs, which I collage alongside floral and abolitionist imagery.

I work in ceramics because all the women around me as I grew up—my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother—cherished ceramic dinner plates. These were centerpieces kept in one of their most important acquisitions, a specially made mahogany cabinet. To fabricate the plates, it is important that I am working with Emma Price, a British ceramicist based in Stoke-on-Trent in the former Spode factories. In the realization of the series, that connection imbues them with a meaning that shows the long and enduring relationship between England and Jamaica. For that same reason, British Art Studies is a fitting venue for their first ever publication and partner to create an accompanying film exploring the plates and their themes.

Though the likenesses of none of the women in my family are represented in this series, centering the market woman is my way of paying homage to my great-grandmother Celeste Walker, who I grew up knowing very well, and who was a market woman/huckster/milkwoman par excellence. Celeste was born in the tiny district of Nonsuch hidden high in the Blue Mountains in Portland Parish on the island of Jamaica. Her mother died on the way home from a market, when my great-grandmother was too young to even remember her face. In her adulthood, while my great-grandfather farmed the land, my great-grandmother was the huckster who could easily carry bunches of bananas and baskets of food on her head; the market woman who travelled to far away Kingston to sell in Coronation Market, the largest market on the island. She also hawked fresh fish, and prepared and sold coconut oil, ginger beer, cut flowers, and cocoa beans that were pounded in a heavy wooden mortar. I remember her in my childhood as the milkwoman waking very early in the morning and walking through the district selling fresh cow’s milk. The tradition of huckstering would be passed on to my grandmother who relished the role in her older years. My hope in doing this work is to give much respect to the market women of the Jamaican and larger Atlantic world who have fed, and continue to feed, nations. The market woman is the defining symbol of Jamaican and Caribbean societies.

My work integrates the mediums of painting, drawing and photography to explore issues of home, ancestry, family, connectivity and belonging. As someone who has lived longer outside of my birthplace of Jamaica, than I have lived on the island, I am acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider. This ability to see the world from multiple psychological and territorial spaces has led to the development of a particular lens that allows me to view a given environment from a distance. Because I am also a fiction writer and poet as well as a visual artist, the text and narrative are significant parts of my artistic practice.

Oftentimes I utilize a process of competing narratives to have the viewer participate in the creation of meaning. In my “Folly” series I recount a story I heard as a child, of two tales of a “haunted” house. In time, I researched the history of the house and through a process of photomontage combined photographs I took with archival footage to try and tell the two stories. The ghostly images of the past occupants are integrated into the walls and on the grounds of the present-day ruins. The overall effect is spectral and haunting. I also used this process of photomontage in an ongoing series of ethereal and transcendent “Childhood Memories,” in which characters are often split between heaven and earth. There is a palpable sense of loss in these images as characters seek to inhabit a time and a place long gone.

The “Babylon” and “Zion” paintings are about the Rastafarian ideas of Babylon being a place of captivity and oppression while Zion symbolizes a utopian place of unity and peace. In the Babylon series, I write the lyrics from songs and poems to create text-based drip paintings leading up to the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” in which I use popular dancehall posters to evoke the inner-city Babylonian “walls” of Kingston. The Zion series is comprised largely of monochrome paintings to delineate this symbolic paradise. Glitter is present in these works not only as a representation of the paradise that Rastafarians seek in the Biblical homeland of Zion but also as a commentary on the ‘bling and glitter’ culture that has enveloped much of Jamaican society. Consequently, my work is very much engaged with helping me to understand my heritage.

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Medulla Art Gallery is pleased to invite you to

"EDEN" BY STUART HAHN

OPENING RECEPTION:

Date: Thursday 27th July 2023

Time: 7pm - 9pm

Venue: Medulla Art Gallery

Address: #37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain.

For more information please contact:

Telephone: +1(868)680-1041, +1(868)622-1196

Email: medullaartgallery@gmail.com

Artist’s Talk: Thursday 10th August, 2023 at 7pm-9pm

Exhibition continues until: Tuesday 29th August, 2023

FREE ADMISSION - OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Gallery hours: Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-2pm

ABOUT THE SHOW:

The story of Eden has intrigued me since childhood and this exhibition is one of the results of that, undertaken with the greatest reverence to the countless great artists who have indulged in the very same obsession over time immemorial. Philosophically I’ve come away from it with more questions than answers, especially about the god it features, the strange and disturbing notion and concept of Original Sin, what really is this thing called evil… etc etc. How closely it resembles so many other creation stories, and how it also differs from them. The cherubim obviously impressed me, though I could not bring myself to depict them as the monstrous physically deformed creatures described elsewhere.. The sad, blood-soaked story of the first murder, for me, needs much more explanation than its given. The choice of the snake as the embodiment of evil, handmade of Satan… why? Poor womankind, the bringer of the species, its very womb, so demonized… how come, why? This exhibition is the edited version of these ruminations, perhaps there will be another to complete the process, if time allows. There are also two drawings here from another ongoing series, Dante’s Divine Comedy, of the pathetic plight of Paulo and Francesca, also, hopefully, another exhibition.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Stuart Hahn was born in Nevis in 1949 and was educated in Barbados and Trinidad to A level. He began his artistic career in commercial-advertising art before leaving that discipline to become a full time fine artist in his homeland, Trinidad. His exhibition career began in 1984 in Port of Spain, since then he has exhibited internationally, to the present day. He has illustrated local folklore and universal myths and legends, predominantly Greek and Judeo-Christian. His influences have been the Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists, Art Nouveau, and early 20th century book illustration, the great Alf Codallo and the beauty of the people and landscape of his island home.

Graphic Design: Agyei Archer

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