Natalie Willis, Author at National Art Gallery of The Bahamas

The Cultural Surface: In conversation with visual artist Christopher Outten on the becomings of his debut exhibition

20 March 2019 Natalie Willis

By Kevanté A.C. Cash, NAGB Correspondent. One of the beauties in the Bahamian creative landscape is the ability the community has to expand and build upon the precepts and concepts of art and artistry in times past to create what exists today as contemporary art. Artists of such a genre tend to incorporate a “voice” within their work that speaks toward social and/ or political issues they may find interest in and seek to advocate for, while ultimately staying true to their practice and sometimes, even honouring master artists they’ve been inspired by. Artist Christopher Outten does just that with his most recent body of work entitled “The Cultural Surface” displayed within his debut exhibition held at the Doongalik Art Studios during the month of February. I had an opportunity to attend the show’s opening night and host a conversation with Outten about the process in preparation for the show and how it finally feels to have a seat at the table among peers and the greats.

The God Self: Lessons on Self-Love from Emerging Artist Cydne Coleby

19 March 2019 Natalie Willis

By Kevanté A.C. Cash, NAGB Correspondent. At first glance, through a narrow lens, one could be offended by the works of emerging artist Cydne Coleby supported in the National Exhibition 9 (NE9) “The Fruit and The Seed”. Crafted with a “slight sense of narcissism”, interwoven with themes of erotic imagery, Coleby addresses the self – the God self, that is. She conducts a session of “soulversations” – moments in time allotted for self to do the work of loving and healing from past traumas and pains through her series “A God Called Self”.

Tender Seedlings: Anina and A.L. Major Reflect on Pain and Love in the Bahamian Diaspora

18 March 2019 Natalie Willis

By Natalie Willis. Art and language, be it in literature, poetry, or song, have perhaps always gone hand in hand. It makes sense of course, because really what we’re getting down to in artwork or in words is communication – often with one being used to describe or illustrate the other. It’s a happy collaboration, and so too was the collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Anina Major and her flesh-and-blood family A.L. Major. The two came together to produce Seedling (2018) for the NE9 “The Fruit and The Seed,” a work incorporating cohesively all manner of material – ceramic, wood, digital clocks, a newly sprouted dilly tree, and the words of poetry and phone calls overland and oversea. The work – part artistic laboratory experiment and part poetic becoming – gives us a way to think on the struggles of identity of the Bahamian emigre.

The Island Repeated: Toni Alexia Roach’s Patterned Approach to Confronting the Past

13 February 2019 Natalie Willis

By Natalie Willis. The land we live in feels like a repetition. We are a repetition of limestone rocks across shallow seas. We are repetitions of faces across families. We repeat the things we learn in school and church and wherever else – many times without critique, and, most disconcertingly, we repeat the same models of power–mainly paternalistic–from hundreds of years ago. This is at the heart of what Toni Alexia Roach gets to in her work for the “NE9: The Fruit and The Seed.” We look at the visual repetitions – palm tree after palm tree, and beach after beach – but we also see that these images are not symbolic of the place we live in, of the Caribbean, they are symbolic of the very idea of the Caribbean picturesque.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post: A much-needed education in empathy for the region

11 February 2019 Natalie Willis

By Kevanté A.C. Cash. NAGB Correspondent. The storyline of the film The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)—the Grand Jury Prize Winner at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival—is one not too far-fetched to imagine for a queer person living in the Caribbean today, especially when considering the theme of malicious religious manipulation coming to the fore throughout the film. Given the recent polarizing conversations via social media and other channels among Bahamian LGBT rights activist Erin Greene and Jamaican singer-songwriter Buju Banton, whose 1992 hit Boom Bye Bye inspired controversy among the Bahamian people just last month, the timing of this film’s showing at the third annual Island House Film Festival (TIHFF) seems rather fitting and almost intentional, as a move towards a step in a much progressive direction.

Transforming Spaces 2019!

8 February 2019 Natalie Willis

Transforming Spaces (TS) 2019 is gearing up for its annual art bus tour which will be taking place on Saturday and Sunday, April 6 and 7. Slated to be another inspiring art event, this year’s theme “Sustainability – I Have A Dream – I Am the Dream – We are the Dream” is already bearing fruit. Having started since September 2018, the theme will extend into the year 2020 to highlight the mission statement of one of TS’s founding members, the late Jackson Burnside, who stated that ‘by the year 2020, more persons will visit The Bahamas for its art, culture and heritage, rather than merely for its sun, sand and sea.” TS Executives, master artist Antonius Roberts and Pam Burnside, are spearheading this multi-year project which has its roots within the Bahamian community.

A Botanical of Grief: Yasmin Glinton and Charlotte Henay Connect with Ancestors’ Voices and Put Mother Tongue to Poetry

6 February 2019 Natalie Willis

By Natalie Willis. In much of cultural studies, the Caribbean region has been discussed as a place where people feel an uneasy, tense tie to landscape due to our history of people being displaced here. Paradise or purgatory, whether these islands were viewed as restorative or a place of exile – and truthfully, we have had both stories ring true throughout time, it’s all in the branding. Tourist narratives aside, this space is a difficult one to feel truly close to, the landscape feels at once that it is ours and that it is without of our reach given the fact we are all “from elsewhere”, as Stuart Hall (the late Jamaican scholar and father of cultural studies) stated. Poetry in visual art can also be a difficult fit – is it language? Is it visual? Is it both? Problematising our ties to the land and the neat boxes that traditionalists might wish to shove the vast world of poetry into, are the unapologetic works of Yasmin Glinton and Charlotte Henay. “A Botanical of Grief” (2018), displayed in subtle silver script bearing powerful words of great weight, exists between – like so many of us in the Caribbean. The work is between voices: of the authors, of their ancestors, of poet and of artist, but it also exists in a liminal space physically as it spans the high walls of the stairwell of the 1860’s old bones that make up the Villa Doyle. Stairs are between places, and so are we as children of the Caribbean. We are between Africa and Europe, between India and China, we come from Arawaks, Tainos and Caribs with difficult access to those mother tongues – and most importantly, we are an amalgam of any and all combinations of these continents.

The Grave Silence: Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan give voice to victims of rape in The Caribbean

30 January 2019 Natalie Willis

By Natalie Willis. The issue of rape, and subsequently its deafening silence, is a shocking social disservice in this country, and it is something we should be using our voices to ask many, many questions about. With a failed gender equality referendum, and marital rape still being legal, it is hardly surprising that the statistics for sexual assault in The Bahamas continue to rise. Read between the lines of the statistics and there’s still not enough room for the 60%+ unreported sexual assaults, let alone the “pick-up” lines (see: street harassment) that feeds into gender-based violence. The statistics for the rape of men are even less likely to show the severity of the situation. The sexual violence against women, children, and men, in addition to the commonplace armed robbery and assault, we are left with a labyrinth of heartache and bloodshed that is difficult to find our way out of.

Under Attack: Averia Wright’s Elevating the Blue Light Special and the Dualities of Bahamian Identity

29 January 2019 Natalie Willis

By Ethan Knowles. War for much of the Caribbean is a remote idea – a thing of books, films and faraway lands. In a region characterized by calm waters, light breezes and laidback locals, the notion seems oddly out of place. But the idea is not just a distant one. It’s also awfully dangerous. War necessarily conflicts with what Caribbean nations like The Bahamas ‘should’ be, that is, a peaceful escape for the worn and overworked. Put simply: conflict in the Caribbean is off-brand. And in our Bahamaland, where at least sixty percent of the GDP and half the workforce rely on a carefully manufactured and embellished brand image, being off-brand can be about as deadly as armed conflict. As the daughter of a straw vendor in a family of straw vendors, Bahamian sculptor and expanded practice artist Averia Wright is well-acquainted with the brand of paradise we manufacture here. Her work, which grapples with issues affecting both The Bahamas and the region at large, is particularly concerned with tourism and its role as a neocolonialist system in the country today. Elevating the Blue Light Special (2018), Wright’s submission for the “NE9: The Fruit and The Seed,” addresses just this concern, exposing and critiquing the commercialisation of identity which is so central to the contemporary tourist economy.

A Garden: Letitia Pratt Creates New Folklore in Response to Biblical Patriarchal Storytelling

28 January 2019 Natalie Willis

By Kevanté A.C. Cash, NAGB Correspondent. Amid the cacophany of fragile male egos, speaking ever so loudly over the voices of the most vulnerable, the question arises: where can the disenfranchised go to feel safe and protected? To feel comfortable in one’s own skin? To be loved for themselves entirely, and not be used, abused, mistreated or abandoned? Organised religion, for years, has done a superb job in keeping the marginalised on the outskirts of the conversations that seeks to give them liberty. The marginalised meaning ‘the backbone of society’, the movers, makers, shakers and doers, the ones who are made to feel ashamed for how they express themselves and their sexualities. These people–women–I argue are the most disenfranchised group of individuals within society.