On Blank Canvas, host Amard Rolle (the NAGB’s Executive Assistant)is joined by Brigidy Bram co-directors and producers, Kareem Mortimer and Laura Gamse.
On today’s Blank Canvas, the show on which we discuss visual culture and creative community, your host Katrina Cartwright, iis joined by members of the TERN team–Lauren Perez and Romel Shearer, and artists Florence St. George and Freya Bramble-Carter.
On today’s Blank Canvas, the show on which we discuss visual culture and creative community, your host Katrina Cartwright, iis joined by members of the TERN team–Amanda Coulson, Founding Director and Jodi Minnis, Gallery Manager—and artist Melissa Alcena, who is a Bahamian documentarian and fine art photographer.
Kendra Frorup’s “Melody in the Men’s Room” (2010) sees an old, polished brass handrail becomes the amplifier of the most contrarily inconspicuous-yet-sizeable music box many of us will ever have the pleasure to encounter. The tubing of the handrail becomes a megaphone for the delicate mechanisms of a tiny coconut-rose ballerina perched lightly atop its surface. There is a deftness and sophistication with which she repurposes – or rather, reinvigorates – these found pieces of material from the mundane to the magical.
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett
Migration, the moving image, the environment and cultural identity are all a part of the treasure chest of what could be referred to as national or cultural identity. In the context of The Bahamas, cultural identity is distinct and unique because of the archipelagic nature of the country. This, of course, takes into consideration all the nuances and complexities of the differences between–let’s say Bimini and Ragged Island–that have very little in common, but all form a part of what makes up Bahamian national identity.
By Dr Ian Bethell Bennett. We often see the representation of indigenous culture on the screen or read about in books that present it in interesting yet reductive ways. Documentary and docudrama can aid in combating the erasure of identity, space and place that so much of the Caribbean is under. Erasure is not only dangerous but also destructive, as it removes tangible culture from the radar and replaces it with ideas of development that belong nowhere and exist everywhere. As the colonial space shows, the rapidly shifting geographies are real, as climate changes and ideas of development imagines space differently. The important part is to document the shift and what was there before.
On October 18th and 19th, Best Ever Films Ltd. premiered Kareem Mortimer’s “Cargo,” positioned as the largest Bahamian film production ever on home soil, to two quite different audiences. The first a small, boutique event at The Island House (West End), populated largely by Lyford Cay and Old Fort residents and with a good percentage of ex-pats, and the second at a huge, glamorous event at Atlantis on Paradise Island.
Good films are the one true, universal language. They have the power to transcend cultures and different societies. In the hands of a master filmmaker the audience forgets that the film is in Italian or German and is swept away by the story.