The Color and the Shape

The Color and the Shape will investigate the correlations between Bahamian artist Kendra Frorup and US-based, Puerto Rican artist Gabriel Ramos’ understanding and representation of cultural identity and its connection to childhood and growing up in the tropics.

The centerpiece of this collaboration focuses on Frorup’s and Ramos’ idea of drawing on signifiers from childhood. The immateriality and ephemerality of their collective experiences are constructed, deconstructed and then finally presented through the reconstruction of a space that seeks to elicit some kind of familiarity and intimacy. Within this exchange, the creative process and aesthetics are analyzed to trigger memories from the past and of the past.

Frorup and Ramos’ exploitation of the tropical landscape, everyday objects and their renderings of surreal and imaginative imagery provides us with representations revealing something familiar and uncanny; something deeply dormant within our psyches.

This experiential installation references nostalgia, childhood and the harmonies that exist within visual compositions that recall the failure and or the limitations of memory and how memories are recorded. The ephemeral nature of memory is exploited through the use of materials that harken back to island living including the ubiquitous breeze-block; an iconic marker knitting homes of the region together.

Attached to the element of memory and are points of pondering that reveal the shared importance of witnessing; leading to the moment where one can consider how acts of remembering and forgetting create a cyclical loop where the minutia and significant are all at once in a tumble.

Kendra Frorup
Kendra Frorup was born and raised in Nassau, The Bahamas and uses her memories of this time in her art. After a childhood in The Bahamas, she welcomed the opportunity to study in the United States and began to create representational images that showed a commonality with her culture. Frorup earned her BFA in Sculpture at the University of Tampa and her MFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University. She is currently Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of Tampa. Her work in Major International Collections includes The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Venice Biennale – Exposició Art Camp 2012, col·lecció FEDA, International through Andorra and Unesco. Recent selected exhibitions Include The Sixth National Exhibition, National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, The Bahamas “The Global Caribbean: Focus on Caribbean Landscape,” Little Haiti Cultural Complex, Art Basel Venue, Miami, Florida and Musée International des Arts Modestes in Sète, France and Solo exhibition, “The Inner Temple Project,” National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, The Bahamas.

Gabriel Ramos
Gabriel Ramos was born 1987 in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico and currently lives and works in Florida. He obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of South Florida in 2011 and is currently an MFA candidate at Cornell University. His work has been featured in many local and international publications and has been shown nationally and internationally. Some of his noted achievements include participation in the recent exhibition “Digital” at the National Gallery of Jamaica, The Fotofest 2014 Biennial and The Gasparilla International Film Festival in 2012. His current artwork is mainly photography, but it has expanded into sculpture, installation, and video.

This exhibition is curated by Holly Bynoe, Chief Curator.