All posts tagged: Dave Smith

Dave Smith “Violence, the beauty of paradise”: The art of capturing the lingering impact

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. In the Caribbean, like most of the world with globalisation’s flattening of the world, as Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (2005), demonstrates, inequality increases as the local place is transformed by the international space.  Art and the art scene belie the international and interstitial connectivity of local and global.  Dave Smith’s Caribbean Sunrise (2018), is emblematic of this using juxtaposition and colour in striking yet contradictory and discordant ways.  We never think of the Caribbean as a violent space, yet with this history of occupation and exploitation is is quintessentially violent, it’s geography hides violence: the violence of the encounter or the discovery, that in itself marks a violent erasure of what was once there, though overlaying it with a imagery and imaginary of paradise, almost like Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). The allure is dangerous.   

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From the Collection: “Let Us Prey” (1984-86) by Dave Smith

By Natalie Willis. The title is undoubtedly provocative given the Bahamian bent toward Christianity, but “Let Us Prey” (1984-86) is, quite literally, a gift. Donated by Dave Smith in 2007, the work is at once an act of good faith, while simultaneously critical of bad. It’s another painting from the National Collection that we have given some gentle care to and put on display for the current Permanent Exhibition, “Revisiting An Eye For The Tropics,” and fits into the theme of the Bahamian Everyday that works within this exhibition.

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“Pasting colours: Envisioning Alternatives” by Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett shares: I have visions of colour rubbing up on each other, sliding over liquid slopes of sun-drenched limestone and bleached out roads, deepened by heat and dust.  Colour capturing what we do not see, but refuse to ignore.   Islands are aloof, detached, yet our islands lay under the vibrant eyes of people who do not know this.  They have always travelled, always ventured, always known that life is bigger than us, bigger than this island in the middle of the water, surrounded by beaches of no value until the new people came and barred these things from our lives. 

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