All posts tagged: gaze

Speaking to views and gazes in the work of Eric Rose: Education, Space and Knowing your Place

1 January 2019

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, University of The Bahamas.

My eyes may be dim, but I can see

Though sight be mitigated by supervision,

My view is my experience

I shall not be moved

 Art provides an interior image of exteriorised feelings that are usually not openly discussed.  The interior/exterior reality of images and experiences is often surreal as it collapses spaces into times that are not always compatible.  Art allows whimsical flights of fantasy and fancy, which break down barriers and create potential changes that defy limitations. Photography, at the same time, opens eyes to what is often overlooked, while also capturing an image of something in a unique way that renders it more or less than it is.  

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Returning the Gaze: Melissa Alcena’s work for the NE9 seeks to challenge the gaze on the Black Bahamian body

31 December 2018

By Kevanté A. C. Cash. Melissa Alcena’s work is not for the faint of heart. It is not for those of whom dismiss the work of introspection. It causes a discomfort in self; challenges interior and personal spaces and the world around it, especially if that self exists as a Black body traversing through a “post-colonial” society.  As one of the 38 artists supported by the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) in the Ninth National Exhibition (NE9), “The Fruit and The Seed” Alcena’s work delivered nothing short of expectation. Her interpretation of the exhibition’s thematic manifested as works seeking to return the gaze and dispel the notion of “othering”, because truly, what is a “them”? What is a “they” if we are all experiencing the same aftermath outside of British colonial ruling? “Is the island not 21 x 7 miles even though the archipelago far flung? Why do we act as if we are so far apart?” With her biting and intimate suite of images, Alcena poses these questions.  

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“Traversing the Picturesque: For Sentimental Value” – The Colonial Gaze

19 March 2018

By Holly Bynoe.  On March 22nd through July 29th, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas presents the first of two historical surveys exhibitions that include works produced from 1856-1960 by visiting artists and expatriates, who were inspired by the then-colony’s landscapes, people, luminescence, coastlines and seas and bustling lifestyles. Traversing the Picturesque: For Sentimental Value draws from several familiar and a few new collections to detail the breadth and scope of how The Bahamas has been framed within the popular global imagination and the impact of the colonial and outsider gaze on the development of a historical understanding of the nation.

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From the Collection: “A Distant View of Nassau” (c.1857-1904) by Jacob F. Coonley

15 November 2017

By Natalie Willis.  Looking at this photograph, “distant” is certainly apt in different facets of the word. It is a distant, far off view. It is a distant time, a bygone era. It is also a distant idea to think of Nassau in this way – so largely uninhabited with stretches of green bush for miles, sisal and rocky paths to illustrate this difficult land – formerly difficult for our floral inhabitants, now harder for the people living in what feels like harsh social terrain. The reactions witnessed to this image are very telling, the astonishment on locals faces when they try to imagine a Nassau like this seems like having to tell someone to imagine us in prehistoric times, not just over 200 years ago. That surprise speaks to the way the development has become so utterly integral to our identity in the capital, and truly the country as a whole.

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The Culture of Space: Places for Art

28 August 2017

By : Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

The post office stands at the top of Parliament Street on East Hill street, a monument to 1970s development. It stands now condemned. The Churchill building stands condemned, much like the Rodney Bain Building on the verge of Parliament Street Hill on the way to the post office.  Condemned buildings populate the city of Nassau.  The shift has been rapid; from a thriving colonial backwater settled by administrators and Loyalists to a post-colonial shadow of colonial rule, to a derelict city of decay. This shift has been enormous. 

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What’s in the frame: Tourism, art, installation and rebuilding the old whore of a body

15 August 2017

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett. Frames capture or remove things, images, objects, people for or from the public eye.  The frame of the photo can bring something into sharp focus, or it can reduce that same thing into an abstraction in the fore or background and highlight something else. One image usually metaphorically represents an entire discourse and political, economic and socio-cultural paradigm, a way of thinking about enslaved bodies and their relation to consumer politics, that is to say, discourses of otherness and sexualisation.  

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From The Collection: “A Native Sugar Mill” (ca. 1901) by William Henry Jackson

12 June 2017

By Natalie Willis. “A Native Sugar Mill” (ca. 1901) by William Henry Jackson is part of the suite of historic colonial photographs in the National Collection. Jackson was an American, who started a photo studio here after emigrating from New York in the 1870s and is one of the small group of colonial migrants whose pictures help us piece together part of the story of the time. According to the catalogue for “Bahamian Visions: Photographs 1870 – 1920,” curated by Krista Thompson, Jackson first came to The Bahamas at the request of the Governor of the time, Sir William Robinson, in 1877. Since around 1856, Jackson worked as a landscape painter, colourist of photographs and also owned a studio specialising in Daguerreotype photographs. In addition, he manufactured albumenized paper, managed a stereoscopic printing shop and had even worked as a Civil War photographer. Many of these things seem very far removed from us now, but they were staples of photography at the time.

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From the Collection: Blue Curry’s Nassau From Above

31 May 2017

A sense of gloom surrounds Nassau from Above through Blue Curry’s use of black-and-white collage-styled imagery, paired with the words “Doesn’t it all look so peaceful… from up here.” We are slapped with sarcasm as these words overlay an image of Nassau seen from above through an airplane window.

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