ART FAIRS
ATLANTIC WORLD ART FAIR
20 April - 5 May 2022
Suzie was honoured to work with 6 Caribbean artists for the second staging of the Atlantic World Art Fair:
Franz Caba, Dominican Republic; Shediene Fletcher, Jamaica; Mafalda Mondestin, Haiti; Richard Natoo, Jamaica; Curtis Santiago, Canada/Trinidad and Tobago; and Cornelius Tulloch, USA/Jamaica
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Curtis Talwst Santiago, who showed works with us for @atlanticworldartfair has been selected for the first @fountainheadarts residency in partnership with the Atlantic World Art Fair.
From the 96 artists featured in AWAF 2022,a shortlist of 10 artists was selected by curator Maria Elena Ortiz, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. The final review was completed by a panel of curators and scholars, which included Allison Glenn, a senior curator at Public Art Fund in New York; Susanna Temkin, a curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York; Rodrigo Valenzuela, a Fountainhead alum, visual artist and professor of photography at the University of California Los Angeles; and Melissa Wallen, the director of the de la Cruz Collection in Miami.
ATLANTIC WORLD ART FAIR
Online, 31 May - 21 June 2021
Suzie Wong Presents was thrilled to be a part of the original cohort of 9 galleries and curatorial agencies for the 2021 inaugural staging of the Atlantic World Art Fair, in partnership with global art platform, Artsy. This Fair is a pioneering development in the Caribbean art landscape, creating a sense of regional cohesion on the international art world stage, and each entity presented artists of the Caribbean and her Diaspora.
Suzie Wong had the pleasure of working with 7 artists of Jamaican and Caribbean origin and descent: LaVaughn Belle (Tobago/US VI); Edouard Duvall-Carrié (Haiti/USA); Laura Facey (Jamaica); T'waani Sinclair (Jamaica); Nyugen Smith ( Trinidad/USA); Roberta Stoddart (Jamaica/Trinidad); Zpya Taylor (Jamaica/Norway).
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Watch shorts on the artists included, and click graphics below to view related programming!
Nyugen E. Smith
Laura Facey
La Vaughn Belle
T'waunii Sinclair
Roberta Stoddart
Press:
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Artsy - The Galleries Championing Artists from the Caribbean Region
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-galleries-championing-artists-caribbean-region
Artsy - Atlantic World Art Fair: Curator's Choice by Isolde Brielmaier and Franklin Sirmans
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Atlantic World Fair- Galleries led by 9 women
https://artishockrevista.com/2021/06/11/atlantic-world-art-fair-caribe/
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Three Trinidad and Tobago Artists is Atlantic World Art fair
https://newsday.co.tt/2021/06/13/three-trinidad-and-tobago-artists-in-atlantic-world-art-fair/
PRIZM 2020
Online. 1-21 December 2020
Suzie Wong Presents featured new works by Jamaican filmmaker and visual artist Storm Saulter, and Trinidadian new media artist Rodell Warner at Prizm art fair’s first virtual online staging. Titled 'Noir, Noir’, the curatorial remit is the exploration of the influence of African film on the practise of visual artists in the Diaspora.
Both Rodell and Storm engage in ideas around identity, heritage, displacement, power and relationship. Two bodies of work by Rodell are on show, ‘Friends and Family’, and ‘Augmented Archive’. Using both family and historical photographs as foundations upon which to intervene with contemporary technology and re-interpretation, Rodell creates microfilms which re-contexualise these images with new layers of story telling. In his ‘Family and Friends’ series, colourful orbs flash, and in the ‘Augmented Archive’ series, muffled and distorted soundtracks are also layered in, creating a tumultuous disorientation, mirroring perhaps, the possible internal lives of the subjects in the original image.
Left: Rodell Warner, Family and Friends no.1, 2017. Right: Rodell Warner - Augmented Archive 004, colorized, 2020.
Storm’s photographic works are assemblages of his years of archived visuality as a film maker. Through the practise of storyboarding, he brings disparate images into a new body, using various time, place and contexts, to weave new narratives and new meanings in a kind of photographic quilting. The work brings insights into the tense interiority of Jamaican masculinity and its performance, the Caribbean experience of religion and spirituality, our post colonial paradoxes, dancehall culture and the seduction of infamy, tropicality and death. This tapestry practise of Storm’s imaging creates esoteric work, and offers new ways of feeling, responding to and thinking about contemporary Jamaica. By navigating and surveilling gender and class in this way, Storm’s work also reveals social anxieties and desires whilst exposing vulnerabilities and issues of where true power lies in the Jamaican self.
Both artists engage in filmic practise in different ways to give fresh visuality of history and contemporary culture of the Caribbean.
Storm Saulter - Ring Around the Rosy, 2020
Storm Saulter - Master, 2020
Storm Saulter - J.R., 2020
Storm Saulter is a well established filmmaker and emerging visual artist from Jamaica. Best known for his award winning films ‘Betta Mus’ Come’ and ‘Sprinter’ Storm has also directed music videos for Chronixx, Arcade Fire, Protoje and Popcaan, and recently captured visuals for Beyoncé and Jay-Z ‘s On The Run 2 world tour. His photography has been published in Rolling Stone Magazine and The FADER, and his experimental film and photography work has been exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum, The British Museum, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. He is also a commercial director, working extensively with athletes like Usain Bolt and brands like PUMA, RED STRIPE, and ANGOSTURA.
Storm served as the first Filmmaker-in-Residence at The University of the West indies, Mona in 2015 and co-founded the New Caribbean Cinema collective, a group of emerging Caribbean auteurs. The group used community filmmaking tactics to create 7 groundbreaking short films, by different directors, with virtually no budget. Those shorts were combined into one feature length anthology film titled “Ring Di Alarm!”, which premiered at the British Film Institute in London.
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Rodell Warner (b. 1986) is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography. His works have been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art in the 2016 Dreamlands exhibition as part of the collective video project Ways of Something, and at The National Gallery of Jamaica in the 2016 exhibition Digital, and at the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018 in I’m Not Who You Think I’m Not #14. Rodell is a recipient of the 2011 Commonwealth Connections International Arts Residency, and the 2014 summer residency at NLS Kingston, and was commissioned in 2017 to create the Davidoff Art Edition, a series of five artworks printed onto a limited edition of five thousand boxes of luxury cigars and presented and sold at Art Basel in Hong Kong, Miami, and Basel. Rodell lives and works between Port of Spain in Trinidad, Kingston in Jamaica, and Austin, Texas, in the US.
LEASHO JOHNSON & MONIQUE GILPIN IN ‘REQUIRED READING’
1:54 Contemporary African Art fair, London, 3-7 October 2018
Jamaica-based gallerist Susanne Fredricks aka Suzie Wong, in partnership with non profit 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London, presented Required Reading, an showcasing of work by two Jamaican artists, Leasho Johnson and Monique Gilpin. Both artists engage with issues of identity, particularly as they relate to the black body – its objectification, its wounds, its power and the unrelenting tensions of reconstructing and navigating identity in a post plantation society and economy. The presentation draws on the discourse of Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall, particularly his important essay 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora', and his investigation into the processes of 'being' and 'becoming', and how these dynamics work in visual culture.