We’re so unhappy to have missed this earlier this yr. Check out the dazzling work of Los Angeles-based, Bahamian artist April Bey, whose solo exhibition “Colonial Swag” is on view by June 11, 2022, at TERN Gallery in Nassau, Bahamas.
Falling between Bey’s well-received solo present at Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles and a future exhibition with Simon Lee Gallery, London in September 2022, Colonial Swag finds Bey incisively coming house on the similar time her work is deepening and being discovered by new audiences all over the world.
TERN Gallery is happy to current Colonial Swag, a solo exhibition of work, tapestries, and blended media by artist April Bey. Raised in Nassau on the island of New Windfall in The Bahamas and at present residing in Los Angeles, Bey’s interdisciplinary work combines American and Bahamian visible tradition and up to date popular culture into potent and imaginative social critique. Her work incorporates components of feminism, generational idea, Afrofuturism, Afro-surrealism, and constructs of race inside supremacist programs.
Bey’s artworks are sometimes crafted across the perspective of the fictional planet Atlantica, an Afrofuturist alien world which redefines Blackness outdoors the context of white supremacy and colonial struggling. Recognized by the artist as her true level of origin, the planet was named in reference to tales her Black father instructed her as a method to clarify racism, colourism, texturism and identification when she was a baby. From the attitude of extraterrestrial statement and interplanetary transcendence, Bey’s works free Black expression from the politics and victimization of Earth’s ingrained energy relations, imagining completely separate realms and histories the place no proverbial “isms” exist, glitter is foreign money and all inhabitants are wonderful of their types of free expression.
For her exhibition at TERN, Bey will exhibit two-dimensional mixed-media works and installations from her ongoing Colonial Swag sequence. Colonial Swag is a “high-fashion luxurious model on Atlantica that makes use of totally sustainable, ethically mined colonialism from Earth’s creating international locations to create stunning, priceless items of style.” This iteration of the sequence highlights the Afro-queer group of The Bahamas and inserts them into promoting campaigns for the alien luxurious label. As in lots of Caribbean areas, legal guidelines criminalizing homosexuality stay in The Bahamas as vestiges of its colonial interval, leaving the LGBTQ+ group marginalized and weak in absence of official types of recognition. Incorporating fur, glitter, vinyl and woven textiles—supplies wealthy in associative histories of queerness—Bey crafts icons across the photos of real-life figures from her group, capturing acts of defiance and celebration that outline a materialist aesthetic on an interstellar scale.
Contrasting the works from the Colonial Swag marketing campaign throughout the gallery area are two tapestries that includes “détourned” photos of Queen Elizabeth II, showing right here behind bars hand-sewn from West African materials. These arresting defacements refer each to the historic colonization undertaken by the British crown, together with in The Bahamas, in addition to to the larger system of oppression and energy relations that imprison us all, Elizabeth II, included. Marginalizing the Queen in a gallery area of primarily Black our bodies, who gaze instantly outwards from their frames and pose in positions of empowered rest, Colonial Swag envisions our world from an Atlantican perspective, emphasizing photos of freedom which break free from Elizabeth’s colonial entrapment.
Bey’s works manifest as woven tapestries, digitally woven blankets and textiles mounted on wooden and encased in resin. All of her works are extraordinarily labor intensive, with demonstrative care even within the supplies used; many incorporate materials and components sourced from Black femme-owned companies. Bey’s titles (“Bitch You Higher Reward God or Imma Shoot and That’s on God,” 2022; “They Advantageous Cross Mami Wata,” 2022) reference Blackness in up to date society with free associative verve, plucking phrases from viral songs or blockbuster motion pictures. In distinction, her topics are usually private relations and shut associates, chosen right here as fashions for the Colonial Swag model and as idealized magnificence requirements for the Atlantican populace. Expansively imagining a world the place Earth’s hierarchies are slyly flipped or just forgotten, Bey’s skill to seamlessly mix pop-culture components with surrealist imagery steeped in science fiction is a testomony to her energy to envelope us in her world.
APRIL BEY is a Bahamian interdisciplinary artist who makes work that’s each an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian tradition, up to date popular culture, feminism, generational idea, social media, Afrofuturism, Afro-surrealism, post-colonialism and constructs of race inside supremacist programs. Bey is each a practising up to date artist and artwork educator, having taught a controversial course at Artwork Heart School of Design known as “Fairly Hurts”—analyzing process-based artwork and Beyoncé hashtag fake feminism. Bey grew up in Nassau, New Windfall, in The Bahamas and moved to the USA in her early teenagers. She attained her MFA in 2014 from California State College, Northridge, and now resides and works in Los Angeles as a visible artist and artwork educator. Bey is at present a tenured professor at Glendale School.
For extra data, see https://www.terngallery.com/
[Shown above: “Bitch You Better Praise God or Imma Shoot and That’s on God,” 2022; and April Bey in front of her work.]