Sunday, 20 October 2019
3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Part of a series of events connected to the “Art in a Crisis Climate” Exhibition at:
Chhaya CDC Richmond Hill Center
121-18 Liberty Avenue
2nd Floor
Queens, NY 11419
RSVP here
COMMUNITY EVENT
Artist Talk with Andil Gosine
This is an opportunity for community members of Richmond Hill and beyond to speak directly to the artist, and learn about the thought process behind his work. What does it mean to be worried? What does it mean to take action? This is “Art in a Crisis Climate.”
Located at Chhaya’s Richmond Hill Center gallery space, “Deities, Parts I & II” was born out of Gosine’s participation in Project Prithvi – a monthly clean-up of Jamaica Bay led by a Queens-based organization Sadhana. Chhaya is thrilled to provide an extension to this work, and share it with local residents of Richmond Hill, Queens. The exhibit will showcase digital prints and debut new ceramic works, in collaboration with Romy Ceppetelli, that seek to “modernize” heritage objects.
*Chai and refreshments will be served.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
I started to make these offerings to water as long as I’ve known myself. Every time we went to the beach, the first thing my grandmother taught me to do was to find a flower and offer it to the ocean, with a prayer to Mother Earth. Each Divali, a “puja” would be performed at my parents’ home, and the (usually entirely biodegradable) materials from it were supposed to be left at a river bank. There was something quite beautiful about growing up with that practice. But rituals have to change with the times and context. Encountering those idols at Jamaica Bay, most of them made from plastic or other toxic materials, I felt conflicted: they were beautiful and ugly; they elicited a warm sentimentality but they were also evidence of my own self-destructive habits. These offerings were supposed to offer a kind of reverence for nature, but they were actually destructive to the environment.
BIOGRAPHY:
Named “one of the most exciting Caribbean artists working right now” (Island Origins magazine 2019), Andil Gosine draws on themes of migration, ecology and desire to create multimedia conceptual works. Professor of Artistic Practices at York University in Toronto, Dr. Gosine’s recent solo exhibitions include Coolie Coolie Viens which explored the legacy of Indian indentureship programs and the subsequent migrations of Indo-Caribbean peoples to cities in North America and Europe, and All the Flowers, which reflected on the impact of migration during adolescence. His work in the Queens community include the portraiture project Cane Portraiture: (Made In Love) at the inaugural Indo-Caribbean Alliance gala in 2013, his presentation of the performance Our Holy Waters, And Mine at the Queens museum in 2014, and part I of the Deities exhibition at RISE, Rockaways, earlier this year.
Dr. Gosine has authored numerous scholarly articles in journals and anthologies, and is co-author of Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction. His current research “Art in a Crisis Climate” explores the potential of artistic practice to secure just environmental futures, and his next solo exhibition rêvenir, will open in Trinidad in early 2020.
Above adapted primarily from Eventbrite page for the event.
