By Staff
May 30th, 2022
BURLINGTON, ON
With the pandemic receding from our day to day lives – that doesn’t mean it is over – the lock downs and restrictions are not as harsh.
We didn’t have a chance to update our readers on event at the Art Gallery of Burlington.
Joiri Minaya, Container #3, 2017. Archival pigment print, 40” x 60“ . Courtesy of the artist.
Here Comes the Sun is running until August 13th, 2022 in the Perry Gallery.
Four artists are featured – Irene de Andrés, Katherine Kennedy, Joiri Minaya and Ada M. Patterson
The exhibition was curated by Noor Alé
Here Comes the Sun traces the origins of extractive tourism industries through the works of contemporary artists whose practices examine the interconnections between colonial legacies of crop plantations and service economies in the Caribbean.
Gesturing towards the Caribbean’s complicated relationship with the tourism industry, Irene de Andrés and Katherine Kennedy deliver criticisms of international stakeholders and land developers who stand to benefit from the economic, social, and environmental well-being of the region. Countering the intrusive colonial gaze, Joiri Minaya exposes fictitious representations of the landscape and the exoticization of Caribbean women. Ada M. Patterson subverts images of crops to offer a lamentation on the place of sugar and tourism in the Barbadian cultural imaginary.
The works problematize the paradise trope ascribed to the Caribbean by the West and pose questions about its construction: What are the historical foundations of this trope? Why, and for whom, was it built? Together, these works resist the Western gaze, address the shared complicity between tourists, diasporic communities, and land developers, and critique reductive conceptions of the Caribbean as a site of escapism.
The exhibition title is borrowed from Jamaican-born writer Nicole Dennis-Benn’s titular fictional novel. In Here Comes the Sun (2016), Dennis-Benn narrates the lives of three Jamaican women against a backdrop of power dynamics, economics, and gender inequities to advance conversations in the Global North about the complexity of tourism industries.
Here Comes the Sun has been generously sponsored by DJB Chartered Professional and the Ontario Arts Council.
The AGB is supported by the Ontario Arts Council, Ontario Trillium Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
