LIMINAL SPACE

Songs for the Mighty Sparrow: The Ballad of Monkey Mountain, 1998 Acrylic, collage, mixed-media on canvas Courtesy of the estate of Donald Locke

In Songs for the Mighty Sparrow: The Ballad of Monkey Mountain, Locke layers the canvas with magazine advertising, snapshots of his bronze female nude sculptures, and a monkey in its natural habitat, alluding to the work’s title “Monkey Mountain,” a remote terrain in Guyana’s Potaro-Siparuni region.

Locke also adds photographic imagery of Guyana’s past sourced from its newspapers: black and white passport portraits charged with notions of both belonging and displacement. A weave of meandering gestural black forms rests on the grid of images. The canvas is punctuated by red, green, yellow, and gold colors and two blue upward facing arrow shapes.

Untitled (MerCouple), 2016 Mixed-media collage on paper Courtesy of the artist

Abrams uses fantasy, myth, folklore, and contemporary popular culture to explore a Black utopia infused with Afro-Futurism. In this work, a mermaid couple, swathed in glitter, is posed in acts of love, desire, and devotion.

Their hybrid bodies are set against magazine cutouts of dreamy landscapes where outer space, ocean, and land all meet. The imagery of non-linear and otherworldly narratives reflects “a space of liberation for the Black imagination that rejects tragedy and trauma as the dominant narratives of the Black experience,” states Abrams. These beautiful bodies against beautiful dreamscapes of night skies dressed in shimmering violets and blues require us to examine love as a political act; a space “where happily ever after includes social justice.”

Devotion Point (Bushy Park, Parika, Essequibo, Guyana) from the series, Oniabo, 2013 Archival pigment print on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, New Jersey

The stark black and white seascape of Devotion Point, and the sense of timelessness it embodies in its aesthetic, implore the viewer to meditate on Guyana’s historical and pivotal relationship with water as a great threshold: A sacred natural resource for the country’s first people, the Amerindians, the means where European colonizers first arrived, the traumatic Trans-Atlantic Middle Passage that brought Africans to toil its soil, and a visceral reminder of precarious indentured immigrant crossings for Indians and Chinese.

As the notable Caribbean poet Derek Walcott wrote in his 1930 poem of the same name, “The sea is History.” In the tranquil scene of Devotion Point taken in Essequibo, jhandi flags planted on bamboo poles indicate that an Indian Hindu religious ceremony, a puja, has been performed. Here the image and title of “devotion” are both symbolic — it is where ancestral histories, trauma, survival, and spiritual desire all share space.

The artist engages “rootedness” in We Meet Here where twelve distinct photographs are displayed in a grid composition.

Via digital collage, Hunter layers organic imagery reminiscent of Guyana’s lush vegetation found on the seawall of its Atlantic Coast. Within each individual work, two things are a constant presence: a white silhouette self-referential figure and a green morning glory plant that thrives amidst extreme elements of temperature wind, water, and sand. Questioning what it means to navigate the space between being rooted in one land and transplanted to another, Hunter states, “The morning glory plant could be likened to those of us who, while rooted in a very particular space, find relief and discomfort at the cusp of both here and there.”

In El Dorado After All, Mattai reimagines the mythical city of gold that ignited 16th century European explorations of South America. Drawing from a photograph hypothesizing the location of this lush world, Mattai renders “El Dorado” an idealized, imagined, abandoned, symbolic space.

The work teems with texture, materiality and laborious detail. Mattai weaves onto a large-scale seaweed rug a bounty of objects and materials via processes that are hand-done and domestic — a nod to the women in her family who are experts in weaving, embroidering, needlepointing, and sewing. Mattai is concerned with the liminal space of disorientation when one transitions through multiple cultural spheres. It is important to note that she created this work while on a short-term stay in France. With each puncture of embroidery, each woven thread, Mattai attempts to de-center fixed ideas of history.

“By hand-embroidering this idealized (and fictitious) version of Guyana,” she states, “I am weaving together both personal and historical traces to create a mythical past. Like all myth, this past is part fiction and part truth.”

White: Crossing, 2017 Acrylic polymer emulsion, pigments and glass beads on canvas Courtesy of the artist

Weithers employs the experimentation of form, material, and technique of Modernism to create White: Crossing, part of his series of large-scale white paintings. The surface of the work is richly textured, defined by its grandiose play with light, shadow, and the luminosity of acrylic paint. A glorious white dominates the top half of the canvas, becoming both receptive and reflective of light and shadow.

In G741 Drawing Structures, a painted green rectangular plywood sheath with the bottom edges diagonally cut out is decorated with Lyght’s freehand drawings of white geometric shapes influenced by Amerindian “Timehri” rock carvings in Guyana. Drawing from his childhood days of constructing kites, Lyght creates an illusion of a floating sheath, noting how the work is meant to “flow through space, lightly touch the plane of the wall, and appear to have no fixed boundaries.”

The plywood is held in place by a visible crossbar on the front and a partially hidden lightweight oak stick framing system behind it — a reference to the stick-frame houses in Guyana that first ignited the artist’s attraction to line and structure. Of this visual vocabulary, meant to elude notions of confinement, Lyght states, “I wanted to create a sense of being in a landscape, a sense of space around real things, a feeling of the near and far distance and of the horizon line, the place that you never get to.”

Untitled (blue), 2014 Archival pigment print on canvas Courtesy of the artist

The simplicity of the imagery in Sahadeo’s photograph belie its disruption. In the self-portraiture work Untitled (blue), the artist is photographed in his bedroom, illuminated by the glow of multiple digital screens: a tablet rests on his lap, a phone lies under his hand, a laptop is on the dresser.

The wealth of technology visible in the frame is juxtaposed by visual codes of an impoverished nation that continues to grapple with a struggling infrastructure — the artist is enclosed under a mosquito netting and photographed in a city blackout. In exploring the reliance on devices to stay connected, Sahadeo comments on what he sees as the “disconnection between Guyana and myself.” Within the quiet stillness of the moment, there is a sense of transition. The subject of Untitled (blue) is physically present in Guyana and engaged in digital spaces outside its borders.

In response to the act of migration as a liminal space, Hazlewood grapples with the “unsayable,” drawing from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke that “Most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered.” Armed with a range of materials both pedestrian and exquisite, the artist elevates objects that are often invisible or trivialized: pushpin, tape, a piece of string to construct Demerara Song.

In this “wall painting,” informed by the scale and curve of the wall, Hazlewood folds, drapes, pins, pleats, cuts, and layers the materials as he plays with negative and positive space. While the work relies on set of formal and minimalism techniques, Demerara Song is a conversation on temporality, “an attempt to rescue something out of nothing, pinning down a moment,” states Hazlewood. The viewer will never see the work in this iteration again as the artist will dismantle its parts when the exhibition concludes.

Bread Man, 2001 Acrylic on canvas scroll Courtesy of the artist

Employing the aesthetic of French Surrealists painters, Greaves draws from his boyhood growing up in an impoverished Georgetown tenement yard in creating the self-referential painting Bread Man. Two dark, unclothed figures border the canvas: one carries a loaf of bread, the other has an empty board. What the figures carry is a commentary on “hope and despair” states the artist.

Greaves also adds subtle singular objects of biographical symbolism — an empty shot glass, a bent nail, a leafy garnish — that further references Surrealism. The more obvious symbolic object, the shadowy square hole in the ground, is centered in the canvas.