Here Comes the Sun
CURATOR: Noor Alé, ARTISTS: Irene de Andrés, Katherine Kennedy, Joiri Minaya, Ada M. Patterson
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.
Exhibition Links:
Read writer, curator, and public programmer, Rea McNamara’s, piece on Here Comes the Sun: Seashell
Watch the Here Comes the Sun Exhibition Video Here: Here Comes the Sun on Vimeo
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.
For more information Click Here
Meet the artists
Irene de Andrés
Irene de Andrés graduated in Fine Arts at Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 2009 and did a Master of Research and Artistic Production. She has been one of the artists in residency at Escuela FLORA ars + natura, in Bogotá, Colombia (Artistic Residency Program sponsored by AC/E) and at The Harbor – Beta Local, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Recently, she has finished a Residency at Academia de España en Roma (Italy).
Katherine Kennedy
Katherine Kennedy is a Barbadian artist and writer. She graduated with a BA in Creative Arts (First Class Hons.) from Lancaster University, UK, and has exhibited locally, regionally, and internationally in Barbados, London, Glasgow, the USA, Aruba, Jamaica, Nigeria, New Zealand, and South Korea to date. She currently works for the Fresh Milk Art Platform in Barbados as the Communications and Operations Manager and has contributed to ARC Magazine of contemporary Caribbean art as a Writer, Editor, and the Assistant to Director. Through these platforms, she has coordinated and co-managed programmes such as Caribbean Linked and Transoceanic Visual Exchange (TVE).
Joiri Minaya
Joiri Minaya is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work navigates binaries in search of in-betweenness, investigating the female body within constructions of identity, multi-cultural social spaces, and hierarchies. Recent works focus on questioning historic and contemporary representations of black and brown womanhood in relation to an imagined tropical identity from a decolonial stance.
Ada M. Patterson
Ada M. Patterson is an artist and writer based between Barbados and Rotterdam. She works with masquerade, performance, poetry, textiles, and video, looking at the ways storytelling can limit, enable, and complicate identity formation. Her recent work considers grief, elegy writing and archiving as tools for disrupting the disappearance of communities queered by different experiences of crisis. Patterson was the 2020 NLS Kingston Curatorial and Art Writing Fellow. Exhibitions include “Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now” at Tate Britain. Her writing has featured in Sugarcane Magazine, PREE, Mister Motley and Metropolis M.
Noor Alé
Noor Alé is a curator, art historian, and writer. She is the Associate Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics, decolonization, and social justice. She has served in curatorial capacities at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Bowmanville; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She recently curated Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT, The Power Plant; this is not an atlas, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington; and Valentin Brown: Welcome to My Regulated Body, Art Gallery of Windsor. She was awarded curatorial residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Shanghai Curators Lab. She holds an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialized in photography, film, and video in global contemporary art.