In Blue Curry's solo show at the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden gallery in Weisbaden, Germany, viewers are dropped into a strange space. Tropical signifiers like conch shells are paired with strobe lights or tires covered with black and white beans, and in every untitled sculpture lies a possibility of meaning, if only the complete misuse of these paired objects could be reconciled.
"Sometimes I look at that object and think, I know what the use of that object is; what would be the best misuse of it, or the most genius misuse of it?" Blue says.
"Stranger than Paradise" is a collection of two years of work by the artist, which came on the heels of his finished MFA in Fine Art studies at Goldsmiths. The Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden Gallery is no stranger, however, to Bahamian work -- in 2006, it was the site of "Funky Nassau", the group show by Bahamian artists, including Blue. Curators Elke Gruhn and Sara Stehr invited him back for a solo show years later, and also to take part in the gallery's educational program, where Blue guided and gave critical advice to high school students' artwork for a student show in the gallery space.
Some of Blue's pieces have appeared in group shows already -- his black and white beaded tire can seen in the Fifth National Exhibition at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, and the cement mixer filled with sunscreen appeared in the 6th Liverpool Biennial -- but this is the first time all of these pieces have appeared in one exhibition together. He considers it his first solo show as a mature artist -- it's his first solo show in roughly a decade.
"One thing I said to my curator is 'I think my work looks better in group shows'," he laughs. "Just in a funny way initially, because I hadn't seen so much of my stuff together in such a long time. Many times one of my pieces would work really well in a group show because it sits apart, really apart, whether its in materials or colors or critical thinking, it's usually a jarring effect. But when you walk into here it's not so jarring as what I'm used to, and I'm walking around thinking wow, this stuff goes well together."
The effect instead is exactly the show's title -- bizarreness, an environment of both fantasticality and weirdness. From the get-go, visitors first encounter a black bucket placed upside-down on the floor, three shells stuck on in a triangle so one can discern a blackface figure.
"It really divides opinion because I think people get so frustrated with it because it's too easy. I'm fully aware of how easy that piece is, and that's why I put it there, so people can walk in and say 'well I can make that', and then walk into the next room and say, 'ok, I can't make that.' Something that involved five minutes of labor gets placed next to the tires that involve months and months of labor. Also the bucket is understated, while others are very overstated. I like to play back and forth with that. With the knowledge I have about the art world, the knowledge I have of artwork, it can be both ways, sometimes it can be that simple and brilliant, and sometimes it has to be more complex and hundreds of hours to execute."
But this piece especially -- like all of them in their own ways -- is a nod to the encounter, as well as the performance, of "the other," the identity constructed by both visitors and residents to create the idea of "paradise." In all of Blue's pieces this self-constructed environment is evident -- conch shells strung together with strobe lighting within allude to the "lighting of the stage" of our performance, as well as attempts to jazz up the novelty of the tropical landscape -- for he plays with the idea of the fetishized objects that make up the culture of the other. He calls it "performing the tropical."
"We're still marketing the other, we're still marketing the black body, the potential of some sexual rendezvous or encounter with the other," he explains. "There's still a dependency on that performance we're doing for people who already have set ideas, you can't work outside of that, so you recycle the same old clichés over and over again. So my thesis idea (at Goldsmiths) is that everything has to go post-tropical because the tropical are just all of those clichés and everything that limit us. My idea of going post-tropical goes beyond using those set tropes that are expected of us."
Blue's pieces both engage and resist this performance at once in his very choice of materials -- pairing familiar tropical signifiers with unlikely candidates that become a misuse of both. Take his spears surrounded by the inner diskettes of floppy disks. Though a stunning and beautiful object in itself (also untouchable with the sharp edges of both objects, indicating some sinister or edgy element), it alludes to the idea that such developing cultures primitively misuse such technological material for decorative or crafty "folk art" purposes.
"You just have to imagine, if I were in one of the 'primitive' societies in which we advertise that we live in, how would I approach this material? Because obviously we don't have any computers," he says. "I feel like I'm simplifying the process a lot, so I look at the material and I think, it's just material, so you use it in a kind of decorative way to create this fetishized object."
Blue also admits he is also concerned with the very nature/technology divide, and finds such magnetic media beautiful as a material to work with -- one may remember seeing images of his piece in the Goldsmiths graduate show where yards and yards of cassette tape pour from the great bone jaw of a shark suspended in the air, cascading down and piling onto the floor below. The very choice of the type of technological material used though -- floppy disks, cassette tape -- allude also to an obsolescence that ties back into the assumption that only such underdeveloped societies on the fringe of the developed world use these outdated materials.
"I was collecting those diskettes from markets around London and when an office was going out of business. But I found that in order to have three thousand discs, a lot of material for the piece, I needed to buy some," Blue remembers. "I found a wholesaler in London selling them and his argument was that he couldn't go too far down in his prices because he sells these to Nigeria. So he wants me to believe Africans are still using technology that's so out of date it's ridiculous. So these obsolete materials also connect back in to what's expected of us."
A humor is being cultivated here -- how many times have Bahamians traveled abroad and been asked if they use computers or have Internet or even wear clothes "where they are from"? Though some of these statements may be made in jest, the manifestation in the world consciousness that--despite rapid and almost complete globalization -- these tropical or "primitive" societies remain in "The Heart of Darkness" is evident of a constructed fantasy that persists today.
This is something Blue examines in his piece where black plastic buoys are ringed in Swarovski crystals, again bringing together two unlikely worlds -- industrial and luxurious -- to create a manifestation of tropical society and the veil of fantasy that is applied to such places as vacation destinations "to escape it all," as well as the idea of "selling ourselves cheap."
"There's an intentional cheapness about this world which goes back to creating an image," Blue explains. "Fantasies can operate over those images no matter how cheaply they are constructed. So a lot of this stuff is about other people's fantasies of these places, because some of these places these objects are ironic of don't even exist."
But in all of Blue's sculptures, there's a uselessness -- none of these objects are entirely useful for anything practical. One can't use the spears to fish or use in a computer. One can't use the buoys for their boat or wear them around their neck. They become the very uselessness evident in our constructed identities, and exist also in the limbo many residents of such places find themselves -- between the outdated perceived notion of the tropical and its stark modern reality.
The fact that all of Blue's pieces are "Untitled" create this very unstable environment explored -- he provides no guidance with which to approach his work, which allows the viewer to approach it with all of their preconceived notions about paradise and apply it. Blue recognizes that this is where it is evident viewers either buy into the fantasy, or move beyond it, as his pieces do.
"To have some sort of a contrived title which leads somebody into one direction or one way of understanding doesn't work for me. I'd like people to try and connect the materials, to try to get their own understanding of it," he says. "To me, the most interesting art opens up a space where I've never been before and I'm not being told what to think and I don't know what to think but I like it. The two dots never quite join up, and that's the most interesting space to be. If a title names what you're looking at, then you've got all the answers. If it goes off into this mysterious land completely off the wall, then it's too self-indulgent. My response for the moment is to keep it open and people can take what they want from it."
But at the same time, Blue recognizes that the danger of his pieces lie in their very ambiguity. Displaying such pieces abroad means the visitor--once they know the artist is from The Bahamas -- may not fully move beyond their assumptions.
"What they do is they come and see something that they think is highly decorative and emblematic of what you might find from that region and then they walk away -- then you have people who understand that there's a critical background to my work, who know I studied and Goldsmiths, that I do that with a great deal of knowledge," he says. "It works in my favor and it works against me; some people get it and some people don't. I shoot myself in the foot sometimes with the work in an odd way because I know that what I'm talking about is that very perception -- you put it in front of someone and either they rise to that challenge and they understand that idea is being challenged, or they think it just reinforces that idea."
Is there a longing for the absolute idea of the primitive? Is there a resentment? A pride? The fact is, Blue applies little emotional guidance in his work as possible as an artist -- his approach is to focus on materials at hand rather than their connotations, to play with familiar objects in unfamiliar ways and let that object take on the meaning implied by such relationships and the mindset of the viewer. There's a disproportionate amount of responsibility placed on the viewer here -- but perhaps that's how it should be. Few Caribbean artists are carrying the torch abroad, and until the world can get comfortable with a wide range of artistic work coming out of this region that critically examines our place in the world, no one will reach the post-tropical he speaks about. Like those two dots that never meet, those two objects that never reconcile, paradise exists in a detached space. So perhaps the real question you must face before viewing his work is this: What is paradise? And are you there yet?
 

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