Blue Curry is a Bahamian artist currently living in London, who flies his flags in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Known primarily for his installation works that broach cultural and historical themes, in 2013 Curry was asked to take part in Unsettled Landscapes, a biennial exhibition featuring the work of artists from Nunavut all the way to Tierra del Fuego, and countries in between.
Held at Site Santa Fe, Unsettled Landscapes opened in July 2014. The exhibition examines the "urgencies, political conditions and historical narratives that inform the work of contemporary artists across the Americas". Each work in the show responds to three themes: landscape, territory and trade.
Curry's childhood memories of a tourism-saturated Downtown Nassau were the catalyst for his proposal for Unsettled Landscapes.
"I started by remembering how, as a boy, the cruise ships would come into Nassau Harbour and how dramatic the difference was between just walking around kind of two-story or four-story buildings, and suddenly something the size of a cruise ship comes in and creates this new city," he said.
Seeing the cruise port through a sculptor's eyes, Curry noted the port's shifting shape each time one of the massive vessels arrived or left.
"I'd often see the cruise ship port as a sculptor, because, if you look at the ships, on no two days, does that combination of ships in the port look exactly the same. So I would see it as sculpture and the combinations of the ships coming in, the way they dock and the formations they make, as a sculpture."
Looking to the past for inspiration again, Curry drew on his knowledge of Fort Fincastle and its historical flagpole, which served as an effective communication method for the port, Nassau's residents and incoming ships, in years gone.
"That was at a time when you could look to the top of that hill and see the flagpole - people did commonly know what the flags stood for, so they knew what was going on in Nassau Harbour," said the artist. "Time progressed and flagpoles became obsolescent. Beyond that, the downtown port became predominantly a port for cruise liners, so it served no more purpose. At one moment that flagpole would have been so important, and it has no relevance at all now."
With his wheels turning, Curry offered the concept of presenting Downtown Nassau as a "site for sculpture and installation, rather than a site for just
consumption" to Unsettled Landscapes' curatorial team. His proposal began with the installation of a live video camera taping the port and displaying the "sculptural formations of cruise ships coming in and out".
In a twist on the Fort Fincastle flag post, the artist recreated a signal mast outside of the Site Santa Fe gallery. Curry highlights the impact of The Bahamas' largest industry on its landscape with a pole of nondescript, patterned beach towels fashioned into flags. Each flag represents one of the 40 cruise lines expected to arrive in Nassau Harbour for the duration of Unsettled Landscapes. Inside the Site Santa Fe gallery, the installation is complemented by a projected broadcast of the live streaming from the video camera situated in Nassau and shelves of meticulously folded flags representing the ships that are not currently in Nassau Harbour.
"It's the responsibility of the gallery staff, according to the cruise ship schedules, to raise and lower flags when ships are in the port of Nassau," said Curry. "...One sculpture in Nassau activates another in Santa Fe. Just like cruise ships, it's always changing. There is not really a day that the flag poles always look the same."
Curry has pointed out the symbolism involved in his use of the beach towels as flags.
"The beach towel I'm using it in a sly way," he said. "It is a means of conquest. If only for a day, when tourists go to the beach, they throw these towels down, and they can occupy a beach for a day. This sort of taking over of space that tourists do on a daily basis maybe doesn't affect us, but maybe psychologically it does, as a very small act of conquest. I'm interested in the beach towel as a material that you can use to possess a piece of land, a piece of the beach, if only for the day."
The Unsettled Landscapes exhibition will be up until January 2015. Those interested in finding out more about the space are encouraged to visit its website at https://sitesantafe.org/. More information about Blue Curry and his work as well as a link to his installation's live video stream can be found online at http://www.bluecurry.com/index.html.

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