Artists Jodi Minnis and Drew Weech skewer facile images while also bringing their observations to bear in their personal orbit, baring an intimacy with the viewer in their two-person show "Balancing Act" at TERN Gallery.
For Weech, the performative aspect of tourism can be paralleled with the art world where the creator is also expected to play the act.
Minnis inserted herself into the images to reflect on her own experiences around expectation and desire.
While the content for both artists is profound, there is an allowance for a tongue-in-cheek drollness in the works as the artists balance that fine line between the tragicomic.
It is this balancing act two-person show that pairs Minnis and Weech for their keen acuity which will open on Thursday, May 25 with a reception between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. The exhibition will run through July 1.
Weech and Minnis' paintings and drawings (and, in Minnis' case, sculptures) unpack and reflect upon Bahamian society, its structures and strictures. While there is a literal equilibrium between the artists' approaches, using clean, graphic lines in many cases to unpack caricatures of the human – specifically Black Bahamian – figure and how it has been perceived and packaged by a largely colonial or touristic gaze, there is also a balance in the works themselves between levity and gravity.
Weech presents the viewer with his sardonic worldview, described in black, white, and shades of gray with the occasional minimal and muted use of color. In his precise canvases and slightly looser drawings, he illustrates his vision of modern Bahamian society that is mordantly humorous while simultaneously bleak, a revelatory counterpart to the brightly colored images with which most equate the country. Men are seen as paper cut-outs that have been literally flattened into a husk by the demands of the tourist industry. His actors – whether male or female – are sad clowns, plastering on a smile when called for, and balancing on a tightrope of existence, while trying to navigate their humanity and retain their dignity and sense of self. His meditation on the "penny divers'' – figures that historically were made to perform by retrieving the coins tossed by newly arrived tourists on steamer ships – reveals the exhaustion and futility of the tourism merry-go-round.
Painter David Weech's "Keepsake", which is a part of a two-person show "Balancing Act" with visual artist Jodi Minnis which opens on Thursday, May 25 and runs through July 1 at TERN Gallery.
Minnis, on the other hand, takes the very well-known figures of the Bahamian policeman, standing erect in his starched white uniform and pith helmet – a much-beloved image evocative for many of a romanticized bygone age of perceived safety and security – and the "Mammy" figure, known locally as the "Bahama Mama," and also calls out the reductiveness of these caricatures, objecting to how they minimize the fullness of Bahamian identity.
Both are hollow representations: The "keeper of the peace" in contemporary society is for many, especially Bahamian women, an agent of intimidation and harassment. He is therefore a false idol, a symbol of sham protection and a general loss of trust in public services, initially designed to protect and care for people.
The Bahama Mamas meanwhile are actually hollow: a salt-shaker, dinner bell and piggy bank. Not only are their purposes cringeworthy but also their lack of content speaks to assumptions around Black womanhood, that is, vessels expected to be in service or to hold space for the dreams, aspirations, and livelihoods of others. The tchotchkes are broken, reclaimed, rejected and made safe, transformed from tourist knick-knacks to sculptural totems that not only reject but protect.
Minnis is a visual artist whose practice contends with multiplicity through the lens of gender, race and culture. Utilizing drawing, collage, sculpture and performance, she scrutinizes the traditional representations and tropes around Black, specifically Bahamian, women. By investigating how imagery defines and relegates social status and investigating the personal and political aspects of those themes, Minnis uses her practice as reclamation and call to ownership of the totality of Black Caribbean womanhood.
Weech is a painter based in Harlem, New York, who explores various historical and contemporary archetypes to vivify his own conflicted feelings about the notion of "home". Working primarily in black and white, his practice rejects notions of a single-story by diffusing the space between the past and the present. He juxtaposes imagery that presents a multiplicitous concurrence of personal and collective narratives. In relation to his Afro-Caribbean upbringing, Weech uses his practice as a means of pulling the audience into exploring the depths and nuances of existence outside of the paradisiacal gaze.
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