Andrea Chung,Residue, 2010. Courtesy of the artist
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Bayeté Ross Smith, Antoinette Cosway. Courtesy of the artist
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Charll Landvreugd, Anaruka 1, 2009. Courtesy of the artist
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Derrick Adams,The Hidden Entrance, 2009-2010. Courtesy of the artist
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Justin Randolph Thompson, Hoodoo Wackin’, 2010. Courtesy of the artist
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Elizabeth Colomba, Seated, 2007. Courtesy of the artist
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Bertha/Antoinette Mason is the so-called madwoman in the attic, a minor but enigmatic figure who plays a background role in Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel, Jane Eyre. The character, referred to in the story as Mr. Rochester's "creole" wife, inspired Jean Rhys to write her book, Wide Sargasso Sea. Published in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Antoinette's early life from a post-colonial Emancipation perspective: the drama of a white Creole who becomes broken by the anger and coldness of social repression from both black and white cultures. Rhys’s many-layered short novel also provided the inspiration for the current exhibition at Deutsche Bank’s 60 Wall Gallery in New York. Guest curator Kimberli Gant, former Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn, invited 11 artists to explore the book and its themes, which include uprootedness, truth and perception, identity politics and racism. Titled There is No Looking Glass Here, the show presents a variety of works in different mediums, some of which were made especially for the exhibition.
Andrea Chung’s work Residue is a dyed silk dress conceived as a metaphor for class difference and interracial mixing in Carribean society. The heroine in the novel, Antoinette, comes from an impoverished family of former slaveholders and for this reason is shunned both by the wealthy white and the black population alike. Chung gradually stained a white dress with brown sugar—as a reference to the "caste system" contingent on skin color, which bears a heavy colonialist legacy, as well as the use of a product of the predominant slave industry of the Carribean, sugar cane. Derrick Adams’s sculpture Hidden Entrance addresses Antoinette’s imprisonment on the property of her British husband, while the art photographer Bayeté Ross Smith created fictional travel documents for six of the novel's characters that imagine questions of ethnic and social identity.
With a conceptual twist, Kenya Robinson references the origin of the two main characters, Antoinette and Rochester, by overlaying paper cut outs of their two islands, Jamaica and England, in a kind of Rorschach symmetry that reflects the psychological underpinnings of the story. For his sculpture, Anaruka, Charl Landvreugd re-proportioned a classical portrait bust in shiny black enamel paint and adorned it with feathers and crystals—"creolizing it," so to speak. In Swahili, "Anaruka" means "to fly," and hence the work alludes to the traditional religious beliefs in Landvreugd’s native country of Surinam: an "air spirit" transports the souls of the deceased to their maker. In both novels, Antoinette sets fire to the country residence in which she’s held captive as a "madwoman" and jumps from the roof of the burning building. Landvreugd’s work interprets her tragic suicide as an act of liberation. The title of the exhibition, There is no Looking Glass Here is a quote from Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, who feels caught in a world without perception and understanding, one which traffics in isolation and fear and resonates universally as the ultimate obstacle to freedom.
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