RELATED PROGRAMMING:
Opening Reception
February 17, 4-8 pm
Artist Talk during the reception 5-6
with music featuring Dr. Olaf "Bronco" Hendricks
Teen Worshop
My Story. My History
Student collages will accompany the exhibition at the end of the workshop.
EPHEMERAL ARCHIPELAGO
As part of my attempts to draw nearer to the lived experiences of Crucians, I devised an exploratory and iterative experimental approach. Integral to this was the recognition of my position as a visitor, an outsider, who could only aspire to conjuring a partial knowledge of the complex assemblage that constitutes this island in time.
In addition to working with Crucian families, the private archives they shared with me and the rich histories accompanying them, I worked exclusively with analogue film and photographic equipment. Just like the local archives that were at the center of my research, the material qualities of negative film formats and 8mm film footage, as well as the constraints of this older technology, evoke a certain ephemerality and fragility that speaks to the paradox of my anthropological endeavor to understand the enigma that is St. Croix with its profound historical and cultural entanglements. It also evokes the frailty of remembrance and memory itself as evidenced in the material degradation of the local archives subject to humidity, hurricanes, and other climatic conditions.
The three film works that form part of the assemblage in the two main galleries of this exhibition attest to my position as an outsider, attempting to grasp hold of time and complexity, here manifest in the blurred and fragmented nature of the imagery, while seeking to articulate the connections that this remarkable island illuminates.
HORIZON
In an island world conditioned by ephemerality, the sound of breaking waves reminds us of the vast time the environment has sustained us. Like an eternal breath, the ocean, effectively a tissue connecting us across our planet, is ever changing but remarkably consistent and as such bears testimony to our shared history.
To some the ocean evokes sentiments of se- renity, to others it holds the violent traumas of colonial injustices as evidenced in the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade.
As the sun sets on Frederiksted, on the West Side of St. Croix, we are reminded of how time both erases and preserves the past and that tomorrow is on the horizon following the long spell of darkness that is the night.
VI
During my first visit to St. Croix in 2019, Madonna’s global hit, ‘Like a Virgin’ from 1984 enforced itself on my imagination. Upon revisiting the lyrics, I found that the apparent banality of this love song could be repurposed into an ambiguous comment on the colonial encounter itself.
Upon my return in 2022 and after much consideration, I reached out to the legendary St. Croix orchestra, Stanley and the Ten Sleepless Knights, proposing that they make a cover version in a manner they found appropriate. Reinterpreting the song into a Crucian version, it becomes a subversive anthem exposing the absurdity of imperial narratives about conquest and salvation.
Envisioning a visual pastiche of the romantic narrative propagated in Madonna’s original music video, I initially recorded a love story with two young Crucians. However, this turned out antithetical to the critique on coloniality that I intended. Consequently, the present film installation represents an iterative and fragmentary palimpsest of impressions recorded during my successive stays in St. Croix. A dream punctuated by the returned gazes of proud islanders.
