Blue Curry: Mango Sunset

 

Growing up in Spanish Wells, The Bahamas, a place known for its highly commodified natural beauty, Curry experienced a dissonance between the touristic representation of his homeland compared with the nuanced socioeconomic reality of living in the Caribbean. Printed in Risograph, Mango Sunset’s florid central straw signifies the touristic expectations of the Caribbean: a place of consumption and pleasure, where uncomfortable thoughts of power cuts, crime and colonial legacies are pushed aside between fruity drinks. Both the urchin carapace and the Risograph jaguar spots reference the reductive ethnographic tendencies central to the tourist economy. For the artist, animal prints bear visual reminders of exotification and colonial Orientalism, the capability of a mass-reproduced visual stereotype to reduce a nation, culture or entire geographic locale to a set of trivializing characteristics. Likewise, Curry’s repeated use of shells can be seen as a comment on the international networks created by tourism and the extractive nature of the souvenir industry. Through his viscerally suggestive straw, Curry references this draining of resources and culture, an unseen figure leeching life from a hollow natural form. Rather than contributing to those same extractive processes, the artist often sources shells locally using eBay, calling into question the authenticity of Caribbean iconography and the destructive potential of displacing and circulating natural objects on a mass scale.

 

At the core of Curry’s work is an interrogation of how an idealised image of the tropics supersedes reality, obscuring the systemic behind the surface and nature behind the artificial. Throughout his practice, the artist relates found objects associated with waste and consumption to those of the natural world. He celebrates tensions between kitschy souvenirs­­—bath towels, farmed shells and plastic flowers—and raw materials representing the authentic, mundane experience of Caribbean life—sand, cement, rubber and steel. By placing the urchin carapace on a rotating solar-panelled stand charged by bright LED light, a pedestal evoking performativity and illusion, Curry activates a space between artificiality and authenticity. Mango Sunset complicates Western media’s conception of the Caribbean as a place of leisure or paradise, asking us to consider for whom this space is paradisiacal and what truths may exist beyond such a construct.

Blue Curry (b. 1974, Nassau, The Bahamas) lives and works in London, UK. He is the director of Ruby Cruel, a creative space in Hackney, London, and he holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, London. Curry participated in the 15th edition of Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2022), and in December of this year will exhibit in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s–Now, travelling from Tate Britain (2021-22) to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2023-24). In January 2024 Curry will also exhibit in Trópico es Político: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime, curated by Marina Reyes Franco, at Amhurst College, MA, travelling from the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Leisure Aesthetics, Rejecting Exoticisim, Part of Caribbean Art Today: Visualising Evolving Identities, V&A Academy, Online (2022); TERN Gallery, Nassau, Bahamas (2022); MOCA London Web Exhibitions, Online (2020); 55 Gallon BBQ, The Empire Remains Shop, Grand Union, Birmingham, UK (2019); Foreign Matter, SCAN, London (2019); and Designer Exotics, AIR, Copenhagen, Denmark (2018). Residencies include AIR Artist in Residence, Copenhagen, Denmark; Perez Art Museum, Miami FL; Centro León Residency, Santiago, Dominican Republic; PEER Residency, London; LoBe Residency, Germany; and Omi International Artists Residency, NY, amongst others.