The Second Voyage by Irene de Andres, Here Comes the Sun, Art Gallery of Burlington, AGB, 1333 Lakeshore Road, Burlington, ON
Excerpt from the plaque:
The Second Voyage by Irene de Andres: El Segundo Viaje (The Second Voyage) is a work comprised of photographs drawn from the Archivo General de Puerto Rico and travel records of the arts that examines the island’s range of visitors, from the first colonizers to present-day tour operators. In the early 1500s, the Spanish empire colonized Puerto Rico, which briefly gained independence for forth-eight hours, in 1898, before becoming a territory of the United States, as it remains today. Puerto Rico’s strategic location facilitated American and Spanish military control over the Atlantic Ocean, and in later years, this history of occupation was cast as a model that alleged economic prosperity as an outcome of colonial incursions. Puerto Rico – its Spanish name translates to “rich harbour” – once sheltered galleons of the West Indies fleet, and now receives Royal Caribbean cruise ships.
Excerpt from agb.life/visit/exhibitions/here-comes-the-sun:
Here Comes the Sun traces the origins of extractive tourism industries through the works of contemporary artists whose practices examine the interconnections between colonial legacies of crop plantations and service economies in the Caribbean. Gesturing towards the Caribbean’s complicated relationship with the tourism industry, Irene de Andrés and Katherine Kennedy deliver criticisms of international stakeholders and land developers who stand to benefit from the economic, social, and environmental well-being of the region. Countering the intrusive colonial gaze, Joiri Minaya exposes fictitious representations of the landscape and the exoticization of Caribbean women. Ada M. Patterson subverts images of crops to offer a lamentation on the place of sugar and tourism in the Barbadian cultural imaginary.
The works problematize the paradise trope ascribed to the Caribbean by the West and pose questions about its construction: What are the historical foundations of this trope? Why, and for whom, was it built? Together, these works resist the Western gaze, address the shared complicity between tourists, diasporic communities, and land developers, and critique reductive conceptions of the Caribbean as a site of escapism.
The exhibition title is borrowed from Jamaican-born writer Nicole Dennis-Benn’s titular fictional novel. In Here Comes the Sun (2016), Dennis-Benn narrates the lives of three Jamaican women against a backdrop of power dynamics, economics, and gender inequities to advance conversations in the Global North about the complexity of tourism industries.
The Second Voyage by Irene de Andres, Here Comes the Sun, Art Gallery of Burlington, AGB, 1333 Lakeshore Road, Burlington, ON
Excerpt from the plaque:
The Second Voyage by Irene de Andres: El Segundo Viaje (The Second Voyage) is a work comprised of photographs drawn from the Archivo General de Puerto Rico and travel records of the arts that examines the island’s range of visitors, from the first colonizers to present-day tour operators. In the early 1500s, the Spanish empire colonized Puerto Rico, which briefly gained independence for forth-eight hours, in 1898, before becoming a territory of the United States, as it remains today. Puerto Rico’s strategic location facilitated American and Spanish military control over the Atlantic Ocean, and in later years, this history of occupation was cast as a model that alleged economic prosperity as an outcome of colonial incursions. Puerto Rico – its Spanish name translates to “rich harbour” – once sheltered galleons of the West Indies fleet, and now receives Royal Caribbean cruise ships.
Excerpt from agb.life/visit/exhibitions/here-comes-the-sun:
Here Comes the Sun traces the origins of extractive tourism industries through the works of contemporary artists whose practices examine the interconnections between colonial legacies of crop plantations and service economies in the Caribbean. Gesturing towards the Caribbean’s complicated relationship with the tourism industry, Irene de Andrés and Katherine Kennedy deliver criticisms of international stakeholders and land developers who stand to benefit from the economic, social, and environmental well-being of the region. Countering the intrusive colonial gaze, Joiri Minaya exposes fictitious representations of the landscape and the exoticization of Caribbean women. Ada M. Patterson subverts images of crops to offer a lamentation on the place of sugar and tourism in the Barbadian cultural imaginary.
The works problematize the paradise trope ascribed to the Caribbean by the West and pose questions about its construction: What are the historical foundations of this trope? Why, and for whom, was it built? Together, these works resist the Western gaze, address the shared complicity between tourists, diasporic communities, and land developers, and critique reductive conceptions of the Caribbean as a site of escapism.
The exhibition title is borrowed from Jamaican-born writer Nicole Dennis-Benn’s titular fictional novel. In Here Comes the Sun (2016), Dennis-Benn narrates the lives of three Jamaican women against a backdrop of power dynamics, economics, and gender inequities to advance conversations in the Global North about the complexity of tourism industries.