For their first exhibition of 2024, TERN Gallery is excited to present “In Relation” a group exhibition featuring Caribbean artists, Gherdai Hassell, Simon Tatum, and Drew Weech. This exhibition brings together three practices from the Anglophone Caribbean to illuminate intimacy within the personal and the political. Each artist grounds their work in personal anecdotes that push their audience to the ever-present politics of our existence within the Global North; however, they allow tenderness and intimacy to remain in place. “In Relation” gives breath to this dichotomy.
To imagine all things as disparate dismisses the universal need for interconnectivity. In this line of thinking, ecologies become undone, histories are erased, and loneliness brews. Ripe with iconography and sentiment given to the mundane, this exhibition centers works on paper rendered either through collage—whether analog or digital—print-making and painting. For this exhibition, Bermudian multidisciplinary artist Gherdai Hassell is presenting collages from her series “Onion Spawn.” Based in Manchester, UK, Hassell’s practice investigates nostalgia and uses collective memory to unearth the origins of narratives surrounding her identifiers. This series explores remnants of colonial Bermuda’s onion production. Though this agricultural economy has waned, the relationship with the landscape persists in interpersonal relationships, with “onion” being a term of endearment.
Through her abstract analog collages, Hassell’s work makes room for the nuances that arise from considering the extent of the influence of Bermuda’s onion industry. Though Simon Tatum also uses collages to pull his audience into the Cayman Island’s colonial and tourism history, he starts with perspectives gained through his relationship with his grandmother and other matriarchal figures. As an interdisciplinary artist, Tatum negotiates provenance, global trade, and cultural aesthetics by investigating tchotchkes found within his matriarchs’ homes. Through silk screening, digital collage and video, he presents amalgamations of textures, iconographies and print material to expand the wider implications of these seemingly harmless objects. Tatum pushes us past the ornate; forcing us to engage in the function of the objects’ visuals rather than focusing solely at its beauty and lack of function. The examination of the collector’s curiosity of his grandmother and the other matriarchs serves as a launching pad for his research and the bridging of places and spaces.
Bahamian painter, Drew Weech, presents a continuation of his “Nude” series. This iteration centers distorted/pixelated images taken from pornography made in the ’90s. Weech travels through the filters of time, technology and viewership to carve out his own place into this genre of painting. Often thought of as the apex of intimacy, scenes of sexual intercourse are rendered by Weech into small squares on paper. Up close and afar, the images remain obscured, creating a barrier or consent pushing and pulling the audience into the act. Here, the negotiation to engage or disengage arises, and the audience is left with the tension of the public connotations of being curious about what images may be revealed with time and concentration. In these delicate paintings, Weech presents the unresolved body, as tender and in bloom, in longing or to be left alone.
Although the connotations of pornography usually center on discourses of pleasure, it is at once steeped in political protest for sexual liberation while simultaneously protested against due to sexual exploitation. In the midst of this intrinsically common act, polarities of arguments on its benefits and harm arise, clouding the innate connection it forms with its viewers. Weech does not overtly take a side but veils the material he engaged with, keeping the audience at arm’s length.
Gherdai Hassell
Hassell is a China trained, multidisciplinary contemporary artist, writer and storyteller, based in Manchester, UK. Her work investigates memory and nostalgia to create unexpected narratives surrounding identity. She uses collage to thread and weave histories, and tales of transformation passed down through family lineages. Her work typically centers female bodies, simultaneously existing within realms of past, present, and future.
Simon Tatum
Tatum is an interdisciplinary artist from The Cayman Islands based in Nashville, Tennesse. His works center procedures that loosely follow Du Bois’s message of double-consciousness. He focuses on the actions of undoing, remaking, disassembling, and reassembling print imagery (ex: advertisements/ documentary images) and found objects through my own authorship. The imagery and objects he chooses to manipulate are relevant to his interests in colonial narratives, tourism, and his personal identity as a mixed-race Caribbean male who grew up negotiating foreign expectations of cultural aesthetics.
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Drew Weech
Weech is a Bahamian painter 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.