TERN, a new Nassau-based gallery, presents “The Other Side Of The Pentaprism: Six Photographers In Conversation”, a photographic exhibition presenting the work of six female contemporary artists from the Caribbean: Tamika Galanis, Melissa Alcena, Jodi Minnis, Tiffany Smith, Leanne Russell and Lynn Parotti, on view from August 26th to October 30th, 2021.
A key tool in photography, the pentaprism is a five-faced reflective surface that refracts light at a 90-degree angle. This type of prism is used in a traditional single-lens reflex camera, re-inverting the image in the viewfinder that is sent to the eye by the camera’s lens. Hence, the image that is received by your brain has been transformed in order to deliver you a version of “reality.” Simply put, a pentaprism “corrects” the inverted image caused by the camera’s lens—without the pentaprism, the viewfinder would display an upside-down world.
While mirrors purport to display veracity, they are also capable of manipulation, through angles or flaws, yet still are credited with mediating the “unvarnished truth.” In photographs, subjects can be arranged “naturally,” while specific lighting, make-up, or constructed and considered poses may mimic authenticity, creating a narrative sold as truth while it actually distorts.
In Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” Alice traverses the reflective plane to discover a topsy-turvy world where everything is reversed, including logic itself. But what if the “other side” were, in fact, the natural order? What if our side—the constructed world around us—is the “alternate reality” that has been fabricated to appear “normal”? What if the odd, inverted or strange is in fact the world we seek?
The Other Side Of The Pentaprism (re-)mirrors a vision of the Caribbean as it is, but seldom is seen. The six artists in this show are the pentaprism, filtering their gaze through their creative vision. Revealing a different universe while questioning the “real” one in which we inhabit, the exhibition upsets the narratives and histories many of us have been taught, showing that the norms and status quo are truly mad. Is it not our accepted world that is illogical? A world where the homes of the enslavers are venerated while those of the enslaved are forgotten, where women are valued only for their ability to serve or bear children and where histories are unwritten. These artists present us rather with a world where people exist as more than props within a fabricated backdrop.
As artists of the Caribbean and its diaspora, these women project their own value system, tackling common threads in their work but in entirely unique ways. Tamika Galanis and Melissa Alcena desire to reveal the humanity and personhood of each subject, escaping from the tendency of traditional historical, archival or anthropological images that dehumanize and make anonymous and unknowable; Galanis literally returns the names of her agents and actors while Alcena reframes Black manhood and womanhood in an entirely new light. Jodi Minnis and Tiffany Smith take on the tropes around Black—and specifically Caribbean—womanhood and confront them head on, exaggerating the inherent tendency to exoticize to reveal its superficiality. Leanne Russell and Lynn Parotti use architecture to speak to the impracticable and unreasonable cycle of destruction and regeneration, of worth and disregard, whereby we rebuild on ruins and expect tenable and robust results. And not only do we mean the literal, structural wreckage, but also the metaphorical wreckage of a people who must consistently display strength and resilience before they have been able to recover from historical and contemporary traumas. Taking us through the glass and to the other side of the pentaprism, Galanis, Alcena, Minnis, Smith, Russell and Parotti are pulling back the curtain to a strange stage. There, perhaps a healthier and more equitable conversation around the agency and value of Caribbean people might be found and held.
About the featured artists:
TAMIKA GALANIS (Nassau, The Bahamas, b. 1979) is a documentarian and multimedia visual artist. A Bahamian native, Tamika’s work examines the complexities of living in a place shrouded in tourism’s ideal during the age of climate concerns. Emphasizing the importance of Bahamian cultural identity for cultural preservation, Tamika documents aspects of Bahamian life not curated for tourist consumption to intervene in the historical archive. This work counters the widely held paradisiacal view of the Caribbean, the origins of which arose post-emancipation through a controlled, systematic visual framing and commodification of the tropics. Tamika’s photography-based practice includes traditional documentary work and new media abstractions of written, oral, and archival histories.
MELISSA ALCENA (Nassau, The Bahamas, b. 1988) is a Bahamian portrait and documentary photographer based in Nassau, Bahamas. Her work often focuses on shifting the narrative around the Caribbean, and specifically The Bahamas, which is regularly portrayed as a country of shallow luxury, corruption or climate destruction. Known as a vacation site with landscapes populated by foreigners, Alcena flips the script by directly engaging with the people of The Bahamas, putting them front and centre, showing them and her country as complex, sophisticated and diverse. Her strong sense of color, of bright light and deep shadow, are purely homegrown, yet unexpected and nuanced. Reaching deeply into each of her subjects, she delves far beyond the surface to reveal the true nature of her sitter and the nation.
JODI MINNIS (Nassau, The Bahamas, b. 1995) is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the intersection of gender, race and culture. Through photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, video and performance, she scrutinizes the traditional representations and tropes around Black, specifically Bahamian, women. By investigating how imagery defines and relegates social status and investigating the personal and political aspects of those themes, Jodi uses her practice as a reclamation and/or call to ownership of the totality of Black Caribbean womanhood.
TIFFANY SMITH (Miami, USA, b. 1980) is an interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean diaspora (Jamaica/Guyana/Bahamas) working in photography, video, installation, and design. Using plant matter, design elements, patterning and costuming as cultural signifiers, Smith creates photographic portraits, site-responsive installations, user-engaged experiences, and assemblages focused on identity, representation, cultural ambiguity, and displacement. Smith’s practice centers on what forms and defines communities of people of color, in particular; how they are identified and represented, and how they persist.
LEANNE RUSSELL (Abaco, The Bahamas, b. 1982) is a multimedia artist who works in painting, sculpture and photography with digital manipulation. Leanne colorizes and overlaps archival images of her home island, Green Turtle Cay, Abaco, with present-day images of the island to unpack and bring to light the untold histories of that space. The Bahamian experience, both historically and in the everyday, is usually synonymous with Nassau, New Providence and Leanne’s work de-centers Nassauvian history and expands ideas of what the Bahamian existence is.
LYNN PAROTTI (Nassau, The Bahamas, b. 1968) is a Bahamian multi-media artist who is preoccupied with the environment in all its multifaceted connotations. She has a consuming passion for the natural landscape of the Bahamas where she was born but is equally concerned with the social geography of place; the human experience and relationship to these locations, the historical traces, the economic and environmental impact and consequences. Her sensuous reveling in the beauty of nature is increasingly counter-balanced by a politicized awareness of its imperiled state due to climate change and the attendant crises of rising sea levels, the depletion of natural resources, the consequences of coral bleaching, the availability of clean water. She also references the human toll through allusions to migration, coastal communities, substance fishing and poverty.
About the gallery
TERN is a new gallery in Nassau, The Bahamas, which opened its doors in December 2020. Recognizing the need for world-class contemporary art spaces to bring Bahamian artists to local and global acclaim, Amanda Coulson and Lauren Holowesko, together with Jodi Minnis, debuted TERN, creating a space of opportunity that had previously been absent in the often eurocentric art world. TERN offers a platform for Bahamian and Caribbean artists to find international success, setting pathways for young and emerging artists to access careers in the arts beyond the prior realm of possibility.
