Hurvin Anderson: Anywhere but Nowhere by Mia Morettini

Anywhere

Anywhere but Nowhere Hurvin Anderson

April 9

August 7

Janine Mileaf

“I could go anywhere and still be nowhere. I could be across the sea and still be nowhere”

Director’s Foreword

The lush and vibrant spaces in the new paintings for Hurvin Anderson: Anywhere but Nowhere at The Arts Club of Chicago reference touristic sites of simultaneous development and dereliction in Jamaica, the artist’s ancestral home. Departing from photographs Anderson took during a visit to the island in 2017, the paintings and drawings on view elaborate the artist’s process of abstraction, moving between motif and surface, landscape and color field. Anderson takes the title for this exhibition from K. C. White’s 1973 reggae version of a classic American pop song. The lyrics “I could go anywhere and still be nowhere. I could be across the sea and still be nowhere” express the alienation that Anderson locates in the combined landscape of wild vegetation and persistent construction— an emblem of his own ambivalent position on the island. Born in the United Kingdom as a member of the Jamaican diaspora, Anderson relates to the Caribbean as both insider and outsider, aware of the mythmaking that the idea of a lost or future paradise generates, and of the irony of expansive development in the face of neglect. As scholar Krista Thompson relates in her essay for this brochure, the rootedness of dwelling in place remains elusive to the diasporic artist who actively works to unsee scenes of Jamaica that have been filtered through colonialism. In his thinking and in his painting, Anderson takes the long view. He stays with a set of problems, an approach, or an image and its construction steadily, turning it over, redrawing it, reframing, and zeroing in closer as he gains clarity through multiple studies, layered transparencies, and restarts. The body of work that he produced for this exhibition thereby benefited from its unfortunate postponement due to the global pandemic that shut down galleries and means of transport.

Given extra time, Anderson did not diverge from the planned canvases and drawings. Instead, he continued to paint through to a richer set of propositions, arriving at a thoroughly actualized vision that portrays the landscape of hotels, perforated limestone walls, or imaginatively heightened and overgrown nature. And then he added a thought; in the monumental, multi-panel painting No one remembers (2021), Anderson evokes the colorful signage, political messaging, and repeated visual motifs that are characteristically seen on exterior walls in Jamaica (Pl. 13). Beginning a new inquiry, this final painting focuses the subject of the exhibition more specifically than Anderson had originally imagined, making the Jamaican context explicit to the informed eye through a panoramic view. It had always been Anderson’s plan to include preparatory materials and studies, as well as the earlier painting Flat Top (2006), along with this new body of work, to connect his observations about the interior and exterior spaces he encountered in Jamaica (Pl. 24). The combination of works from his celebrated barbershop series with these new touristic landscapes thereby evidences fifteen years of continued thought and a consistent methodology. Indeed, he has produced Miss Jamaica (2021), a new drawing that returns to the barbershop rubric, evidencing Anderson’s continued ruminations on the subject even as he developed a new investigation (Pl. 16). Throughout both series, Anderson mapped space, clarified relations, noted imbalances, and shifted perspective until he had thoroughly analyzed his subjects—and then he began again. Each new painting or drawing exists in the very threshold separating paint and representation, where brushstrokes hover between marking form and formlessness in a manner cognizant of the history of modernist art. Higher Heights

(2020) expresses that tension in the most overt terms with its pink grid iterating canvas and structure at once (Pl. 14). Inadvertently, Anderson further placed himself within an explicit painting lineage when he inserted a young Jamaican girl within the architecture in Grace Jones (2020), echoing famed staircase descenders by Marcel Duchamp or Gerhard Richter (Pl. 12). The Chalet series sums up Anderson’s embrace of the tenets of abstraction through its fantastic coloration and bifocal views that depart from in-person observation of limestone and foliage (Pls. 9–11). In this challenging year, sustained concentration of this nature has escaped many. Yet Anderson has maintained a deep investigation across many months and canvases. We are privileged to be the beneficiaries of such productivity and thank Anderson enormously for honoring this exhibition so completely during these many months of dislocation and interruption. Tremendous thanks are also due to Alice Chubb for her constant oversight and communication with us. We are extremely grateful to Thomas Dane and his gallery staff for their enthusiasm for The Arts Club and ongoing logistical assistance, especially Olivia Rawnsley. We further thank Michael Werner Gallery, especially Kadee Robbins for her aid in locating works. As always, we acknowledge our own team, especially gallery manager Adam Mikos and administrative assistant David Merz for the efforts from home and in-person that have brought this exhibition to fruition. For her collaboration in the sensitive design and single-handed execution of this brochure, we are indebted to Mary Clare Butler of Fata Morgana Press. As this exhibition debuts, the world is taking tentative steps to resume more normal operations. Anderson’s paintings subtly caution us to reconsider “normal” and be deliberate in the choices we make regarding travel, the environment, and a rush toward expansion. At the same time, they envelop us in the extraordinary sensory and memory impressions of place.

Krista Thompson

Seeing Diasporically: Hurvin Anderson’s Caribbean “Territories of Soul”

What I name territories of soul, after the Guyana-born British writer Mike Philips, are those spaces that embody the classic diasporic dialectic of being at once imagined and material. They are, in this book, like Hall’s jazz everywhere: places and people of black identification that are most lively as horizons of possibility, a call from afar that one keeps trying and trying to answer. — Nadia Ellis, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora I argue that this witnessing-someone else-witness-Haiti, of seeing dyasporically, is a critical part of the Haitian Dyasporic experience, one that cultivates a practice of learning to (un)see what and how Haiti has been represented in the colonial imaginary. — Kantara E. Souffrant, Circling the Cosmograms: Feminist Art, Vodou, and Dyasporic (Re) turns to Post-Quake Haiti

In Hurvin Anderson’s Ascent (2019) a mirage of a landscape washes down the paper, leaving vibrant trails and clouds of paint dripping and drifting down the surface of the image (Fig. 1). Verdant greens and atmospheric purple planes of paint are punctuated by gangling palms, which give the watercolor-like landscape some identifiable botanical features. The red leaves of one palm in particular in the center of the image recall the colorful shock of Poinciana trees commonly found in the Caribbean. A grey staircase, composed of structured geometric shapes, charts a mysterious path through the vegetation. What lays beyond it is unclear. The shades of gray and blue suggest a waterfall or a building subsumed in nature. The background seemingly dissolves into the paper. A grid-like

and Trinidad as engaged in a history of a diasporic reenvisioning of colonial imagery and diasporic imaginaries of the Caribbean, which opens up the representational possibilities of Caribbean landscapes.

structure reveals itself especially to the left side of the image, interrupting the impressionistic scene. This matrix-like pattern calls attention to the very nature of the scene, how it has made, manufactured or engineered ways of seeing. What technologies, techniques, and histories structure the making and viewing of the Caribbean? What exceeds or escapes such visual filters? Anderson’s paintings call attention to the ways that the landscape of the Caribbean has been filtered through the eyes, lenses, and brushes of others, whether tourists and expats, colonial and imperial interests, or artists coming from other parts of the African diaspora.1 Its landscape has been imagined and represented so much that it seems forever allusive. The paintings also respond to and elucidate “seeing diasporically,” a term scholar Kantara Souffrant uses to describe how second generation Caribbean descendants living in the diaspora have come to cultivate “a practice of learning to (un) see what and how Haiti has been represented in the colonial imaginary.” 2 Applying her observations more broadly to the Caribbean and Anderson’s work, I contend that his paintings manifest the “haunted and inherited” 3 relationship that many artists in the diaspora have to the Caribbean and its representations. Many negotiate what Souffrant characterizes as seeing Haiti by “witnessing-someone-else-witnessingHaiti.” 4 In other words, I see Anderson’s landscapes of Jamaica

1 For a small sampling of this literature, see Kennicott, 12–14; Philogene, 100–126; Pressley-Sanon, 6–32; Sheller; Souffrant; Thompson 2006; Thompson 2007, 74–97; Thompson 2011, 6–31; Twa; Ulysse 37–43; VanDiver, 24–51. 2 Souffrant, 69. 3 Souffrant, 70. 4 Souffrant, 69.

Figure 1. Ascent

Figure 2. Verdure

Figure 3. Blue Mahoe

Anderson was born in Birmingham, U.K., and his earliest memories of Jamaica came at the age of six or seven through the recollections of his parents. He was especially compelled by stories of his grandmother working the land— an important material production of landscape—and reveled in stories of “the country” and “the bush,” the rural and untamed terrain beyond the island’s urban centers.5 The lure of the island was especially great given his experiences sometimes in British society, in which he felt like his surroundings were not his place.6 Anderson experienced what Nadia Ellis views as central to the diasporic experience. “The urgent sensation of a pull from elsewhere, when not fulfilled, constitutes diaspora culture at its most curious, eccentric, and [Ellis] would argue, paradigmatic.” 7 Anderson experienced this pull, this literal and figurative draw, to “the romantic ideal of what the place, [Jamaica,] was.” 8 When Anderson visited Jamaica with his mother at the age of fourteen, he was able to experience the island himself, connecting with relatives and connecting places to his visions of them. With the guidance of family, he learned what it meant to “go to country,” “where to walk, what to eat, how to live off the land.” His travels took him from Spanish Town to the north coast of the island where he started to photograph the land, as so many had done before him.9 Indeed, the grid-like structure evident in paintings like Verdure (2019) and Palace 1 (2019) recalls how a viewfinder on a camera might frame and partition a landscape, readying it for photographic capture (Fig. 2 and Pl. 2). The grid framework in the paintings

5 6 7 8 9

Author interview with Anderson, August 18, 2020. Author interview, 2020. Ellis 2015, 2. Author interview, 2020 Author interview, 2020.

brings to mind a longer history of attempts to bring the Caribbean into focus, through photography or other viewing apparatuses, from Claude glasses to stereoscopes. The north coast of Jamaica, which Anderson photographed, was the site of some of the earliest tourism campaigns in the region, dating to the late nineteenth century.10 The British colonial government in collaboration with the United States and U.K.-based banana companies and hoteliers turned to photography to promote the island as a tropically picturesque locale. This was a specific ideal of the island as having a tamed and disciplined population and nature.11 Photographs circulated through projections in lantern lectures, stereographs, postcards, photographic prints, and through guide books. For Verdure (2019), for example, Anderson used an analogue camera and scanned the negatives creating a large print of the landscape.12 He then employed a grid to “scale up” the image to the size of the painting, all of the processes of scaling up and projection speaking historically to the translation between different mediums which were central in the construction of the touristic Caribbean landscape. This grid visualizes the broader scaffolding and infrastructure on which ideals of the Caribbean have been hung. Anderson notes that his palette would incorporate unrealistic colors as the ground for work, to underscore the imaginative underpinning of the paintings and Caribbean landscape ideals.13 The impression of Jamaica (and Trinidad) in Anderson’s paintings is certainly not that of a century-old touristic picturesque tropical ideal. In paintings like Palace 1 (2019) and Blue Mahoe (2019) (Fig. 3) vegetation bursts wildly forth and seemingly dissolves on the surface of the work. On the northern coast, Anderson was struck by the many structures of derelict hotels that existed alongside new hotel construction. In paintings like Verdure and Palace 1, these structures are hinted at in the 10 Thompson 2006. 11 Thompson 2006. 12 Author interview, 2020. 13 Author interview, 2020.

grey geometric forms that give some solidity to the scene. “Everything,” Anderson recalls, “seemed in half-way state.” 14 The architectural forms are reminiscent of former plantations that became hotels and of the recurring vision of successive postcolonial governments which hung the island’s future on a singular notion of the nation’s developmental prospects. These vacated and emergent structures, some sitting on hillsides amid crashing oceans, conjured for Anderson the opposite of marketed touristic ideals. Local murals commemorating people who had died through acts of violence also undercut notions of beauty promoted in the island’s photographic campaigns.15 But the paintings cannot be easily subsumed within a history of touristic and colonial imaginaries. They are importantly the product of seeing diasporically, a learning to scrutinize a history of colonial and touristic representations while drawing on an intimacy and distance from the islands as someone from the Caribbean diaspora. To return to Souffrant, images produced by the outside world have become “a necessary visual ‘go-between’ that allows the Dyaspora to see at a distance––to ‘access’ Haiti” [and the Caribbean more broadly].” 16 Several of Anderson’s paintings seem to capture this sense of visually “going in between” “outside world” and “diasporically distanced” purviews on the Caribbean landscape. Chalet 1 and Chalet 2 (2019), appear to represent different perspectives on a single landscape. (Pls. 9 and 10) Both sides of the work share the horizon lines, the composition, of one landscape. However, the colors and paint application suggest dual, different, if not irreconcilable ways of seeing and representing the same landscape. The bipartite structure of both works is reminiscent of stereographic cards picturing the Caribbean and many parts of the world starting in the late nineteenth century, through two slightly different photographic views which were placed side by side. Looking at the pair of images

14 Author interview, 2020. 15 Author interview, 2020. 16 “Dyaspora” is the Haitian creole of “Diaspora.” Souffrant, 60.

through a stereoscope device would seemingly blend the two parts together to simulate the ideal of looking into threedimensional space. In Anderson’s Chalet 1 and Chalet 2, the two parts of the stereographic card that would create the optical illusion remain separated and visible. The work makes legible what Ellis describes as the “metaphorical space of multiplicity and suspension” that is part of African diasporic cultural and political practices.17 I want to conclude by further examining Anderson’s paintings in relation to Ellis’s work, particularly her analysis of the spaces and processes within the African diaspora which function as “territories of the soul.” This characterizes new modes of “diasporic aesthetics and subjectivity” produced through a “sense of insufficiency, in the haunting gap between here and there.” 18 Her description of the work generated in the gap of diasporic distance and intimacy recalls Anderson’s engagement with Jamaica, his recognition that he “was standing outside and looking at it [the island’s landscape] and thinking ‘I know it,’ but it’s partly about someone’s memory of the place.” 19 Anderson’s use of the grill in his work may be seen as literally representing the gap between here and there, the space of African diasporic desire and distance. The grid-like structure in many of Anderson’s works was inspired in part by the security grills that are a common feature in buildings across the Caribbean. From an interior looking out, the grills represent a physical barrier, a distance, and an out-of-reach-state of the Caribbean landscape. A trope in the work of other Caribbean and African diasporic artists including John Beadle, Chris Ofili, Paul Anthony Smith, and Fred Wilson; through the grills the landscape in Anderson’s work is visible but beyond reach. The viewer must

17 Ellis, 11. 18 Ellis, 3. 19 Author interview, 2020.

linger on the elements that block their physical connection and visual perception. The grills cut into and scar the scene, creating what Anderson describes as an anti-landscape.20 “Territories of the soul” emerge precisely from “the gap between the ground on which one stands and a compelling place beyond.” 21 Ellis, drawing on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, sees this gap, which she understands as a diasporic sense of queerness, as very generative within African diasporic cultures. Potential arises precisely through “that thing that lets us feel that the world is not enough,” in the space that “suspends rather resolves any arrival of a new space of exile.” 22 Anderson’s work was inspired by his coming to terms with an inability to “find a place” in the Caribbean and U.K., from a Caribbean diasporic search for belonging. This quest remains explicitly unresolved in the work, which focuses on the colonial, touristic, diasporic, and familial histories, representations, and memories that open sights and spaces of proximity and distance. The work holds viewers behind grills, grids, viewfinders, stereographs, and cameras before landscapes that occupy a space between mediums—incorporating drawings, painting, and photography. In both what they picture and the process of creation, they suspend viewers in a waiting room of Caribbean landscape, activating their own diasporic territories.

20 When you paint grilles, you feel like you’re cutting into the landscape, a sacred thing. They’re anti-landscape. Uslip, npag. The idea of scarring the landscape comes from Author interview, 2020. 21 Drawing on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, Ellis explains that “The gap between the ground on which one stands and a compelling place beyond can be described by the word queer. For queerness is that thing that lets us feel that the world is not enough. . . . In that sense of insufficiency, in the haunting gap between here and there, queerness resides.” Ellis, 3. 22 Ellis, 4 and 11.

Bibliography Chambers, Eddie. “Hurvin Anderson: The Frontiers of Abstraction.” Critical Interventions 7.2 (2013): 78–90. Ellis, Nadia. Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Fischer, Sibylle. “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” Small Axe 23 (2007):1–15. Kennicott, Philip. “Codes of Exposure: Imaging the Body and Suffering in Haiti.” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 39.1–2 (2011): 12–14. Philogene, Jerry. “‘Dead Citizen’ and the Abject Nation: Social Death, Haiti, and the Strategic Power of the Image.” Journal of Haitian Studies 21.1 (2015): 100–126. Pressley-Sanon, Toni. “Lucid Cameras: Imaging Haiti After the Earthquake of 2010,”Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 2011): 6–32. Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: from Arawaks to Zombies. Psychology Press, 2003. Souffrant, Kantara E. Circling the Cosmograms: Feminist Art, Vodou, and Dyasporic (Re) turns to Post-Quake Haiti. Diss. Northwestern University, 2017. Thompson, Krista A. An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Thompson, Krista A. “Preoccupied with Haiti: The Dream of Diaspora in African American Art, 1915–1942.” American Art 21.3 (2007): 74–97.

Thompson, Krista. “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United States.” Art Journal 70.3 (2011): 6–31. Twa, Lindsay J. Visualizing Haiti in US Culture, 1910-1950. Farnham, Surrey: Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Ulysse, Gina Athena. “Why Representations of Haiti Matter Now More Than Ever,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 43, No.4 (July/August 2010): 37–43 Uslip, Jeffrey. “Backdrop.” Hurvin Anderson: Backdrop. St. Louis, MO: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2016. Npag. VanDiver, Rebecca. “The Diasporic Connotations of Collage: Loïs Mailou Jones in Haiti, 1954–1964.” American Art 32.1 (2018): 24–51.

Figures 1 Hurvin Anderson Ascent, 2019 acrylic on paper laid on board 39 3/8 x 51 1/8 in. (100 x 130 cm.) Photo: Rat Hole Gallery/Daishinsha 2 Hurvin Anderson Verdure, 2019 oil, acrylic on board 39 3/8 x 51 1/8 in. (100 x 130 cm.) Photo: Rat Hole Gallery/Daishinsha 3 Hurvin Anderson Blue Mahoe, 2019 acrylic on paper, framed 39 3/8 x 51 1/8 in. (100 x 130 cm.) Photo: Rat Hole Gallery/Daishinsha

but Nowhere

Plates

2 Hurvin Anderson Palace 1, 2019 ink on cartridge paper 10 ½ x 13 ¾ in. (26.7 x 35 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

3 Hurvin Anderson Palace 2, 2019 ink on cartridge paper 8 ⅛ x 11 ⅛ in. (20.5 x 28.4 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

1 Hurvin Anderson Limestone Wall, 2020 acrylic, oil, colored pencil on linen 59 ⅛ x 85 ⅜ in. (150 x 217 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

4 Hurvin Anderson Water Meets Concrete, 2020 acrylic, paper, collage, framed 66 ¾ x 59 ¼ in. (169.7 x 150.4 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

5 Hurvin Anderson Study for Jungle Garden 1, 2019 ink, pencil and masking tape on paper 9 ⅝ x 3 ⅜ in. (24.4 x 21.4 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

Hurvin Anderson Study for Jungle Garden 2, 2019

Hurvin Anderson Study for Jungle Garden 3, 2019

Hurvin Anderson Jungle Garden, 2020

ink on cartridge paper 11 ⅝ x 9 ⅝ in. (29.5 x 24.4 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

ink on cartridge paper 13 ⅛ x 12 ¼ in. (33.4 x 31.2 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

acrylic, oil on linen 71 ¼ x 59 ⅛ in. (181 x 150 cm) Courtesy De Ying Foundation. Photo: Richard Ivey

9 Hurvin Anderson Chalet 1, 2019 ink and pencil on cartridge paper 10 ⅛ x 14 ⅞ in (25.8 x 37.7 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

10 Hurvin Anderson Chalet 2, 2019 ink and pencil, collage on cartridge paper 11 ⅝ x 15 in. (29.4 x 38.1 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

11 Hurvin Anderson Chalet 3, 2019 ink, acrylic and pencil on cartridge paper 11 ½ x 15 1/8 in. (29.2 x 38.4 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby 12 Hurvin Anderson Grace Jones, 2020 acrylic, oil on linen 88 ¼ x 59 ⅛ in. (224 x 150 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

13 Hurvin Anderson No one remembers, 2021 acrylic on paper laid on Dibond 59 ⅛ x 354 ⅜ in. (150 x 900 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

Hurvin Anderson Higher Heights, 2020

Hurvin Anderson Hawksbill Bay, 2020

acrylic, oil on linen 59 ⅛ x 74 ¾ in. (150 x 190 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

acrylic, oil on linen 59 ⅛ x 80 ¾ in. (150 x 205 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

17 Hurvin Anderson Studio Drawing 1, 2006 acrylic paint on paper, framed 8 ¼ x 11 ⅝ in. (21 x 29.5 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

18 Hurvin Anderson Studio Drawing 2, 2006 acrylic paint on paper, framed 8 ¼ x 11 ⅝ in. (21 x 29.5 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

Hurvin Anderson Miss Jamaica, 2021

Hurvin Anderson Studio Drawing 3, 2006

acrylic on paper 94 x 75 ½ in. (238.7 x 191.8 cm) Photo: Ben Westoby

acrylic paint on paper, framed 8 ¼ x 11 ¾ in. (21.1 x 29.7 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

24 Hurvin Anderson Flat Top, 2008 oil on canvas 98 ⅜ x 81 ⅞ in. (250 x 208 cm) Collection Thomas Dane, London Photo: Hugh Kelly

Hurvin Anderson Studio Drawing 4, 2006

Hurvin Anderson Studio Drawing 5, 2006

acrylic paint on paper, framed 8 ¼ x 11 ¾ in. (21.1 x 29.7 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

acrylic paint on paper, framed 8 ½ x 11 ¾ in. (21.5 x 29.7 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

Hurvin Anderson Studio Drawing 6, 2006

Hurvin Anderson Studio Drawing 7, 2006

acrylic paint on paper, framed 8 ⅜ x 11 ¾ in. (21.2 x 29.7 cm) Photo: Richard Ivey

25 Hurvin Anderson Studio Drawing 9, 2012 acrylic on drafting film, framed 19 ⅛ x 33 ⅛ in. (48.6 x 84.2 cm) Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Michael Werner Gallery, New York.

Colophon

Published on the occasion of Hurvin Anderson: Anywhere but Nowhere The Arts Club of Chicago April 9 –August 7, 2021

Curator: Janine Mileaf Essay: Krista Thompson All rights reserved. Unless otherwise noted, all works courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. © 2021, The Arts Club of Chicago © Essay by Krista Thompson and The Arts Club of Chicago

Design and Typesetting by Mary Clare Butler of Fata Morgana Press. The type is set in Grilli Type Alpina Light and Extended. Text block 1 was offset printed at Fata Morgana Press on Mohawk Superfine White, 80# text using an AB Dick 360. Text block 2 was digitally printed by Classic Color on Mohawk Superfine White, 80# text using a Fuji Jetpress.

ISBN: 978-1-891925-04-7 The cover was letterpress printed at Fata Morgana Press on Mohawk Carnival Forest Green, 80# cover using a Vandercook Universal 1.