Christopher Cozier, All That’s Left, 2011, set of eight ten-color screen prints, 9 x 7 inches each.
Made at Axelle Fine Arts in Brooklyn in collaboration with Luther Davis and his team, and supported by David Krut projects, this silkscreen edition is a suite of 8 images that are in concert with each other. I am searching for an associative connection like a Tarot reading of a given moment. It is also an adaptation of newer and older elements of Tropical Night's visual language. The basic idea comes from a five gourde coin that I have had on me since my first visit to Haiti some years ago. The coin was astonishingly smooth and the figures of the revolution had become so worn down that they looked like shadows or silhouettes - visible but unrecognizable. You sort of know it’s them if you know the history. What does this say about the use of these figures within national narratives and the current political reality.
This connected with the empty lots that I have been looking at over the last few years ( which first appeared in the 2010 TTFF edition "now showing") that I now call either "all that is left" or "Site of Exchange. " I am thinking of our troubled relation to history or the predicament of it in a situation in which all is expediently transformed into a cash value, The thousands of paintings of those Colonial edifices that are now mostly demolished and converted into square feet of real estate and car parks come to mind. So for the rest of us, history or memory becomes an act of conjuring. We are only left to imagine what was there before when we encounter these empty lots. So what do they represent? Is this a moment of opportunity or of violation? Within this set of images, there are other signs and or forms being investigated but I do not want of over explain. I myself need to figure what they may be producing while I look at them over time.
Available through David Krut Projects NY - see here
See interview by Kristyna Comer on the edition here
