Author: Andrea Leland

Saturday, February 15, 2025 6 p.m. Bajo el Sol Gallery The Gri Gri Project, and the St. John Film Society will host a retrospective screening of a series of video art pieces by Virgin Islands multimedia artist Sigi Torinus.   Q & A with the filmmaker following the screening $5 suggested donation New media works that include site-specific installation and improvisatory interactive live-video performance will be presented. About the Artist: Sigi Torinus was born and raised in the US Virgin Islands. She pursued studies in Art and Philosophy, earning her MFA from the Braunschweig Art Institute in Germany and San Francisco State University in California. The experience of migration and movement echoes in her art practice as she experiments with light and sound in poetic and playful ways. Taking flight and landing, her work evokes the lyrical tension between soaring and stillness in a layered meditation on the nuanced dance between darkness and illumination. Each creation embodies a sense of flux, shifting between the readily tangible and the subtly elusive. Torinus is a Professor of Integrated Media at the School of Creative Arts / University of Windsor where she co-directs the Noiseborder Multimedia Performance Lab (NMPL). She enjoys working with video, as it appears as liquid light: ethereal and in constant flux. Bajo El Sol Gallery & Art Bar is home to thought-provoking monthly exhibitions, readings by award winning V.I. writers & poets, documentary screenings on some of the Caribbean’s most respected thinkers, as well as talks by local academics and visiting curators. The Gri Gri Project’s mission is to create and support interpretive art exhibitions, artist-centered events, archives, and writing related to the cultural patrimony of the U.S. Virgin Islands and the broader Caribbean region. The screening is supported by the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, & the Virgin Islands Council on the Arts & the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC.  

Bajo El Sol Gallery, Cruz Bay, St John, USVI  Two screenings: 7-8pm & 9-10pm.  GREEN A film by Eric Zucker   GREEN is about more than color and it is a Faction— a blend of fact and fiction— created as allegorical, dramatic narrative. GREEN is but one story of many from one clan of storyteller’s who question us all about our views of the past, present and future of St. John, the Virgin Islands, and even the world. For more information visit : https://www.sunlitstjohn.com/ St John Film is funded in part by VICA and National Endowment for the Arts.

NEW DATE: SATURDAY, AUGUST 24, 2024 7:00pm Bajo el Sol Gallery The Gri Gri Project and the St. John Film Society present: VI Crawl’s award winning Sun, Sand & Scenes A short film series titled “Love Chain” and “Hitch”. VI Crawl recognizes that the Virgin Islands is a dynamic film destination, filled with rich stories &natural storytellers. Through their Sun, Sand & Scenes short film series, VI Crawl collaborates with individuals to explore their passions in filmmaking. Two films within this project named “Love Chain” and Hitch received the Fan Favorite award at the Paradise 48 Film Festival in St. Thomas. Hitch also received the Best Actor award, Best Scoring, and Best Editing. VI Crawl is a USVI nonprofit that aims to empower Virgin Islanders through culture, art education, virtual platforms, and community events. The event will also serve as the August edition of their monthly event Cocktails and Conversations, an in-person event series to promote conversations on various topics in the community. Attendees will have an opportunity to meet with the founders of the non-profit, Khalarni Rivers and Nyaila Callwood and engage in a Q&A. The founders of VI Crawl Khalarni Rivers and Nyaila Callwood met as students at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), where they quickly realized their overlapping passion for creative arts, cultural enrichment & artrepreneurship, a blending of innovation in business design with an artistic focus. This award-winning team of young Virgin Islanders has a combined 15+ years of experience in program design & 20+ years in performing arts. Since 2019, VI Crawl has partnered with UVI and many local nonprofits to coordinate learning programs rooted in cultural exploration, performing arts, and professional development for a range of ages. More information about the film screening and about future events can be found by contacting the gallery at 340-693-7070 or bajoelsolgallery@gmail.com. Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Virgin Island Council of the Arts and the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands.  For more information, contact the St John Film Society stjviff@gmail.com or visit www.stjohnfilm.com    

Saturday, June 22, 2024 6pm / Bajo El Sol Gallery  A series of short films by artist / filmmaker LaVaughn Belle Filmmaker will be present for Q & A La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. Through exploring the material culture of coloniality Belle creates narratives from fragments and silences. Working in a variety of disciplines her practice includes: painting, installation, photography, writing, video and public interventions. Ms. Belle will present five short videos, each 5 to 7 minutes in length. Video works to be screened include ‘Por El Viento y La Curriente / Becoming Wind and Current,’ a poetic investigation of the history of marronage and its implications today commissioned by MAC en el Barrio, a program of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico). The screening will also include ‘Effluvia,’ a video commissioned by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art on the occasion of Belle’s solo exhibition in 2023. Shot in the marshes and swamps of South Carolina Belle traverses former rice plantations, sites of slave rebellions to explore what histories ooze from the earth and water. ARTIST STATEMENT My work is about unbecoming a colonial being and the power of story in that process. I was born in the  dual island nation of Trinidad in Tobago with all my political rights intact. I would soon lose them when my parents migrated to the U.S. Virgin Islands when I was 5 months old and I became something between a subject and a citizen. I belong to this place that has changed colonial hands seven times—the longest being Denmark and the last being the United States. My work deals with this history, that is both personal and global, and tells new stories that validate freedom and self-determination. In my practice I examine archives, architecture and other aspects of material culture from the colonial period. I look for the narratives inscribed in various objects and places. I find ways to add to them and subvert them by layering other narratives including my own. I also look to elements in the natural world like the land or sea and powerful forces like the hurricane or the black hole for strategies to create new geographies. I move fluidly between painting, sculpture, video, public intervention and writing. In this way I am sometimes making myths, other times maps, counter monuments and archives. What is constant are my desires to piece together the fragments, to move beyond colonial nostalgia and to make visible the unremembered. ARTIST BIO:  Belle holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba and an MA and BA from Columbia University in NY. She was a finalist for the She Built NYC project to develop a monument to memorialize the legacy of Shirley Chisholm and for the Inequality in Bronze project in Philadelphia to redesign one of the first monuments to an enslaved woman at the Stenton historic house museum. As a 2018-2020 fellow at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Research Center for Women...