Summer Film Series 2024
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 at Columbia University she researched the citizenless Virgin Islanders in the Harlem Renaissance. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO). Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.
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