“One of The Boys” is the first solo exhibition at the gallery by the talented Cydne Jasmin Coleby, a Bahamian digital and mixed media collage artist. Having presented Coleby in group shows and at international art fairs, TERN invited the artist to permeate the entire space for One of The Boys, an exhibition exploring the dynamic of bars in our local communities. The exhibition will be on view from November 30th to January 13th, 2024, with an opening reception on Thursday, November 30th, from 6 p.m. through 8 p.m. with the artist present for the occasion. During the reception—occasions usually lubricated with alcohol—TERN will create dry spaces of care where persons struggling with alcohol dependency or addiction may find support and refuge.
For One of The Boys, Coleby uses a video recording of her first Christmas as the genesis. The recording of this childhood festivity, however, was scrubbed out when her father reused the video cassette to capture friends at his local watering hole, taping over her early experience. Coleby uses this act of erasure as metaphor for examining how bars are sites of escapism, where the over-consumption of alcohol and the resulting absence–both physical but also mental–erodes relationships within the Bahamian family. Taking stills images from the video as the basis for her new paintings, the artist examines her family history, trying to understand both her father’s own childhood, the cyclical repetition of certain behaviours, and the need for escapism and self-medication.
The artist’s face and body are common motifs in her artwork. Sometimes overtly sexualized, sometimes broken up and reconstituted using local fruits as muscles and tendons, Coleby’s anatomy becomes a site of investigation within itself. In this new collection, she hovers at the margins—inserting herself as a viewer, eavesdropper, or participant on the side lines. While Coleby was not historically present in the scenes (since her father, for urgent health reasons, had become a teetotaller by the time she was grown) she was there even so—literally at home with her mother, or metaphorically underneath the erased film—and she alludes to this by repeatedly inserting herself in the images. Sometimes it is overt: she leans on the bar as an accomplice or a partner-in-crime, befriending them, joining in as “one of the boys,” sometimes it’s oblique: a disembodied hand toasting amongst others or a series of eyes, watching, learning, aiming to understand this aspect of her father’s journey.
Cydne Jasmin Coleby
Cydne Jasmin Coleby is a digital and mixed media collage artist based in Nassau, The Bahamas.
Throughout her childhood, Coleby remembers disassociating herself from her body, questioning aspects of her being and how they are perceived by others. But even with this awareness, she has been unable to elude conditioning’s grasp. At some point she pivoted from the position of investigating to accepting – accepting narratives she was told were hers despite never holding a writing credit. Though she found that she did this for many years, she concludes, one cannot fight their nature.