To Scatter Seeds is a group exhibition featuring works by Bahamian artists Cydne Jasmin Coleby, Kachelle Knowles, and Jodi Minnis. To Scatter Seeds is the culmination of works considering themes of generational differences and traits, lineage, family, spirituality, and the diaspora.
Cydne Jasmin Coleby’s works will continue the exploration of the subject matter of family. Interpreting “seeds” in this context as children reflected through childhood images, this time, Coleby fuses elements of the home, such as colonial iconography, overgrown plants, and old family portraits, in her new works. As self-reflection is an intrinsic aspect of Coleby’s practice, her graphic collages examine the personal and collective/ancestral relationships to trauma and conditioning, an essential component of the exhibition.
Kachelle Knowles’ works explore culture and intergenerational fashion as an interpretation of scattering seeds, where she cross-examines the fashion culture of Millennial and Generation Z schoolboys. Dedicated to the intentional and delicate portrayal of Black men and boys that create room for the fluidity of masculine and feminine coexisting, Knowles’ virtuoso graphite works suggest the scattering of seeds as an expansion of one generation determining what fashion can be and the next generation building upon it or “bringing it back.”
Jodi Minnis focuses on the implications of the word “scatter” in her new body of works for the exhibition. In initial conversations with her exhibition mates Coleby and Knowles, Minnis recognized the term “scatter” as diaspora, which means “to scatter about,” and “seed” as children and heritage. Continuing her work with the Bahama Mama salt shakers, Minnis intentionally grouped and scattered the shakers in her studio, causing them to break into pieces. These pieces were then salvaged and rearranged as small islands, continents, and worlds. Considering this, and the violence and anxiety induced from the act of scattering itself, Minnis continues to scrutinize the traditional representations and tropes around Black, specifically Bahamian women, contributing to the exhibition’s overarching theme.
Coleby, Knowles, and Minnis create a conversation for all to participate in reckoning with the act of scattering as either violence or continuance, whether by choice or unknowingly.
Cydne Jasmin Coleby
Cydne Jasmin Coleby (b. 1993, Nassau) is an interdisciplinary artist from The Bahamas, primarily working in digital and mixed media. Her texturally dense collage practice investigates the transformative effects of trauma and grief through a personal lens. Coleby’s practice meditates on the difficulty in distinguishing between which experiences (lived and inherited) inform, rather than define, our sense of identity.
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Kachelle Knowles
Kachelle Knowles (born 1990, Nassau, The Bahamas) is a contemporary artist who explores the ideas of gender identity, cultural preservation/production, and social relations within the Black community. Knowles’ graphite drawings on paper centre portraits of men of the African diaspora, specifically Bahamian men. In these delicate renderings, Knowles is expanding, with intention, the portrayal of Black men creating room for the fluidity of the masculine and the feminine while counteracting stereotypes.
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Jodi Minnis
Jodi Minnis (b. 1995) is a visual artist whose practice contends with multiplicity through the lens of gender, race and culture. Utilizing drawing, collage, sculpture and performance, she scrutinizes the traditional representations and tropes around Black, specifically Bahamian, women. By investigating how imagery defines and relegates social status and investigating the personal and political aspects of those themes, Minnis uses her practice as reclamation and call to ownership of the totality of Black Caribbean womanhood.
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