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Uncomfortable: The Art of Christopher Cozier

Richard Fung

2005 00:47:38 Canada, Trinidad & TobagoEnglishColorStereo4:3DV video
Tags:
Consumer culture, Visual Art, Post-colonialism, Portrait, Artist Spaces, Artist Portraits

Description

Uncomfortable journeys through the work and ideas of Christopher Cozier, a leading contemporary artist in the Caribbean. The video presents Cozier's witty and incisive drawings, installations and videos in the context of post-independence Trinidad with its oil-rich economy, complicated ethnic politics, and vibrant cultural forms. Treated in this video are the failure of McDonald's to take root (while other fast-food chains proliferate); an art market that validates only pretty pictures of flowers and beaches, while the country is obsessed with kidnappings and murders; and the systemic difficulties of a Third World artist circulating internationally. It illuminates the relationship between the local and the global.

Christopher Cozier's biography: Christopher Cozier is a contemporary artist and writer based in Trinidad. He holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Rutgers University. His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including at the Havana Bienale, the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, TENT in Rotterdam, CCA7 in Port of Spain, the Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, the Art Foundry in Barbados, AfricAmericA 2002, "Nouveau Monde/mondes nouveaux" in Montreal, the Art Centre of the City of Copenhagen, and A Space in Toronto. He sits on the editorial board of Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and is an editorial advisor to BOMB magazine.

"A sequence of shots shows… megaphone, a crutch, a small wrought iron table of a type popular in 1960's Trinidad. These are all objects converted into ironic symbols in Cozier's multimedia work, aimed at finding a vocabulary to describe the experience of living in a small post-colonial Caribbean island that has never fit the white-sand-and-palm-trees stereotype…."

--Nicholas Laughlin, Modern Painters

"Concise and insightful… A terrific introduction to Cozier's art…"

--Glenn Sumi, NOW Magazine "

About Richard Fung

Richard Fung is a Toronto-based video artist, writer, theorist and educator. He holds a degree in cinema studies as well as an ME in sociology and cultural studies, both from the University of Toronto. He is Associate Professor in the Integrated Media program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. 

His work comprises of a series of challenging videos on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS and his own family history. His tapes, which include My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000) and Uncomfortable (2005), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada and the United States.

His essays have been published in many journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002), recently updated and translated into French. Richard is a past Rockefeller Fellow at New York University and has received the Bell Canada Award for Lifetime Achievement in Video as well as the Toronto Arts Award for Media Art.

 Fung has always seen himself as much as an educator as an artist, and in Helen Lee’s essay ‘Dirty Dozen: Playing 12 Questions with Richard Fung’ from Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung (Images Festival and Insomniac Press, 2002), Fung says he aims to produce work which is ‘pedagogical, but hopefully not pedantic’. Richard is a public intellectual who has pushed forward the debates about queer sexuality, Asian identity and the uneasy borderlands of culture and politics.