Hew Locke’s debut solo exhibition evokes migration and displacement
Born in Scotland in 1959, artist Hew Locke grew up in Georgetown, Guyana before returning to Britain for his university education.
Locke’s multi-media practice includes large-format installation, painting, sculpture, photography and tapestry and has been called a “mental ‘Moulinex’ or food processor, into which experiences are tossed, mixed around, and transformed into chimerical creations”.
Locke’s most recent works are part of his debut solo exhibition, The Wine Dark Sea, with the Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, located at L.L.C. 37 West 57th Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY – currently ongoing.
The Anglo-Guyanese artist consistently explores themes of race, colonialism, displacement, the creation of cultures, and the visual codes of power, drawing on a deeply personal visual language.
The Wine Dark Sea presents new works by the artist that highlight Locke’s acclaimed sculptures of boats, which occupy an important place in his personal iconography.
“The wine dark sea” is a description of the Mediterranean used by Greek poet Homer throughout his poem “The Odyssey”. The phrase is repeated by Derek Walcott in his epic poem “Omeros” set mainly in the Caribbean and referencing characters from “The Iliad”.
This new series of 25 vessels of varied scale and hues are suspended from the ceiling in the Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art gallery, creating a flotilla at eye level. Incorporating contemporary and historically resonant vessels – clippers and cargo ships, battleships and lifeboats – Locke creates a spectacular sculptural environment.
Locke’s work articulates this environment as filled with hope, potential prosperity and gratification, as well as despair, anguish, and suffering. This narrative resonates deeply with the tides of refugees fleeing to the sea from war, oppression, and poverty, but also with those viewers for whom migration and displacement are part of family history.
A ship is a symbolic object; vessel of the soul, means of escape, both safety and danger. According to Locke, “we’re all floating on the same ocean. As a child and young man I sailed the Atlantic. At sea, a twist of fate can send a super-yacht down – it can be an equalizer between rich and poor.”
Extracts from the catalogue by Zoe Lukov, Director of Exhibitions, Faena Art state: “Waves and war – the same forces of affliction and ambition extolled in Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ converge within a single current that Hew Locke has summoned for his exhibition The Wine Dark Sea…”
It adds: “… A master at accumulating and assembling quotidian materials to create art objects that are also uncommon altars and shrines to our past, this new installation brings together thirty-four new hand-made and customised model ships from around the world that the artist has intervened in and adorned. Hanging from the ceiling at eye-level, these ships are suspended in one continuous current that moves towards the gallery’s windows out onto the bustling cityscape of midtown Manhattan. Floating on this tide are the scraps and treasures of our shared and communal histories that leave indelible prints on our own national narratives even as we erase them from our conscious thoughts…Locke has given us a maritime procession—at once celebratory and funereal—that is animated by the submarine pulse of history.” (Information from Carl E. Hazlewood. Hew Locke photos)
