A masterful use of collage so nice, you have to look twice.

KAREEM-ANTHONY FERREIRA
First Foundation
at Nino Mier Gallery September 12–October 3, 2020

Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with Canadian artist Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, opening September 12th, 2020.

Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, a first-generation Canadian, completed his BFA at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario in 2012 and his MFA at the University of Arizona in 2020. Using a combination of painting and collage, Ferreira builds richly textured surfaces upon large-scale unstretched canvases, depicting intimate scenes that negotiate his Canadian and Trinidadian heritage.

psychological transport to the Caribbean, an unspecified fictional location whose primary purpose is to serve its visitors as a space of escape and entertainment.

“In my work, I am tracing patterns of personal, familial, and social identity within the genre of black portraiture. In an effort to shift the overly simplified perceptions that my two disparate familial communities hold toward the other, I offer visual re-creations of both identities, personal family traits, and events. The experiences and narratives that manifest in each work is the result of combining several vernacular photographs into a compositional arrangement. The paintings display an accumulation and assemblage of disassociated objects motivated by my family’s compulsive repurposing of ordinary materials. I similarly repurpose these materials by incorporating them onto the surface of my paintings. Patterns are taken from commercial representations of the Caribbean and are meant to be easily identifiable, cliché, and at times, sarcastic.

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The social imaginaries placed on these non-indigenous patterns and textiles satisfy North American desires for a mental state of ‘island life’ characterized by ‘island dress.’ The commercialized and mass-produced patterns serve as a mechanism for psychological transport to the Caribbean, an unspecified fictional location whose primary purpose is to serve its visitors as a space of escape and entertainment. The Caribbean and specifically Trinidadian identities are flattened and stripped of their historically transcultural and transnational complexities. In my paintings, I explore the island imaginaries through a personification of repetitive flora and fauna patterning, which sits in contrast to the emotional sincerity I convey through the human figures and expressions. My reverence for my hybridized community is conveyed through my portraits of the black body as individuals or groupings, the family unit, or community gathering to participate in the everyday lived experiences.”

- Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, 2020

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Kareem-Anthony Ferreira (b. 1989, Hamilton, Ontario; lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario) has exhibited works at Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York; Alice Yard Gallery, Trinidad and Tobago; the Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; DeFacto Gallery, Ontario; and the Workers Art & Heritage Museum, Ontario.

Photos courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery