Caribbean Dreams

  • Caribbean Dreams Tracing her roots to African, Indian, Jamaican and Trinidadian ancestry, US-based Samantha Box finds a home within the...

    Caribbean Dreams

     
    Tracing her roots to African, Indian, Jamaican and Trinidadian ancestry, US-based Samantha Box finds a home within the diaspora. Conscious of the popular tendency to romanticize the notion of the homeland, she fractures the myth of the origin story, allowing herself to exist within multiplicities instead.
     
    In Constructions, Box builds tableaux and still-lifes using family heirlooms and objects carrying cultural memory. Plants, local to the Caribbean and “alien” to the United States, are grown under artificial lights ‒ stand-ins for immigrant populations, they adopt strategies, that are crucial for survival in foreign lands. Produce stickers and receipts collage on top of the image, gesturing towards capitalist society’s obsession with the commodification of identity. Archival images of indentured laborers draw upon the Caribbean’s colonized past, while family photographs layer to assert an alternate, emancipated history. In deliberately exposing the artifice of the studio, Box comments on the role it has historically played in reinforcing the fallacy of viewing the Caribbean as an exotic colonial paradise.
     
    In Flashcards, colonial legacies of categorization collide with traditional knowledge systems, as the artist learns the vernacular names of Caribbean fruits and vegetables, repeating them after her mother. Their different accents reveal the transformations resulting from migration, as well as globalized economy’s demand for the homogenization of cultures.
     
    Caribbean Dreams ‒ where the pixelated photograph meets the vernacular ‒ navigates multiple temporalities. The sugarcane, that once signified the colonizer’s exploitative thirst for prosperity, is reclaimed in an act of power. Colonial representations ‒ ethnographic photographs and Dutch still-life paintings ‒ are challenged. Using self-portraiture, Box animates the previously disenfranchized Black subject, subverting imperially dictated archival images and histories of the Caribbean.
     
    Text/Tanvi Mishra
     
     
     Presented by Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York, United States.
     
    Tiger Strikes Asteroid is a non-profit network of independently programmed, artist-run exhibition spaces with locations in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC. Our goal is to collectively bring people together, expand connections, and create community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities.
  • CURATOR: Tanvi Mishra Born 1986 in New Delhi, India. Lives and works in New Delhi, India. Tanvi Mishra works with...
    Portrait of Tanvi Mishra ©Aditya Kapoor

    CURATOR: Tanvi Mishra

    Born 1986 in New Delhi, India.

    Lives and works in New Delhi, India.

     

    Tanvi Mishra works with images as a photo editor, curator, and writer based in New Delhi, India. Among her interests are rights and representation in image-making, research strategies in visual culture as well as the notion of fiction in photography, particularly in the current political landscape.


    She has worked as the Photo Editor and Creative Director of The Caravan, a journal covering politics and culture. She is part of the photo-editorial team of "PIX", a South Asian publication and display practice. She has served on multiple juries and is currently a part of the first international advisory committee of World Press Photo.

  • ARTIST: Samantha Box Born 1977 in Kingston, Jamaica. Lives and works in New York, United States. Samantha Box holds an...
    Portrait of Samantha Box ©Sasha Bush

    ARTIST: Samantha Box

    Born 1977 in Kingston, Jamaica.

    Lives and works in New York, United States.

     

    Samantha Box holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College and a certificate in Photojournalism and Documentary Studies from the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited, most notably, at the Houston Center for Photography, the DePaul Art Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the Open Society Foundations, and the ICP Museum, and is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Box has been an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and at Light Work. She will be in residence at the Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, New York) in 2023. She has been awarded a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Photography twice: in 2010 and in 2022.

  • Samantha Box. "Edges", archival inkjet print, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
  • Samantha Box. "Multiple #3", in-camera multiple exposure, printed as archival inkjet print, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
  • Samantha Box. "One Kind of Story", digital collage, printed as archival inkjet print, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
  • Samantha Box. "Portal", digital collage, printed as archival inkjet print, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

  • Samantha Box. "Transplant Family Portrait", digital collage, printed as archival inkjet print, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.