The art in Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt. reflects on the vastness and precarity of the Caribbean landscape, the ebb and flow of its rising sea levels, and coastline erosion.
SASKATOON, Canada Contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions at an institutional level are all too rare. Those that reflect an understanding of the region’s intertwined histories are particularly uncommon. So I can say, as a Trini-Canadian writer and curator, that my encounter with Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Contemporary Contemplations of the Caribbean at the Remai Modern felt unexpectedly familiar, close, and even astute. It’s a feeling I have longed for, at a seemingly unlikely institution (especially at a time when Caribbean art exhibitions at Western institutions appear to be under threat) a modern and contemporary art museum near the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, within Treaty 6 Territory.
But first, what to make of the show’s willfully long name? Perhaps it’s a sly prick at those ethnographic studies of yore, with their protracted titles a way to unsettle the waves of coloniality and exploitation long pervaded by non Caribbean curators. However, curators Michelle Jacques and Sally Frater, both of the Remai, are Caribbean-Canadian themselves, and focus on artists from the Caribbean region and its diaspora. So far, their collaborations at the Remai have been fortuitous for instance, with the Art Gallery of Ontario, they co-organized the first touring retrospective of the late Trinidadian-Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos, which received widespread praise.
As someone invested in contemporary Caribbean art exhibition-making, Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt. seemed initially like a retread. A majority of its participants appeared in Frater’s Kept Alive Within Us. The 2023 group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph (AGG) in Ontario was equally concerned with artists connected to the Caribbean and its natural environments. Yet, where the AGG show felt uneven and scattershot to me, this one is muscular and focused.
It helps that Frater and Jacques smartly anchor it with Deborah Jack’s stunning and profound multi-channel video installation “the fecund, the lush, and the salted land waits for a harvest…her people…ripe with promise, wait until the next blowing season” (2022), commissioned for the MCA Chicago’s Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today. The work’s stirring violin soundtrack pulls audiences into scenes of crashing waves and swirling sea foam, setting a tone of solemn contemplation. Jack juxtaposes archival black and white documentary footage of the salt-mining industry in Sint Maarten, her mother’s home island, with present day technicolor bursts of pomegranate trees; the light from the projections reveals, at times, lines from a poem printed on cut mirrored vinyl about the sky, sea, and salt.
