If works by the Pittsburgh-born artist, born in 1985, are unlikely to be shown at the Bermuda National Gallery, they will be exhibited at two leading American museums: the MASS MoCA and The Whitney. The artist met with HAPPENING ahead of the opening of his Paris exhibition, and discussed the difficult history of Bermuda with us.
With the wider public associating Bermuda with tax havens and dreamlike beaches, the country’s complex history — and especially its implication in the slave trade — have largely been forgotten.
In the seventeenth century, the archipelago became a British territory, and the country’s current population consists largely of descendants of African slaves. This part of the country’s history has largely been forgotten — and was hardly every accepted — in Bermuda. If Gavin’s previous paintings privileged the representation of somber, phantom-like, and extremely evocative silhouettes, these works reflect the existence of landscapes whose shapes, contours and colors are buried deep within the artist’s memory. Cy Gavin opts for symbolism and poetry to spur reflection upon the traumatizing history of the archipels’ relation to slavery
Photo courtesy: Benjamin André — Text by Henri Robert
