SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art presents

Here Comes the Sun

Here Comes the Sun traces the origins of extractive tourism in the Caribbean through the lens of four contemporary artists whose practices examine the colonial legacies of the region’s crop plantations and service economies. The artists in this exhibition — Irene de Andrés, Katherine Kennedy, Joiri Minaya and Ada M. Patterson — expose new points of entry into complex histories and struggles centered on the fantasy of the Caribbean and its commodification.

The exhibition gestures towards the complicated relationship between the tourism industry and its international stakeholders, the intrusive colonial gaze and constructions of beauty, and the violent histories of the plantation era that still endure. The selected works problematize the paradise trope ascribed to the Caribbean and pose questions about the construction and propagation of this image: What are the historical foundations of this trope, and for whom was it built? Together, these works resist the Western gaze, addressing the shared complicity between tourists, land developers, and other foreign interests to critique reductive conceptions of the Caribbean as a site of escapism. The artists of Here Comes the Sun prompt critical dialogues about the histories of the Caribbean, the extractive forces of tourism, and the realities and burdens of living in so-called paradise, issues that are endemic across the region.

Here Comes the Sun is titled after Jamaican-American writer Nicole Dennis-Benn’s fictional novel that tells the story of three Jamaican women against a backdrop of tourism and its social and economic fallout.

Opening hours:
Sunday – Monday: closed
Tuesday – Saturday: 12:00 – 5:30 pm

For more information visit: www.sbcgallery.ca

SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art
372 Ste-Catherine Street West, space 507
Tiohtià: ke / Mooniyaang / Montreal (QC)
H3B 1A2 Canada