NYAB Event - Yinka Shonibare, MBE "Prospero's Monsters"

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At James Cohan Gallery
Media: Photography, Sculpture

James Cohan Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by Yinka Shonibare, MBE. Shonibare's three-part installation of sculpture and photography revisits the collision between irrational mysticism and logical reason that occurred in society during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment period. The artist's work often concerns itself with the history of colonization and its ensuing struggles. Here, the artist intimates that western democracy's current conquests may similarly invoke physical or psychological conflict.

The installation opens with a room-sized, battered frigate, which dangerously lists as if it is about to sink. Set against the photographic backdrop of the same model ship perilously afloat in a stormy sea, Shonibare's sculpture appears as both a dramatic stage set and a two-dimensional image come to life. The work recalls the devastating wreck of the French ship, Medusa, off the coast of Senegal in 1819; the appalling conditions faced by its survivors were imagined by Théodore Géricault's 1819 painting, The Raft of the Medusa. The artist also alludes to William Shakespeare's 1611 play, The Tempest, which tells the story of the sorcerer Prospero, who, marooned on an island, conjures a shipwreck to lead his jealous brother, Antonio, to him. The shipwreck, which is never staged in the play, here is given a tangible form. The sculpture introduces the artist's exhibition and is the visual equivalent of Shakespeare's "tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning" with which he begins his tale.

[Image: Yinka Shonibare, MBE "The Sleep of Reason (America)" (2007) 5 color C-prints 72" x 49.5" ]

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