Blue Curry: Souvenir

A solo exhibition by Bahamas-born, London-based artist, Blue Curry. Curry repurposes commonplace objects to explore themes of exoticism, tourism and cultural commodification.

In 'Souvenir', Curry uses the windows of the gallery in a retail styled display format. Hair combs have been elegantly arranged into sculptural forms and presented in ordered repetition as a new typology of object for us to consume. These minimalist sculptures are backgrounded by an impossibly endless horizon of aquamarine sea, typical of cliche' screensaver images, inducing escapist thoughts of tropical paradises - even in an urban setting like Bermondsey Square.

By removing the 'found' object from its ordinary context he challenges us - the audience and the consumer - to think about its function in an entirely new way. Offering only an ambiguous suggestion as to the new meaning of the sculptures, the artist leaves it almost entirely to us to reimagine the purpose of these objects. Layering on thick exotic tropes he takes us on a journey from the familiar to the foreign, encouraging us to question and even to deny, simple objectification and consumption.

Blue Curry (b. 1974, Nassau) is a London based artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation. He obtained an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and a BA (Hons) in Photography and Multimedia at the University of Westminster, London. He has recently been nominated for the Cisneros Emerging Artist Award. He was included in the Catlin Guide to the top 40 emerging UK artists in 2010 and was profiled in a two-part BBC documentary on graduate artists the same year. He has shown widely, participating in the 6th Liverpool Biennial as well as in group shows in P.P.O.W Gallery, New York, The Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2011 he had his first institutional solo show, Stranger than Paradise, at the Nassauischer Kunstverein (NKV), Germany and is currently showing a newly commissioned work for the SITE Santa Fe biennial, Unsettled Landscapes, in New Mexico, USA.

Group shows include; Future Memories, 14N 61W, Martinique (2014); Take a Bite out of a Peach, Attic, Nottingham, UK (2014); 40 Years of Bahamian Art, National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Bahamas (2014); The Creekside Open, A.P.T Gallery, London, UK 2013), Paradise Lodge, Studio X, Mumbai, India (2013); Misuse: Creating Alternatives, Cass Gallery, London, UK (2013); Emergency5, Aspex, Portsmouth, UK (2012); Zu Hause/At Home, LoBe, Berlin, Germany (2012); Earth Works, P.P.O.W, New York, USA (2012); So Here We Are, Kunstverein Speyer, Germany (2011); Caribes Globales, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Puerto Rico (2011); First Triennial of Caribbean Art, Museum of Modern Art, Dominican Republic (2010); The Devil's Necktie, The Woodmill, London, UK (2010); Rockstone and Bootheel, Real Art Ways, Connecticut (2009).