KAREEM-ANTHONY FERREIRA
SAMPSON, COSMO Gordon, MASTER TAILOR OF 5 CONSTANTINE AVE. AROUCA
February 20 - March 5, 2022
Nino Mier Gallery | Glassell Park
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce the first exhibition in our new Glassell Park location, SAMPSON, COSMO Gordon, MASTER TAILOR OF 5 CONSTANTINE AVE. AROUCA, an installation by Canadian artist Kareem-Anthony Ferreira. The show will run from February 20 - March 5, 2022.
The new gallery, our fifth location in Los Angeles and seventh location globally, is located at 2700 W Ave 34, Los Angeles, CA, 90065, and will be open Wednesdays through Sundays from 12-6pm.
For Nino Mier Gallery, Glassell Park’s inaugural exhibition, Ferreira presents a three-panel triptych distributed across the gallery walls. The work harnesses his erstwhile engagement with his Trinidadian roots and his hybrid practice of collage and painting to explore memory, materiality, and collective mourning.
Within the panels, groups of figures dressed in all black gather, talking and moving amongst themselves. Because Ferreira’s paintings remediate photographs taken by and of his family in Trinidad, his compositions take on the aesthetic of vernacular snapshot photography, capturing people mid-motion, partially out of frame, and often at a slight angle. The casual intimacy of these works is bolstered by their installation, hung around the room at eye-level. Moving among the panels of the triptych, visitors are confronted with myriad faces displaying a wide arrange of emotions, from deep thought to confusion, joviality to solemnity. They congregate at a relatively nondescript outdoor location enclosed by white walls, with dirt and grass beneath their feet and trees beyond. Within the gallery, each panel is assigned to a different wall, so visitors find themselves walking between and among the figures, as though they, too, were part of the scene and able to turn their attention from one moment to the next. Through this spatial dispersal of figures, a unique relationship between the works and their beholders forms.
The triptych materializes the ambience of Ferreira’s late grandfather’s funeral as documented by the photographs taken during the service. Cosmo Gordon Sampson was a master tailor, having studied the craft in England and having spent his career working in Trinidad. The work not only explores the varying social functions that a funeral serves, from family reunion to mourning ritual, but also the peculiarity of burial. The artist recalls a moment during the service wherein the graveyard workers had to finish digging the hole where his grandfather’s casket would later be buried—a labor often erased during funerals, as though the holes had always been there, ready to serve as eternal resting spaces for departed loved ones. Within the pit, Ferreira noted strips of fabric, a material that was so dear to his grandfather’s life and legacy, crumpled and dirtied on the floor. The cloth that hangs off each work both condenses the split status that fabric had during the occasion and serves as a material connection to the ground, where Cosmo Gordon Sampson’s casket was finally laid to rest.
Kareem-Anthony Ferreira (b. 1989 in Hamilton, Ontario; lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario) completed his BFA at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario in 2012 and his MFA at the University of Arizona in 2020. Ferreira recently had a solo exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels and has exhibited works at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York; Alice Yard Gallery, Trinidad and Tobago; the Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; DeFacto Gallery, Ontario; and the Workers Art & Heritage Museum, Ontario.