KAREEM-ANTHONY FERREIRA
Table, Manors
September 16 – October 15, 2022
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce Table, Manors, our fourth solo exhibition with Canadian-Trinidadian painter Kareem-Anthony Ferreira, on view at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles from September 16-October 15, 2022. The paintings and sculptures in Table, Manors are a rich exploration of not only Ferreira’s familial memories, but also the broader thematic of colonialism in the Caribbean.
The paintings in Table, Manors reimagine moments from Ferreira’s Trinidadian family members’ lives, focalized around the dinner table. Images of preparing, serving, and eating food juxtapose with tender and ebullient moments between family members, young and old. Ferreira’s painterly style recalls the composition and lighting of vernacular photography, often catching subjects mid-gesture and from a high angle. Their eyes are widened and look toward the viewer, while their faces glint with the bright light of the camera’s flash. These compositions, pulled from actual family photographs collected by the artist, is in productive tension with the materiality of his paintings, which incorporate collaged and textural motifs inspired by the environs surrounding his family’s home and typical Caribbean textiles.
Simmering beneath the surface of Table, Manors are the vestiges of European colonialism still deeply embedded within Caribbean culture, including within food and dining customs. A series of dining room chairs bring the furnishings represented in his paintings into the exhibition space. The found chairs have been reupholstered by the artist with handprinted serigraphs on textile, with design motifs referencing both characteristic Caribbean prints and images from Ferreira’s paintings.
While Ferreira’s practice at large often takes on the afterlife of the British occupation of Trinidad, this body of work specifically explores the “table” and the “manor,” the latter phrase evocatively recalling the term “manner,” as in managed comportment, as well. As Ferreira explains, the inclusion of fine china, elaborate dining room furnishings, and table decorations are colonial imports that have become an entrenched sign of civility in Caribbean households. But what most interests Ferreira are moments that break that script: mouths wide open ready to consume a delicious meal; a group of bodies gathered around, rather than seated at a table; an ad-hoc meal of finger foods. Table, Manors is an exhibition built on the bedrock of such moments of communal joy.
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, Glassell Park and has exhibited works at 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.