Andrew Voogel is a local artist of Indo Caribbean roots. His ancestors were slaves brought to British Guyana in the early 1900’s to work in the sugar cane plantations.
This body of work begins with his great-grandmother’s fingerprint on the travel/slavery document. This primitive mark inspired Andrew to explore his own mark making and embark on a journey towards understanding otherness, vulnerability, trauma and memory. The artist sees this work as a collaboration between himself and his great-grandmother. He puts himself in her place and imagines being ripped from her world and having to start from scratch in a completely foreign environment.
As is the case with many historical documents, there is one voice sorely missing, the voice of the oppressed. Andrew creates the missing archive. A visual narration of a lost generation of Indian slaves that arrived in South America at the turn of the century. A journey that began in India, headed South West to the Cape of Africa and traversed the Atlantic. This journey is known as the Middle Passage. In the case of Andrew’s great grandfather, he made this voyage on a ship named “Ganges”. In Hindu culture the “Ganges” signifies daily deliverance and he was indeed being removed from the proximity of the great river Ganges of India and delivered to the Amazon river in South America.
Thumbprint With Text
All formal choices in terms of color, medium and technique have a conceptual reason. The stark and limited palette, the use of India ink and oil sticks, the torn uneven paper. All remind Andrew of the stark, hard life in the sugar cane plantation–the primitive existence–of being torn from one’s own life and dropped into another. Andrew scratches on a surface fully covered in oil stick marks. Creating the image in a reductive fashion, finding meaning in the darkness.
We enter darkness as we enter Decker B to experience an immersive video installation. Viewers are asked to enter slowly, give your eyes time to adjust to the dark, sit and experience the laborious efforts of a swimmer arriving on a dark, desolate beach. Meant to be viewed in darkness and silence. This is a 59 second loop
Gestural, performative drawing created directly on a wall in the gallery. The piece will be removed from our wall on the final day of the exhibit. Historical events fade from our memory just as the ephemeral drawing will be erased from our walls following the closure of the exhibit.