CY GAVIN – DEVILS’ ISLE
2018-02-05The title of the exhibition, Devils’ Isle, is taken from the name mariners once bestowed upon Bermuda prior to the founding of the island. Sailors attributed the archipelago’s perilous reef system, mercurial weather phenomena and the whorling ocean currents of the adjacent Sargasso Sea to diabolical influence. Indeed, by 1600, more than thirty doomed European merchant vessels, bearing goods and enslaved people, lay wrecked in the clear waters surrounding Bermuda.
The homeland of Gavin’s father, Bermuda has previously served as a lens through which the artist has considered the African Diaspora at large and the colonial development of the Americas. England’s first two permanent colonies were Jamestown, Virginia and Bermuda, with both colonies developing in parallel. Bermuda’s advantageously far-flung position in the North Atlantic would serve it well as a prismatic way-station for European ships bearing enslaved people to the West Indies, Mexico and the American colonies. It would have been the first land many surviving African people encountered in the Middle Passage. Where encroaching empires met resistance at the hands of indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean, in Bermuda the land itself resisted human occupancy
Opposite – Reef, 2018
Exhibition runs through to February 24th, 2018
VNH Gallery
108 rue Vieille du Temple
75003 Paris
France
