Carl E. Hazlewood presents recent work in:
Salena Gallery at Long Island University, 1 University Plaza, Brooklyn.
Till September27
Untitled (Late Summer – Disrobed), 2014.
About:
“Carl E. Hazlewood’s cut paper and cloth wall poieces are…..ethereal, though one particularly beautiful example is as gray and grave as monument etched with constellation.” Holland Cotter about the work of Hazlewood in december 2013.
Blue Angel, 2014.
Carl E. Hazlewood, born in Guyana, South America, has been an exhibiting artist since childhood. He is also a writer and curator currently living in Brooklyn, NY.
The co-founder of Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ., he has taught at New Jersey City University and other institutions. Currently associate editor for Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, (Duke University) he has written for many other periodicals, including Flash Art International, ART PAPERS Magazine, and NY Arts Magazine.
Since 1984 he has organized numerous curatorial projects for Aljira such as ’Modern Life’ (co-curated with Okwui Enwezor). Hazlewood’s project on behalf of Aljira, ‘Current Identities, Recent Painting in the United States,’ was the US prize-winning representation at the ‘Bienal International de Pintura,’ Cuenca, Ecuador 1994. As an Independent curator he has organized exhibitions for The Nathan Cummings Foundation, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Hallwalls, NY; Artists Space, NY; P.S.122, NY, among other venues.
Untitled, 2013.
Carl E. Hazlewood has written: “My previous body of work was entitled the ‘DEMERARA’ series, an ongoing project I’d been working on since the early 70s. I was born in the Demerara region of Guyana, South America. There is a great river, ‘Demerara’ and a county named after it. Without sounding overly dramatic or romantic, my paintings had been, at least in the conventions of naming, an acknowledgement of the persistence of cultural and personal memory encoded in the way I see color, i.e., landscape color, skin color, pure prismatic color. As we all know, painting had been increasingly problematized as a worthwhile activity. For a culturally complex ‘black’ person from the Caribbean there were even more demanding questions concerning its relevance. As a curator and someone interested in theorethical aspects of art, it seemed necessary to take all these polemical ideas into consideration. But in my own work right now, I’m more interested in paring down complexities to essential practical ideas; particularly those basic ones that concern the visual and establishing an assertive abstract image.”
Hazlewood’s newest works are made mostly of paper and other materials attached directly to the wall. Unframed, the bounding edges are unrestricted, left free to respond to the visual ‘pressures’ of what happens within the piece. So shapes may be rectangular or erratic; they respond mainly to the support, which is the wall. Color or lack of color, textures, and so on, construct a sort of visual ‘order’ enforced by intuitive adjustments of collaged and assembled elements, as well as an implied, but subtle geometric underpinning.
(from Creative Caribbean Network)
