The Arts Zone presents a Mosaic Mural Demonstration & Community Project

Saturday, October 13th, 2012

The Arts Zone studios in Freeport, Grand Bahamas invite the community to partake in the creation of a grand-scale mosaic. Participants will engage in the process of creating materialssetting already-prepared tesserae into a designed template...no experience necessary. The finished mosaic will be displayed at a future major exhibition of The Arts Zone, with acknowledgement of all who actively contributed.

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Mosaic Mural Demonstration
Saturday, October 13th
10:30am to noon
This demo will enlighten participants in their perception of scrap materials. Turn those bits of leftover items into beautiful works of art. From remnant pieces found in the artist's studio to building materials cast aside, so much can be recycled into tesserae for a mosaic. This demo is designed as a lead-in to our exciting mosaic community project. Participants are encouraged to get involved with this hands-on opportunity following the demo. No experience necessary!

Mosaic Mural Community Project
Saturday, October 13th
1:00pm to 4:30pm
The project is to create a myriad of mosaic stepping stones that will be formed into a mosaic floor. To assist financing this project, a suggested donation to bring on Saturday is a bag of high-strength concrete mix!
The demo is not mandatory to participate on the community project.

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As a major part of The Arts Zone's mandate, this project is designed to encourage interaction between artists, art enthusiasts and the curious. The cornerstone of the mosaic project, in particular, is to introduce the local community to possibilities of integrating art to beautify their neighborhoods with readily available materials, and to make the act of expression through art, accessible. The studios, located inside the L'Utopia building on East Sunrise Highway behind the Fountain-family plaza, will be open from 1:00pm to 4:30pm on Saturday, October 13th for those interested in getting involved. Prior to the designated time set aside for the community project, a detailed demonstration on the mosaic process will take place from 10:30am until noon. The demo is free, but donations of cash or a bag of high-strength concrete mix, are most welcome!

"The purpose behind The Arts Zone is to have a positive impact on artists and aspiring artists by offering varying arenas of artistic expression and challenges, while gaining status of value from the local community to encourage their support for artists", states artist, Jacki Boss. "It's my sincere hope that Freeport will be able to sustain such a concept, as our community lacks the variety of alternative creative resources that are available to our neighbors, in Nassau!"

The Arts Zone, formerly named Art Nucleus, has had both organic and administrative changes affecting its direction; the renaming of the artists organization is to accommodate necessary regrouping and refreshing. For further information on how to get involved with The Arts Zone, email: theartszone.gbi@gmail.com; new website under construction.

Philippe Loli has given many concerts worldwide: several tours in Asia, the United States, and all over Europe. A guitar virtuoso, Philippe plays a classical repertoire from Johann Sebastian Bach to Heitor Villa-Lobos. As singer-songwriter, he is interested in all styles of music, from classical to film music. In 2000, he presented and performed his "Concerto Azzurro" with strings,with the Scala di Milano soloists.

After recording a first CD with John McLaughlin entitled "Time Remembered", Philippe participated in "The Promise", consisting of a few big names: Paco de Lucía, Al di Meola, Sting,... and most recently in the Concerto for two guitars "Thieves & Poets" with Victoria Mulova, Paul Meyer and the Orchestre del Pommerigio Musicale. Among the many CDs he recorded as a soloist, the "24 Caprichos de Goya" by Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco recorded live in public and at a world premiere is to be particularly remembered.

Philippe Loli is currently Professor of guitar at the Academy of music where he studied with maestro Pier Domenico Amerio, disciple of Andrés Segovia.

Leopold Giannola studied Jazz at the Ecole Superieur de Siena in Italy. He records with and is part of different Jazz and Pop Rock groups with Caligagan, Neuma, and Marjorie. He plays frequently with Philippe Loli and Zhang Zhang, violinist in the Orchestra Philharmonique de Monaco.

Box Offices are open at Custom Computers, Cable Beach Shopping Centre; Logos Bookstore Harbour Bay Shopping Centre; and Moir & Co., Lyford Cay Shopping Centre. Tickets: Members: $25; Non-Members: $35; Students with valid id: $10. Tickets cost an extra $5 if purchased at the door.

Proceeds toward the Nassau Music Society's scholarship fund.

CLICK HERE to reserve tickets for the concerts.

Trini-Bahamian Poet gets high praise

With two volumes so far, Curry Flavour published in 2000, and Immortelle and Bhandaaraa Poems which appeared in 2011, Lelawattee "Asha" Manoo-Rahming introduces a fresh and original voice into Caribbean poetry, one steeped in her native, Indo-Trinidadian Hindu culture, and at the same time mixed, irreversibly creole. If this seems improbable, look at the opening poem in Curry Flavour “Incarnation on the Caroni” which consists of four stanzas, each ending with the line “on the banks of the Caroni.” Since the Caroni river gives its name to a region in central Trinidad historically associated with sugar cultivation and Indians, the insistent repetition of the name “Caroni,” four times, creates an urgent refrain linking the poem firmly to its local – Trinidadian and Caribbean – context.

“Incarnation on the Caroni” opens with its persona’s claim that, unlike her Indian indentured ancestors, she never made the hazardous crossing of the kala pani (black water) from Calcutta, India, to Trinidad, although she has witnessed celebrations of Indian Arrival Day in Trinidad. In a direct address to her “nani” or maternal grandmother, the persona then asserts that upon death: “your soul is not charioted away/ by the great Vishnu [Hindu deity]/ it stays with me here/ on the banks of the Caroni River.” Even more strongly, the poem asserts that the grandmother’s lifeforce falls on sexually generative parts of the female persona’s body in a triumphantly erotic burst of images of rebirth and reincarnation. This link between the poet and her homeland seems indivisible. It is a creole link again asserted in “Footsteps in this Land” where the persona prays to an indigenous Caribbean deity: “Atabeyra/ Great Mother of the Caribbean sea/ Goddess of childbirth” for children to bring her:” a voice/ from my ancestral spirits/ in that faraway land [India]/ in the east.”

Other poems in Curry Flavour revel in sensuous evocations of Caribbean flora, fauna and culture, for example in “Waterfalls and Water Streams” which celebrates a landscape: “where the only falls are waterfalls/ and summer is perpetual.” As for the boisterous, fun-loving rituals of Caribbean festivals, nothing beats Christmas as in the poem “Down Home for Christmas” which extends the wish to: “Have a rake n’ scrape/Slammin’ jammin’/ Down Home Christmas.” Yet in “Carifesta Five – Rebirth” we are reminded of the genocide at the very foundation of Caribbean history with the: “lifeblood of Caribs and Arawaks/ Africans and Indians/ buried forever in the/ Caribbean sea.” Seldom do we find as succinct and sober an assessment both of the tragic origins of modern Caribbean history, and of the cheering resilience of West Indians in coping with it.....

CLICK HERE to read full review by Frank Birbalsingh of the Stabroek News in Guyana.

Claudette Dean presents five new works of art

In your light I learn how to love. / In your beauty, how to make poems. / You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, / But sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art. – Rumi

It is no accident that Grand Bahama-based artist Claudette Dean’s new body of work is reminiscent of the poetry of Rumi.

Rumi, the renowned Muslim poet and Sufi mystic who lived in 13th century Afghanistan, used metaphor beyond what is initially obvious — and his ecstatic verbal visions dance with an energy beyond the tangible. Fundamentally, Rumi’s poetry was his outpouring of devotion and a communication of his passionate love for God.

Whilst reading the writings of another Sufi mystic, Love is a Fire by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Dean was excited by a profusion of inner imagery. These bountiful visions became the source for her new works: five pieces of art in a range of palettes from earth tones and shimmering blues and black, shifting into more ephemeral pinks, lime greens, and shining yellow, along with her narrative and rich metaphor style images and effortless compositions — all of which express her exploration into spiritual enlightenment as described by Vaughan-Lee.

Dean’s work have a whimsical, dancing yet intense quality that is wholly accessible.

Resurrection, with its intricate filigree, almost Celtic knot work, reflected above and below, held up on wings of a sensuous bird, hidden in the trunk of the tree, pulls us into a hypnotic visual world. The more somber palette and inference of duality in Resurrection reminds briefly of the tones of William Blake’s watercolors but without the angst, as if the core of spirituality has passed through the dark night of the soul and Dean is now presenting a profound image of duality, finally in balance. However, the title gives us a sense of optimism, as if the wings of the bird will bring humanity to a new dawn.

In creating the four subsequent paintings, Dean felt an initial dissatisfaction, a sense of incompleteness. The solution came in a moment of inspiration when she recognized the similarity of their glowing color palette and the remaining pieces from Inner Sanctum (Dean’s 2010 solo exhibition at PopopStudios in Nassau).

The luminous explorations into the physical and metaphoric images of the lotus that were included in Inner Sanctum now became part of four of these new works. The past is implicit in the future as the new paintings seems to spring from the lotus pieces - possibly seeds waiting for this new moment of flourishing. Once this idea had embedded, Dean coupled her new pieces with these past paintings and started playing with further symbolism. In Connected the lotus is placed upon her head, representing spiritual awakening, through the crown chakra. By coupling the two paintings into one, she expands our understanding of her personal imagery.

An Awakened Heart shows streams of pink and butterflies from the center of the lotus flower (from Inner Sanctum) leading up and around a woman who is lost in sumptuous abandon.

The Offering is paradoxically intense and blithe. There is a harmonious balance between the profound blue textured background and the creamy hues of the lotus and the flame. The lotus, the flame, and the chalice are spiritual metaphors in the work however, beyond these clues and the blissful and liberated representation of a woman, there is a deeper sense of an almost imperceptible veil of spiritual energy.