The Armory Show / Platform: Nyugen E. Smith (curated by Tobias Ostrander)

Platform will be dedicated to large-scale installations and site-specific works under the theme of Monumental Change. The section will examine how recent revisionist practices, which are part of dramatic cultural shifts occurring throughout the world, are influencing artists’ engagement with sculptural form. In recent years the public has witnessed the dismantling, defacing, and replacement of public monuments as central to de-colonizing strategies that look to revise the commemoration of figures and events related to histories of slavery and racism, the attempted extermination of indigenous populations and appropriation of their lands, and the subjugation of women. These displaced monuments have traditionally been sculptural and figurative in style, depicting their subjects in portrait or allegorical formats. Platform will ask: What subjects might we collectively look to commemorate now? With which materials? And in what form?

"Monuments to human ingenuity in the face of political and environmental catastrophes Nyugen E. Smith’s totem-like sculptures reference shelters built by displaced migrants, refugees, and hurricane survivors. They are models of bricolage houses constructed using whatever resources can be found at hand (what familiesmanage to bring with them, scavenge for near camps, or find left after a natural disaster). These Bundlehouses speak to the capricious circumstances, tenuousness and overall fragility of both life and home within the contemporary world. The artist’s diverse practice examines universal experiences of memory, trauma, and spirituality within the multifarious impacts of colonialism on the African diaspora. Informed by his personal history as a first-generation Caribbean-American born in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Haitian and Trinidadian parents, Smith’s works seek to connect past upheavals with present political struggles."

— Tobias Ostrander