Monique Meloche and Allison Glenn, Director of Monique Meloche Gallery, invite you to join us for a road trip to Miller Beach, Indiana! Just a 45 minute drive or 1 hour train ride on the South Shore Line, you will find yourself in historic Miller Beach where we will debut Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier’s newest single-channel video Gas Men made on the shores of Lake Michigan during his 2014 residency at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University.

Derived from a recent series of drawings called The Arrest, this video, tentatively titled Gasmen or Globe, (Globe being a popular cinema in Port of Spain), Christopher Cozier’s latest video installation investigates the ongoing environmental and sociopolitical challenges presented by commercial expansion and political opportunism. Through his drawings, prints, sound art, and video work, Cozier explores the dubious space of multinational companies and their role in global politics. Gas Men was filmed on Lake Michigan, a site that in recent years has witnessed repeated crude oil spills, care of British Petroleum’s Whiting, Indiana plant. Thematically intrigued by the role of geography, Cozier created Gas Men to interrogate the specifics of site and movement of bodies. The beach in the scene could be Venezuela, Mexico, Trinidad, or Lake Michigan. Adopting a methodology akin to the aforementioned multinationals, Cozier situates his practice in many different locales; creating site-specific work while identifying gestures and elucidating concerns that are part of the larger Diaspora. The film was produced in collaboration with colleagues in the administrative offices at Northwestern University, where Cozier was in residence at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. The sound was recorded at Alice Yard, a non-profit, contemporary art space located in Port of Spain, Trinidad, with London based musician Caroline Mair-Toby, and Trinidadian sitarist Sharda Patasar.

Christopher Cozier is an artist and writer living and working in Trinidad. A 2013 Prince Claus Award Laureate, he has participated in a number of exhibitions focused upon contemporary art in the Caribbean and internationally. Cozier is a SITE Sante Fe – Satellite Curatorial Advisor for 2014. He has been an editorial advisor to BOMB magazine for their Americas Issues (Winter, 2003, 2004 & 2005) and was part of the editorial collective of Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (1998 – 2010). Additionally, Cozier was a co-curator of the exhibitions Paramaribo Span in 2010 and “Wrestling with the Image” in 2011. Since 2006, he has been one of the founders and administrators of Alice Yard, an experimental space and project in Port of Spain. Cozier’s residencies include Dartmouth College and The Substation in Johannesburg. His work has been exhibited in the 1994 and 2000 Havana Biennials; Trienial Poli/Grafica de San Juan: America Latina y el Caribe (2009); Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, TATE Liverpool (2010), The Global Africa Project, Museum of Art and Design, New York (2010-11) and Being and Island (Inseldasein), DAAD, Berlin (2013). His most recent one-person exhibition, in Development, was shown at David Krut Projects, New York in 2013.

About the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities
The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, building on a rich legacy of Northwestern accomplishments in each of the various disciplines, was established to organize and promote the kind of expansive, interdisciplinary discussion and debate that characterizes leading-edge humanities scholarship today. The Institute cultivates this work through an annual fellowship program for faculty working in the humanities, new undergraduate classes based on the research of Institute Fellows, visits by world-renowned humanists to campus for lectures and seminars, and co-sponsorship of concerts, lectures, film presentations, and other such events throughout the University.

About the Miller Beach Arts & Creative District and Marshall J. Gardner Center for the Arts
The Miller Beach Arts & Creative District (MBACD) is located on the southern shores of Lake Michigan, a short rail ride from downtown Chicago. Miller Beach, a community in Gary, IN, has a long history as a creative community, is surrounded by the natural beauty of the Indiana Dunes National Lake shore. Founded in 2011, the MBACD is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization, operating as a community development corporation. We operate a 5,000 square foot facility, the Marshall J Gardner Center for the Arts, as a space for the presentation of visual and performing arts, along with an active schedule of other community events. The District, which stretches along Lake St. to the beaches of Lake Michigan, is also home to a diverse variety of small local businesses.

Exhibition Partners:
Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, co-sponsored by the Department of Art History, the Department of Communication Studies, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, and the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Program at Northwestern University, Evanston; Miller Beach Arts and Creative District. Special thanks to Evan Boris, Tom Burke, and Ann E. Rose.

South Shore Line weekend train schedule:
To Miller Beach: http://www.nictd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/schedules.pdf

For more information and questions about travel, please contact:
Allison Glenn, info@moniquemeloche.com, 773.252.0299

Official Website

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Tags: Christopher Cozier, moniquemeloche