Zak Ové under a commission he installed in the London headquarters of Facebook.
Carnival in Trinidad arose in the late 18th century as a pre-Lenten jamboree thrown by white French planters and free people of color. The enslaved were forbidden to take part in these parades, so they devised a festival of their own called Canboulay (a word derived from “cannes brulee,” the sugarcane torches carried by the revelers). Though ostensibly commemorating the harvest, Canboulay’s music and dancing were ecstatic celebrations of their imagined eventual freedom. “It was used as a tool of emancipation,” observes the artist Zak Ové. “By celebrating their freedom, they were playing it forward into their future.”
The country abolished slavery in 1838. But by 1881, Canboulay inspired enough bawdy, disorderly conduct to worry the ruling classes. Fearing insurrection, they tried to ban drumming, leading to what is known today as the infamous Canboulay riots.
For Ové – born to a Black Trinidadian father and white Irish mother – Carnival and Canboulay are never-ending sources of inspiration, along with other forms of African diasporic art. Though he works in multiple media, including film, painting and sculpture, his latest body of work, featured in a recent exhibition at De Buck Gallery in New York, titled Canboulay, is all about the joyous, insurgent spirit of that festival.
“Blue Devil”, currently consigned to De Buck Gallery in New York.
The works consist of hundreds of colorful crocheted doilies that Ové layers and collages using a process he calls “hyperbolic pattern-making.” Their titles – Burrokeet, Jouvet, Baby Doll, The Sailor – relate to the elaborate masks and costumes of Canboulay. “The transfigurement of costumes led people to discover other parts of themselves,” he explains. “And the reexamination of who we are leads people to realize they’re more than what they’re told they are.”
Because making doilies was traditionally a woman’s craft, this reexamination allows Ové “to work in a feminine sort of way.” The works recall Xenobia Bailey’s large-scale crocheted wall pieces and mandalas. The costume aspect and the musicality inherent in the visual rhythms Ové creates with the doilies also hark to the Soundsuits of Nick Cave. But their riotous color and pattern, what the artist calls “grandmother psychedelia,” can also remind us of Takashi Murakami’s dense agglomerations of neon-hued daisies and smiley faces.
A figure rendered in yellows.
The doilies come from many sources, including a project for refugee women in Turkey called Knitstanbul. “Crocheting binds community,” Ové believes. “It’s a sense of tradition and old-world harmony, and of mother. But its floral forms also go back to nature.”
Recently, Ové installed a monumentally proportioned Canboulay commission in Facebook’s London offices. Ové’s Moko Jumbie sculptures (named after masqueraders on stilts tall enough for them to collect money from Carnival spectators on balconies) welcome visitors to the British Museum’s Africa galleries. And his Mothership Connection, a nearly 30-foot-tall sculpture that takes the form of an Afrofuturistic rocket, will soon be installed at a site in New York.
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