Cedar Lewisohn: "I am an artist, curator and writer. In my studio practice I am interested in Modernist art history and how it was influenced by “ethnographic” artworks from Africa. I have for the last three years been researching various museum collections around the UK and Europe looking at examples of these various artworks, both ethnographic and Modernist, which I reinterpret in my own visual style. I explore this idea of consumption of culture from a black British perspective. My work has recently looked at the marginalisation of the black body and the black experience both within Modernist art history, and within the contemporary psyche. This relates to the politics of the image and integrating the image. In practical terms my practice takes various forms. I make large and small scale wood carving as well as other types of print making and drawing.
In 2015 I worked on a major project for the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, NL, making a series of very large scale book objects. The project took as its starting point research into museum collections and Modernist artworks which referenced African imagery or culture. These art historical images were seen in museums collections in the Limberg region as well as other nearby locations around Europe. For The Black Book (2015), these artworks I saw were re-drawn almost entirely in black creating images which verge on pure abstraction, but also hinting at figuration. A selection of these images was turned into a huge scale artist book/sculpture. The hand-made books have been screen printed using a unique printing method where drawings are directly turned into screens for printing, with no pixilation. The books were hand bound in Nijmegen, a city with an important history in relation to book binding. One of The Black Books has recently gone into Tate’s archive collection. In 2017 I had an exhibition at Exeter Phoenix. The show explored the collection of The Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM). I worked closely with RAMM’s curator of ethnographic collections to explore the history of a group of mainly West African objects in the museum’s collection. I was interested to explore the history of the objects and how they travelled from West Africa to Exeter. Using this historic research as a starting point, I made a series of drawing of the objects. These drawings where then used as the starting point for a collaboration with a costume maker, who turned the drawings into costumes. The costumes where then used in a short film (Ndungu, Isca, 2017 ), filmed at various historic sites in Exeter. The title of the film, Ndungu Isca, reefers to one of the West African objects I was inspired by, as well as the Roman name for Exeter, Isca. This mixing of various histories, locations told through museum collections and their hidden stories is central in my work."
cedarlewisohn.com
Bio: Cedar Lewisohn is an artist, writer and curator. He has worked on many museum projects for institutions such as Tate Britain, Tate Modern and The British Council. He has published two books (Street Art, Tate 2008, Abstract Graffiti, Marrell, 2011). He is currently curator of a three year project “Outside The Cube” for HangarBicocca foundation in Milan. He writes regularly about the cross over between art and gastronomy, and has recently edited a publication for the Taste International food festival. Recent work has explored various cultural histories through food performances around food. As an artist he has recently exhibited in solo projects at The Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Volume Artist Book Fair, Sydney, and Joey Ramone Gallery, Rotterdam.
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