CURRENT EXHIBITION

Carl E. Hazlewood: Swimming Blind in a Wine-Dark Sea

February 9 - March 17, 2019

Opening Reception: February 9, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Swimming Blind in a Wine-Dark Sea, a solo exhibition by Carl E. Hazlewood. Hazlewood has created new work in situ, responding to the available space and practical situation of the gallery as he has done for his recent exhibitions. Please join us for an opening reception with the artist on Saturday, February 9, 2019.

Swimming Blind in a Wine-Dark Sea is part of BRIC’s Biennial - Volume III: South Brooklyn - opening February 6, 2019 at BRIC, and coincides with exhibitions at La Bodega, Trestle Gallery, Green Wood Cemetery, and NARS Foundation. A catalog featuring all participating venues and artists will be available through BRIC.

“Swimming Blind in the Wine-Dark Sea explores formal, poetic and evocative aspects of my multimedia practice. The title of the exhibition, Swimming Blind in the Wine-Dark Sea, suggests my unknowable journey as I work through possible solutions to various formal and other problems. While many of the things I make are ephemeral, they tend to respond to the light, space and surfaces where they are installed. Beside the painted/constructed environments I create on occasion, I like making discrete/specific 'things'... Thus most of what I do transmute into defined objects of a formal sort; shape, scale, light, colour, materials, etc., are all manipulated as a way to bring my work alive in the presence of the viewer.

Theory, in particular… and even history (on occasion), gives way to practical/personal (& usually formal) impulses concerning material and the physical environment in which a particular work exists. While I've always resisted performing limited notions of ‘identity’ as an aspect of my creative work, lately some subtle references concerning our current problematized social environment creep in - despite myself.
But I’m a border-crosser of sorts continually negotiating various transcultural, social and artistic locations. And as an older black person, poor, an immigrant, in the current political climate, I suppose I’m somewhat suspect. But functioning at that liminal edge of social and artistic possibilities perhaps my experience can be translated into something positive.

Bob Marley, the reggae singer, once remarked “some people feel the rain…others just get wet.”
For me it’s always the center of a storm… It’s all about being in the moment, on ‘presentness’, of always being “real”, in life as well as how one approaches art with its multiplicity and endless possibilities.”

-Carl E. Hazlewood

A recent MacDowell Fellow, Carl E. Hazlewood was born in Guyana, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA (with honors) from Pratt Institute and his MA from Hunter College. A visual artist, curator and writer, he co-founded Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ. Recent awards and honors include Fellowships and residencies from The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France; The Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy; the NARS Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. A 2017 ‘Tree of Life’ award grantee, his fifty-two feet work, ‘TRAVELER’, (2017) was commissioned by the Knockdown Center, Queens. Hazlewood’s work has been shown recently in PRIZM, Volta, and Scope Art Fairs, and has been written about in BOMB Magazine, the NY Times, and Hyperallergic.