Hew Locke's Sculptures

“after collecting commissions from the Met, Tate Modern, British Museum and more, Locke's solo exhibition, Passages, knocked on my doorstep at the Yale Center for British Art. the Guyanese-British "postcolonial baroque" artist reflects on the aftermath of great britain's 170-year long colonial rule over guyana as it pertains to power, transience, economy, and identity-building through symbols. his sculptures weave together "non-traditional" materials – cardboard, strings of beads, mass-produced plastic toys, intricately patterned fabrics, faux plants, faux gold jewelry, found objects, etc. a palette resonant with the predominating mix of ancestries – indian, chinese, and west african. colonial symbols of power serve as the canvas and physical infrastructure, encompassing archival business documents, political monuments, soldiers atop horses, 10' tall heads of the queen, or scale-model naval and trade ships used to take from and transport people of south asia to the west indies for forced labor in appropriating symbols of british power through intricate layering and weaving and draping, locke reimagines (or reasserts) power, shedding light on the lens of a rather overlooked and certainly multifaceted culture and diaspora very special to me”