BUILDINGS ARE PEOPLE TOO

An exhibition by Piaget Moss & Veronica DorsettThe Glass Bridge in the Melia Nassau Beach, Nassau, The BahamasJuly 31 2014

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT PARADISE

F or all of its perceived dividends, paradise is not without its complexities. For both native and visitor, paradise demands a particular dissociation from its colonial implications and careful construction. In a place like The Bahamas, where six million visitors per year contribute to make tourism the number one

industry in the archipelago, the business of paradise is one of survival, punctuated by moments of glory and downfall as a revolving door of hotels and resorts repackage their particular recipe for tropical success.

The $3.5 billion single-phase resort development Baha Mar offers something different both in its construction and in its projected offerings once the hotel is completed and opens to the public at the end of this year. Every hotel is a product of its time and Baha Mar demonstrates a contemporary understanding of the importance of cultural identity in a globalized world by holding a love for Bahamian culture at its core. It might just be the right recWipe for success, at last. Only time will tell. For now, Bahamians alternate between disconnected rapt and careful hopefulness as they eye the development now in its final stages.

Bahamians know, after all, that the business of paradise is not for the faint of heart. They have seen their share of hotels rise out of the limestone, glitter for a short while, then dull and crumble. They’ve seen giants lost to fire like the great Emerald Beach Hotel; they’ve seen once-saviors reduced to rubble, like the demolished Fort Montagu Beach Hotel; and they’ve seen re-brand after re-brand as hotels changed hands like casino chips, as was the fate of the developments lining the Cable Beach strip.

Bahamian artists Piaget Moss and Veronica Dorsett may be too young to have witnessed a full lifecycle of a hotel, but hailing from Grand Bahama, with its once-glamorous International Bazaar and its own concrete ghosts, they know well how the whims of the hospitality industry can greatly affect Bahamian communities.That is perhaps why in their first exhibition together, “Buildings Are People Too”, these emerging artists tune into the visible and invisible anxieties of hotel construction, particularly through the lens of Baha Mar.

With funding from the China Import-Export bank and manual labor provided by several thousand Chinese workers from the general contractor, China State Construction Engineering Corporation, Baha Mar is the first single-phase resort development in The Bahamas built through a collaboration with China. This is a historical moment in Bahamian history, but one not without its own apprehensions. Reactions seem to fall into two categories: xenophobic confrontations rising out of cultural stereotypes and postcolonial fears, or an unwillingness to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality of thousands of low-wage workers laboring day and night in a foreign country specifically to lift such an ambitious project off the ground come December. Until only recently, if one wanted to feel an acute sense of dissociation, one

could drive past the glittering in-progress site of four luxurious hotels and spot the spartan barracks full of Chinese workers at their feet.

What is it about this particular project and its cultural baggage that provokes such a response? It’s not as if foreign and Bahamian parties have never built developments together in the past. Is it that, despite $750 million bid out in contracts to Bahamian companies, despite the promise of a New Riviera with authentic Bahamian culture driving its guest experience, we still feel left out of this process? Or is it the fact that the influx of foreign assistance lies particularly in thousands of low-wage workers, making us question our place on the ladder used to construct paradise?

Bahamians have always managed the strange dissociation between the projection of themselves and the reality of themselves. They know the line is hair-thin between work and lifestyle when it comes to the business of paradise. Do Bahamians feel an exclusive right to their collective tropical experience? So what does it mean to think about the uncomfortable fact that at this very moment, thousands of Chinese workers work, eat, sleep and breathe to build a Bahamian dream?

After all, Bahamians certainly know what the name of the exhibition teaches us: hotels are people, too. Like everything constructed by human hands, they reflect our humanity—they shine, they have fifteen minutes of fame, they have accidents, they age, they go through mid-life crises, they re-invent themselves, they struggle, they have face-lifts, they grow, they shrink, they die.

We should be indifferent to this cycle, but we aren’t. We worked to build these hotels, we worked to keep them alive, and we bore witness to their journey into obscurity. We poured their foundation, we stacked their bricks. We fluffed their pillows, we lifeguarded their pools. We trimmed their bougainvillea hedges and perfect coconut palms. We stood at check-in counters, restaurant tables, nightclub doorways, bars. We ran our fingers along the hallway walls in back-of-house. We lit their stages and performed on their stages. We smiled at guests and we didn’t smile at guests because even in paradise we have good days and bad days. Sometimes we loved it, and sometimes we didn’t because paradise is hard to keep up 365 days a year. Some-times we believed in it, too, the promise of paradise. Sometimes it felt like something that belonged to us. Often it didn’t.

Even if we have never worked in one, hotels share with us some of our most defining memories: first dates listening to a band play high up in the majestic silk cotton trees at the Royal Victoria Hotel; working up a sweat to Bahamian performers at the Nassau Beach Hotel; wedding photographs under the poinciana trees in the Cable Beach Strip gardens; prom parades through the Hilton’s welcome arch to a crowd of onlookers; a dance recital at the Rainforest Theatre in the Crystal Palace; graduation in the

1REN (detail)Piaget Moss Mixed Media 11.5” x 11”2014

2LASTING IMPRESSIONS Piaget MossDigital Photograph2014

3SCREWED (detail)Veronica DorsettMixed Media11” x 9”2014

4REALIGNMENTVeronica DorsettMixed Media12” x 10”2014

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NEW GROUNDSPiaget MossMixed media on canvas41 x 52in2014

Radisson ballroom; a weekend staycation with your sweetheart at Sandals; conquering childhood fears at the gravity-defying Leap of Faith slide in Atlantis.

When hotels go, we mourn. The day that the Montagu Beach Hotel hit the ground in a cloud of decades-old dust, Bahamians gathered in some makeshift wake on nearby docks and boats to watch it fall and take with it some of the moments they hold dear, and some moments they don’t, too, because when you build your lives around hotels, you do it for better or for worse. How then can anyone else know what we have known—the beautiful and terrible duty of gatekeepers of paradise? To prepare for “Buildings Are People Too”, Piaget Moss and Veronica Dorsett, as Baha Mar’s first artists-in-residence, both lived and worked in the Crystal Palace Train-ing Hotel (the Wyndham Nassau Resort in its last reincarnation), which Bahamians once knew as the bizarre but glamorous Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace Training Hotel’s fate is all but sealed as it is dwarfed by Baha Mar’s four large hotels, and also flanked by what will eventually become the fifth member of the Baha Mar family, the Melia Nassau Beach Hotel, its name a homage to the beloved Nassau Beach Hotel which once stoof in its place. For now, the Crystal Palace Training Hotel presents a shifting and anxious space as an annex to the home stretch of Baha Mar’s develop-ment. The Current art studio occupies a space that once held a bar, and The Current offices have settled into an old conference room until the Baha Mar development is complete. Even the Chinese workers have moved from their barracks to the empty rooms in a closed tower at the Crystal Palace Training Hotel, sharing their living space with Bahamians working in makeshift offices to develop Baha Mar.

This offered the pair of artists an inside look at resort development. Witnessing the body of the hotel once known as the glamorous Crystal Palace undergo partitions and rewiring to make room for temporary offices; peering into guest rooms gutted of hun-dreds of desks and chairs and tables, stacked up in the ballroom as a makeshift ware-house; spying the laundry of Chinese workers hanging out to dry along the balconies of a once-rainbow-lit façade that has paled to a dirty beige; counting the cigarette butts on carpets; noticing that the site mud on stilled escalators and windows thick with dust and salt are never cleared away ---- all of this is a strange and prolonged exercise in mourning. It informs our careful hope for future hospitality developments. For if this is the peculiar fate of a hotel we once hinged our dreams upon not thirty years ago, what will we be doing thirty years from now?

What will people think, centuries from now, uncovering these lives lived through concrete giants? When the presence of each guest is systematically cleaned from every sheet, every doorknob, every piece of silverware, every drop of drained pool water, and when the hands that have heaved bricks and stirred pots and shaken hands and folded sheets then fold themselves, what will be left to tell the

archeologists of the future about the lives we lived? Will our presence, like thepresence of these thousands of Chinese workers at this present moment, evaporate when the job is done? Or is the truth just that the job of paradise is never truly done?

Piaget and Veronica have taken on the role of modern-day archeologists, mining the present moment and trying—through piecing together unearthed fragments of humanity and hardware—to place their fingers on the collective pulse of this anxiety. What exactly does our complex relationship to the current situation at Baha Mar say about our own awareness of the hospitality industry?

Piaget Moss attempts to answer this question in the most direct of ways: communica-tion. For the better part of this past year, Piaget has been spending time on site speaking with these Chinese workers and photographing their portraits. She had wondered—as perhaps many Bahamians have at some point or another—what drove the workers to take up posts in The Bahamas, the lives they lived and left at home, or else the lives they experience as nomads building projects around the world. Armed with a hardhat, a camera, and basic Mandarin picked up in a class at the College of The Bahamas, Piaget spent days on site tuning into the daily lives of the Chinese workers building the New Bahamian Riviera.

The resulting portraits capture immense and astounding lives that are at once so different from our own yet also completely relatable: the desire to build a better life for their family, the belief in a shared national goal, good days and bad days. Piaget remembers the story behind every portrait: which worker, which hotel, which floor, how their faces changed when they spoke of home, their self-conscious straightening of posture, hiding of crooked teeth, and broadness of smile, how they, too, often feel the crushing weight of responsibility for the development’s success, leaving us to wonder if—for they never say so directly—they, too, privately resent it at times.

In her portrait series for “Buildings Are People Too”, Piaget distorts these images through photo transfers onto canvas, a method the young artist has adopted as her signature over the past year. Initially interested in drawing the human body, Piaget be-gan deconstructing the figure through photo transfer and digital collage, letting these bodies dissolve into botanicals as a means to explore social experiences of race, gender, culture and history. These transfers of her Chinese worker portraits obscure the delicate and intimate clarity of her original photographs with all of their shifts in posture and emotion, but whether alone or paired with salvaged objects from the con-struction site, the portraits hold vulnerable and honest confrontations with the viewer.

Herein, then, lies their strength, and their beauty: Piaget has successfully deconstruct-ed buildings themselves without even using an image of the development. Instead, she gave some of the thousands of Chinese workers—faceless in our collective

LEAD, FOLLOW, REPEATVeronica DorsettMixed Media30 X 42”2014

RENOWN (detail)Veronica Dorsett

Mixed Media14 x 10”

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HANDMADEPiaget MossWood and NailsVaried Dimensions2014

national consciousness—a space to exist and stare back, forcing viewers to confront the reality of their existence and move past their xenophobic mythologies to a shared humanity. After all, in front of a camera, at our most vulnerable, we are all face the same question: How would you like to be remembered?

If they prefer not to confront the portraits, viewers are still haunted by the undeniable presence of other-ness in Piaget’s body of work. Her signifier of choice is a single pair of dirty construction gloves she picked up on one of her many rounds on site, which she photo transfers over and over into fans and layers of circles, or a series of plaster-cast hands. The obsessive repetition of these acts hum with anxiety. Viewers may wonder if the paper or sculpture will buckle under the weight of so many crowded anonymous souls.

In her painting “New Grounds”, smudged again with presence of construction gloves, Piaget approached a China Construction America employee, named Jerry, to directly translate the phrase of the title into Mandarin script and invited him to directly apply it to her canvas. This piece, juxtaposing the nameless with the identified, best demonstrates the great courage and the yet utter hopelessness of her mission the best: the desire to record and pay tribute to thousands of people, and the unsettling reality of its impossibility.

Veronica Dorsett, on the other hand, comes at this thesis with hardware. Whereas Piaget deconstructs, Veronica departs—her Baha Mar signifiers, such as the ubiquitous yellow hard hat used by construction workers, loosely tie her subject matter to the present issue at hand, while extra flourishes create an alternate universe of sorts that we soon recognise as manifestations of paradise. In the spare, clean world of her multi-media pieces, construction workers dabble in the glamor of high fashion; yellow hard hats dense with screws and black string become unsettling phrenology maps; and a myriad of spray-painted legs in hot-pink construction boots march onwards—in what direction, we are unsure, except for away from us—their stenciled nature, like her half-shadowed hard-hatted figures, preferring the anony-mous existence to the autonomous one.

Living in Grand Bahama, where she cannot witness the Baha Mar development in her everyday commute coming to life like some glorious gestation, Veronica oper-ates from a detached space. Her resulting body of work takes the surface snippets of Baha Mar’s grandeur and pushes them into the sensational realm of wonderland, fulfilling the flashy and grotesque promises of paradise where people and buildings come together in two-for-one specials. There exists little reconciliation here, except for a few cobbled together sculptural pieces where salvaged wood from the site form two irregular halves of a circle or triangle. But even that calls attention to the impossible act of adopting someone else’s child.

EXCHANGESPiaget MossMixed Media18” x 44”2014

For Veronica, making art is a mental battle as much as a creative one. Working and reworking a piece to get at the very core of it all results in clean and open final con-structions whose simplicity belie their deep connotations. If they look closely, viewers may see, in the dense black canvas of “Jerry”, the ghost of her stenciled marching construction boots. Buried first beneath a layer of soft pastels and then under a heavy swath of black, Veronica performed her archaeological duties in reverse, removing all signs of humanity, feeding our anxieties of a life lived fulfilling the dreams of a globe hungry for an easy understanding of tropical life.

After Veronica finished painting the canvas black, she ripped it in half. When she ripped it in half, she did not find the pastel layer underneath, or the footprints deeper still. It’s just a gap. What we talk about when we talk about paradise—when we talk about buildings and people—is this gap: between one culture and another culture, between our collective dream and our individual needs, between the people who work in the hotel and people who visit the hotel, between an acknowledged individual and a faceless mass, between the moment a hotel is born and the moment it dies. How do you fill that gap? What lies between the very excitement of it all, and the very dread of it all, which eventually feels one and the same? What if we fail? More importantly, more fearfully—what if we succeed? What new standard, what cultural precedent, has this development solidified for our nation? And will it be enough? Will it ever be enough?

As its title suggests, the same China Construction America employee, Jerry, who helped Piaget complete “New Grounds” with his own handwriting, also contributed to Veronica’s work. Given free reign by Veronica to write what he pleased upon this black canvas—a burial ground of sorts—Jerry stood in silent contemplation for fifteen minutes. He picked up a plaster finger—broken off from one of Piaget’s myriad cast hands—and scrawled a shiny Baha Mar slogan, “One Team, One Dream” in the top center half, the finger leaving chalky white in its wake. Then, he framed it in Mandarin: “Two beautiful girls asked me to write something, but I don’t know what to say.” A pause. Then, “Artists need ideas like construction needs workers.”

As the archaeologists who found hand-picked flowers fossilized around bodies in ancient burial grounds, footprints unearthed from lands thought to be swallowed by volcanic disaster, and fingerprints smudged into cave paintings will remind us: not all is lost. It never is. The workers in their boots march on to the next destination, the hotel opens its doors. Almost all of us will be faceless. What remains is accident, good fortune, or calculation: vacation postcards from long demolished buildings, a pair of discarded gloves dusted with construction dirt, a worn architectural drawing of a play-ground in paradise, distorted portraits of bad teeth, layers and layers of paint, and Jerry, the unlikely philosopher, making modern day cave paintings with two young Bahamian artists, trying to bridge the gap.

JERRY Veronica DorsettMixed Media4’ x 9’BML Collection2014

Born on the island of Grand Bahama, Veronica is primarily an installation art-ist with a keen interest in sculptural and mixed media works. She recently grad-uated from The College of The Baha-mas in Nassau, New Providence with an AA in Art and plans to pursue a BFA in sculpture in 2014.

Dorsett was awarded the 2012 Popop-studios ICVA Junior Residency Prize as well as the 2013 National Merit Schol-arship Grant and was a resident artist at the Atelier’s89 “Caribbean Linked II” in Oranjestad, Aruba, August 2013. Her works have been featured in nu-merous galleries across the Bahamas such as the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Popopstudios ICVA and The Grand Gallery, among others.

“Upon the genesis of my Baha Mar ex-perience, I found a keen interest in the stereotypes that exist around the world of construction and foreigners; and how our economy and mentalities are affect-ed by this combination. Limited interac-tions gave me --- for lack of a better term --- a distant relationship with the workers, which allowed me to take on the per-spectives of any casual onlooker, thus generating works that could essentially fulfill the typical “labels” of the Baha Mar “Chinese” workers. From my dis-tance, their worn-down boots and bright neon yellow hats created a monotonous visual repitition, lacking any true identity or human characteristics.

VERONICA DORSETT

The strength of this perception al-lowed me to focus more on the ob-jects that were left behind by the workers, like hard hats, gloves, boots, even scrap pieces of paper that they wrote on. All of these ob-jects somehow became a glowing light of history and a lasting trade-mark of the souls that would have literally built Baha Mar from the ground up. It is my aim to glorify these objects that will remain once the workers have left and docu-ment their journey through discard-ed materials in order to dignify and praise the gift that they will leave behind in the Bahamas.”

Originally from Freeport, The Bahamas, Piaget was born in April 1994. After grad-uating high school in 2011, she moved to Nassau, New Providence in 2012 where she is presently pursuing an AA in Art at The College of The Bahamas. As an emerg-ing contemporary artist, she seeks connec-tions with other creative minds throughout the Caribbean diaspora and the global art community. Moss’ interests lie in projecting ideas of personal identity and human emo-tion, and social and cultural construction.

She has participated in numerous shows, including the third annual All-star Amateur Art Exhibition at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (Nassau, The Bahamas, 2013), Color of Harmony, the Art De-partment’s End of Year Exhibition at The College of The Bahamas (Nassau, The Bahamas, 2013), Independent Artists, The Grand Gallery (Freeport, The Bahamas, 2013), The New New, Popopstudios ICVA (Nassau, The Bahamas), and Transform-ing Spaces 2014 After the Flood, Liquid Courage Gallery (Nassau, The Bahamas, 2014).

“Each day, Baha Mar is building a history and I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to contribute to its construction.”

PIAGET MOSS

Our experience during this Baha Mar residency has been a lasting and pivotal moment in our careers as young artists and one that we will not soon forget. We would like to extend heartfelt thanks to John Cox, and his entire Baha Mar Team at The Current, including Sonia Farmer, Khia Poitier, Cydne Coleby, Richardo Barrett and their interns Alecia Munnings, Jacob Miller, Kelly Taylor, and Berchadette Moss for their amazing support and time. They are truly a group of gifted people who have the capacity to make magic happen in the months and years to come at Baha Mar.

THANK YOU

THE GLASS BRIDGE

Located in a dynamic hallway space at The Melia, The Glass Bridge presents a look at creative practices within the contemporary art landscape. Focusing on project-based exhibitions by emerging artists, this gallery offers candid examinations of creative ebb and flow while also providing a significant platform for up-and-coming artists to present their work to a wider global audience.

THE CURRENT

Electrifying the intersection between the Baha Mar brand and the Bahamian art community, The Current defines and presents dynamic art programming at the luxury resort. This curatorial art team acts as a hub for the various moments of art across the campus—including three art galleries—creating a compelling experience of Bahamian visual culture for both guests and Bahamians alike.

For more, email art@bahamar.com and like us on Facebook at facebook.com/thecurrentart.

MELIÁ NASSAU BEACH

Meliá Nassau Beach is located on a 1,000 foot stretch of white sand along Nassau’s Cable Beach. The property’s 694 guestrooms and 32 suites offer unsurpassable views of the Atlantic Ocean as well as an array of on-site activities and amenities including four dining venues and a meeting space of more than 25,000-square-feet. Renova-tions are currently underway without any interruption to the on-site guest experience.

Meliá Hotels & Resorts

Meliá Hotels & Resorts brand is the Group’s city and resort hotels brand that combine a mixture of stunning yet functional facilities within preferred business and leisure destinations, such as Meliá Kuala Lumpur – Malaysia, Meliá Jardim Europa - Sao Paolo, Meliá Caribe Tropical - Dominican Republic, Meliá Barcelona - Spain, Melià Vendome - Paris, Melià Whitehouse - London and Meliá Zanzibar - Tanzania. The brand is designed to offer the five senses a fresh and innovative experience through igniting the Spanish tradition of excellence in hospitality. All hotels pay close attention to sensory design coupled with fresh and welcoming decorations, balancing aesthetics and design functionality. Meliá hotels feature a VIP experience called “The Level” that offers a private lounge with open bar, exclusive room accommodations, special in room amenities and the finest service. www.melia-hotels.com

BAHA MAR

Baha Mar, opening December 2014, is set on 3,000 feet of white-sand beach just ten minutes from Nassau’s newly expanded Lynden Pindling International Airport. This must-visit destination will feature an elite collection of hotel brands with gam-ing, entertainment, private residences, shopping and natural attractions that reflect an authentic Bahamian experience. The Baha Mar Casino & Hotel, with 1,000 rooms, is the centerpiece of the resort, and includes a 100,000-square-foot Las Ve-gas-style casino – the largest in the Caribbean region. Baha Mar will also include a 700-room Grand Hyatt at Baha Mar, a 300-room SLS LUX at Baha Mar, and a 200-room Rosewood at Baha Mar. Upon completion of extensive renovations, the 694-room Meliá Nassau Beach will join Baha Mar and complete the extraordi-nary accommodations at the luxury resort.

Amenities will include the 18-hole, 72-par championship Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course at Baha Mar; 200,000 square feet of combined, flexible, state-of-the-art convention facilities including a 2,000-seat performing arts center and an art gallery with the largest curated collection of Bahamian art in The Bahamas; more than 30 restaurants and bars; two spas, including the 30,000-square-foot destina-tion spa, ESPA at Baha Mar; designer retail boutiques and 20 acres of exquisitely landscaped beach and pool experiences, including a beachfront sanctuary with native Bahamian flora and fauna.

For more information, please visit www.bahamar.com.

Buildings Are People Too is a book written, designed, printed and bound by The Current, the curatorial art team at Baha Mar, for Current Books, in a limited edition of 100 copies, in July 2014. “Buildings Are People Too” was an exhibition of artwork by Piaget Moss and Veronica Dorsett on display at The Glass Bridge in the Melia Nassau Beach during August and September 2014. The exhibition was a culmination of a month-long residency in July 2014 at The Current art studio at Baha Mar. What We Talk About When We Talk About Paradise was written by Sonia Farmer. Catalogue design is by Khia Poitier and Cydne Coleby. The letterpress-printed covers were designed and hand-printed by Sonia Farmer and Orchid Burnside at Poinciana Paper Press and the books were hand bound by The Current and their interns in a limited edition of 100.

Book © Current Books

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