Founder and Creative Director Dennison Smith established The Baldwin Gallery as a place for bringing contemporary art into European home life, with a distinct focus on indigenous North American artists. Smith was inspired by the Native American perspective of art as who you are and where you live, and thus created a home-based gallery, where art is a fully integrated experience. The Baldwin Gallery launches with Mobile Forms: Parisian Abstraction to Amerindian Pop on November 5th, followed by a series of literary and musical dinner-salons, aiming to create a sense of community and expand the appreciation and understanding of contemporary art. Something Curated met with Smith in the run up to The Baldwin’s inaugural show to discuss the vision behind the space, her interest in First Nations art, as well as her plans for the gallery’s future programme.
Something Curated: Could you tell us about The Baldwin Gallery, the vision and ethos behind the organisation?
Dennison Smith: My intention is to create a dialogue between European art traditions and First Nations Canadian art, and, specifically indigenous Northwest Pacific Coast. That art tradition is very complex. It’s so sophisticated, and it has rarely been experienced outside the British Museum in England. I don’t think it’s ever been experienced in the context of London’s contemporary art world. I’m looking at those First Nations’ artists whose work stands on an interesting cusp between the traditional and the contemporary, and putting them into dialogue with established European artists who have a strong sense of place. That’s one of the subtexts – relationship to place and to identity born out of place.
SC: Could you tell us a bit about the current exhibition?
DS: There are three primary artists in this exhibition. First, Alexandra Roussopoulos, who is a Parisian abstract artist. The Baldwin is focusing on her ‘mobile forms’, a distillation of self to its most amoebic shape or abstracted geometry. We put her work in dialogue with Sonny Assu and Steve Smith, who are both Kwakwaka’wakw artists, a Northwest Pacific Coast band (in the States you’d say ‘tribe’). What Sonny calls ’Interventions on the Imaginary’ are interventions upon the colonialist gaze and the myth of the empty continent. He distils Northwest Pacific Coast communal identity, or tribal identity, down to a 3D iconic form, influenced by pop art sensibility and sci-fi. He digitally imposes these forms (in Northwest Coast vernacular, they’re called form-lines) upon famous colonialist paintings of First Nations people, some of whom are actually his people.