Photo show opens at Real Art Ways Thursday night

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006
Zak Ové: Blue Devils: Works from the Transfigura Series
Oct. 15—Dec.13, 2009.
Opening reception and Creative Cocktail Hour on Thurs. Oct.15, 6—10 p.m.

Press release

In conjunction with Creative Cocktail Hour, there will be an opening this Thurs., Oct. 15, at Real Art Ways of the exhbition Blue Devils: Works from the Transfigura Series, featuring photographs by Zak Ové. Admission to Creative Cocktail Hour is $10, $5 for Real Art Ways members.

The Trinidad Carnival is an annual event just before the beginning of Lent, although its roots stretch back to ancient African culture. It's a 48-hour celebration that Zak Ové describes as "an oral history of the peoples - of whom they were, and where they came from."

For 8 years, Ové travelled to Trinidad for the Carnival, photographing the characters created by its participants. In many ways, his process paralleled the Carnival itself: like Ové, the participants in the Carnival return year after year to play the same role, perfecting their performance, some in the same role since early childhood.

As Zak Ové puts it: "by engaging, year after year, with the same character, the Masquerader is involved in a continuous, organic and never-ending process, in which each festival is only a stop, a showcase, for his or her ever-developing 'otherness', in a journey, internal and external, without a definitive destination, or end."

In turn, Ové, by returning to his father's homeland, was looking to "piece together some of [his] own story, there on the island, and further back, in the endless twists of history."

This exhibition coincides with Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art.

About Zak Ové:

Zak Ové was born in London during the height of the 1960's psychedelia to an Irish self-made feminist mother and a pioneering Caribbean filmmaking father. His childhood, a riot of creative expression, was filled with outlandish characters and hot political activism. Ové learned the art of filmmaking from his father, and began a career as a music video director in New York, later taking on commercial work in the UK. After his film, I Have A Dream, about the plight of two young, lovestruck Senegalese immigrants, won several international awards, Ové began the photography project that would become Transfigura.